The Senate Judiciary Committee will debate repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act Nov. 3, setting up a battle with House Republicans.
Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced S. 598, the Respect for Marriage Act, will be among the items considered during an executive business meeting. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced the bill in March with the support of 29 co-sponsors.
House Republican leaders announced they would pay former Solicitor General Paul Clement up to $1.5 million to defend the law, Main Justice previously reported. Attorney General Eric Holder in February announced the Department of Justice would no longer defend the law, which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
President Barack Obama supports Feinstein’s bill, Main Justice previously reported, and same-sex marriage is expected to be an issue in the 2012 elections.
Following the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, several military members sued the Department of Veterans Affairs, arguing that DOMA is unconstitutional, the Washington Post reported.
Six states and the District of Columbia permit same-sex marriage and another five allow same-sex civil unions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The Justice Department filed suit Monday challenging South Carolina’s immigration law, which DOJ officials say infringes on civil rights and usurps the federal government’s authority.
Assistant Attorney General Tony West, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told reporters during a conference call that the federal government also plans to file a motion asking a judge to issue an injunction against the law.
“The United States understands the State of South Carolina’s legitimate concerns about illegal immigration,” the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston, states. “But the United States Constitution forbids South Carolina from supplanting the federal government’s immigration regime with its own State-specific immigration policy.”
Justice Department lawyers, who listed the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as plaintiffs in the case, claim that the law “will impose significant and counterproductive burdens” on federal immigration enforcement agencies, and divert federal resources from the current efforts focused on “dangerous aliens”.
Justice Department lawyers also claim that the law will cause documented immigrants and Americans citizens without documentation to face “detention and harassment” because of the “rigid approach of universal, undifferentiated enforcement.”
The lawsuit is the third of its kind; earlier Justice Department lawyers filed suit against similar laws enacted in Arizona and Alabama.
West added that the Justice Department has been in talks with Attorneys General from Utah, Georgia and Indiana about similar immigration laws in those states, and said that the lawsuit filed against South Carolina “makes clear once again that the Justice Department will not hesitate to challenge a state’s immigration law.”
Attorney General Eric Holder will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a Justice Department oversight hearing on November 8.
The date of the hearing was announced Monday in a news release issued by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).
Although the November Senate panel will convene as a standard departmental oversight hearing, Holder can expect a tough reception from Republican senators who have been up in arms over the handling of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive’s failed gun-walking initiative, Operation Fast and Furious.
At a regular House Judiciary Committee Department of Homeland Security oversight hearing last week, Republican Congressmen grilled Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano over what she knew about the ATF operation.
Holder has particularly drawn the ire of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican of the Senate Judiciary Committee who has been assisting Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, in his congressional probe of Operation Fast and Furious.
Last week, Grassley and Issa blasted the Attorney General for an October 11 response to a query made by the senator.
Holder has also been called to testify about Operation Fast and Furious before a House Judiciary Committee investigative meeting on December 8.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said on Friday that he would “take all necessary action” to block rules drafted by the Department of Justice, which would allow government agencies to deceive people about the existence of information in response to Freedom of Information Act Requests.
The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee informed Attorney General Eric Holder of his intentions in a letter that also requested more information and clarifications about the proposed legislation, known as section 16.6(f)(2).
Grassley said that he was against the proposed rule change in its current language because he believed that it would lead to an increase in FOIA related litigation — if those requesting information can’t trust a “no records” response — and would undermine the public’s trust in government.
“Proposed section 16.6(f)(2) stands in stark contrast to both the President’s and your prior statements about FOIA, transparency and open government,” Grassley said in his letter, citing Holder’s prior support of President Barack Obama’s Open Government Initiative — a memo issued by President on his first day in office, which called for “a presumption of disclosure” from government agencies dealing with FOIA requests.
The Republican senator also asked whether or not the proposal was necessary, citing the argument of transparency advocates that the government can already withhold information under current exemptions without neither lying nor explicitly acknowledging the existence of the information in question.
Grassley asked Holder to clarify when the government would be allowed to deceive those who filed FOIA requests, asked the Attorney General if it was currently doing so and whether or not the Justice Department was counseling other government agencies on FOIA deceptions. He also wanted to know how the DOJ intends to proceed with the proposed rule change.
The regulation was first proposed in 1987 as official policy by Edwin Meese, Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, to avoid inadvertently revealing ongoing investigations.
Recent proposals by the Department of Justice would enshrine Meese’s policy as law.
Melanie Ann Pustay, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, told the AP on Friday that the provision “has been implemented the same way for the 25 years it has been in existence,” and praised the Justice Department for reopening the public comment period on the proposed revision of FOIA regulations.
The widow of a Florida man who was the first of five people to die in the 2001 anthrax attacks has reached a settlement in her wrongful-death suit against the U.S. government, Reuters reported, citing a court filing.
“The parties have reached a tentative settlement subject to required approval by officials in the Department of Justice,” said the Oct. 27 document filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in West Palm Beach, Reuters reported. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Maureen Stevens had contended that her husband, Robert Stevens, who worked in Boca Raton as a tabloid photo editor, was exposed to anthrax as a result of negligence on the part of the government, which she said had failed to secure the anthrax bacillus at a military laboratory.
A decade after the anthrax attacks killed five people and caused at least 17 others to become ill, some mysteries and questions remain, despite the government’s conclusion that Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense expert who worked at Fort Detrick, Md., carried out the attacks. Some of the doubts have raised by scientists, as Main Justice reported recently, while others have been based on intuition, most notably in the case of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who voiced skepticism about the government’s findings, as we reported.
Leahy’s office was the target of an anthrax mailing, as was that of Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, at the time the Democratic leader in the Senate. Why those lawmakers were targets has never been established, just as it has never been established why the Florida tabloid editor was a victim. Other victims who died or were made ill, like mail handlers in Washington, seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Why did a subsidiary of a Russian steel and mining company, controlled by one of the world’s richest men, receive a low-interest federal government loan to help upgrade a Michigan plant to supply the auto industry?
That’s what House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is asking Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
In a letter to Chu last week, Issa says that Severstal North America received a $730 million loan under the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program; the company is a subsidiary of a Russian company led by Alexei Mordashov, who has a net worth of more than $18 billion, according to Issa. Mordashov has close ties to former Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Issa said that Severstal applied for the loan to improve a high-strength steel plant, but that the material to be produced is not in short supply. He added that that before receiving the loan, the company had sold plants in Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia to shift resources to the Dearborn plant and that the company already had decided to proceed with the project.
“Announcements made by Severstal during the loan consideration process indicated that the company had ample means to carry out the project,” Issa said, in his letter. ” Given the immense wealth and power of Severstal’s CEO and the fact that the corporation had already made significant investments in the project, it is surprising that DOE would choose Severstal for a loan meant to spark new businesses and technologies within the automotive industry.”
Issa added that it is unclear whether Severstal even qualified for the loan program.
In announcing the loan to Severstal Dearborn, LLC on July 13, Chu said, “The Severstal project will help make American automakers more competitive as demand for lighter, more fuel efficient vehicles increases. By manufacturing more advanced high strength steel here at home, we rely less on imports and create thousands of new jobs that get people back to work.”
Issa asked Chu for documents relating to the loan application and the approval of the loan and said he wants the answers to his questions by Nov. 3.
Reuters recently reported that the company has struggled since entering the regional steel market.
The Barack Obama administration has ordered a review of all Energy Department loan programs, as a result of loans the department made to Solyndra, a solar energy company that has failed. Former Treasury official Herbert Allison, who oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is heading that review.
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A group of House members — mostly California Democrats — called on President Barack Obama Friday to end the Justice Department’s crackown on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries.
In a letter sent to the White House, the nine members said that the initiative tramples on states’ sovereignty and will push patients with cannabis prescriptions into the black market.
“No longer should the federal government’s laws supersede the wishes of local citizens who have decided that their fellow neighbors ought to have the right to legitimately use medical marijuana,” the House members said, in their letter. “As we have seen for years, seriously ill patients will attempt to obtain their medication however they can and it is unconscionable for the DOJ to use its limited resources to endanger the lives of patients who are simply seeking to ease their suffering.”
The members also called on the president to either classify marijuana as a schedule II or schedule III drug under the Drug Enforcement Administration’s controlled substance schedule, or support legislation that would reclassify it as such. Currently, marijuana is listed as a schedule I drug, which the federal government considers as having “no currently accepted medical use in treatment,” and the members argued that a reclassification “will clear up any ambiguity as to what the legitimate role of the federal government is in this arena.”
On October 7, California’s four chief federal prosecutors — Los Angeles U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr., San Francisco U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag, San Diego U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy and Sacramento U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner — announced that they would crackdown on the state’s medical marijuana system, claiming that it violates the Controlled Substances Act, and that federal law “takes precedence over state laws and applies regardless of the particular uses for which a dispensary is selling and distributing marijuana.”
Reps. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Pete Stark (D-Calif.), Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), Sam Farr (D-Calif.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif), Jared Polis (D-Colo.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), and Bob Filner (D-Calif.) all signed the letter calling on President Obama to stop the initiative.
Sixteen states and the District of Columbia either have laws on the books that permit doctors to prescribe marijuana as a pain reliever, or have passed such legislation that has yet to take effect.
Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 8 about the troubled gun operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.
The committee had asked Holder to testify, after documents released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee appeared to conflict with Holder’s assertion that he did not know about the operation, which allowed guns to be “walked” into Mexico in an effort to trace them, until April 2011.
In a related development, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the oversight panel, has sent a letter to Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), asking that Kenneth Melson, former acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, be called to testify before the committee.
“Our staffs have already conducted transcribed interviews with Mr. Melson and the former Deputy Director of ATF, William Hoover,” Cummings wrote. “During those interviews, these officials expressed serious concerns about the controversial tactics employed by the Phoenix Field Division of ATF as part of this operation. They also raised concerns about the manner in which the Department of Justice responded to congressional inquiries.”
“Since the Attorney General has now agreed to appear before Congress in December,” the letter also stated, “I believe Members also deserve an opportunity to question Mr. Melson directly, especially since he headed the agency responsible for Operation Fast and Furious. My staff has been in touch with Mr. Melson’s attorney, who reports that Mr. Melson would be pleased to cooperate with the Committee.”
Melson resigned as ATF acting director in late August. He had been appointed by President Barack Obama on an interim basis in 2009.
Remember the $16 muffins?
The Justice Department’s Inspector General officially said Friday that they didn’t exist.
The IG issued a revised report Friday on DOJ convention expenses and said that based on new information, the department got more than muffins for the $16 it spent for breakfast at an Executive Office for Immigration Review conference in August 2009. The Capital Hilton, the location for that conference, had disputed the cost of the muffins, saying that attendees had received much more for the $16.
The $16 muffins had become the new poster food for federal government waste. Now, comes word they didn’t exist.
But the IG says that’s the only mistake in the report. “We hope that our correction of the record for this 1 conference among the 10 conferences we reviewed does not detract from the more significant conclusion in our report: government conference expenditures must be managed carefully, and the Department can do more to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and accounted for properly.”
That means that DOJ conferences still included Beef Wellington hors d’oeuvers that cost $7.32 a piece, candy bars, Cracker Jacks, popcorn, at a cost of $32 per person and eight ounce cups of coffee that cost $8.32.
