Lawmaker News

As a member of the Illinois Congressional delegation, I have been besieged by questions on the status of Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.). These well-intended queries come from colleagues from around the country, Congressional staffers, the professional employees of the government, local Republican leaders and the general public.
 
When I went to visit Sen. Kirk on Sunday night, he was clearly very happy to see me. Family and close friends have pitched in to support him, and he was surrounded by "get well" notes from Illinois and around the world. I added to the collection with a card recently signed at the Clark County Republican Lincoln Day dinner and another from wounded warriors, organized by Bert Caswell, who is a red-coat tour guide at the United States Capitol.

When 14-year-old Janessa Senter was sitting in her high school classroom, she never dreamed that a trip to the principal’s office would change her life forever. But it did just that. One day during class, Janessa was called into the office where she was informed that she and her two sisters were being placed into foster care. Suddenly Janessa was thrust into an unknown and frightening world. In the four years that followed, until she exited the foster care program at age 18, Janessa was passed from group home to youth shelter to several different foster homes. The lack of a parental guide in her life hurt her; she remembers not knowing how to do simple tasks like opening a checking account or filling out financial aid forms for college. There was simply no one to teach her those skills.
 
Fortunately, Janessa’s story does have a happy ending. She has now found a “parent” who has committed to being a loving guide and foundation for the rest of her life. That commitment has forever impacted Janessa’s life for the better. She now is a senior social work major at the University of North Iowa who looks forward to one day starting a Youth and Family Center in her hometown of Wellington, Iowa. She also serves as a spokesperson for FosterClub, a national network of former foster youth that believes every young person in foster care deserves to be connected, informed, inspired and represented.

Many people in Washington will miss Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican and bipartisan bridge-builder who announced Tuesday evening that she has decided not to seek a fourth term in the U.S. Senate. But perhaps none more so than Charlie Palmer.

Though the confirmed centrist hardly fits the image of a "red-meat Republican," the Charlie Palmer Steakhouse, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, appears to be one of her favorite venues. Records compiled by Sunlight Foundation's Political Party Time show that the GOP lawmaker held 27 fundraisers there between May and December of last year. On three occasions, she headlined two events at the Charlie Palmer Steakhouse in one day, most recently on December 14. It's one indication of how sudden and surprising Snowe's announcement was: She ended 2011 with more than $3 million in her campaign warchest.

It’s the classic saga: good versus evil. The latest playbill from Washington has the airlines as the villain, the taxpayers as the victim and, yes you guessed it, the federal government starring as the hero.  And, as with all good thrillers, there’s a twist.

Just last week, the hero raced to the “rescue.”  However, while valiantly standing in defense of the “victims,” the hero picks their pocket.  In an effort to “protect consumers,” the Department of Transportation issued a ruling requiring all airlines to mask and embed all 16 federal taxes and fees in the price of an airplane ticket.  You got it: “Out of sight, out of mind.”

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.