The earmark-loathing Club for Growth has chastised Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday for opposing an amendment seeking to strike new earmarks from the 2005 highway bill. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had offered the amendment, which also called for cap on earmarks already in the bill.
Fixing the highway bill has become a cause celebre for earmark hawks due to one $10 million earmark for the Coconut Road project in Florida. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has called for a Congressional commission to investigate how the Coconut Road earmark got into the bill. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wants a Justice Department probe instead.
The Wednesday vote on the DeMint's amendment failed 78-18, with bipartisan support. Read the statement of Club for Growth President Pat Toomey below.
President Bush is expected to call for the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to cease by 2025. Bush is scheduled to speak about climate change in the Rose Garden at 2:45 p.m. today.
The White House released excerpts from Bush's prepared speech early this afternoon.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee want Attorney General Michael Mukasey to clarify his claim that the the government failed to act on a phone call about the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Mukasey said last month in San Francisco that the government failed to wiretap a phone call from an Afghanistan "safe house" to somebody in the United States prior to the September 11th strike. Mukasey made the claim while arguing that that Congress should renew a 2007 expansion of government surveillance capabilities.
On Monday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Robert "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Mukasey asking what he was referring to. Mukasey's statement, they wrote, was "very disturbing" because it was the first time someone had referred "to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have helped prevented the terrorist attacks.
They added: "If such calls were known about and not intercepted, serious additional concerns would be raised about the government's failure to take appropriate action before 9/11."
Here's Mukasey's quote under scrutiny, as reported by the New York Sun:
Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up the phone in Iraq and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."
Mukasey made the claim while calling on Congress swiftly renew an amendment to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FISA) that had allowed for expanded surveillance activities.
House Democrats have bucked the Bush administration's request, passing their own FISA update last month that does not include retroactive legal immunity for telecom companies that participated in the government's domestic warrantless wiretapping program. President Bush has said he would veto any FISA bill that lacks immunity for the companies.
Read the Democrats' letter to Mukasey here (.pdf).
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) argued that the Bush administration has failed to discuss the merits of the Colombia-U.S. free trade agreement with Congress, leading the House to delay a vote on it.
Rangel had joined other Democrats in delaying a vote on the agreement on Thursday. Rangel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued earlier in the week that that Bush's decision to send the deal to the House this week had showed a "disregard" toward Congress and "jeopardiz[ed] prospects for its passage."
Bush had sent it to Congress under "fast track" rules, which had required to Congress to consider it within 90 days. But the House Democrats' delay means that the vote is postponed indefinitely.
Rangel on CNBC Friday said that the Bush administration has taken the attitude that says, "I don't have to negotiate with you."
"It would seem to me that if you were trying to get something passed in the House of Representatives, you wouldn't confuse me with the facts as you see them," Rangel said. "You would say, 'What is the problem? What is the impediment?'"
Labor groups and both Democratic presidential candidates have opposed the free trade deal, saying that they're concerned about its effects on American workers. Democrats in the House have also called for greater protection in the deal for union workers in Colombia.
Rangel said that the bill's supporters have couched their support for it in terms of its effect on national security and Latin American relations.
"It's absolutely surprising, as I remind them, whether it's the secretary of commerce, the secretary -- every time they come, they want us to know the threat that Hu Chavez is, how we would violate the friendship that we have with these wonderful people -- and I love the Colombian people -- and that Castro is in on it," he said. "And so, it's a question of national defense."
Save the Whales was a movement that started in 1977 and soared in the 1980s. Save the Sharks could be next, or at least that's what Del. Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam) and seven other legislators were hoping for when they introduced a shark conservation measure on Thursday.
The Bordallo measure would seek to eliminate "an enforcement loophole" related to the transport of shark fins. In a floor speech, Bordallo said, "The rising demand for shark fins over past decades has also led to increases in the particularly exploitive practice of shark finning, where fins of sharks are removed and the carcass is discarded at sea."
Sharks don't attract any sympathy from beachgoers who fear a "Jaws"-like demise, but Bordallo says saving the sharks is vital to conserve marine ecosystems.
The other backers of the measure are Reps. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Sam Farr (D-Calif.), Charlie Gonzales (D-Texas), Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), Frank Pallone (D-N.J.). and Dels. Donna Christensen (D-V.I.) and Eni Faleomavaega (D-A.S.).
Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) posted this video to his congressional site today, attacking a proposed loophole that would exempt contractors from waste, fraud, and abuse oversight on jobs done overseas. Welch has introduced legislation to prevent the loophole.
Warning that an immediate House vote on the Colombia free trade agreement would fail, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to delay voting on the deal.
At a Thursday press conference, she said she will have the House decide Thursday on a rule change removing the deadline requiring the House to vote on the deal within 60 days of receiving it from the president. Pelosi said that she disagreed with the president's decision to send the bill this week.
"But the President took his action," she said. "I will take mine tomorrow."
Unions and several Democratic leaders, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have come out against approval of the free trade pact. They have called for expanding programs for U.S. workers displaced by jobs that went abroad and better protections for Colombian union members .
"We're first and foremost here to look out for the concerns of America's working families," Pelosi said.
House Minority Leader John Boehner said that he's disappointed in Pelosi's call for a delay and that he believes that it's an attempt to kill the deal.
"And when you look at the fact that exports are the one silver lining in our economy, why would we avoid dealing with a Colombia free trade issue that can enhance our ability to export products that are produced here, by American workers, around the world," Boehner said.
House Democrats opposing President Bush's Colombia Free Trade Agreement criticized the deal today after Bush sent it to Congress.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) said in a joint statement that they could not support the deal. Bush's "unprecedented decision to send a free trade agreement to Congress without following established protocols," they said, was "counter-productive."
Members of the House Trade Working Group offered even sharper criticism. Rep. Mike Michaud, the group's co-founder, said the deal was "dead on arrival."
"If the Bush Administration really believes this agreement is vital to national security interests, it would not send it to a certain defeat," Michaud said in a statement. "They would work with Democrats to stop labor leader assassinations and address forced displacement and murder of Afro-Colombians."
Assassinations of labor leaders by the Colombian military have formed the cornerstone of U.S. labor unions' opposition to the deal.
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