TMC Blog

The following is a transcript of remarks made by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy upon this morning’s release of the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s illegal seizing of thousands of phone records of Americans (including those of American newspaper reporters) by: lying to phone companies, lying to FISA court judges,…

Overnight, news emerged that for years, the FBI grabbed Americans’ private telephone records without any search warrants, and justifying the seizures of these records by claiming that there were emergency terrorist threats that in fact never existed. Thousands of times, the FBI completely invented stories of terrorist plots to attack the United States so that…

In March of 2009, we reviewed the congressional activity of the-members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is a coalition of liberals in the House of Representatives, one that has been characterized by the right wing as relentless in their pursuit of Red Army extremism. We found that, despite conservatives’ characterization of the group, the Progressive Caucus…

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 his…

At her LinkedIn profile, Helen Milby is coy about her line of work. “Non-Profit Organization Management”, she calls it. Her company’s web site is more blatantly uncommunicative with the public. It’s been almost 5 years now since Helen Milby registered the domain that she and her colleagues use for business emails. Still, the web site claims…

The following is our transcription of the November 19, 2009 testimony of John Amos of Skytruth, a non-profit environmental imaging organization, to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. After more than a decade analyzing satellite imagery in the commercial sector for oil and gas exploration, I founded Skytruth, a non-profit corporation dedicated to…

Two very different perspectives on U.S. oceans policy were expressed in the House of Representatives yesterday. First came Ron Klein, a Democratic Representative from Florida, a state that’s almost completely surrounded by salt water. Klein spoke in favor of the renewal and augmentation of the Coral Reef Conservation Act. Originally passed in the year 2000, the act…

“Tell Rod to keep me in mind for that seat, would ya?…. I know I could give him a check myself.” – Roland Burris, in a phone call with Robert Blagojevich, November 13, 2008, prior to his being appointed by Rod Blagojevich to the United States Senate. Senator Burris, it’s not like you’ve been busy on Capitol…

Committee on House Administration maintains a list of official registered “Congressional Member Organizations,” more regularly known as caucuses. A caucus is a group of members of the House of Representatives who share some commonality, whether it be personal (ex. the Congressional Hispanic Caucus), related to a district (ex. the Congressional Rural Caucus) or reflective of a representative’s…

This last week, Lamar Smith in the House and John Cornyn in the Senate introduced identical bills (H.R. 1076 and S. 436) to criminalize anonymous use of the Internet. If passed, the legislation (entitled the Internet Safety Act of 2009) would require every person in America to register every single time they use the internet and to have their identity…

For the last couple of months, Republicans in Congress have been whining and complaining that gasoline prices in the United States would go down a whole bunch, if only the the Democrats in Congress would do only something to increase the amount of oil drilling taking place on federal lands. Well, wouldn’t you know it,…

What do Republicans in Congress have against efficiency? They’ve recently voted against efficient public schools, against efficient light bulbs, and against efficient crane conservation. Now, Republicans in Congress are trying to destroy legislation that would promote efficient transportation. For reasonable people, the issues related to the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 are straightforward. The…

Republican politicians are always complaining that public schools are not efficient enough. They use this complaint as an excuse for cutting off the funds that public schools need to give American children an adequate education. Yesterday, the Democrats in Congress called the Republicans’ bluff. You want efficient public schools? Good. Congressman Ben Chandler, who is…

Republicans say that they’re fiscally responsible. That means that they ought to support programs that are financially efficient. Republicans say that they’re conservative. That means that they ought to support conservation programs. Nonetheless, a fiscally efficient conservation program came before the House of Representatives yesterday, and most Republicans voted against it. Why would they do…

Last fall, as members of the Senate were preparing to pass the ill-advised Military Commissions Act, Senator Hillary Clinton stood before the Senate and made plain her opposition to the legislation: Mr. President, During the Revolutionary War, between the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which set our founding ideals to paper, and the writing of our…