An update on a previous report: Representative Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia has maintained his perfect record in Congress. Since he entered office more than five years ago, Rep. Westmoreland has represented his district through perfect inactivity, having failed to sponsor a single piece of legislation, a single amendment, or a single symbolic resolution in that [...]

Wherever one stands on the question of just how the ideas of Confucius should be categorized, it’s clear that some of the opposition to H. Res. 784 was not at all based in a loyalty to the separation of church and state

Why the call for a new study on red snapper populations, and why from the Department of Commerce, instead of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is actually qualified and prepared to carry out fish population studies? The answer has more to do with commerce than it has to do with science.

I have to tell you in all honesty that until tonight, I thought Representative Lynn Westmoreland was a woman. Why is that? It’s not because I haven’t been paying attention to congressional affairs. In one form or another, I’ve been writing about the U.S. Congress and congressional legislation for over a decade. It’s not simply [...]

The Larochelles were seeking to separate the flag from the Constitution, and to make it a symbol of religious belief – and officially recognized by Congress as such. Congressman Mike Turner was more than happy to help them do this – and to try to use the boy scout as a tool to push religion as a wedge issue – when he introduced H.R. 3779.

If an oil company isn’t even using the leases of public lands they already have, why should they take on yet more leases… unless what those oil companies really want to do is just squat on their leases of public lands with oil under them only in order to prevent the oil from being drilled, thus decreasing supply and artificially driving up the cost of petroleum products so that they can make a bigger profit without doing any more work.

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.

Only someone determined not to see what’s happening around them could deny that America is going through profound economic suffering. Gasoline prices are up, and that means that there’s inflation for practically everything else we buy too. At the same time, work is increasingly hard to come by. New jobs aren’t being created much any [...]

The Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, as its name implies, would begin a transition from reliance on out-of-date fossil fuels for transportation toward more efficient transportation by train. It’s exactly what we need to deal with America’s current economic and environmental problems. For some bizarre reason, almost all of the Republicans in the House of Representatives oppose it.

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.