If H.R. 3600 succeeds, political candidates and political parties will be able to convert churches and charities into little more than campaign tools. Power brokers will be able to make donations to campaigns for political office through churches, and then to write off these campaign donations on their taxes. New corrupt relationships forged by financial transactions between churches and politicians will encourage radical schemes to increase government interference in religious matters, in order to give special advantage to well-connected preachers.

The truth is that there is increasing distrust in the idea of God in the United States, and increasing disagreement on religious issues. If Congress passes any resolution on the subject, it should be to reaffirm that the government should simply stay out of religious affairs, and neither promote nor oppose any religious beliefs. The U.S. House of Representatives couldn’t help itself yesterday, though, and so it voted overwhelmingly to pass H. Con. Res. 13.

Every one of the U.S. Representatives supporting H.R. 3051, legislation to ban the death penalty, are Democrats.

H. Con. Res. 301 would have required a complete American military pullout from Pakistan by the end of this December.

Drilling is taking place already under the status quo, which Representative Emanuel Cleaver supports. Yet, Jacob Turk accuses Cleaver of being “against drilling for U.S. oil in U.S. soil.”

Way back in the early 1970s, Ron Breiger came up with a formal articulation of Georg Simmel’s ideas regarding the intersection of “social circles” (a good discussion of which you may read here). Breiger recognized that if one has membership lists for a variety of organizations, then one can infer patterns of social connection in [...]

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.

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.