13 Democrats and 3 Republicans have cosponsored Kucinich’s privileged resolution, designed to force a debate about the ongoing authorization of the war in Afghanistan.

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.

Instead of trying to forget the mistake they made in 2002, politicians like Walter Jones would do better to remember the kind of thinking that led them to support what they should have known was an unwise policy.

Two Mississippi Democrats went the other way, voting against the leadership of their own political party, in favor of allowing the effort to unseat Charlie Rangel to continue.

It seems that Walter Jones actually does support expanded government spending on health care – on a piecemeal basis. What he opposes is reform of the health care system to make it more efficient and affordable for Americans.

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.

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.

The problem is in the way that this resolution provides the official recognition and sanction of Congress for Billy Graham’s religious practice and promotion of Christianity. Congress has no place passing legislation respecting that kind of activity. Americans ought to judge for themselves whether one religion is worthwhile, not have Congress lecture them on the subject.

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.

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.