The Democratic measure, sponsored by Reps. Brad Ashford (Neb.), Gwen Graham (Fla.), Scott Peters (Calif.) and Ami Bera (Calif.), would halt pay for members of Congress if they don’t agree to a new round of funding for the agency by Friday, in which case DHS would partially close.
The legislation is similar to several bills that would have halted lawmakers’ salaries during the government-wide shutdown of 2013. Those measures never made it out of committee that year.
Federal statute only allows lawmakers to change the salaries of future members of Congress, so the new House bill would put their wages in an escrow account until the potential Homeland Security shutdown ends.
Rep. Curt Clawson (R-Fla.) addressed what he believed were two members of the Indian government at a House hearing on Thursday and assured them that, as a U.S. representative, he would support all efforts to facilitate a better relationship between America and “your country” and “your government.”
There was only one problem. The officials testifying before the House Asia and Pacific subcommittee weren’t Indian officials at all, but two senior members of the U.S. government. Read More
Republicans who set out to skewer Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius got off on the wrong foot. First off, some of the first speakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee started with the Wizard of Oz theme. Sebelius is the former governor of Kansas. “We’re not in Kansas any more” was used on several occasions, to no avail. Their theme simply didn’t fit into the day or its events.
Sebelius disarmed her attackers by immediately opening up with the following statement:
“Access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans,” she said in her opening statement. “So let me say directly to these Americans: You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”
With the federal government careening toward its first shutdown in 17 years, House Republicans chose a hard line Saturday in their attack on President Obama’s health care law, setting up a late vote to attach a one-year delay of the health care law to legislation that would keep the government operating past midnight Monday.
The House Republican package would also permanently repeal a tax on medical devices that helps pay for the Affordable Care Act.
The House will also vote on a separate bill to ensure military forces continue to be paid in the event of a government shutdown, an admission that the outcome of the fiscal showdown is all but sealed.
The decision to choose confrontation over compromise or surrender all but ensures that much of the government will close on Tuesday, barring a last-minute decision to pass a short-term spending bill while negotiations continue.
That’s one way of looking at it. Moe Davis is right. Too many politicians have done the mea culpa thing and all is seemingly forgiven. Shed a tear or two and you come out a winner. Vitter, Sandord, are just the beginning of a long list of Republican naughty boys who have been forgiven and embraced by the ‘base.’
According to Moe Davis, the solution for Weiner “…to revive his political career, Weiner needs to move south to a less intellectual state, change the pronunciation of his last name to ‘Win-ner,’ and convert to a New Testament religion like Sen David Vitter and Rep Mark Sanford so he can say “the Good Lord gave me another chance, so shouldn’t you?””
Anthony Weiner does need to convert. Anyone with Weiner for a last name who lives to adulthood really should be forgiven. He is a walking, breathing self-fulfilling prophecy.
Former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who resigned from Congress after misfiring a racy photo over Twitter, spent more than $50,000 on polling in recent months, according to New York City campaign finance filings.
The latest filing with the city’s Campaign Finance Board for Weiner’s close-to-dormant mayoral campaign account shows he spent $54,000 on polling by David Binder Research on March 5. He spent another $52,500 on the firm for consulting work a day earlier, the filings show.
Weiner declined comment, and it’s unclear precisely what the polling was for. The New York Post reported earlier this year on a polling survey being conducted tossing Weiner’s name into the mix for city comptroller and for mayor.
Perhaps the former Rep. Weiner wants to run again for Congress. The question becomes, will Anthony Weiner be forgiven for his rather obvious and large indiscretions? Should we expect our congressmen to not participate in sexting? Is that too much to expect?
Will his little old ladies who made up excuses for him continue to support him? If he wins the office he runs for, will he behavr himself? What possesses a person to throw it all away on a naughty picture or two?
The House has concluded Legislative business for the week. Speaker Boehner could not muster the votes. There is no deal.
Eric Cantor probably played vulture politics, hoping to not get the votes, so he could take the speakership away from Boehner. Can we all say weasel together? I wish I could have seen the fighting. There seems to be a lot of that these days.
So they can all go home and the rest of us will watch our investments circle the drain.
Thanks, MOfo’s. Just what I wanted for Christmas.
How many people in Northern Virginia will lose their jobs right after Christmas? I already know of people who have been laid off from the defense industry. How will that impact the rest of the nation? We are in serious trouble.
Perhaps the American people should hold Congress’s paychecks until they finish their job. They have abrogated their responsibilities.
Westboro Baptist Church protesters will soon be severely limited in their ability to disrupt military funerals, after Congress passed a sweeping veterans bill this week that includes restrictions on such demonstrations.
According to “The Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012,” which is now headed to President Barack Obama’s desk, demonstrators will no longer be allowed to picket military funerals two hours before or after a service. The bill also requires protestors to be at least 300 feet away from grieving family members.
This aspect of the legislation was introduced by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who, at the urging of a teenage constituent, proposed new limitations on military funeral demonstrations as a response to a 2011 Supreme Court case that ruled such actions were protected under the First Amendment.
Let’s hope the work of this Congress puts some teeth in the law and that Westboro will not longer be able to manipulate and bastardize the First Amendment to dispense their hate, often at a military family’s most vulnerable time. Westboro will continue to act inappropriately, for sure, but at least our military families will be insulated by a layer of protection. There are just some lines people shouldn’t cross and this is one of them, in my opinion.
Its good to see that Congress can finally get something done.
Congress manipulates Wall Street and passes legislation to prevent other branches of government from doing it. Typical hypocritical Congress. Both sides of the aisle are guilty of padding their own pockets by what appears to be the use of insider information. From the Washington Post:
One-hundred-thirty members of Congress or their families have traded stocks collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars in companies lobbying on bills that came before their committees, a practice that is permitted under current ethics rules, a Washington Post analysis has found.
The lawmakers bought and sold a total of between $85 million and $218 million in 323 companies registered to lobby on legislation that appeared before them, according to an examination of all 45,000 individual congressional stock transactions contained in computerized financial disclosure data from 2007 to 2010.
Sometimes people have a representative but its in name only. Perhaps this blog can get the attention of Rep. Connolly. There is nothing like a little embarrassment to bring everyone front and center.
Colonel Morris Davis, better known to all of us at Moonhowlings as Moe Davis, once again attempts to get hold of his Congressman for some assistance with his on-going problem–that problem being he was denied his first amendment rights by his government. You don’t have to agree with Moe, but damn he does have a right to his opinion.
Here is his correspondence, again, to his congressman, Gerry Connolly, who is pretending Moe does not exist.
Dear Rep. Connolly,
I have tried several times over the past two years to contact you by email and regular mail to request your assistance. To date, I have not received so much as a form letter reply. [Although I did get an out-of-office email response once in Dec. 2009 from Mr. Fields.] Copied below is an article published earlier today on CBSNews.com that explains why I have tried to contact you repeatedly the past two years. As one of your constituents, I again ask for your assistance.
Here’s the First Amendment, in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment. The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism. Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.
Rep. Frank Wolf ripped into lobbyist Grover Norquist on the floor of the House today, stating that his no-taxes pledge has “paralyzed” Congress from doing what is necessary to tackle the deficit.
“Simply put, I believe Mr. Norquist is connected with, or has profited from, a number of unsavory people and groups out of the mainstream,” Wolf said.
In an interview, Norquist dismissed Wolf’s remarks as a “hissy fit.”
“He gets in these silly attacks on me that are plagiarized from racist websites,” Norquist told POLITICO. “He’s got to know that this is garbage.”
Wolf, a 16-term congressman who sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, also accused Norquist of using his no-taxes pledge – signed by virtually every congressional Republican — as leverage to push causes that the lawmaker said “many Americans would find inappropriate.
Wolf, who has a long conservative voting record, has not signed Norquist’s pledge.
Wolf emphasized that he himself did not support tax increases – essentially the mission of Norquist’s organization, Americans for Tax Reform. But the no-taxes pledge, Wolf argued, was hamstringing Congress from being able to “realistically” pursue tax reform – which Wolf said was a critical component in taming the nation’s debt.
“Have we really reached a point where one person’s demand for ideological purity is paralyzing Congress to the point that even a discussion of tax reform is viewed as breaking a no-tax pledge?” Wolf asked.
“He gets in these silly attacks on me that are plagiarized from racist websites,” Norquist told POLITICO. “He’s got to know that this is garbage.”
Good for Frank Wolf. He understands the meaning of compromise. Its about time someone sent Norquist packing.
Norquist was dismissive of Wolf’s attack in an interview with National Journal. “He either doesn’t understand what the pledge is or he is not accurate in how he portrays it,” Norquist said. “He had a melt-down and a hissy fit and I hope he’ll sober up and get back to the issue of holding spending down, not raising taxes.”
No one is quite sure what set Rep. Wolf off and no other congressmen or women jumped in to back him up.
Emboldened by recent wins at the polls, House Republicans, led by Rep. Stearns of Florida has demanded 10 years worth of records from Planned Parenthood in order to shut them down.
I thought McCarthyism was over. Congress wastes more time getting involved in football, baseball, steroid use with atheletes and women’s reproduction. They need to work on the economy and creating jobs.
Release: Snakes on a Plane In Congress Sep 14 2011 The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has held 22 hearings attacking federal regulations, but not a single hearing on job creation, Congressman Gerry Connolly, a member of the committee, lamented today.
Connolly said Wednesday’s hearing bordered on theater of the absurd when the majority brought in a snake breeder who urged Congress to repeal regulations associated with the Lacey Act of 1900, a law that controls the importation of dangerous and invasive plant and animal species.
The majority’s witness, David Barker of the Association of Reptile Breeders, argued for the elimination of an Interior Department rule that would ban the transportation across state lines of giant Burmese pythons and eight other dangerous snakes. “These pythons are the same snakes that are breeding rapidly, overrunning the Everglades, eating every animal in sight including large alligators, and establishing a permanent habitat in South Florida, according to the National Park Service,” Connolly said.
“The gentleman from Florida. who represents thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, as do I, is supportive of this plan that would increase costs for Medicare beneficiaries, unbelievable from a Member from South Florida,” Wasserman Schultz said, saying the legislation “slashes Medicaid and critical investments essential to winning the future in favor of protecting tax breaks for Big Oil, millionaires, and companies who ship American jobs overseas.”
He said:
From: Z112 West, Allen Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 04:48 PM To: Wasserman Schultz, Debbie Cc: McCarthy, Kevin; Blyth, Jonathan; Pelosi, Nancy; Cantor, Eric Subject: Unprofessional and Inappropriate Sophomoric Behavior from Wasserman-Schultz
Look, Debbie, I understand that after I departed the House floor you directed your floor speech comments directly towards me. Let me make myself perfectly clear, you want a personal fight, I am happy to oblige. You are the most vile, unprofessional ,and despicable member of the US House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up. Focus on your own congressional district!
I am bringing your actions today to our Majority Leader and Majority Whip and from this time forward, understand that I shall defend myself forthright against your heinous characterless behavior……which dates back to the disgusting protest you ordered at my campaign hqs, October 2010 in Deerfield Beach.
You have proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!
Steadfast and Loyal
Congressman Allen B West (R-FL
The she and he are Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, on the floor of the House and Allen West. West seems to have gone way over the top. He moved from a disagreement over policy to a very personal attack which included words like ‘vile,’ ‘unprofessional,’ and ‘despicable.’ It sounds to me like West is no gentleman.
One reason not to up the old tax rate on the more affluent might be sitting right under our noses. Both the speaker of the house and his second in command are millionaires. I don’t guess they will have much sympathy for the middle class.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Majority Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.) , the GOP leaders who rode to power on the grassroots wave of tea-party activists, are multi-millionaires with financial investments in some of the nation’s largest corporations.
Boehner had minimum financial holdings of $2 million at the end of 2010, while his top deputy was worth at least $3.4 million, according to financial disclosure forms that were released Wednesday. Their true net worth is likely to be far greater because lawmakers are only required to reveal a broad range of their financial holdings and the value of their primary residences is not mandatory in the disclosures. And, as is the case with Cantor’s wife, Diana, spouses are required to reveal the stocks and other assets they hold at the end of the year, not their annual income from the jobs they hold.
