If you care about what Bush has done to the US Constitution and want to discuss how to put the imperial presidency back in the box, you might find a conference scheduled for next week at the Harvard Law School of interest. Four area organizations that want to see a return to constitutional government have announced a symposium at the Harvard Law School on May 16, 2008, on the topic, “Restoring America After Bush.” Cooperating sponsors include the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Boston Lawyers Chapter of the American Constitution Society, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute of Race and Justice of the Harvard Law School, and the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action, a Boston-based civil rights organization.
Responding to nationwide dismay over how to restore the country to both constitutional government and to its traditional position of world leadership, these organizations have brought together distinguished panels to discuss such vital issues as: curbing the “imperial” presidency; restoring governmental checks and balances; depoliticizing government agencies and the courts; reinvigorating habeas corpus and the Fourth and Sixth Amendments; reversing the Bush-Cheney doctrine of pre-emptive war; renewing American commitment to multilateralism; achieving real security without sacrificing fundamental rights; and reversing America’s current image as the propagator of arbitrary detention and even torture.
Panelists include Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who serves on the Select Committee on Intelligence and on the Judiciary Committee; Prof. Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, a widely published expert on international security affairs; F.A.O. Schwarz, Jr., of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School; Louis Fisher, distinguished constitutional law specialist at the Library of Congress; Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute; Prof. Charles A. Fried, Beneficial Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School and former solicitor general of the United States; and Prof. Detlev Vagts, Bemis Professor of International Law, Emeritus, also of Harvard Law School.
The conference will be held in the Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall on the Harvard Law School campus from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the public is invited. For questions or reservations, call the JALSA office at 617-227-3000 or email them at rsvp@jalsa.org.
Sheila Decter, decter@jalsa.org
JALSA
See also my previous posting on this forum. Let us hope there’s something left of America to restore after Bush, i.e. no October Surprise attack on Iran that flirts with WWIII and drives voters to the Military Hero candidate. But they wouldn’t be so cynical. Would they?
If there will be anything left of the idea of “America” after Bush leaves office (and then only if McCain looses), these minds will be the ones to conjure it and implement it. I’m going to hopefully see where we are heading and what we can do in the post-W era to bring us back to where we should be, as Thomas Jefferson said about the United States, “the last, best hope for all mankind.”