Do college-age kids care about the Constitution? Do they even know about it? See what some University of Mississippi students have to say about our nation’s founding document. They speak angst and hope, knowing their future depends on defending what the Constitution stands for.
Join us in speaking up, and pledge to vote your values. Join these students in telling the candidates, loud and clear: “You canβt ignore the Constitution.”
Are you a Constitution Voter? We were in Mississippi last Friday for the first presidential debate, and found the Ole Miss campus crawling with students who care about the Constitution. Many of them pledged to vote based on how well they think candidates will uphold the Constitution. See the faces and voices from the University of Mississippi and then sign the pledge yourself. Go to http://www.aclu.org/constitutionvoter.
Don’t forget, we’ll be sending these pledges to the presidential candidates in October. Let’s show them how much American voters care about the Constitution, and tell them to address the issues we care about, like torture, warrantless spying and closing Guantánamo.
Join these students in telling the candidates, loud and clear: "You can’t ignore the Constitution."
Sometimes it’s hard to focus on civil liberties when all everyone is talking about is the economic bailout. (The House voted today; Senate vote Wednesday. You’re welcome.)
This will be a light week on the civil liberties front for Congress. We’re…still…waiting for that report on National Security Letters from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, and we’re still hoping for a markup of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) state secrets bill.
In addition, President Bush is expected to sign H.R. 923, the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, into law this week.
Congress will adjourn this week: the House today, and the Senate, well…soon. And hey, did you know that Congress will return for a lame duck session after the elections?
Tuesday, September 30
Freedom of Religion in Prison
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a teleconference at 11 a.m. on, among other things, freedom of religion in prison.
(In July, the ACLU won a freedom of religion in prison case a few months ago on behalf of a Native-American inmate who was prohibited from possessing the eagle feathers crucial to a religious prayer.)
As we were told by the lovely family who’s housing us in Oxford, tonight will be a combination of debate-watching and tailgating. Issue alley is situated in the Grove, what seems to be the nerve center of the Ole Miss campus, where a lot of tailgating goes down during football season. Lots of locals and students have been setting up their lawn chairs and digging in for tonight’s big event.
The debate will happen in the Ford Center. Last night we walked around campus and saw the ginormous media tent, a.k.a. the “spin room,” where pundits and camera crews will gather for pre- and post-debate coverage.
We’re having a lot of fun telling people about our Constitution Voter campaign, getting lots of signatures to the pledge, and lots of photos. (Check out the entire Flickr set if you don’t want to wait for the pix to scroll through.) We’re cheered to see how most people want to hear the candidates talk about the Constitution in this campaign, so we’re hoping for some meaty, substantive questions about the Constitution in this and following debates. Protecting the Constitution is something that all voters can get behind.
Our intrepid Multimedia Producer Joel Engardio is talking to Ole Miss students about the election, so stay tuned for video from today. For a taste, check out our Constitution Day video on YouTube!
The ACLU is in Oxford, Miss., today for the first presidential debate. We’ve got a table in “Issue Alley” with a bunch of other great groups, like Vote Darfur and the Ole Miss law school’s Public Interest Law Foundation. Last night we met Hays Burchfield, who just started Outlaw, a group for LGBT law school students, at the Ole Miss law school.
Rock the Vote is busy providing an eclectic array of tunes — the ACLU is nonpartisan, but we’re partisan when it comes to music and our favorites so far have been the North Mississippi All-Stars. We’ve also got a lot of people taking pictures with our Constitution Voter sign, so check out the photo feed if you haven’t already.
We’ll be here all day, so if you’re in the area, stop by for a visit. We’ll take your picture with our Constitution Voter sign and give you a free pocket Constitution. Sounds like a deal, right?
Stuart Townsend’s new film Battle in Seattle is the fictional story of the very real protests that rocked the world in November 1999 when thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Seattle in protest of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Ministerial Meeting. The film stars Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Ray Liottaand Charlize Theron, each with unique story, some united in mission, but all affected by what’s at stake when our fundamental right to protest is put to test.
The ACLU has always represented protestors who have been wrongfully arrested and groups that have been infiltrated and spied on. Our right to dissent is one our nation’s founders recognized as one of the most necessary liberties for a democratic society.Codified by the First Amendment and upheld over time as one of our most fundamental freedoms as Americans, the right to assemble, protest, and petition still continue to come under fire today.
Most recently, the ACLU of Colorado and ACLU of Minnesota fought to secure the rights of protestors at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions through lawsuits and negotiations with city officials. And as we all now know, the processing and handling of protestors at the DNC, plus the pre-arrests and house raids at the RNC, shows that our First Amendment right to protest is still threatened.
With regard to the WTO protests, the ACLU of Washington filed suit in March 2000 on behalf of citizens whose rights to freedom of speech were violated by the city’s actions. Plaintiffs were individuals who were either kept out or forced out of the No-Protest Zone solely because they had anti-WTO cartoons, buttons, stickers, or signs. Included was a person who was handing out copies of the First Amendment, but they were confiscated by police. Another plaintiff twice had signs taken away by Seattle police, including one that said, “I Have a Right to Non-Violent Protest.”
In a conversation for the ACLU’s Rights / Camera / Action program, director Stuart Townsend and star Martin Henderson talked about the making of the film and its contemporary relevance. Watch the video here:
The film recently opened in select cities and continues its rollout this Friday. Stuart, Charlize, and Martin will be doing a few Q&A’s as the film opens across the country. For a schedule of showtimes and list of cities and theaters near you, go to: http://www.battleinseattlemovie.com/tickets/.
Boy oh boy, this week is busy on the Hill. So you might have heard that Congress has been wrangling with this economic bailout. Congress will juggle that, plus a huge slate of civil liberties issues this week. (Hey, at least they’re not passing resolutions honoring country music stars.)
In addition, from Wednesday to Saturday, the Congressional Black Caucus will hold its annual legislative conference. And cross your fingers for a Senate vote this week on reporters’ shield legislation. There is still a possibility of a markup in House Judiciary of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) state secrets bill. And of course we wait, with bated breath, for the final Inspector General report on National Security Letters. Any day now, Mr. Fine…
Read more…
After interning with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in 2006, my interest in civil liberties and the struggles that others have endured to preserve them over the years peaked. It was after this experience that I began to seek out others that could augment my existing interest in the law, including activism.
In early September 2008 the Republican National Convention was held in St. Paul, Minn. Armed with a camera and a few spare hours, I headed to St. Paul to photograph the events surrounding the convention. It wasn’t until I arrived that I discovered hundreds of protestors, both in downtown St. Paul and on the front lawn of the State Capitol. Many of the protestors were civil and presented their objections respectfully on signs or through orchestrated chanting. It wasn’t until armed police forced their way into the crowds did I observe discord.
With perfect timing, the ACLU of Minnesota announced its offering of an Activist Training course. Given my displeasure with the events that I observed during the previous week, I was eager to attend. At the training, Joshua Spaulding of the ACLU’s National Office in Washington, D.C. offered several ideas for how local activists could mobilize others into action. The first step in this process is to articulate an "ask" question. This question consists of a call to action that is couched within the agenda of the asker in hopes of positioning the recipient to actually act.
At its end, I felt much more confident in my ability to approach friends, colleagues, and even my elected officials and ask of them what may previously have felt impossible – to take action. Instead of combating police at protest, empower others to effect change through your own passion for the issue. It all begins with an "ask."
If you’d like to attend an Activist Training course, our next trainings are this Saturday, September 27, in Novi, Mi., and Columbia, Mo., and Sunday, September 28, in Kansas City, Mo.
But just barely. Matt Stoller at OpenLeft writes:
Of course, the Constitution isn’t a quaint representation of some wonderful time of yore, it is a living document that must be refreshed from time to time with our willingness to recreate rights against an oppressive conservative movement aided by the quislings who shout for civil liberties but are unwilling to pay any price or even consider challenging their favorite politicians to add richness to their words.
[…]So we have to restore our civil liberties, using, as we saw in St Paul, our own words, actions, and bodies if necessary. That’s how every generation of Americans did it before us and it’s how we’ll do it again.
Our electoral process is a start. Letters to the editor and to Congress are a start. Blogging is a start. Ultimately, the massive forces arrayed against civil liberties, including the huge sums of money designed to suppress free speech and spy on all of us in the name of Bush’s war on terror, will need to be confronted with creativity, innovation, and resolve.
And that’s how we’ll restore the Constitution.
A restoration of the Constitution must begin with the re-establishment of the system of checks and balances that has served us so well for more than 200 years. As Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office wrote in Huffington Post today:
[…]In its first hundred days, the next administration should take at least three steps to restore the critical constitutional checks and balances citizens demand. First, our leaders should ensure there is no more warrantless spying; second, they should direct the attorney general and other relevant agency heads to end government monitoring of political activists who are not suspected of involvement in criminal activity; and, third, they should review the government’s terrorist watch lists so that the names on the lists are limited to those who would do us harm.
In other words, undo the damage done by the Bush/Cheney administration. And you can be sure the ACLU will be hounding the new administration from Day One.
Every time another election rolls around, I am prepared to be astonished. Again.
Astonished by the utter lack of knowledge most Americans have about their civil liberties or, indeed, their country.
For instance, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government, and can name them (Zogby, August 2006).
And 60 percent of Americans, 16 to 26 years old, could not find Iraq on the map (National Geographic poll, 2006).
Our high school kids seem to be too busy taking mandatory tests to pay much attention to the Bill of Rights and what it means to them.
Which is why the Florida ACLU has come up with some help for every high school student and teacher in America:
It’s a free video featuring high school students facing some challenges to their rights: Can I wear my anti-war T-shirt in class? Do I have to open my glove compartment when a police officer asks me to? Can we satirize the superintendent in the school paper? And can our parents insist that our graduation ceremony start with a Christian prayer?
It started in the Sarasota School system — where some teachers use it for Constitution Day and others as extra material in history or government classes all during the year.
The video is spreading like a virus — and is now being used in high schools throughout Florida, as well as in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and in several Wyoming schools as well! (As one teacher commented: "The dvd was very interesting and created much conversation and questions from my students.")
Anyone can download the video ("The Rights We’ve Inherited"), absolutely free, from our website: http://www.aclufl.org/videos.cfm
It runs 10 minutes, with automatic pauses for class discussion, and should take up one regular school period.
(There’s also a free teacher’s guide that available on the site.)
If you’re finding the same lack of knowledge where you live that I found in Florida, your schools need this Bill of Rights video.
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