In response to President Barack Obama announcing on Thursday that he will “maintain our current posture of 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of next year,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) issued a statement the same day calling on Congress to “take responsibility for this conflict and vote on an Authorization for the Use of Military Force that clearly defines the current mission and ensures that there is a clear strategy for withdrawal.” read on...
No wonder Americans have such disdain for Congress. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of nine United States senators joined together to introduce the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. In a press release heralding the bill’s introduction, sponsor Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and several of the bill’s cosponsors commend the bill as mitigating overly-harsh aspects of the US criminal justice system, including mandatory minimum sentences. Left unmentioned is the fact that the bill, should it become law, would actually create new mandatory minimum sentences while lengthening existing maximum sentences.
Say one thing and do another. The deception continues on Capitol Hill.
No doubt, most or all of the senators who signed on to the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act are aware of shifts in public sentiment regarding incarceration and the drug war in which maximum minimums have played a prominent role. Seeking to appease public demands for reductions in government power while surreptitiously increasing that power is an old trick in the Washington, DC chicanery book.
Reading the press release announcing the bill, we see the senators promoting their bill as a fulfillment the public’s demand. Yet, reading the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, we see that the Senators are actually attempting to do something entirely different behind the scenes. read on...
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the United States government’s war on drugs, and especially its war on marijuana, is being torn down by state and local governments choosing to move in a less punitive direction. But, drug warriors, in and out of government, are trying their best to keep the war going and the casualty count increasing. From Rep. John Flemming (R-LA) promoting misinformation about marijuana in the US House of Representatives to former “Drug Czars” William J. Bennett and John P. Walters writing nostalgically in the Boston Globe about the drug war that they assert “worked,” the drug warriors are refusing to just fade away.
In an insightful USA Today editorial “Bitter-end drug warriors do more damage than weed” published Friday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) dresses down the drug war promoters, whom he terms “bitter-enders.” Rohrabacher devotes substantial attention in the editorial to criticizing marijuana prohibition in particular. Still, much of his critique extends to the entire war on drugs. read on...
Shortly before United States House of Representatives members left Washington, DC for the August recess, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) introduced a resolution declaring the office of speaker of the house vacant. The passing of the resolution would effectively fire House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) from his top leadership position.
While Meadows’ resolution is unusual, so also was 24 Republicans choosing to vote for a variety of people to be speaker instead of fellow party member Boehner in January at the beginning of the new Congress. Another Republican member voted “present,” while four more did not vote. read on...
Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr., in a speech Wednesday on the House of Representatives floor, quoted several prominent conservatives to help make the case that “there has been nothing conservative about our policy of permanent, forever, endless war in the Middle East.” In the speech, Duncan quotes, in turn, thought-provoking comments from Thomas Sowell, David Keene, Jon Utley, Peggy Noonan, and William F. Buckley, Jr. read on...
The days of the United States House of Representatives leadership blocking debate and a vote on the ISIS War appear to be coming to an end. On Thursday, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), along with Reps Walter Jones (R-NC) and Barbara Lee (D-CA), introduced, pursuant to the War Powers Resolution, a privileged resolution (H.Con.Res. 55) intended to force the House to debate and vote within 15 days on withdrawing US armed forces from Iraq and Syria.
Upon the resolution’s introduction, Reps. McGovern and Jones (a Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board member) spoke for 26 compelling and informative minutes on the House floor regarding the resolution they had introduced, as well as their frustration with the US war in Iraq and Syria and the failure of Congress to meet its responsibility to debate and vote on that war. read on...
The congressional push to promote national ID cards worldwide continues, and it looks like the legislative vehicle — the Girls Count Act (S 802) — will likely be sent this week to President Barack Obama to be signed into law without recorded votes in the US Senate or House of Representatives.
In November, the House of Representatives approved by a voice vote HR 3398, a previous version of the Girls Count Act. That 2014 bill would, as detailed in a Ron Paul Institute Congress Alert, define it as the policy of the US government to encourage other nations to require all citizens to have national identity cards, as well as direct the US government to work with multinational organizations and private entities on imposing registration, identification, and documentation laws on people around the world. But, then the 113th Congress ended without the Senate taking action on the bill. read on...
The US House of Representatives on Friday again voted to pay for war on the Islamic State (ISIS) without ever having a debate and vote on the authorization of the war. This result is par for the course given the House leadership is well practiced in manipulating House rules to scuttle efforts by Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and James McGovern (D-MA), as well as by other House members, to ensure that the legislative branch fulfills its constitutional responsibility to decide when the US government uses military force.
By barring war debates and votes, the House leadership ensures the continued legislative rubber-stamping of the wars the executive branch unilaterally pursues.
The authorization of funding for the ISIS War that the House approved Friday is included in the massive National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2016 (HR 1735) that covers funding authorization for the Department of Defense generally. This leaves any representative who voted for the legislation with the ability to deny responsibility for the ISIS War by saying he voted for the NDAA just to advance some combination on other provisions in the bill. read on...
Speaking Tuesday on the United States House of Representatives floor, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) again urged Congress to exercise its constitutional responsibility by debating and voting on if the United States government will continue militarily intervening in Afghanistan for nine more years.
Referring to Afghanistan as “well known by historians as the graveyard of empires,” Jones, a Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory Board member, details the high cost in thousands of US troops killed, tens of thousands more US troops wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the US government in the first 14 years of the Afghanistan War. Jones proceeds to note that a new bilateral security agreement President Barack Obama has entered into with Afghanistan “ties us — our nation — to a failed policy for another nine years.” read on...
There is no doubt that the US government engages in extraordinary military and “national security” spending. In February, a Washington Post article cited an International Institute for Strategic Studies report ranking US “defense spending” at four and a half times that of China (the next biggest spender), close to matching China and the next 13 nations combined, and more than a third of the total defense spending of all nations. As explained by Ron Paul Institute Academic Board Member Robert Higgs, even such calculations far understate US national security spending by focusing on the Department of Defense base budget while neglecting to include significant expenses including, for example, separately allocated war spending and US Department of Energy spending on the nuclear weapons program.
Despite this vast spending dwarfing that of other nations around the world, Alexander Bolton reports in the The Hill on Saturday that a bipartisan group of US Senators is focusing on gaining Senate approval for increased military spending beyond 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) limitations when appropriations legislation is considered later this year. read on...
