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Posts Tagged ‘House of Representatives’
August 26th, 2014 at 7:57 pm
DOJ: We Have Lois Lerner’s “Lost” Emails

Apparently, you can lie to Congress but not to Judicial Watch.

The conservative watchdog organization is publicizing an admission by the Department of Justice that government officials can access emails reportedly lost in a hard drive crash.

The messages – correspondence to and from former IRS manager Lois Lerner – have been sought by congressional investigators seeking more information about the agency’s targeting of conservative advocacy groups filing for tax-exempt status.

In sworn testimony, IRS officials have told members of Congress that thousands of emails sent from Lerner’s government account could not be retrieved because a back-up system had also been erased.

But now attorneys at the DOJ are singing a different tune.

“Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Justice Department lawyers informed him that the federal government keeps a back-up copy of every email and record in the event of a government-wide catastrophe,” reports the Washington Examiner.

That includes Lerner’s IRS emails.

But don’t expect them to be produced anytime soon. The DOJ is claiming that the newly revealed back-up system would be “too onerous to search,” but did say that Treasury Department inspectors are looking into it.

While the litigators wrangle, we’re left with yet more evidence that the Obama administration doesn’t mind playing fast and loose with the truth – even under oath.

The House of Representatives already voted back in May to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify; making her the second administration official after Attorney General Eric Holder to receive such a dishonor.

If it’s true that top IRS brass lied under oath to Congress about the whereabouts of Lerner’s potentially damaging emails, one wonders what message House leadership would send to this latest act of executive defiance.

July 31st, 2014 at 1:10 pm
House Passes Bill to Sue Obama

The House of Representatives made history today when it passed a bill allowing Congress to sue the President of the United States for failing to implement a federal law, reports the L.A. Times.

The legislation authorizes House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to file suit in federal court demanding that President Barack Obama enforce ObamaCare’s employer mandate, which requires companies with 50 or more full-time workers to purchase ObamaCare-compliant health insurance or pay a penalty.

House Republicans have been critical of President Obama’s unilateral delays in enforcing the mandate – now scheduled to go into effect in 2016 – because it spares Democrats and the Obama administration substantial political pain. If the law is so great, Republicans reason, then it should go into full effect.

As with other anti-ObamaCare measures to pass the House, this bill has virtually no chance of clearing the Senate where Democrats are in the majority. Still, it’s very presence helps Republicans draw a clearer contrast over where each party stands on the rule of law; in particular the president’s ability to pick-and-choose which parts of a statute he will – as he swore upon taking office – to faithfully execute.

July 14th, 2014 at 2:53 pm
“Operation Choke Point” – Rogue Obama Administration Program Faces House Scrutiny This Week
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Already mired in myriad scandals – the IRS, our southern border, Benghazi, etc. – one would presume the Obama Administration reluctant to run a legally and ethically dubious program named “Operation Choke Point.”  Yet that’s exactly what this tone-deaf administration has done.

Fortunately, the House of Representatives is paying close attention, and holding several important hearings on the matter this week.

For those still unfamiliar, Operation Choke Point is a program initiated by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice to interrupt – or “choke” – access to private financial resources by entirely legal industries such as firearms sales, ammunition sales, coin dealers and others.  If the administration can successfully pressure financial services like banks and third-party payment processors to refuse to do business with those industries, they obviously cannot survive for very long.  All the while, none of the targeted industries have even been shown to have violated any laws.  Accordingly, it’s a prototypical Obama Administration effort to demonize and target legal business that it happens to dislike.

This week, however, two House committees will bring cleansing public sunlight to this rogue operation.  On Tuesday at 10:00 a.m., the House Financial Services Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee will hold a hearing entitled “The Department of Justice’s ‘Operation Choke Point,'” and at 2:00 p.m. the House Financial Services Financial Institution and Consumer Credit Subcommittee will hole its hearing entitled, “Examining Regulatory Relief Proposals for Community Financial Institutions, Part II.”  Then, on Thursday at 9:30 a.m., the House Judiciary Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law Subcommittee will hold its hearing entitled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent?  A Study of the Proprietary & Legal Authority for the Justice Department’s Operation Choke Point.”

As with other Justice Department and IRS campaigns, Operation Choke Point is characterized by abuse of due process, secrecy and dishonesty.  Thankfully, this week’s battery of House hearings will provide some much-needed public scrutiny, and hopefully help end this rogue scheme.

February 7th, 2014 at 4:55 pm
The Case for Expanding the House
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Here in Southern California, the biggest development in recent weeks has been the announcement that hyper-liberal congressman Henry Waxman — who’s held a House seat from the Los Angeles area for 40 years — is finally stepping down at the end of the current session.

Given how long Waxman has dominated the politics of the area, it’s no surprise that there’s a long list of candidates lining up to succeed him. There’s another reason, however, for the glut of competition: this is an enormous district of wildly divergent communities. In my weekly column for the Orange County Register, I argue that this stems from a mistake in how we’ve organized the lower chamber for the past 85 years:

The physical distance between the northwestern edge of Waxman’s 33rd District, in Malibu, and its southeastern terminus, in San Pedro, is more than 40 miles. The cultural difference can only be measured in light years. The South Bay, the Westside, the Conejo Valley, and the coastal refuges of Pacific Palisades and Malibu are all worlds unto themselves, populated by citizens who view themselves as distinct from one another. The idea that they should all be represented by one person in Congress makes a mockery of the notion that House districts represent discrete, coherent communities.

That sort of absurdity is inevitable, however, given the fact that the House was severed from its original purpose 85 years ago, when Congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929. That law fixed the number of seats in the House of Representatives at 435, dictating that the available seats would be redistributed among the states based on population changes in each census, instead of adding new ones, which had been the historical practice (the House had grown to 435 from its original number of only 65). As a result, the average House district now consists of over 700,000 people – a far cry from the original system, where there was one representative for approximately 33,000 souls.

Whoever inherits Waxman’s seat will represent more people than the U.S. senators from the states of Wyoming or Vermont. Were the ratios employed by the founders still in use today, California’s 33rd Congressional District would actually be split into 21 discrete House seats.

Returning to that standard may be overkill; it would swell the ranks of the House of Representatives to over 9,500 members. Some expansion, however, is surely justified to create House districts small enough to actually represent something like the will of a coherent community. Until such changes are made, the notion of the House as the “people’s chamber” will be little more than a touch of historical nostalgia.

I’ll also note that having an enlarged House would (A) make it harder for special interests to capture critical masses of legislators and (b) have the practical effect of making it cheaper to run for Congress and allowing more true citizen-legislators to emerge. In short, it would make it harder to consolidate power in Congress—which is precisely why most sitting lawmakers won’t support it…and why it’s the right thing to do.

November 28th, 2012 at 8:37 pm
More Thoughts on Partisan Polarization
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Ashton correctly notes below that the Democratic Party is incapable of discovering “diversity” anywhere other than in the melanin count or chromosomal pairings of its members, beyond which measures the party is remarkably homogeneous. I want to add one note to that, which plays into my longstanding irritation with the raw deal that African-Americans get from the Democratic Party.

While Debbie Wasserman-Schultz crows about the greater diversity in Democratic ranks, what goes unspoken is that the process by which minorities get elected to the House of Representatives actually thwarts their ability to move into higher office. Consider: in the outgoing Congress (the 112th), there are 44 black members, or just over 10 percent of the body. Blacks are 12.6 percent of the nation’s population, but there’s no iron-clad law by which we should expect them to achieve elected office in perfect proportion to their share of the population. Still, this is pretty close.

Now, how many black senators are there? 0

How many black governors? 1, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick

When you consider that the House often acts as a feeder to both of these higher offices, the discontinuity only gets stranger. So what’s the cause?

Of the 44 black House members, 26 (59 percent) come from congressional districts where the majority of the population is black (as a bit of a trivia on the side, it’s worth noting that there’s one district — the Tennessee 9th, located in Memphis — where a majority black population is represented by a white member, liberal Steve Cohen). An additional four come from districts where the black population is over 40 percent. And the representatives who come from districts with smaller black populations include some of the most left-wing members of the House, including Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Keith Ellison.

The problem is that Democrats have long agitated for lawmakers to gerrymander these minority-majority districts as a means to ensuring electoral success for black candidates. That’s worked so far as it goes, but it’s also generated a generation of black politicians who have no experience appealing to anyone other than their fellow urban blacks. Since that group represents a small population in statewide races (even in Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of African-American residents, blacks make up only a little over 1/3 of residents), these House members end up being precisely the wrong kind of figures to obtain higher office. Indeed, it’s notable that Governor Patrick and President Obama, the two most prominent black public-sector executives in the nation, never served in the House (Obama lost a bid for the Democratic nomination in the First District of Illinois in 2000).

The vast majority of Americans agree that we should be striving for a color-blind nation. We’ve made remarkably brisk progress towards that goal in civil society for the past several decades. But, if anything, we’re lagging behind on the political front. Segregating black politicians from non-black voters is not the solution.

July 11th, 2012 at 5:44 pm
House Votes to Repeal ObamaCare
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The U.S. House of Representatives voted 244-185 this afternoon to repeal ObamaCare. 

Five Democrats joined all Republicans in the House to support the repeal measure.  The five Democrats included:

  • Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT)
  • Rep. Larry Kissell (D-NC)
  • Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC)
  • Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR)
  • Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK)

McIntyre, Ross and Boren all voted for repeal in 2011.  Matheson and Kissell, both facing tough reelection fights, voted against repeal last year and changed their votes today.

May 16th, 2012 at 7:11 pm
Congress Votes Down Obama’s 2012 Budget: 513 – 0

You read that right.

After the House voted down President Barack Obama’s budget proposal 414 – 0 in March, today the Senate defeated it 99 – 0.  There are 51 Democrats in the Senate (and two Independents that caucus with them).  Not one voted for their president’s budget.  There are 190 Democrats in the House.  Not one voted for their president’s budget.

There are only 535 members in Congress.  As of today, 513 are on record opposing Barack Obama’s 2012 budget.  No one is on record supporting it.

By contrast, Paul Ryan’s budget passed the House on March 29th with 228 Republican votes, and only 10 party members against.  Today, 41 of 47 Republicans voted for Ryan’s budget; short of the 51 needed for passage.

Only one party is trying to govern.  The other is refusing to.  The American people should take notice and vote accordingly.

May 9th, 2012 at 8:16 pm
House Hits DOJ with $1 Million Fine for Fast & Furious Stonewalling

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) explains on the House floor why his bill to cut $1 million from the Department of Justice’s appropriation is justified in light of Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to hand over documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal:

“For those watching at home, what would happen to them if they ignored a summons for jury duty? What would happen for them if they ignored a grand jury subpoena? What would happen if a committee of Congress demanded documents [from them] and they summarily refused to cooperate?”

Gowdy said that if any ordinary American citizen obstructed subpoenas the way Holder has, they “would be sanctioned, fined and probably jailed.”

America is a nation of laws, not men.  It reflects well on the House of Representatives that Gowdy’s bill passed by voice vote, indicating it had lots of support.

H/T: The Daily Caller

December 21st, 2011 at 9:36 am
Ramirez Cartoon: Obama Plan
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

December 7th, 2011 at 6:41 pm
House Passes REINS Act, Senate Likely to Dither

Huzzah to the 241 members of the House of Representatives who, in a thinly bipartisan vote today (4 Democrats voted in favor), passed H.R. 10, better known as the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act.  As the acronym indicates, the bill wants to limit President Barack Obama’s ability to impose job-killing regulations on the economy.

How does the REINS Act purport to do its job?  If passed by the Senate and signed by the President then every new federal agency regulation inflicting at least $100 million in economic costs would be subject to an up-or-down vote by both houses of Congress.  ($100 million is the threshold for “major” regulations these days.)  When those bills fails – which they almost certainly will unless they are inextricably intertwined with a national security issue – the bureaucrats who dream up these obstacles to economic growth will have to go back to the drawing board and divine a less expensive way to grow the federal government.

Characteristically, the Democrats running the Senate and the one occupying the White House have promised to do nothing to help pass this bill.  (The President even threatened to veto it should enough Senate Dems have the temerity to save their states’ small business owners from the paperwork onslaught thanks to 219 new regulations poised to add thousands of dollars per worker in compliance costs.)

Today, fiscal conservatives can cheer passage of a real “job creation” bill thanks to the conservative plurality in the House of Representatives.  Next year, it will critically important to elect more of these to the Senate – and hopefully the presidency – so that America can get back to work.

July 28th, 2011 at 10:45 am
The Scorecard of Conservatives for the Boehner Plan

At the American Spectator, I’ve been keeping tabs.

June 3rd, 2011 at 3:53 pm
House Drops the Hammer on Obama for Libyan War
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As I wrote earlier this week, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is growing tired of President Obama’s refusal to involve the legislative branch in the policy-setting for the conflict in Libya. Today that irritation grew to a head on the floor of the House of Representatives. The Washington Times reports:

Crossing party lines to deliver a stunning rebuke to the commander in chief, the vast majority of the House voted Friday for resolutions telling President Obama he has broken the constitutional chain of authority by committing U.S. troops to the international military mission in Libya.

In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya.

The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must give explain himself [sic] or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.

The word “including” in the last sentence is a bit of an overstatement. Since the courts will almost certainly refuse to intervene in this matter under the political question doctrine, cutting off funds is virtually the only way for Congress to impose real consequences (it’s also something of a proxy for a vote on policy, given that many White Houses argue that approving funds is the same as approving a war).

It’s not clear that this would be a wise move, however. Regardless of the initial rationale for the Libyan expedition (which was not compelling in terms of American national security interests), the reality is that the strategic landscape has shifted since the West has intervened. Leaving now in a rush has the potential to be more destablizing than not intervening in the first place. It would be better instead to set a few hard and fast objectives (killing Gaddafi, securing rebel control of certain parts of the country, etc.), achieve them, and go home, hopefully leaving that nation no worse than we found it.

That prescription may be less dramatic than the Congress wants. But that’s what they get for not speaking up sooner.

April 14th, 2011 at 12:00 am
Gimmicky Budget Deal Causes National Review to Turn on Boehner
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If you’ve lost National Review — the most consistently conservative child of William F. Buckley — you’ve lost the conservative moment. Thus, House Speaker John Boehner should be insecure about NR’s new staff editorial reacting to the recently revealed gimmicks in last week’s budget deal, ominously entitled “Strike One.” Reading the content won’t assuage those fears:

There’s realism and then there’s cynicism. This deal — oversold and dependent on classic Washington budget trickery — comes too close to the latter. John Boehner has repeatedly said he’s going to reject “business as usual,” but that’s what he’s offered his caucus. It’s one thing for Tea Party Republicans to vote for a cut that falls short of what they’d get if the controlled all of Washington; it’s another thing for them, after making so much of bringing transparency and honesty to the Beltway, to vote for a deal sold partly on false pretenses.

Last week, some of us held out hope that the budget deal represented real — albeit incremental — change. The disappointment that would have resulted from a less satisfying outcome would have been bad. But the betrayal that results from feeling duped by your own leadership is far worse.

January 21st, 2011 at 10:19 am
Video: The Beginning of the End for ObamaCare
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In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino challenges the professional cynics in Washington who continue to claim that, despite the House vote this week to repeal ObamaCare, full repeal will never become a reality.  Giachino further explains why the skeptics are missing three important points and how the House vote was indeed the beginning of the end for ObamaCare.

 

January 19th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
House Passes ObamaCare Repeal Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives just passed H.R. 2, legislation to fully repeal ObamaCare, by a vote of 245-189.  Three Democrats — Representatives Mike Ross (AR), Mike McIntyre (NC) and Dan Boren (OK) — joined with all Republicans in support of the repeal measure.

January 5th, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Congratulations Speaker Boehner

The United States House of Representatives just elected Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) as its next Speaker.  The vote was 241-173.

January 4th, 2011 at 8:51 am
House Republicans Post Repeal ObamaCare Bill Online

Making good on the promise to offer greater legislative transparency and in preparation forthe House vote to repeal ObamaCare scheduled for next week, House Republicans have posted the repeal bill online for all to see.

Check it out here.

November 13th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
House Dems’ Version of Job Creation

At least outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) can claim credit for creating one job during her tenure.  According to The Hill, Pelosi – the frontrunner to become Minority Leader when the defeated Democrats give up power next Congress – has a novel idea how to decide which of two people gets one available job: create a new position.  (Title and portfolio TBD)

How perfect.  Rather than let Reps. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Jim Clyburn (D-SC) compete for the position of Minority Whip, Pelosi is proposing to create a federal job that spends more taxpayer money.  (Unless, unlike all other congressional leadership positions, the new post comes without staff, office, and an expense account; a situation that would hardly appeal to anyone gunning for a job with real power.)

Even in the face of a 60 seat rebuke that cost her the Speakership, San Francisco Nancy is still following the same liberal formula of growing the federal government.  If this is the kind of in-the-box, hidebound thinking House Democrats want to pursue over the next two years, Republicans should get ready to win even more seats in 2012.

November 11th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Re: House GOP Leadership Team Taking Shape
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Ashton makes a good point about the geographic diversity of the GOP House leadership in comparison to its Democratic predecessor. Another interesting addition may be Kristi Noem, the incoming freshman who will serve as the At-Large Representative for South Dakota and who looks to be in line to fill a new position being created to give some leadership representation to the burgeoning ranks of Tea Party-affiliated conservatives. Noem is attractive, articulate, and has a compelling biography. She looks to be a definite rising star in the party.

I think the mix of the two parties may be reflective of what caused the Democrats to go astray in the past few years. Looking at the new Republican leadership, only Texan Jeb Hensarling comes from a state where Republicans are reliably strong in both federal and state elections. Democrats, on the other hand, populated their leadership ranks with figures from the deepest of the deep blue states. They governed that way too. And in so doing, they forgot all the lessons that gave them control of the Congress.

In the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, Rahm Emanuel in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate gave considerable flexibility to their recruited candidates, allowing them to run with conservative positions on a host of issues that allowed them to escape being tarred as liberals in the Midwest, the South, and the Mountain West. While they succeeded in getting a large percentage of those candidates elected, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda then lurched so heavily to the left that the new members had to run for reelection in the shadow of a record that undermined all their pretensions of moderation.

The facile interpretation of this trend is that a party always has to govern from the center to keep its majority. That’s also the rationale for liberals like  E.J. Dionne, who hope that the new conservative majority’s stand on principle will alienate them from the electorate. In his most recent column, Dionne writes:

Give Republicans credit for this: They don’t chase the center, they try to move it. Democrats can play a loser’s game of scrambling after a center being pushed ever rightward. Or they can stand their ground and show how far their opponents are from moderate, problem-solving governance. Why should Democrats take Republican advice that Republicans themselves would never be foolish enough to follow?

This is what happens when a static mind attempts to comprehend a dynamic landscape. The problem with Dionne’s analysis is that he assumes the left and the right are equidistant from the center. This is false. When Gallup polled the question in June, 42 percent of Americans identified as conservative, 35 percent said they were moderate, and 20 percent said they were liberal. That means the self-identified center-right represents an astonishing 77 percent of the country. By contrast, the center-left at its theoretical apex is only a slight majority of Americans. When you then factor in that 56 percent of independents broke for Republicans this year — and that that represented a 36 point swing from 2006 — you see how steep the hill is for Democrats.

Dionne and his counterparts in Congress need to learn the lesson: in a center-right country, it’s more important for Democrats to moderate than Republicans. If you doubt that, ask Bill Clinton — he might remind you that he’s the only Democratic president to be elected twice since FDR.

November 11th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
House GOP Leadership Team Taking Shape

With Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announcing the end of her campaign to be Republican Conference Chairman, the likely top four House GOP leadership spots look like this:

(1)   Speaker – Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)

(2)   Majority Leader – Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)

(3)   Majority Whip – Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

(4)   Conference Chairman – Rep. Jeb Hersarling (R-TX)

It’s always interesting to see where leadership team members are from because it indicates where the strength of the party lies.  Since leadership positions are sought and won by members with multiple terms in office, it’s intriguing to see four Republicans representing each corner of the country.

Contrast this with the locations represented by the outgoing top four House Democrat leaders:

(1)   Speaker – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

(2)   Majority Leader – Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD)

(3)   Majority Whip – Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC)

(4)   Caucus Chairman – Rep. John Larson (D-CT)

Aside from Clyburn, all the Democrat leaders come from deep blue coastal states (e.g. California, Maryland, and Connecticut).  Counting Clyburn, the Democrats’ claim to a “southern” voice is tied to a gerrymandered district designed to elect a liberal African-American.  If Hoyer beats Clyburn for the Minority Whip post, even that fig leaf of regional diversity will blow away.

The House Democratic caucus lost 29 of 57 “blue dog” members last Tuesday, making the remaining chamber membership much more liberal.  It also wiped out the Democrats’ claims to represent regions other than the high-tax, morally bankrupt coasts.  That, combined with Nancy Pelosi’s likely retention as caucus leader, will make it substantially more difficult for the party to recruit viable candidates in 2012.

Conservatives shouldn’t count on gifts like this forever, but for now, we’ll gladly take them.