Posted by Congress Watcher on June 25, 2008 at 7:49 am · Filed under All Articles, Personalities, campaign gear
In Houston and Waco, Texas, local Democrats are all in a flutter about a comment that Nancy Pelosi made in an interview with Newsweek magazine that Chet Edwards would be a great vice presidential pick for Barack Obama. Edwards is a Congressman who represents Waco in the House of Representatives.
The idea is absurd, which means, of course, that it just might happen.
Chet Edwards is just the kind of Democrat who could turn other Democrats off, and keep them from showing up to vote on Election Day if he is picked for Vice President. In the Progressive Patriots legislative scorecard, Chet Edwards has a right wing score as high as his progressive score. Chet Edwards has voted for almost every bad idea that George W. Bush ever proposed to the U.S. Congress.
I found a bumper sticker - political button set that expresses the problem with Chet Edwards perfectly. It tickles me with its way of expressing political dissatisfaction in a relatively folsky way, so I thought I’d share it with you: Chet Edwards is a Democrat like a catfish is a cat - in other words, Chet Edwards is a Democrat in name only.
Posted by Congressional Aid on June 21, 2008 at 1:58 pm · Filed under All Articles, House legislation, Personalities
Just before he voted on June 20, 2008 for H.R. 6304, legislation that guts the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Republican Representative Randy Forbes of Virginia took to the floor of the House to identify the real problem with America.
What, pray tell, is the real problem with America? Could it be members of Congress who swear a solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, then turn around and vote for bills that undercut that same Constitution?
No, no. For Randy Forbes, the problem is the Constitution itself. It’s not just that Randy Forbes disrespects the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. He has a problem with the First Amendment. The real problem with America, according to Randy Forbes, is that people are speaking their minds:
Today, when the sun comes up on America, there are all too many people who spend all too much time criticizing and apologizing for this nation, trying to verbally tear it down.
In Randy Forbes’ America, everything would be hunky dory if everyone only used their right to free speech to praise America, if everyone only used their right to free speech to agree with what America’s leadership is doing, if everyone only used their free speech they way Randy Forbes would like. In other words, Randy Forbes is only willing to support free speech as long as it isn’t free at all.
Well I tell you what, Representative Forbes: you can have my free speech right after you kiss my assignation of liberty with the individual goodbye. It’s locked firmly in my mind, and I simply can’t recall where I placed the key.
Posted by Congress Watcher on June 20, 2008 at 6:27 pm · Filed under All Articles, House legislation
Today, there was a very important and very simple vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Leaders of both political parties tried to make the vote seem more complicated than it was, to try to quell protest against the bill, and they tried to hush and rush the bill through in 24 hours so no one would notice what happened.
We noticed. We are paying attention. We are ready to raise a ruddy ruckus in protest.
Let’s start with the basic facts:
1. The name of the bill is the FISA Amendments Act. It’s registered number is H.R. 6304
2. The bill extends the terrible Protect America Act, which allows:
- a) Massive electronic spying against American citizens’ telephone calls, emails, and web activities
- b) Tracking of Americans’ physicial movements through cell phone and GPS technology
- c) Physical searches of Americans’ homes and places of work
- d) All of a), b), and c) without any search warrant, without any judicial restraint, and without any meaningful congressional oversight
3. The bill gives retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications corporations that broke the law by giving George W. Bush private information about the personal communications of millions of Americans, without permission and without telling their customers about the breach of their privacy agreements
4. The bill is unconstitutional, in violation of the 4th amendment to the Constitution and the separation of powers
To vote for this bill was to insult the Constitution of the United States of America, and in doing so, to insult the USA itself. A vote in favor of this bill is a betrayal of the Oath of Office every member of Congress has taken. It is unpatriotic, and a grave breach of trust.
The idea to pass the FISA Amendments Act was Republican, but the passage of the FISA Amendments Act was by no means a purely Republican act. One hundred and five Democratic members of Congress abandoned their duty to the Constitution and joined George W. Bush and the Republicans in order to vote for big government spying on Americans.
The names of the 293 members of Congress who betrayed their Oath to uphold the Constitution are:
ColoradObama Button for 2008
Posted by Congressional Aid on June 20, 2008 at 3:34 pm · Filed under All Articles, House legislation, Personalities
The following are the remarks of Democratic Representative Bobby Scott regarding H.R. 6304, the bill to nullify the Fourth Amendment rights of those living under American jurisdiction. Representative Scott of Virginia rose in opposition on the morning of June 20, 2008, just before H.R. 6304 was passed:
I oppose H.R. 6304. It allows widespread acquisition of private conversations without adequate court review. The bill actually permits the government to perform mass untargeted surveillance of any and all conversations believed to be coming into and out of the United States without any individualized finding and without a requirement that wrongdoing is believed to be involved at all. It is not limited to just terrorism; it could be any foreign intelligence which would include diplomacy and everything else.
It is vague on what can be done with the information after it is acquired, and who has access to it, and the only court review is a check on whether the government certifies that the process has been followed. The court does not review for who, what and where the tapping will take place.
Furthermore, the collection of all this data can be done under emergency provisions before the court acts, but the collection can continue to be done even if the court rejects the application if the administration appeals. The bill also provides retroactive immunity to communications companies who have violated people’s rights, and whether or not those rights have been violated should be reviewed by the courts, not decided here by the Congress.
Posted by Congress Watcher on June 20, 2008 at 2:37 pm · Filed under All Articles, Podcasts, Site News
This podcast introduces the That’s My Congress audio podcast, explaining who we are and what we intend to do, what our focus on the United States Congress can include, and how we’re different from the Washington D.C. insider and political podcasts. We’re not corporate sponsored, and we don’t have the big financial backing of the journalistic establishment, but we do have the ability to look for the information.
Our introductory podcast.
Posted by Congress Watcher on June 13, 2008 at 2:04 pm · Filed under All Articles, House legislation
If you wanted to choose a source of energy that would damage local resources, poison America’s air with deadly pollution, accelerate global climate change, and become useful only a dangerously wasteful set of technologies, then tar sands and oil shale would be among your top picks. Of course, when most of us think about reforming America’s energy infrastructure, we have a very different set of priorities.
The Natural Resources Defense Council summarizes the significant shortcomings of mining tar sands and oil shale for energy as follows:
- “Mining and drilling tar sands, extracting bitumen and turning it into crude oil is a dirty, energy-intensive and destructive process. It takes four tons of material dug out of open pit mines to produce a single barrel of oil.”
- “Tar sands oil production generates three times as much global warming pollution as conventional oil production.”
- “Commercial oil shale technology is largely untested.”
- “Oil shale development would further deplete already scarce water resources in the West, threaten wildlife habitat and increase air pollution, and the conversion process could also generate toxic waste.”
Sustainability Watch places oil shale and tar sands both in the Earth’s top 5 dirtiest sources of energy, explaining, “Oil shale shares many of the same problems as tar sands. Like Tar sand its production is very energy intensive… Oil Shale like tar sands, also creates significant environmental damage when produced and consumed.”
This information about the profound shortcomings of tar sands and oil shale is not some kind of secret. It’s based upon easily accessible public knowledge.
In spite of that, nine members of the House of Representatives are pushing a new piece of legislation that would promote the mining of oil shale and tar sand deposits on protected public lands. Their bill, registered as H.R. 6211 four days ago, carries the cumbersome title, “To allow Americans the opportunity to see their vast oil shale and tar sands resources on Federal lands developed by providing the President with the ability to determine the quickest and most responsible way to access oil shale resources.”
Talk about chutzpah. According to the sponsors of H.R. 6211, the American people are supposed to regard it as an “opportunity” to have big oil corporations come onto our public lands at a bargain basement rate, take whatever wealth they can find, sell it at a huge profit that won’t be shared with the rest of us, and then leave what they found as a scarred, poison wreck of its former self. Sorry, but I don’t see the “opportunity” in that.
The federal government is supposed to act as a steward of public lands, not a pimp to sell out their precious resources for corrupt purposes at a cheap price. Yet, pimping out the valuable lands of the USA for the sake of the personal profit of a very small number of politically connected big oil elites is just what the following members of the U.S. House of Representatives have in mind. They are the sponsors of H.R. 6211, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves:
Chris Cannon
Rob Bishop
Henry Brown
John Culberson
David Dreier
Elton Gallegly
Wally Herger
Darrell Issa
John Peterson
South Dakota Environmentalist Button
Posted by Congress Watcher on June 10, 2008 at 8:36 am · Filed under All Articles, House hearings
Hearings taking place in the House of Representatives today:
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection
Environmental Protection Agency scientists will testify and be questioned about the the health effects of phthalates and bisphenol-A in consumer products. Given the existence of research indicating that these chemicals can cause cancer, diabetes and obesity in humans, there are grave concerns about what led the EPA to delay efforts to inform consumers about the risks of using products containing phthalates and bisphenol-A.
Representative Bobby Rush chairs the subcommittee.
The Foreign Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, 2:00 PM
John Bellinger, the legal adviser to the Department of State, will testify and be asked questions about the Bush Administration’s practice of extreme rendition, in which prisoners in United States custody are knowingly sent to be interrogated by nations that routinely use torture.
Representative William Delahunt chairs the subcommittee.
The Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Oceans, 2:00 PM
On the upcoming annual International Whaling Commission meeting. This year’s meeting will be held in Santiago, Chile from June 23-27. This year, for the first time in a long while, some nations have begun to hunt whales.
A live webcast of the hearing will be available. Representative Madeleine Bordallo chairs the subcommittee.
Posted by Congress Watcher on June 5, 2008 at 4:55 pm · Filed under All Articles, House legislation
Republican politicians are always complaining that public schools are not efficient enough. They use this complaint as an excuse for cutting off the funds that public schools need to give American children an adequate education.
Yesterday, the Democrats in Congress called the Republicans’ bluff. You want efficient public schools? Good. Congressman Ben Chandler, who is very far from liberal, had introduced H.R.3021, the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act. The proposed law would encourage public schools to run efficiently.
No more money-guzzling out of date school buildings. No more safety hazards for American children. The legislation would provide an investment in energy-efficient, healthy, technologically-updated schools. That way, taxpayers would save huge amounts of money on their property taxes by not having to pay so much on energy costs for schools at a time when the price of energy is shooting through the roof.
Under this law, more money would go toward quality education. Less taxpayer money would go to just keeping children warm in the winter, or to protecting schoolchildren in the South from record-breaking heat. For a small national investment in efficient schools, taxpayers around the country would get huge savings for an entire generation to come.
This legislation does exactly what Republicans say they want to do. It makes public schools more efficient. In fact, the bill makes such plain sense that 27 Republican members of the House of Representatives crossed the aisle yesterday to vote in favor of it. Thanks to them, the bill passed, and will become law if passed by the Senate. Those Republicans voting in favor were:
Sadly, 164 Republicans in Congress actually voted against making public schools more efficient. They voted against the bill. The names of these short-sighted members of Congress are:
Posted by Congress Watcher on May 27, 2008 at 6:34 am · Filed under All Articles, House legislation
Don’t look up now, but there could be an asteroid plunging through space aimed directly toward your head. Most likely, though, there’s not.
There probably is, however, a big near-earth asteroid somewhere out in space that will hit the earth sometime and cause a lot of trouble. It could strike this afternoon. It could strike one hundred million years from now.
Of course, it might not ever strike at all. Maybe we could see it coming and stop it from hitting us. That’s the hope of California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who has focused much of his political energy over the last few years on the issue of dealing with near-earth asteroids.
Back in 2004, Representative Rohrabacher introduced legislation that would have established a system to identify and track near-earth asteroids. In 2005, Rohrabacher introduced another bill that would have done the same thing. Six months ago, Rohrabacher introduced yet another bill that would support a governmental effort to establish procedures for intercepting near-earth asteroids or mitigating the effects of their impact on our planet.
Astronomers advise that the task of preventing a large asteroid from hitting the earth would be very technically difficult. Such an effort would require precision, planning, and disciplined execution in order to succeed.
Dana Rohrabacher wants to take the lead in Congress in establishing an anti-asteroid effort that could work, but he can’t even seem to manage the legislative engineering necessary to gain support for his bills in Congress. The 2004 legislation had no co-sponsors. The 2005 legislation had only two co-sponsors. The 2007 legislation has no co-sponsors. The first two bills died in committee, even though Rohrabacher’s Republican Party was in control of Congress at time. The latest anti-asteroid legislation from Rohrabacher seems set to meet the same fate.
Dana Rohrabacher seems to lack the ability to work with other members of the U.S. House of Representatives in order to get his bills serious consideration. Whether they support anti-asteroid systems or not, Rohrabacher’s constituents should be concerned with his problem getting anything accomplished in Congress.
This year, there are two Democrats, two alternative party candidates, and even another Republican lined up to challenge Dana Rohrabacher for his seat in Congress. There’s good reason for that. Congressman Rohrabacher may have his eyes set on big goals, but he can’t seem to keep his fit from tripping over little molehills.
Rhode Island Democrat Coffee Mug
Posted by Congress Watcher on May 23, 2008 at 4:08 pm · Filed under All Articles, House legislation
Republican Congressman Paul Broun, from the 10th district of Georgia, has just introduced a bill to amend the Constitution of the United States of America in order to reduce marriage rights.
Reduce marriage rights?!? Don’t I mean to say that Congressman Broun has introduced a constitutional amendment that would protect marriage?
No. That’s what Congressman Paul Broun says about his proposed constitutional amendment, but it’s not true. The Broun amendment to the Constitution would ban all Americans except for heterosexuals from getting married.
The first clause of the 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” That means that all couples in the United States have an equal right to get married. Most states don’t follow this constitutional requirement, but it is there nonetheless.
So, when Congressman Broun’s amendment to forbids some Americans from getting married, it undermines the 14th amendment to the Constitution. Congressman Broun’s constitutional amendment says that equality in America is only for some people. Within Congressman Broun’s new vision for America, equality will be traded in for inequality.
Paul Broun’s constitutional amendment is anti-equality, and it’s anti-marriage.
Unfortunately, Paul Broun isn’t the only one supporting this terrible constitutional amendment. As of this afternoon, Representative Broun has 28 cosponsors committed to support his anti-marriage amendment. If you see the name of your representative in Congress on this list, make a call through the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121, and tell your representative’s staff that you want to see their cosponsorship of Paul Broun’s antimarriage amendment removed:
Robert Aderholt
Todd Akin
Roscoe Bartlett
Brian Bilbray
Henry Brown
Dan Burton
Mary Fallin
Tom Feeney
Virginia Foxx
Trent Franks
Scott Garrett
Ralph Hall
Robin Hayes
Peter Hoekstra
Walter Jones
Steve King
John Linder
Thaddeus McCotter
Jeff Miller
John Peterson
Joseph Pitts
John Shimkus
Mark Souder
Tim Walberg
Lynn Westmoreland
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