Nita Lowey has gone back 8 separate times over the last three years for more lobbyist-arranged money, courtesy of the Twenty-First Century Group.

The lobbyists who actually wrote the speeches for members of Congress were working for Genentech, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical corporation Roche, which has a substantial financial interest in blocking health care reform legislation.

Donald Payne is not the most progressive member of the House of Representatives, but he’s no right wing Blue Dog either. With a progressive action score of 56 out of a possible 100, there are a lot of progressive pieces of legislation that Payne hasn’t supported yet. However, in a more generally progressive Congress, he could become a reliable part of a team to move America forward.

H.R. 3591, the Constitution and Citizenship Day Act, creates four million dollars for competitive grants to educational programs that teach about the federal constitution and state constitutions.

230 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted in favor of a bill stuffed with pork barrel, expanding the military, and providing for the continuation of wars that will soon have lasted an entire decade.

Will this commission examine the role that the military plays in the glorification of violence in American culture? Will it examine religious influence in the justification of individual and institutional violence. If not, why not?

The FISA Amendments Act completely unravels the fourth amendment to the Constitution. It makes protection from unreasonable search and seizure a mere privilege for those that please the government, not an inalienable right.

You are probably not aware of it, but the Equal Rights Amendment did not die back in the 1980s. It has been brought back to the House of Representatives and to the Senate. Both the Senate and House versions of the proposed constitutional amendment state that: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be [...]

It’s especially important to conserve wild cats and dogs, because they’re predators. As such, they help to preserve balance within ecological systems. When predators go extinct, their prey species go through wild boom and bust cycles that endanger large number of animal and plant circles. So, the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act of 2008 is arguably the most important conservation legislation to be presented to Congress this year.

Many of these representatives are progressive Democrats, but some of them are right wing Republicans. Hank Johnson included people from both sides of the political spectrum because he realized that the human tragedy of the fighting in northern Uganda merited a unified approach that transcended domestic politics.