Lawmaker News

Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), delivered remarks today on the House floor honoring the service of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).

None of us on this Floor are talented enough to summon the rhetoric that all of us feel in our hearts. We have young men and women, arrayed on the fields in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other troubled spots in the world. They are fighting for freedom and democracy and too many of them are injured on those fields. Our beloved colleague, Gabrielle Giffords, was injured on the field in the exercise of that democracy. And in being injured, she has become an example for us, for all Americans, indeed all the world, of courage, of clarity of purpose, of grace, of responsibility, of a sense of duty which she exercises this day.

I love Gabby Giffords. I was honored when she first ran for office before she was elected, to go to her district, as I have done for so many others in this country, to stand by her side, to walk down the streets of her community with her, to see in her the beauty not only of person. Many of us see the outward visage, but Gabby's beauty is in the heart, in the soul, in the spirit. The House of Representatives has been made proud by this extraordinary daughter of this House, who served so well during her tenure here, who felt so deeply about her constituents and cared so much for her country. Gabby, we love you. We have missed you.

When a service member joins the military, it’s not just a job; it’s a family commitment to our country. And yet, we, as a nation, tend to focus almost exclusively on the service members who put themselves in harm’s way, while often forgetting about the family members they leave behind who also make tremendous sacrifices on our behalf.  These family members are affected in countless ways, and we have an obligation to do right by them.

The challenges they face are not a mystery.  If a spouse rotates to a different military installation, the entire family is uprooted and they have to create a new support structure.  Their kids have to start new schools.  The families have to identify new caregivers for their children, a new specialist if they have a family member with special needs, and sometimes a new house if they are not living on the base.

If the spouse is not in the military, then they also have to find a new job – often with new state credentialing requirements. Given these tough economic times, it is not difficult to imagine just how great this burden is for the families of our troops.

We were reminded again this month of the sinister role that insider trading has played in our markets. In two totally different contexts, we meet head-on with the reality of this practice, both the advantage it provides to the person trading on such information and how unfair it is to everyone else participating in such markets.

Recently, more news has broken on the nearly two-year ordeal of insider trading allegations in the so-called “Raj Raj” case involving a vast network of experts, insiders, and investors, all in the know about the latest earnings figures for various companies.

The problem: they were in the know hours before everyone else. They acted on this so-called material, non-public information prior to its public release and before anyone else had a chance. Shame! This is as clearly and blatantly illegal as it gets. Additional people connected to the wide-ranging case were charged and sentenced this week. Even Raj himself made news, seeking a quick appeal and reversal of his guilty verdict.

The House is moving forward with three bills that would cripple the regulatory system.  The bills are not going to become law this Congress, but they show how far a party in thrall to its right-most wing is willing to veer from what has long been the mainstream.  The critical question is whether and when more moderate voices – centrist Republicans in Congress, sensible business leaders and the largely centrist American public – will recognize the damage being done and raise their voices to call it to a halt.  Clearly, that’s not going to happen in the House itself.
           
No one would argue that the regulatory system is perfect or that it’s some holy apparatus from which mere lawmakers should keep their distance.  But overall, it accomplishes what Congress set it up to do – it protects the public, produces benefits that outweigh costs, and has, according to most studies, a neutral to slightly positive effect on employment.  And as we continue to suffer through a bank-induced recession, it shouldn’t take leaps of imagination to understand the harm inflicted when the system fails to do its job.
          
Yet the bills before the House would prevent the system from working: they are a recipe for failure.  The bills are sometimes described with the mild term “regulatory reform” but these measures have as much to do with reform as Communist re-education camps had to do with education.  

The end of the fiscal year has come and gone and yet again Congress has failed to enact any appropriations bills and the country is deeper in debt.  

Congress also hasn’t addressed real spending reform as entitlement spending continues to bring the country closer to bankruptcy. Despite these dire circumstances, those responsible for these pressing national concerns, the United States Congress, still receive pay and benefits totaling $285,000 per year. This makes members of Congress among the highest-paid five percent of American workers.  

More Americans now support the notion of legalizing marijuana than oppose it. That was the conclusion of a new nationwide Gallup poll, released on Monday.
 
While the result may come as a surprise to some, it shouldn’t. The public’s growing support for marijuana law reform has been constant and consistent. Says the polling firm: “When Gallup first asked about legalizing marijuana, in 1969, 12 percent of Americans favored it.  … Support remained in the mid-20s … from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but has crept up since, passing 30 percent in 2000 and 40 percent in 2009 before reaching the 50 percent level in this year's … survey.”
 
In fact, since 2005, public support for legalizing cannabis has grown among every single demographic  polled. That’s right, today a greater percentage of Americans of every age, political ideology, and from every region of the country back marijuana law reform than did just six years ago.

Over last few weeks I have questioned the intent of Maine's Senator Susan Collins in her drive to overturn school-nutrition recommendations made by our nation’s most recognized medical authority, the National Academies' Institute of Medicine (IOM).  Specifically, the Senator takes issue with the recommendation to moderate potato and overall starchy vegetable servings from being unlimited to 2 servings a week in school lunches.  A broader concern, however, is the impact of politicians trying to trump scientific evidence that the medical community relies upon to improve the health of our nation and its children.

The IOM’s purpose is to provide biomedical science, medicine and health advice to the public based on the most thorough reviews of evidence-based medicine.  The Institute does this in an unbiased and authoritative fashion, and its recommendations for policy are considered the most respected views on health in our nation.  Congress often funds IOM studies and implements its recommendations.

The conclusions of the IOM can sometimes be surprising, even to the medical experts who serve on its panels.  One example of such a surprise was a recent IOM report on Vitamin D.  One of Maine’s most admired physicians, Dr. Clifford Rosen, served on this panel, which concluded that the doses of Vitamin D recommended by health professionals are in many cases too high.  Though a surprise, these results have changed the way physicians now recommend Vitamin D to their patients. 

The night before September’s unemployment numbers came out last week, the world’s greatest deliberative body spent the evening debating Senate rules instead of voting on jobs.   No wonder Americans are disillusioned with Washington.  So far this month the Senate has taken four votes: three of them have been about internal Senate procedures.  14 million people remain out of work, foreclosures are at record highs, yet it’s arcane parliamentary procedure that is taking up much of the Senate’s attention. 

In Congress, the Tea Party Republican majority is determined to ignore the jobs crisis in this country.  They’d rather focus Congress’ time and energy on busting unions and attacking the federally protected rights of workers to organize.
 
The Tea Party Republicans’ latest assault on hardworking Americans comes in the form of this legislation: Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act (H.R. 2587), which should have been titled the Busting Unions and Outsourcing Jobs to Protect Corporate Profits Act.  This legislation dismantles workers’ rights in the name of protecting the profits of a single corporation -- Boeing. 

 
H.R. 2587 is the Tea Party Republicans’ attempt to reward a corporation that breaks the law in order to bust union workers.  Rather than negotiate with union members to reach contract agreements, Boeing built a new $750 million facility in South Carolina.  H.R. 2587 would permit any company in America to move their operations to any low-wage location where workers’ rights are ignored, whether inside or outside the United States.
 

I met “Sonia,” a farmworker in upstate New York, in August. She and her husband had managed to scrape together $3,000 for a down payment on a house. After two years of making mortgage payments, they discovered the seller had never transferred the title to them. They are being evicted from the home they thought was their own.

What would you do if you were Sonia? Hire a lawyer?

Sonia and her husband tried to do just that, but as they started to seek recourse in the legal system, the seller threatened to call immigration. Sonia is an undocumented immigrant.

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