It’s been seven years since Rep. Jo Bonner first came to Congress, and it’s been a year since he took his seat as a member of the 111th Congress. Representative Bonner has had a lot of time to warm up. To date in the 111th Congress, Jo Bonner has not introduced one bill, not one [...]

Most of the Senate debate on the afternoon of December 8 leading up to the rejection of the Nelson-Hatch Amendment was pretty predictable. The amendment itself, after all, was a near cookie-cutter copy of the Stupak Amendment that was passed earlier this month in the House of Representatives. Both amendments prohibit private health insurance plans [...]

Gene Green, Democrat from Texas, proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College on January 7th, but it hasn’t advanced through the legislative process at all since February.

Term limits could exacerbate problems of corruption, by accelerating the revolving door between corporate lobbying and Congress.

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Richard Durbin just offered an amendment to S. 1692, a bill reauthorizing Patriot Act surveillance powers. It would have only required that when national security letters (NSLs) are issued without constitutional warrants, they have to be limited to surveillance of those who are suspected terrorists, suspected spies, or people [...]

This morning, a visitor to the website franken.senate.gov will encounter a canned message: “Sorry, the web page you have requested is experiencing technical difficulties.” Senator Al Franken is upgrading his web page from a canned, stand-in version (the one all new senators get) to a new, fully-formed and customized web page. As he warms to [...]

At That’s My Congress, we would like to clarify a matter which may appear unimportant out of context. In context, however, the clarification demonstrates a small but consistent effort by two senators to reform surveillance laws in the direction of greater constitutional protection. In an otherwise excellent legislative analysis by Kevin Bankston of the Electronic [...]

Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama today declared in the Senate Judiciary Committee, “it would be a mistake for us to sunset the national security letter provisions.” Under national security letter authority, a provision of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, government agents are able to obtain personal information on Americans’ activities without the warrant [...]

Senator Mike Johanns of Nebraska is so strongly opposed to health care reform legislation that when a group of teachers and veterans in favor of health care reform brought him some apple pie, his office called the police to haul them away. The same Senator Mike Johanns who is so adamantly opposed to health care [...]

The signs declaring that projects in certain areas were funded through stimulus legislation usually include the name of a United States senator or member of the House of Representatives. These signs amount to a form of political campaigning, demonstrating that a member of Congress is able to bring money into constituents’ communities.