The fight between Congress and our federal judges is heating up. Congress wants to further limit judicial discretion in sentencing by reigning in judges who grant downward departures from the federal sentencing guidelines. Many judges are furious. Here's what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy had to say yesterday:

"I do think federal judges who depart downward are courageous," Kennedy told the House Appropriations Committee during a hearing on the court's budget. Judges should not have to "follow, blindly, these unjust guidelines," he said....The mandatory minimums enacted by the Congress are in my view unfair, unjust, unwise," Kennedy said.

Update your bookmarks.....Kevin Drum of the wildly popular Calpundit has moved to Washington Monthly.

by TChris

Susan Lindauer, charged last week with conspiring to spy for Iraq before the war, says that she was "only trying to help prevent a war in Iraq."

Susan Lindauer told The Associated Press she was being punished because she got involved in U.S. foreign policy. She said her intent was to persuade Iraq to allow weapons inspections before the war and to get it to cooperate with the war on terror.

Lindauer is accused of meeting with members of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and of trying to deliver a letter to her second cousin, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, outlining her access to members of Saddam Hussein's regime.

by TChris

Congress must believe that federal judges, left to their own devices, will seize every opportunity to impose lenient, compassionate sentences upon those convicted of federal crimes. First it hogtied sentencing discretion by forcing judges to follow rigid guidelines. Then, in response to those rare occasions on which judges departed down from a guideline sentence to avoid an unjustly harsh result, Congress enacted the Feeney Amendment, further restricting their ability to impose fair sentences and requiring them to tattle on themselves when they do.

Since Republican administrations have chosen federal judges in 15 out of the last 23 years, Congress must think all those liberal Republican-picked judges are just too compassionate. But no judge of any political persuasion likes to have Congress meddling in judicial business. Judges inhabit a separate and equal branch of government, after all, and they know it. And they're mad.

"Feeney makes judges go from being 'the pinnacle' of the plea-bargaining process to being merely 'a nuisance,'" complains U.S. District Judge William Young, the chief federal trial judge in Massachusetts. He sees the amendment as further proof that Congress wants to vitiate the judiciary's role in sentencing while maintaining the aura of judicial independence and power. "Congress doesn't want to get rid of [the] symbolism [of judge-inspired sentences] because that conveys to our people that there has been judgment, that there has been reflection," Young adds.

Chief Justice Rehnquist isn't one of the liberal judges that Congress imagines to be running amuck in the judiciary, but he let Congress know that he doesn't like being ignored. Congress didn't bother to ask the judges what they thought of the Feeney Amendment before enacting it. Not a bright idea, Congress. Guess who gets to decide if your law is constitutional?

by TChris

All twelve counts accusing recording artist R. Kelly of possessing child pornography in Florida have been dismissed.

The case began when Polk County sheriff's detectives found marijuana in a home Kelly rented for his business associates. The detectives obtained a warrant to search the nearby house where Kelly was staying. During that search, detective Robert Mateo found what he considered to be an "unusual" amount of adult pornography in a cabinet. (It is unclear what constitutes an "unusual" amount of porn -- perhaps more than Mateo kept in his own home?)

Relying on his discovery of adult porn, Mateo requested a second warrant to search for child porn. Why Mateo thought he had probable cause to believe that a consumer of adult porn would also have child porn is again unclear, although the affidavit supporting the warrant apparently made reference to "unspecified information from Chicago authorities." Kelly is also charged with possession of child porn in Chicago, although some of those charges were recently dismissed.

Armed with the second warrant, Mateo returned to Kelly's home and seized a video camera, on which he discovered "several pictures of two women performing sex acts and other photos of Kelly in a sex act." Mateo apparently judged the women in question to be minors -- hence the child porn charges.

Circuit Judge Dennis Maloney suppressed the pictures as evidence after concluding that Mateo did not present sufficient evidence to justify issuance of the second warrant. Judge Maloney ruled that Mateo failed to demonstrate that a possessor of adult porn, marijuana, and video cameras would probably also be in possession of child porn. No pictures, no case, so the prosecution dropped the charges after deciding it had no grounds for appeal.

by TChris

In most of the country, little attention is paid to the Border Patrol. Taxpayers might begin to pay greater attention if they notice that the Border Patrol is now the largest uniformed police force in the country, at a cost of $20 billion over the past decade. The agency will soon spend another $10 million to add 260 agents, unmanned aircraft and more detention space in Arizona.

Is this money well spent? Dramatic increases in Border Patrol resources haven't been effective in the past.

Although the number of agents has more than tripled, thousands of undocumented immigrants cross the border each day and hundreds of them die each year. A decade after the start of [Operation Gatekeeper], arrests have dropped to 900,000 last year from 1.2 million in 1993.

It may take 16,000 agents to fully patrol the border, but a General Accounting Office study concludes that Operation Gatekeeper, started in the 1990's, did not clearly reduce the number of illegal entries along the southwestern border. It did, however, made illegal entry a riskier proposition, leading to an increase in deaths.

As a record number of immigrants tried crossing through Arizona, the Border Patrol increased the number of agents by 666 percent, and the death count rapidly climbed. In 1998, Border Patrol agents in Arizona recorded 28 deaths in the Yuma and Tucson sectors. Last year, the agency counted more than 150, though an independent count by The Arizona Republic came up with 205.

Treating illegal entry as a criminal justice problem that can be solved with more Border Patrol agents and some unmanned aircraft is doomed to failure. In the meantime, taxpayers will continue to pay the rapidly growing cost of enforcement and people seeking a better life in the United States will continue to die in the Arizona desert.

by TChris

The tension between privacy and security continues to grow as the government seeks to implement the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II). The system would rank air passengers according to the likelihood that they are terrorists.

Congress last year ordered the General Accounting Office, its investigative arm, to report on whether CAPPS II safeguards passenger privacy. The auditors reported last month that the government hasn't adequately addressed security and privacy concerns.

The Transportation Security Administration intends to order airlines to surrender passenger records so that it can test CAPPS II. The airlines have refused to provide the information voluntarily. The airlines are worried about "government snooping and the possibility that people will be wrongly labeled as terrorists." The Air Transport Association, speaking for the airlines, would like the TSA to adopt guidelines that would protect the privacy of passengers.

The guidelines seek to ensure the TSA collects only personal information pertaining to aviation security, stores it securely and gets rid of it as soon as travel is completed. The airlines also said that passengers must be allowed to access their personal information and correct any errors.

The TSA has hired a privacy officer to assure that it obeys existing privacy laws, and says that it won't retain passengers' records, "except for people who might be terrorists."

CAPPS II would compare passenger information to government databases and assign each passenger a color code. Red means the passenger is a terrorist or violent criminal: no flying allowed. Yellow means questions exist and the passenger would go through extra security screening. Everybody else would be green, meaning they go through routine screening.

In response to the GAO report, some members of Congress believe CAPPS II is so flawed that it will ultimately be cancelled. The TSA is pressing onward, and will order the airlines to submit the requested passenger information within the next couple of months.

A car bomb destroyed a Baghdad hotel Wednesday night, killing 27 (as of now.)

The Bush administration offered prayers for the victims but said such attacks would not change U.S. policy. "Democracy is taking root in Iraq and there is no turning back," said Scott McClellan, White House spokesman. "This is a time of testing, but the terrorists will not prevail."

Here's an open thread to discuss it and all things Iraq war-related.

TalkLeft hit 2 million visitors today. We began in June, 2002, and were lucky to get 100 readers a day. Now, over 6,000 readers daily visit TalkLeft, many more than once. Thanks to all of you for making us a success in the blogosphere.

We're taking the day off....see you tonight.

Colorado Green Beret, Chief Warrant Officer William Howell, killed himself during a confrontation with police who had responded to his home on a domestic disturbance call. He returned from Iraq three weeks ago. He was 36.

The military requires troops returning from combat to be screened for post-traumatic stress disorder and other problems. The policy was enacted after four military wives of special forces soldiers returning from Afghanistan were killed by their husbands at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 2002.

Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group for veterans of both conflicts, said at least 23 service members committed suicide in Iraq since the war started and six, excluding Howell, killed themselves after returning stateside.

Read Joe Conasen today on the decline of the Western alliance:

Rather than using the events in Spain to retroactively justify the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq, honest analysis must acknowledge that last year’s invasion of Iraq was a serious strategic error. By rejecting multilateralism in pursuit of their "pre-emptive" doctrine, the President and his advisers damaged American credibility, weakened the Western alliance and created the situation now being exploited by Al Qaeda.

...The neoconservative strategy in Iraq has proved wrong in almost every particular. The costs of the war have been far greater than predicted, while the benefits remain in grave doubt. Meanwhile the Western alliance continues to decline, as does the moral reputation of the United States.

This is an official database of the Administration's statements on Iraq set up in the House of Representatives at the request of Rep. Henry Waxman.

Background:

One year after the Iraq invasion, many doubts have been raised regarding the Administration’s assertions about the threat posed by Iraq. Prior to the war in Iraq, the President and his advisors repeatedly claimed that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction that jeopardized the security of the United States. The failure to discover these weapons after the war has led to questions about whether the President and his advisors were candid in describing Iraq’s threat.

The Database:

The Iraq on the Record Report, prepared at the request of Rep. Henry A.Waxman, is a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

This database identifies 237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by these five officials in 125 public appearances in the time leading up to and after the commencement of hostilities in Iraq. The search options on the left can be used to find statements by any combination of speaker, subject, keyword, or date.