These politicians have not been elected to Congress to complain about Washington. They’ve been elected to Congress to be part of Washington, and make it better.

Tim Rupli is a registered lobbyist for a variety of non-profit and for-profit corporations including the anti-immigration Numbers USA, the payday-lenders’ association called the Community Financial Services Association of America, the Independent Community Bankers of America, MetaBank, the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association, weapons training corporation Lasershot Inc., and pharmaceutical corporation Sepracor. In compensation for [...]

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.

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.

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Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, as its name implies, would begin a transition from reliance on out-of-date fossil fuels for transportation toward more efficient transportation by train.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.

There can be no rational objection to the Crane Conservation Act on the grounds of fiscal responsibility. The legislation has been examined and been certified to contain no earmarks for pork barrel spending. The Crane Conservation Act also contains no extra provisions to deal with any matters other than crane conservation. It does not secretly modify any existing U.S. law or provide financial kickbacks to anybody.

Do these politicians expect us to believe their excuses, that their failure to protect endangered great cats and canids is due to conservative principles? That explanation is absurd on the face of it. True conservatives support conservation.