News & Commentary

Liberty and equality are everywhere under attack. And that’s why the work of the American Civil Liberties Union feels more precious to us than ever before. The ACLU lawyers and staff are the brave souls who suit up, blast off, and do what they can to divert and repel all those incoming meteors, or blow them right out of the sky. We admire them. We admire them the way you must admire people who devote themselves to doing, to the utmost of their ability, any thankless, impossible, and absolutely essential job.

The Supreme Court just announced that it will hear yet another case about the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) birth control coverage requirement. If you are experiencing déjà vu, you are not alone. Court battles over the birth control coverage requirement have been raging for almost a decade. How did we get here?

This piece originally appeared on Fast Company.

A basic legal consensus about our democracy is that the Constitution assigns the “power of the purse” to Congress. Turning this edict on its head, White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) lawyers reportedly concocted a legal theory that President Trump can override Congress’s foreign policy spending decisions enshrined in law. If such a dangerously expansive proposal exists as a full legal opinion, it should be publicly disclosed — but chances are, it’ll stay secret for a generation unless Congress intervenes.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled time and again that reproductive privacy is “central to personal dignity and autonomy, [which] are central to the liberty protected by” the Constitution. The Court has made eminently clear that under the Constitution, the right of a pregnant person to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability is a right so essential to our freedom that our government cannot ban or impose an undue burden on its exercise. But despite the long-standing clarity of this principle, reproductive health and rights continue to come under blistering, unrelenting attack.

We’re just days into the first state legislative sessions of 2020 and across the country, lawmakers are once again targeting transgender young people with a slate of proposed laws that would bring devastating harms to the transgender community.

This piece originally appeared on TheHill.com.

In 2006, George Alvarez was charged with assaulting a prison guard while awaiting trial on public intoxication. He knew he didn’t do it — the guards actually jumped him — but the ten year mandatory minimum sentence at trial scared him so much that he pled guilty. Little did he know that the government had a video proving his innocence, but they buried it long enough for prosecutors to extract the plea first. George spent almost four years behind bars fighting for his innocence before finally being exonerated.