The House Education and Workforce Committee will be voting today on an amendment by Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ) to completely repeal the Higher Education Act Drug Provision. The Andrews amendment would reinstate financial aid to all of the more than 160,500 students who have been affected by this misguided law.

Contact your legislators and tell them to support the Andrews amendment to scrap the Drug Provision once and for all. Click here to take action now.

This will be the first time Congress has revisited the Drug Provision since it was slipped into the Higher Education Act Reauthorization as an amendment in 1998. Since then, more than 160,000 students with drug convictions have been blocked access to federal financial aid.

In 1998, this amendment quietly became law without debate or recorded vote. Now, seven years later, we finally have a chance to get members on the record about whether or not they truly want to help at-risk young people get the education they need to live productive lives and be responsible citizens.

Editorials in the New York Times and Minneapolis Star Tribune today explain how cutting student aid will foster crime and why we need to make it easier, not harder, for drug offenders to get an education.

[Via Students for a Sensible Drug Policy.]

Moazzam Begg is a British citizen who was recently released after three years of incarceration, first at Bagram AFB and then at Guantanamo. His nightmare began when he was arrested at gunpoint at his home in Pakistan. Alternet has a transcript of an interview with him. Don't miss it. Here is his description of two inmates whose beating deaths he witnesses. At the end, he also commends some of the other prison guards.

DEEPA FERNANDES: I wonder if you can talk us through what happened to you from when you were picked up from your house in Pakistan to your time in prison at Guantanmo Bay.

MOAZZAM BEGG: Yes. It was three years of my life, so it is very difficult to condense into a few minutes. But, I can try to highlight the most profound parts of my incarceration including being held by the Americans in Kandahar, in Bagram, and ultimately in Guantanamo for 2 years. During my time there, I witnessed things that I would have never perceived the United States would be capable of. With my own eyes, I witnessed the killing of at least two detainees by military police with their own hands.

DEEPA FERNANDES: That is a grave charge. What happened?

Professor William Stuntz has an interesting article in the New Republic on the Supreme Court's role in the criminal justice system. Sentencing Law and Policy has excerpted some of the most pertinent quotes.

[T]he Supreme Court's most important job is not managing the culture wars. Regulating the never-ending war on crime is a much bigger task. Alas, it may also be the job the Court does worst.

Civilizations define themselves by when, how, and whom they punish. Those choices are especially important in a society like ours, with a long history of both criminal violence and official racism. Forty-five percent of American prisoners are black. The imprisonment rate — the number of prison inmates per 100,000 people — stood at 482 in 2003. Among black males, the figure was 3,405. For black men in their late twenties, the number exceeds 9,000. Court decisions that help shape those numbers are vastly more important than the latest church-state fight. And the justices do shape those numbers, both by what they regulate and by what they leave alone....

I think it's too soon to start opposing Judge John G. Roberts. Most of us knew nothing about him before tonight. He's only been a Judge for two years. Before that he was deputy solicitor general. The legal arguments he made while working for the Government or as a corporate lawyer may or may not reflect his personal values, or how he would rule as a Supreme Court Justice.

I'd like to know more about him before I make up my mind. I don't think it helps that liberal groups are coming out swinging so soon. It has the appearance that they would oppose anyone Bush would nominate.

It's obvious we're going to get a conservative Supreme Court nominee. Bush is President and the Senate is Republican-dominated. For now, I'm just happy it wasn't a rabid right-winger like Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen, Edith Jones (not to be confused with Edith Clement, who probably would have been okay,) Ted Olson or one of the Fourth Circuit judges that were reportedly under consideration.

I'm more worried about Bush's second pick, the one he will make when Chief Justice Rehnquist retires, when his key aides may be out from under the gun of, or already indicted by, Fitzgerald's grand jury.

I do not want to fall into the Administration's trap of getting so distracted by this judicial nomination that I don't pay attention to other injustices of the Administration, like the war in Iraq, the detainees, military tribunals, the potential abolition of habeas corpus in death cases, and Rove Gate, to name a few.

So, when there's something big to report on Judge John G. Roberts I will, but I'm done with the topic for now.

Update: Sentencing Law and Policy:

I just received an interesting report that there is a rumor going around on a national death penalty discussion list "that Roberts is a 'pro-life conservative' and personally opposed to the death penalty."

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The Washington Post reports:

CRIMINAL MATTERS: His votes on the bench have been mixed. He ruled in favor of a man who challenged his sentence for fraud, then said police did not violate the constitutional rights of a 12-year-old girl who was arrested, handcuffed and detained for eating a single french fry inside a train station in Washington.

POLICE SEARCHES: Joined an appeals court ruling in 2004 that upheld police trunk searches, even if officers do not say they are looking for evidence of a crime.

MILITARY TRIBUNALS: Roberts was part of a unanimous decision last week that allowed the Pentagon to proceed with plans to use military tribunals to try terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Supreme Court nomination of John G. Roberts couldn't come at a better time for Bush. What better way to distract us from the Karl Rove issue?

Murray Waas is breaking another story about Karl Rove, and why grand jury investigators believe Rove didn't tell the truth in the first interview....when he claimed, as we wrote here, that he learned of Valerie Plame's identity from a journalist, but he couldn't remember which one. Waas writes:

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.

Crooks and Liars has the letter that eleven former CIA agents sent to Congress yesterday about the outing of Valerie Plame. They are angry. They explain that contrary to White House talking points, Valerie Plame most definitely was undercover.

The disclosure of Ms. Plame’s name was a shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, may have damaged U.S. national security and poses a threat to the ability of U.S. intelligence gathering using human sources. Any breach of the code of confidentiality and cover weakens the overall fabric of intelligence, and, directly or indirectly, jeopardizes the work and safety of intelligence workers and their sources. The fact is that there are thousands of U.S. intelligence officers who "work at a desk" in the Washington, D.C. area every day who are undercover. Some have official cover, and some have non-official cover. Both classes of cover must and should be protected.

The agents are not making a judgment about whether disclosure violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. They acknowledge they are not lawyers.

Here is the report (pdf) by People for the American Way on Judge John G. Roberts. Here's the overview:

Roberts’s record is a disturbing one. Among other things, Roberts is hostile to women’s reproductive freedom, and he has taken positions in religious liberty and free speech cases that were detrimental to those fundamental rights. Roberts has limited judicial experience, but even his short tenure as a judge raises serious concerns about his ideology and judicial philosophy.

ScotusBlog's sister blog, Supreme Court Nomination Blog, has these criminal law opinions written

Fourth Amendment
United States v. Lawson, 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 10798 - Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Roberts rejected numerous challenges to a conviction for bank robbery. In particular, he upheld the warrantless search of defendant's car. Judge Roberts found that the fact that the car matched an eyewitness description and that officers saw latex gloves on the front seat created probable cause for the search.

Criminal Sentencing
United States v. Mellen, 393 F.3d 175 (D.C. Cir. 2004) - Writing for the majority over a dissent by Judge Henderson, Judge Roberts found that the district court had erred in attributing to the defendant the value of all of the goods stolen by his wife and stored in their shared home. Judge Roberts held that mere knowledge was insufficient to render the defendant responsible for the goods. Instead, the government had to establish that he had agreed to participate in the conspiracy or taken affirmative steps to facilitate the crime.

Ineffective Assistance of Counsel
United States v. Toms, 396 F.3d 427 (D.C. Cir. 2005) - Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Roberts rejected the defendant's claim that his lawyer failed to provide effective assistance because he failed to call a witness and stipulated to a conviction that had been expunged. Judge Roberts found that some aspects of the challenged conduct were strategic choices and therefore "virtually unchallengable," and that the erroneous stipulation was unreasonable but harmless.

Via the Washington Post, the text of Supreme Court nominee John Robert's 2003 confirmation hearing:

• Part One (pdf)

• Part Two (pdf)

Here is the text of Sen. Dick Durbin's statement on Bush's nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court. Durbin is on Larry King Live now.

“The next Supreme Court justice will make decisions that will affect the lives of millions of Americans for years to come. Even if a Supreme Court nominee is honest and professionally competent, that person must also be committed to protecting the rights and liberties that are at the core of our democracy.”

“The President had an opportunity to unite the country with his Supreme Court nomination, to nominate an individual in the image of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Instead, by putting forward John Roberts' name, President Bush has chosen a more controversial nominee and guaranteed a more controversial confirmation process.”

“Now the Judiciary Committee will begin its work. For my part, I will look for one thing -- will this nominee strive to protect the rights of all Americans or will he be a judicial activist with an ideological agenda rather than an independent judge with an open mind.”

The pro-choice groups are already weighing in on Bush's selection of D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John G. Roberts as a nominee for the Supreme Court. Just in from NARAL:

• As Deputy Solicitor General, Roberts argued in a brief before the U.S. Supreme Court (in a case that did not implicate Roe v. Wade) that “[w]e continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled…. [T]he Court’s conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion… finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.”

Update: The ACLU weighs in: