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The American Civil Liberties Union will argue in federal appeals court tomorrow that the Constitution requires law enforcement to get a warrant from a judge before tracking people's cars with GPS devices.
In the case, the FBI - without a warrant - attached a GPS tracker to the vehicle of three men suspected of burglarizing pharmacies. Following the January 2012 Supreme Court ruling that doing so constitutes a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, the district court issued a decision suppressing the evidence produced by the location tracking.
The American Civil Liberties Union will argue in federal appeals court tomorrow that the Constitution requires law enforcement to get a warrant from a judge before tracking people's cars with GPS devices.
In the case, the FBI - without a warrant - attached a GPS tracker to the vehicle of three men suspected of burglarizing pharmacies. Following the January 2012 Supreme Court ruling that doing so constitutes a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, the district court issued a decision suppressing the evidence produced by the location tracking.
The Justice Department appealed that ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing in part that even though attaching the device is a search, a warrant is not needed because of a rule called the "automobile exception." The ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the lower court's opinion, joined by the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
"Just because a technology wasn't around when the Constitution was written doesn't mean that it's not covered," said Catherine Crump, the ACLU attorney who will argue Tuesday before a three-judge panel. "The fundamental privacy rights established by the Fourth Amendment require that police justify their actions and show probable cause to a judge before they can conduct invasive surveillance like constant location tracking. The 'automobile exception' was created so police could find contraband hidden in cars, not so they could monitor a person's movements nonstop for days or even months on end."
WHAT:
Oral argument in U.S. v. Katzin at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The government has appealed the district court's decision granting the defendants' motion to dismiss evidence produced by a GPS tracking device that the FBI attached to their car without a warrant.
WHO:
Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project will argue before Judges D. Brooks Smith, Joseph A. Greenaway, and Franklin Stuart Van Antwerpen.
WHEN:
Tuesday, March 19, 9:30 a.m.
WHERE:
James A. Byrne Courthouse
601 Market Street, 19th Floor
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The ACLU's amicus brief is at:
aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/us-v-katzin-amicus-brief
The government's appeal brief is at:
aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/us-v-katzin-government-appellant-appeal-brief
The district court's ruling is at:
aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/us-v-katzin-district-court-opinion
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666"Did a Big Pharma CEO write these talking points for you on the back of a campaign check?" one critic asked Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
Polling data released this week shows that nearly 90% of Republican voters support allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies.
But congressional Republicans—many of whom receive substantial funding from the pharmaceutical industry—have staked out the opposite position, bashing the Biden administration's rollout of the initial list of medications that will be subject to price negotiations and parroting drugmakers' arguments against the popular reforms.
"The Inflation Reduction Act's socialist drug price controls will stunt the development of lifesaving treatments and cures while granting the government more unnecessary control over Americans' lives," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wrote on social media, invoking the well-worn and misleading narrative that curbing medicine costs would stifle innovation.
Blackburn received $215,500 in campaign donations from pharma and other health product PACs between 2017 and 2022, according to OpenSecrets.
"Did a Big Pharma CEO write these talking points for you on the back of a campaign check?" Tennessee State Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-90) wrote in response to Blackburn. (Johnson is currently exploring a U.S. Senate run against the Republican.)
Every GOP lawmaker in the U.S. House and Senate voted against the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which requires Medicare to negotiate the prices of a subset of high-cost prescription drugs. After the legislation passed, Republicans swiftly began working to roll it back, taking specific aim at Medicare's new authority to negotiate drug prices, which are far higher in the U.S. than in other wealthy nations.
Republican presidential candidates—including former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination—have also vocally criticized the law and suggested they would work to repeal it if they win in 2024.
Earlier this week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services listed the first 10 drugs it plans to negotiate, drawing predictable backlash from the pharmaceutical industry, which lobbied against the IRA's passage and is now suing over the drug pricing provisions. Several of the drugs included on the initial list were already set to face generic competition in the coming years.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the IRA's drug pricing reforms will save Medicare $160 billion over the next decade.
"Any effort by far-right Republicans to paint lowering the costs of prescription drug prices for Americans as a bad thing is laughable."
With President Joe Biden looking to make the drug price negotiations a centerpiece of his 2024 reelection campaign, Republican strategists are urging the GOP to aggressively counter the White House with messaging that mirrors industry claims about the IRA's potential impact on innovation—claims that advocates have long dismissed as false and self-serving.
"Republicans have to figure out how to go after it," Joe Grogan, a Republican strategist who served as a domestic policy adviser for Trump, toldPolitico. "They go after it by taking it head on: it is killing clinical programs, fundamentally restricting the amount of treatments."
Some GOP lawmakers are taking just that approach.
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), whose campaign received $253,400 from pharma and health product PACs between 2017 and 2022, said in a statement Tuesday that Medicare price negotiations "risk reversing decades of progress on bringing lifesaving treatments and medical breakthroughs to American patients."
Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who has received donations from drug companies that are suing the Biden administration over the price negotiations, added that "the Biden administration is trying to take a victory lap while at the same time they are pricing seniors out of their healthcare and ensuring future cures never reach those who need them."
A 2021 report by Patients for Affordable Drugs concluded that "Big Pharma's innovation argument just does not stand up to scrutiny," noting that "the money that U.S.-based drug companies make by charging Americans high prices is 76% greater than what's needed to fund their entire global research and development expenditures."
Democrats have vowed to combat attempts by the pharmaceutical industry and Republicans to sabotage or repeal the IRA, which represents a modest effort to rein in drugmakers' power to drive up prices.
"The products that will now be subject to negotiation are used by millions of seniors in Medicare each year, costing each of them thousands of dollars," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee. "I will be following the negotiation process closely and will fight any attempt by Big Pharma to undo or undermine the progress that's been made."
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) argued Wednesday that "any effort by far-right Republicans to paint lowering the costs of prescription drug prices for Americans as a bad thing is laughable."
"The goal of any federal cannabis policy reform ought to be to address the existing, untenable chasm between federal marijuana policy and the cannabis laws of the majority of U.S. states," said NORML's deputy director.
Cannabis reform advocates and industry representatives on Wednesday renewed demands for legalizing marijuana at the federal level as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra confirmed his department's rescheduling recommendation.
Marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug—the most restricted category under the Controlled Substance Act (CSA)—but President Joe Biden ordered Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to initiate a review last October, when he issued a mass pardon for simple federal cannabis possession.
Bloomberg initially reported Wednesday that a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official on Tuesday wrote to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Anne Milgram to recommend reclassifying cannabis Schedule III, a development Becerra confirmed on social media at 4:20 pm ET.
"Following the data and science, HHS has expeditiously responded to President Biden's directive to HHS Secretary Becerra and provided its scheduling recommendation for marijuana to the DEA on August 29, 2023," an HHS spokesperson told Marijuana Moment. "This administrative process was completed in less than 11 months, reflecting this department's collaboration and leadership to ensure that a comprehensive scientific evaluation be completed and shared expeditiously."
A DEA spokesperson confirmed to the outlet that it received the HHS letter and said: "DEA has the final authority to schedule or reschedule a drug under the Controlled Substances Act. DEA will now initiate its review."
Asked about Bloomberg's reporting on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed to reporters that Biden requested the scheduling review, "it's going to be an independent process," and "it's going to be guided by evidence." She declined to comment regarding Biden's position on decriminalization.
NORML declared in an email that "rescheduling is not enough," and in response to the letter, deputy director Paul Armentano said that "it will be very interesting to see how DEA responds to this recommendation, given the agency's historic opposition to any potential change in cannabis' categorization under federal law. Further, for decades, the agency has utilized its own five-factor criteria for assessing cannabis' placement in the CSA—criteria that as recently as 2016, the agency claimed that cannabis failed to meet. Since the agency has final say over any rescheduling decision, it is safe to say that this process still remains far from over."
Armentano argued that "the goal of any federal cannabis policy reform ought to be to address the existing, untenable chasm between federal marijuana policy and the cannabis laws of the majority of U.S. states," and rescheduling "fails to adequately address this conflict."
"Just as it is intellectually dishonest to categorize cannabis in the same placement as heroin, it is equally disingenuous to treat cannabis in the same manner as anabolic steroids," he added. "The majority of Americans believe that cannabis ought to be legal and that its hazards to health are less significant than those associated with federally descheduled substances like alcohol and tobacco. Like those latter substances, we have long argued the cannabis plant should be removed from the Controlled Substances Act altogether, thereby proving state governments—rather than the federal government—the ability to regulate marijuana in the manner they see fit without violating federal law."
Medicinal use of cannabis is allowed by 38 states, three U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia while recreational adult use is permitted in 23 states, two territories, and D.C., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—an advocate of federally legalizing cannabis—said in a statement that "HHS has done the right thing and DEA should now quickly follow through on this important step to greatly reduce the harm caused by draconian marijuana laws."
"While this is a step forward, there is still much more that needs to be done legislatively to end the federal prohibition on cannabis and roll back the War on Drugs," Schumer added. "I am committed to continuing to work in Congress to pass important marijuana legislation and criminal justice reform."
U.S. Cannabis Council "enthusiastically" welcomed the HHS recommendation, saying on social media: "We believe that rescheduling to Schedule III will mark the most significant federal cannabis reform in modern history. President Biden is effectively declaring an end to [former President Richard] Nixon's failed war on cannabis and placing the nation on a trajectory to end prohibition."
While recognizing the range of benefits from the potential rescheduling—making research easier to tax deductions for businesses—the industry group also emphasized its commitment to full cannabis legalization at the federal level.
National Cannabis Industry Association CEO Aaron Smith said that "moving cannabis to schedule III could have some limited benefit but does nothing to align federal law with the 38 U.S. states which have already effectively regulated cannabis for medical or adult use. The only way to fully resolve the myriad of issues stemming from the federal conflict with state law is to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act and regulate the product in a manner similar to alcohol."
"The enforcement of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against Trump will ensure that our republic is protected and that this insurrectionist-in-chief is forever disqualified from holding any future public office," said the president of Free Speech for People.
Two pro-democracy groups that have long argued that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars former President Donald Trump from running for election wrote to officials in five states, calling on them to keep the Republican's name off ballots in 2024 despite his decision to campaign amid his numerous legal battles.
Free Speech for People (FSFP) and Mi Familia Vota Education Fund (MFVEF) told New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, and members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission that by inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Trump violated Section 3, also known as the insurrectionist disqualification clause.
The clause was enacted after the Civil War and disqualifies an individual from holding public office if they have taken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and then engaged in an insurrection against the United States.
"Since 1868, the qualifications for eligibility for the presidency—in addition to natural-born citizenship, age, and residency—have also included not having engaged in insurrection against the United States after having taken an oath to support the Constitution," the letters read. "And Trump does not meet that qualification."
The Constitution makes clear that "Trump is ineligible to appear on the presidential primary ballot," said FSFP.
FSFP and MFVEF have led efforts in recent months to ensure that Trump is barred from appearing on election ballots in 2024. As the former president has been indicted at the federal level for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and, separately, for working with at least 18 other people to try to overturn the results in Georgia, the groups have written to election officials in 10 other states with the same message they sent Wednesday.
"While the U.S. Justice Department, along with state and local authorities, must hold Donald Trump accountable for all crimes that he has committed, secretaries of state and chief election officials across the country must carry out their responsibility to follow the mandate of the Constitution and the insurrectionist disqualification clause and bar Trump from any future ballot," said John Bonifaz, president of FSFP.
"Criminal prosecutions will establish Trump's liability under the law," Bonifaz added. "But the enforcement of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against Trump will ensure that our republic is protected and that this insurrectionist-in-chief is forever disqualified from holding any future public office."
In New Hampshire, the message reached Scanlan before the groups sent their letters to him on Wednesday. The secretary of state asked state Attorney General John Formella earlier this week to review "the legal issues involved" in potentially barring Trump from appearing on election ballots.
FSFP forwarded their letter to Formella on Wednesday.
Scanlan made the request of Formella's office after two conservative legal scholars noted in a paper that "several of the people involved in [the insurrection]—most notably the defeated president, Donald Trump—had previously taken oaths to support the Constitution."
"If they engaged in or gave aid and comfort to an insurrection against the constitutional government," they argued, "Section 3 would appear to bar them from holding office again."
Irving Zavaleta, national programs manager of MFVEF, said that Scanlan and other secretaries of state and election officials across the U.S. "are well within their authority to bar former President Donald Trump from the ballot."
"Trump is disqualified," Zavaleta said, "and we strongly urge election officials to bar him from the ballot."