Open Congress : Congress Gossip Blog

From: Congress, To: Philip Morris et al.

2008-08-07T09:49:00Z

In late July the House passed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which for the first time would put tobacco products under regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. But the bill also throws the cigarette companies a serious bone:

The AP:

A loophole in a sweeping tobacco regulation bill would give the industry a 21-month window to introduce certain new products without first getting federal approval.

UPDATE: I should also mention that this isn’t the only apparent concession to the tobacco companies in this bill. One of the things the bill is expressly designed to do is ban flavored cigarettes. However, the most popular cigarette flavor, menthol, is specifically exempted from the ban.

Congress Wishes You a Peaceful Flight

2008-08-06T13:04:00Z

While Congress has been deadlocked over problems affecting transportation on the ground, they’ve actually made some progress with legislation to keep people happy when they take to the skies.

The Associated Press:

A U.S. House of Representatives committee advanced a bill to prohibit passengers from making mobile phone calls during flights.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed Thursday the Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace (Hang Up) Act, which would ban voice communication during scheduled flights. The Hang Up Act now moves to the full House of Representatives.

The Federal Aviation Administration already bans cell phone calls during flights, and the Hang Up Act would make that ban permanent. The ban would have certain exemptions for members of the flight crew as well as law enforcement officers.

Additionally, passengers would still be able to access in-flight Wi-Fi, as well as send text messages and e-mails as those services become available.

As an aside, I didn’t really know how I felt about this bill until looking through the Creative Commons search results on Flickr for “airplane sleeping.” Seeing all those sleepy people reminds me of my own troubles with sleeping on airplanes and how bummed I would be if, after finally getting to sleep, I was woken up by a neighbor’s middle-of-the-night conference call.

Above photo by openg, used under a Creative Commons license.

A Busted Tax Code

2008-08-06T12:17:00Z

Four senators are about to introduce a bill to help charity organizations that are struggling from high gas prices. Currently, people who use their cars while volunteering for a charity are eligible for a tax deduction of 14 cents a mile, while corporate employees who use their cars for business get 58.5 cents a mile. The legislation, being introduced today by John Ensign (R-NV), Chuck Schumer (D-IL), Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Chris Dodd (D-CT), will increase the deduction for people doing charity work, but only to 70 percent of the corporate deduction.

At OMB Watch, Craig Jennings rips Congress apart over the whole situation:

Tax breaks are inserted into the tax code as a means of either encouraging certain behavior or restoring fairness to a perceived inequity. That the use of personal vehicles for business deserves a tax break of some four times that of charitable use indicates that, as a society, we either 1) believe personal vehicles should be used way more for business than for charity (free market, baby!) or 2) that it would be really unfair for people who use their personal vehicles for charity work to see a tax break equal to those who use them for business.

Put to a vote, it’s hard to see how either of these options would win in a citizen ballot initiative. Common decency would forbid it. One wonders, then, what sort of conditions foster this kind of shameful disparity in the tax code.

UPDATE: I just noticed that Rep. Robert Latta (R-OH) has already introduced a similar bill in the House. His bill would increase the tax deduction for the charitable use of a personal vehicle to match the corporate deduction, but only for “the delivery of meals to homebound individuals who are elderly, disabled, frail or at risk.”

Another Sign That People Are Ready For Change in Washington

2008-08-05T22:42:00Z

Via Gallup:

In a year when approval of Congress has reached a new low, just 36% of U.S. registered voters say most members of Congress deserve re-election. This is among the lowest ratings Gallup has measured in a recent presidential or congressional election year.

Also worth noting is that the poll found that 35% of voters “are unsure whether their member of Congress is a Democrat or a Republican.”

Pelosi's Got Your Back

2008-08-05T19:13:00Z

The Politico this morning gave in inside view into how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is managing the politics involved in Congress’ standoff over energy policy.

...what looks like intraparty tension on the surface is part of an intentional strategy in which Pelosi takes the heat on energy policy, while behind the scenes she’s encouraging vulnerable Democrats to express their independence if it helps them politically, according to Democratic aides on and off Capitol Hill.

Pelosi’s gambit rests on one big assumption: that Democrats will own Washington after the election and will be able to craft a sweeping energy policy that is heavy on conservation and fuel alternatives while allowing for some new oil drilling. Democrats see no need to make major concessions on energy policy with a party poised to lose seats in both chambers in just three months — even if recess-averse Republicans continue to pound away on the issue.

Pass S.223!

2008-08-05T16:28:00Z

Personally, I find it appalling that the Senate still files their campaign finance disclosures on paper. The House of Representatives went electronic with their disclosures in 2001, and several bills to update the Senate’s procedures have been pending in Congress since 2003. The Senate’s insistence on paper filing costs taxpayers $250,000 per year and, more importantly, creates a disclosure blind-spot that allows 4-6 weeks of campaign contributions to stay invisible to the public until after each election.

There has been a serious push by both citizens and senators in the current session of Congress to pass S.223, a bill to require Senate candidates to file their campaign finance forms electronically. But despite its 42 bipartisan co-sponsors, the bill has been blocked by a few Senate Republicans, most recently John Ensign (R-NV), who are demanding that the bill include an unrelated and controversial amendment to require watchdog groups to disclose their donors.

If the disclosure blind-spot is to be fixed before the Senate elections in November, this bill must be passed as soon as the Senate returns from recess on September 8th.

Thankfully, seven good government reform groups have just initiated an aggressive campaign to pressure the Senate into doing whatever has to be done to get the bill passed. Pass223.com was launched today. It’s a collaborative project that asks you to call your senators and, if she’s not co-sponsoring the bill, ask her to support it; and if she’s already a co-sponsor, thank her and ask her to oppose the Ensign amendment.

If you need more encouragement to pick up the phone and call, consider the absurdity and wastefulness of the way things are done currently:

Instead of quickly downloading their campaign financing data directly to the Federal Election Commission, like everybody else, senators print out their records on paper and snail-mail them to the Senate secretary. These pages have to be scanned into digital images that are then e-mailed to the election commission, where – wait now – they have to be printed and collated. This paper treadmill – perhaps 10,000 pages – is next sent to a private contractor to be tediously typed at a cost of $250,000 back into a computer, of all things. From there, the information is e-mailed back to the election commission for, yes, posting on the Internet.

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Feinstein's Election Reform Flip-Flop

2008-08-04T22:00:00Z

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) came into the 110th session of Congress and her new chairmanship of the Rules and Administration Committee determined to lead the Senate in reforming elections.

“Serious questions have arisen about the accuracy and reliability of new electronic voting machines,” Feinstein said just after the November 2006 elections. In that election, 18,000 electronic votes went missing in a Sarasota County, Florida race that ended up being decided by a margin of only 369 votes. “It’s imperative that Congress does everything it can to help ensure that votes cast are recorded accurately,” Feinstein said.

Upon taking up her chairmanship, Feinstein immediately called for a federal investigation of the Sarasota County case, and was already planning a bill to require a paper trail verified by voters for every electronic voting machine in the nation.

According to the Association for Computing Machinery, electronic voting machines raise risks and vulnerabilities “stemming from poor design, inferior software engineering processes, mediocre protective measures, and insufficient comprehensive testing.” ACM has released a public statement recommending that “e-voting systems enable voters to inspect a physical (e.g., paper) record to verify the accuracy of their vote, and to serve as an independent check on the record produced and stored by the system.”

In May of 2007, Feinstein introduced the Ballot Integrity Act, which would require that all voting machines used in federal election produce a voter-verified paper record in time for the 2010 elections. Her bill was co-sponsored by ten powerful Senate Democrats and one Independent, but it never made it out of her committee.

Senate Republicans, and particularly the Rules and Administration Committee’s Ranking Member, Robert Bennett (R-UT), opposed the bill. At a hearing on the bill in July 2007, Bennett said, “in the State of Utah we feel very good about what we have got. And it does not qualify under this bill. It would have to be thrown out after a lot of research, a lot of work, and a lot of money to put it in place and our experience with it in an election and it worked. Then we would say okay, you have to throw it out. I know I would get significant resistance because they would say, ‘demonstrate that what we have got is not working before you insist that we have to throw it away’.”

Recently, after the Ballot Integrity Act completely stalled out, Senator Feinstein, along with her original nemesis, Senator Bennett, introduced a new election reform bill: the Bipartisan Electronic Voting Reform Act of 2008. The new bill is generally similar to the old one, but with one crucial difference: it does not require electronic machines to produce a paper record.

Instead, it requires the machines to “provide for the independent verification of each ballot cast by means of a paper, electronic, audio, video, pictorial or other independently produced record.” That means that a voting machine could be legally verified by another machine, leaving no durable record behind in case of a malfunction. As a recent New York Times editorial on the issue said, “verifying by electronic records – having one piece of software attest that another piece of software is honest – is not verifying at all.”

Additionally, the new bill moves the implementation date back from 2010 to 2012, with the option of a waiver until 2014.

One has to wonder why Feinstein, who entered this session of Congress with such apparent conviction about the need for verifiable paper trails of all electronic voting machines, would lend her name to such a compromised bill. Perhaps it’s political – with all her talk early on of restoring the integrity of elections, maybe she just wants to be able to say that she accomplished something on that front in the 110th Congress. But it’s a mistake to prioritize passing legislation above implementing sound policy. I’m with the Times on this one: “If Congress cannot pass a good bill, it should let the states continue to do the hard work – and be prepared to explain to voters why it cannot muster the will to protect the integrity of American elections.”

A Bureaucratic Error in Big Oil's Favor

2008-08-04T14:34:00Z

At Public Citizen’s CitizenVox blog, Tyson Slocum reminds us of the oil company tax loophole that Congress should fix before they consider opening more publicly owned areas to drilling.

Because of a bureaucratic oversight by the Department of Interior during the implementation of the [Deep Water Royalty Relief Act of 1995], oil companies that secured leases in 1998 and 1999 were exempted from royalties, regardless of the prevailing market price of oil. This stands in stark contrast to other, similar leases, which require the payment of royalties if the price of oil exceeds a certain threshold. The day the bill was signed in November 1995, West Texas Intermediate oil was trading at $18.28/barrel. With oil now trading nearly 600 percent higher at more than $120/barrel, these companies have been and will be extracting very valuable energy from public land without paying any royalties to American taxpayers.

Fixing this accidental loophole, which the Government Accountability Office estimates will cost the government a total of $14.7 billion, has been a goal of Democratic congressional leaders since taking control of Congress. Upon taking office in January 2007, the House voted to bar companies from new leases unless they agree to renegotiate the 1998-99 contracts as part of their comprehensive energy bill. But that provision was removed from the bill by the Senate before it was signed into law.

Correcting these leases and recovering the money that they have cost taxpayers seems like good compromise material for Democrats looking to work out a deal on expanded drilling.

Wal-Mart vs. Card-Check

2008-08-01T17:46:00Z

The basic argument for the Employee Free Choice Act is that a card-check union formation system would protect workers from being intimidated by their employers. Wal-Mart seems to be strengthening the argument for the bill through the tact they’re pursuing in arguing against it.

The Wall Street Journal:

. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they’ll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies – including Wal-Mart.

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.

According to about a dozen Wal-Mart employees who attended such meetings in seven states, Wal-Mart executives claim that employees at unionized stores would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation. Also, unionization could mean fewer jobs as labor costs rise.

“The meeting leader said, ‘I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won’t have a vote on whether you want a union,’” said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. “I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote,” she said. .

Crazy House

2008-08-01T16:17:00Z

The House of Representatives voted to adjourn for their month-long August recess at 11:23 this morning, but the Republicans just won’t go home. Despite the lights and microphones in the House chamber being turned off, Republicans are standing their ground, protesting the Democratic leadership’s refusal to allow votes on domestic oil drilling.

The Crypt’s got excellent coverage of the event. Check it out:

. Update 4: Republican leaders just sent out a notice looking for a bullhorn, and leadership aides are trying to corral all the members who are still in town to come speak on the floor and sustain this one-sided debate.

Also, Republicans can thank Shadegg for turning on the microphones the first time. Apparently, the fiesty Arizona conservative started typing random codes into the chamber’s public address system and accidentally typed the correct code, allowing Republicans brief access to the microphone before it was turned off again.

“I love this,” Shadegg told reporters up in the press gallery afterward. “Congress can be so boring. ... This is a kick.” .

And:

. It has been quite the scene on the House floor this afternoon, as GOP staff members have kept the chamber filled with an eclectic assortment of people.

Boy Scouts, members of the German army, stray tourists and even members in shorts and t-shirts have all been spotted on the floor at different times.

“You are not witnessing a revolt,” said Rep. Mike Pence. “You are witnessing democracy in action.” .

Also, since the House is officially adjourned, C-SPAN isn’t covering any of this (they have no control over the cameras they use). Thankfully, some members of the GOP are keeping us updated on Twitter and Qik.