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Pros And Cons Of American Civil Liberties

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Nearly one hundred years ago, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was formed in order to encourage and protect freedom of speech and other constitutional rights, especially to groups that are often seen as controversial and thus less deserving of those rights. Its position remains largely the same today. The major issues the ACLU champions in the current day are full rights for LGBT Americans, abortion rights, freedom from government surveillance, and combating mass incarceration. The ACLU lobbies, but mostly uses legal means to affect the government. The ACLU provides legal counsel in civil liberties cases, files civil liberties suits, and participates often in amicus curiae briefs. In fact, no group save the Department of Justice has …show more content…

This committee is involved in considering DeLauro-Frankel-Scott because it proposes that the EEOC uses government funds to establish a national program to collect pay data. Thus, the Committee on Appropriations must determine if this usage of funds is both beneficial and compatible with the federal budget. Another subcommittee that considers this amendment is the Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions. This subcommittee handles employer-employee relationships, employee benefits, and equal opportunity employment, the latter of which would be directly affected by the DeLauro-Frankel-Scott amendment if it were to pass. This subcommittee would weigh the impacts this amendment would make towards ensuring equal employment against its costs and complications to determine whether it is worthwhile legislation to pass. Since DeLauro-Frankel-Scott appropriates funds to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC is one bureaucracy heavily involved with the ACLU’s attempts to pass this amendments. The purpose of the EEOC is to settle employment discrimination cases, so …show more content…

The support for DeLauro-Frankel-Scott comes from the ACLU, which provides campaign support to and entertains members of the Committee on Appropriations and the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions in order to help persuade them to approve of and advocate for this amendment. In return, if the committee members feel sufficiently compensated, they will pass the amendment through Congress and pass the ACLU’s proposed legislation. However, the ACLU still needs to control how this legislation is implemented, so it must give first information on the amendment and later monetary support for any regulations or standards established by the EEOC and Department of Labor. Supporting these standards monetarily ensures that the ACLU has a say in how the law is interpreted and implemented by the bureaucracies. Without this support, these groups could twist the wording in the legislation and carry it out in a way that is detrimental to the goals of the ACLU. If these bureaucracies are satisfied by the support they receive from the ACLU, then they will create regulations that are in line with the goals of the ACLU. Finally, the government must work amongst itself to make sure the ACLU’s legislation works as planned. The Department of Labor and the EEOC must provide information and cost analysis of the amendment to the Senate Committee on Appropriations so that it may decide

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