The House of Representatives rejected protections that might have saved the lives of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon and prevented the tremendous oil spill that resulted from its explosion.

Yesterday’s markup was an opportunity for reform of the abusive law, with amendments that could have brought the Patriot Act closer to compliance with the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee of protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Yet, every single reform that was offer was rejected by the House Judiciary Committee.

H. Res. 211, if passed, would give congressional endorsement to the designation of the first weekend in May as a national celebration of an ancient Judaic equivalent of Islam’s sharia. That old religious law includes the command to refrain from creating most kinds of artwork.

H.R. 642 is a bill without a cause. It ought to be referred to as the Right Wing Urban Legend Pandering Act.

Most members of the House Tea Party Caucus voted in favor of big government and against constitutional rights in yesterday’s vote on extending the abusive Patriot Act.

Is Boesch just another brick in the very shady wall of Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield donations, or just working for another one of his clients when he made that donation to Congressman Pence?

Mike Pence stands firmly against efforts to make the USA a more just and equitable nation. His policy positions may help him gain the favor of the corporations and lobbyists who can provide large amounts of money to a nationwide campaign, but whether they will earn him the support of the voters upon which his success must ultimately depend remains to be seen.

Yesterday we released our new report, “Call and Response,” which covers the extent of reciprocation in the House of Representatives in 2009. To measure reciprocation, we tabulated patterns of sponsorship and cosponsorship for the 4,412 substantive “H.R.” bills introduced to the House that year. A bill’s sponsor is the legislator whose office authors a bill [...]

The same inconsistency is there when it comes to the relative power between federal and local governments. Right wing activists say that local governments should have power above the federal government’s power, when local governments want to deny people rights. When local governments seek to protect constitutional rights, however, the same right wing activists show no respect for local decisions.

It is in this spirit that yesterday, the following 39 Republican members of Congress signed their name to a legal brief urging a court to block D.C.’s legalization of same-sex marriage.

The following are graphs showing the frequency distribution of bill cosponsorship in the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate as of February 13, 2009. Cosponsorship is the signing of a member of Congress’ name to a bill, an act that formally indicates support for the bill. The x-axis in each graph represents [...]