By John Sparks

This morning, in spite of strong support from health care advocates like Public Citizen, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) agreed to withdraw his single-payer health care amendment from consideration as the House approaches a floor vote on the major health care package supported by the Democratic leadership and President Obama.

This news may not surprise many who believed single-payer to be dead on arrival in today’s healthcare reform debate. But even political insiders were stunned by the resurrection of the possibility of a single-payer vote. Over the past week, activists across the country and the coalition of pro-single-payer organizations in Washington got behind Weiner’s campaign to offer an amendment and forced the leadership to seriously reconsider a floor vote.

Weiner acknowledged that last-minute developments caused him to make the difficult decision to withdraw the proposal. The chief reasons stemmed from pressure on the leadership from some members to include other amendments, such as further restrictions on coverage for abortion and undocumented immigrants. Also, it appears that some House members with tough re-election campaigns ahead feared that a forced vote on single payer would hurt them as they try to balance constituent pressures for various reform approaches. But ultimately, the greatest concern was that a vote on a single-payer amendment might undermine the carefully cobbled support for the compromise reform bill.

But wait, there is still another single-payer possibility in play.

An amendment by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) to allow states to set up their own single-payer systems could still make it into the health care package. The amendment was approved in an earlier committee version of the health care bill, but was stripped out of the final compromise going to the floor. Public Citizen and other organizations continue to support restoration of the Kucinich to the final bill. 

Today, Public Citizen President Robert Weissman wrote to Speaker Pelosi:

States, however, may wish to choose a different course, and to implement single payer. There is no legitimate reason why they should be denied the opportunity to adopt good public health and good fiscal policy. The Kucinich amendment aims to provide the opportunity, by waiving certain ERISA [Employee Retirement Income Security Act] requirements that impede state single-payer action. We strongly urge you include the Kucinich amendment in the manager’s amendment.

Also, we’ll stand behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) when he offers his single-payer proposal in the Senate.

But with regard to Weiner’s fight for Medicare-for-all, Speaker Pelosi had this to say:

While single payer, like other popular proposals, is not included in the consensus bill we will vote on this week, Congressman Weiner has been a tireless and effective advocate for progress on health care.

We couldn’t agree more.

There is only one solution to the twin problems of escalating health care costs and the epidemic of the uninsured: a Medicare-for-All, single payer system.

Unfortunately, the healthcare debate on Capitol Hill has evolved without serious consideration of the Medicare-for-All single payer health proposal. There are many reasons for this, but one is that many who actually support Medicare-for-All have claimed that the proposal is “not feasible.”

With the House leadership having settled on a single proposal, now is the time to set aside worries about feasibility. The House process is resolved. Members of Congress should have the opportunity to vote on the merits, up-or-down, on a Medicare-for-All single payer health proposal.

Whether they will have this chance is in the hands of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and is likely to be decided soon. Contact her right away to urge that the House be permitted to vote on a Medicare-for-All single payer health proposal. Call (202) 225-0100 or (as a second best alternative, submit comments on the Speaker’s web page).

Representative Anthony Weiner, D-New York, has proposed to introduce such a Medicare-for-All measure on the House floor in the form of an amendment to the leadership’s healthcare package. If a vote is permitted, it will mark the first time either house of Congress has voted on Medicare-for-All, and will be a landmark in the inevitable march to a national Medicare-for-All system.

Meanwhile, Representative Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, is seeking to enable states to implement their own Medicare-for-All single payer health initiatives. Representative Kucinich introduced an amendment in the House Education and Labor Committee to facilitate such action, by providing for waivers of ERISA (employee benefit) requirements for states adopting single payer plans. This amendment passed the committee with bipartisan support. If Speaker Pelosi decides to incorporate it into the leadership bill, it stands a good chance of becoming law.

Although there are reasons to be skeptical, one can hope that the health reform package that ultimately becomes law will significantly expand coverage and curb insurance industry abuses.

But it is certain that the health reform package will not solve the overwhelming problems of coverage, cost and quality of care facing the country. Solving those problems requires going to the source: the health insurance corporations.

With its private health insurance industry-dominated system, the United States spends far more than other wealthy nations on health care (at least 50 percent more than every country except Luxembourg) but sports middling health indicators.

The private health insurance industry-dominated system in the United States permits 45 million people to live without health insurance, denying them access to preventative and routine care, resulting in the death of at least 35,000 people a year.

The private health insurance industry-dominated system tolerates private health insurance companies making life-and-death rationing decisions for millions of people with only minimal accountability.

The private health insurance industry-dominated system lets private health insurers refuse to take sick people as customers and engage in endless manipulations to discard its customers if they do become sick.

The private health insurance industry-dominated system features a system in which medical bills and illness contribute to almost two of every three personal bankruptcies — even though three-quarters of these bankrupt people had insurance when they became sick.

Not least, the private health insurance industry-dominated health care system translates into a private health insurance industry-dominated political system. As a result, too many politicians refuse to consider real solutions.

There is a cure all for these ills. It is a Medicare-for-All, single-payer system, in which the government pays medical bills (thus operating as the “single payer”).

In a Medicare-for-All system, health care is available as a matter of right. No one is denied treatment because they can’t pay. No one is mandated to buy coverage. No one is denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. No one goes bankrupt paying medical bills.

A Medicare-for-All system would save $350 billion – $400 billion a year in costs (up to $4 trillion over the 10-year period routinely analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office) — enough to cover all of the uninsured. No scandalous CEO pay packages. No money siphoned out of the system by rent-seeking middlemen. No needless paperwork and bureaucracy.

A Medicare-for-All system succeeds by doing away with the private health insurance industry.

The powerful insurers, understandably, don’t like this idea. Yet despite waves of deceptive and misleading propaganda about the purported horrors of government-run insurance, the people do like the idea of Medicare-for-All — polls show it is supported by a majority of the public.

But insurance industry dollars have spoken louder than the people’s voices. And so Medicare-for-All hasn’t been given a serious hearing in Congress. Speaker Pelosi should at least enable a clean up-or-down vote. Call (202) 225-0100 and urge her to do so.

Cross-posted on the Huffington Post.

[Editor's Note: Click here to tell your representative to vote "yes" on the Weiner bill.]

Robert Weissman is president of Public Citizen.

Climate change requires us to rethink and transform the ways we produce and consume energy and the way we transport goods and people. But draft legislation being considered by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (S.1733) fails to hold polluters accountable and falls short of empowering locally controlled sustainable energy.

There is no question that Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) understand the threat posed by climate change and are passionate about and committed to addressing the problem. They are environmental champions. But the draft bill contains compromises, flaws, loopholes and giveaways that defeat its purpose.

The bill is too similar to the flawed legislation passed in June by the House of Representatives that prioritizes nuclear power and coal over solar and wind power, and puts corporate utilities before community-owned power. Science tells us that we must act now to lower our emissions of greenhouse gases, but this legislation locks us in to our coal and oil addictions and relies on a dubious “cap-and-trade” scheme that doesn’t meaningfully reduce emissions – but does result in billion-dollar giveaways to utilities and creates a trillion-dollar pollution trading market for Wall Street. The bill does not come close to achieving the carbon reductions that science says is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change.

Public Citizen understands that addressing climate change means challenging the entrenched political power of the electric power industry, which has strong-armed Congress into giving it enormous taxpayer subsidies for ultra-expensive centralized power plants that are too risky (nuclear) and unproven (clean coal) instead of investing in rooftop solar, wind and geothermal, and investments in energy efficiency. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency concludes that the bulk of emissions reductions comes not from cap-and-trade but from the aggressive building and appliance efficiency mandates in the House-passed bill. Public Citizen understands that households shouldn’t have to pay higher electric bills while utilities use the law’s loopholes to rake in billions of dollars in windfall profits.

Public Citizen calls on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to stand up to the $100 million lobbying campaign by utilities and support meaningful climate legislation that:

• Achieves carbon emission reductions in line with what science says is imperative (25-40 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2020);
• Establishes incentives to promote rooftop solar and wind power instead of new nuclear power and coal plants;
• If it is going to rely on a cap-and-trade scheme, at least embraces President Barack Obama’s call – as repeated in his August revised budget submitted to Congress – for a 100 percent auction that holds polluters accountable and delivers rebates and energy efficiency investments directly to the American people rather than through utilities;
• Limits the use of offsets so our policies promote real emissions reductions, not theoretical ones;
• Prohibits Wall Street from investing in a cap-and-trade speculation frenzy; and
• Mandates strong efficiency standards for buildings, appliances and transportation.

Public Citizen and several other environmental organizations sent a detailed analysis of the bill to Sen. Boxer.

Flickr photo by kevindooley.

Tyson Slocum is the director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program.

Back in the day when I was a young newspaper reporter, we never heard of your Internets and could only dream about the Googles. When we wanted campaign information, we spent days in some dank backroom at the supervisor of elections office, buried under a mountain of documents. And making copies at 10 cents a page added up fast. I can’t imagine what life would have been like if we had access to the online data available at some of the Web sites Katie Donnelly spotlights in her post “10 Projects that help Citizens become Government Watchdogs” at MediaShift.

With the 2010 U.S. elections coming into view, many people are looking for more information about the people running for office — and the individuals and organizations funding these candidates.

Fortunately, there are dozens of initiatives that mine and share the data that influence policy and policy-makers. Many are funded by The Sunlight Foundation, which aims to use “the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens.”

I’ve heard of and used most of the sites Donnelly lists, including SourceWatch, OpenSecrets and MapLight. But there are a couple interesting finds such as LittleSis, which she describes as an “involuntary Facebook” for government officials. You could spend all day playing around with that site, tracking relationships between politicians, lobbyists and campaign contributors.

While it is disappointing that Solicitor General Elena Kagan decided not to appeal en banc an overreaching and potentially crippling court decision in the campaign finance case of Emily’s List v. Federal Election Commission, one lesson for defending the nation’s campaign finance laws has clearly emerged from this case: The Obama administration must break the partisan deadlock that has immobilized the FEC over the past year by finishing the appointment of new leaders to the agency, most notably with the replacement of Commissioner Don McGahn, whose term has long expired.

Since the commission was reestablished in mid-2008, partisan 3-to-3 deadlocks have produced the largest percentage of dismissed enforcement cases and the lowest percentage of substantive enforcement actions in recent history. Deadlocked votes in enforcement actions, for example — which prevent the FEC from acting — jumped from less than 2 percent every year since 2003 to more than 16 percent in 2009. The principal force behind these deadlocks is McGahn, who has coalesced the Republican members of the FEC into a voting bloc committed to reversing established regulations to implement the law and preventing critical enforcement actions.

The latest deadlock prevented the agency from appealing an extreme and overreaching decision by a three-judge panel in the Emily’s List case, a decision that not only threatens the authority of the agency to regulate campaign finance activity of political committees but even calls into question the legitimacy of statutory limits on contributions to candidates and political parties in toto (“the constitutionally permitted legislative solution, as the Court stated in an analogous situation in Davis, is ‘to raise or eliminate’ limits on contributions to parties and candidates”). Despite the overreaching nature of the Emily’s List decision, which drew a rebuke from one of the judges on the panel (“The court, however, is not content just answering a gratuitous constitutional question. Its holding is broader than even the plaintiff requests”), and despite the sweeping threat of the decision to the core tenets of campaign finance laws, McGahn and the other Republican commissioners voted to accept the opinion and block an appeal to the full court.

Public Citizen had hoped that Kagan, the solicitor general, would take over the case from the FEC, but today Kagan declined. We hope the decision by the administration not to take over the case is due more to the fact that Emily’s List could be overruled by a more balanced decision in another case currently pending before the courts (SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission) and does not signal that the administration is wavering in its commitment to campaign finance reform.

Implementation and enforcement of our nation’s campaign finance laws will continue to be crippled until President Obama repairs the incapacitated FEC by appointing new commissioners who will pursue their regulatory duties responsibly and professionally. The terms for three of the six commissioners have expired, including that of McGahn. On April 30, Public Citizen encouraged the president to seize the opportunity to fix the FEC and swiftly appoint new commissioners. To date, only one new commissioner has been nominated, ironically to replace Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who has performed responsibly and castigated the Republican bloc for obstructing the agency’s mission. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) have placed a hold on this nomination, calling on Obama to fill the two other open seats.

We applaud the efforts of Sens. McCain and Feingold and once again call upon President Obama to learn from Emily’s List and immediately appoint new commissioners for all three seats who will pursue their duties responsibly and professionally and bring the era of a deadlocked FEC to a close.

We’ve been spreading the word that the Supreme Court is considering a critically important case this fall: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case started out as a pretty technical dispute about the application of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law to the right-wing group Citizens United’s plan to broadcast a movie smearing Hillary Clinton during last year’s presidential elections. After hearing arguments in the case this spring, the Supreme Court upped the ante by asking the parties of the case to come back in September and argue a much broader issue: Whether the court should overrule key precedents and hold that business corporations have unlimited rights to spend as much money as they want on political campaigns.

Around the time the case was argued on Sept. 9, it was the subject of front-page newspaper stories and got a lot of radio and television coverage (including “The Word” on the Colbert Report), as well as the attention of folks in the blogosphere. And the public responded. We’ve heard a tremendous amount of concern by ordinary people who are afraid that their voices will be supplanted by that of big business in our political campaigns, and lots of folks have taken actions to express their support for campaign finance reform (see http://citizenvox.org/2009/09/10/the-dont-get-rolled-roundup/).

But now, a month and a half later the case has dropped off the front pages. Seemingly, nothing has happened. Has the issue gone away? Not a chance. We asked Public Citizen attorney Scott Nelson, a member of the legal team defending the McCain-Feingold law and a former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk, to give us some idea what’s going on.

Q: Scott, can you remind us why this case is so important?

A: For many decades, corporations have been prohibited by federal law from spending their money directly to support or oppose candidates in federal elections. The Supreme Court in previous decisions has upheld the constitutionality of that prohibition because it exists to protect the system from the corrupting influence of massive corporate war chests. Now the court is considering whether to throw out those precedents and allow unlimited corporate spending on elections. That would be a dramatic change in the rules of the political game and would greatly increase corporate influence over our elected officials.

Q: The case was argued weeks ago. Why haven’t we heard yet what the Supreme Court is going to do?

A: Before it announces its decision, the court prepares written opinions, which are sometimes very lengthy, explaining the results and the reasons for them. Often there are many opinions, as some justices have different reasons than others for supporting the court’s decision and file what are called “concurring” opinions explaining their own take on the issues. Other justices may disagree with the outcome and file “dissenting” opinions. It usually takes weeks—and sometimes months—for all of the writing to be finished.

Q. How does the decision-making process work? Does the court take a lot of time to deliberate while various justices write different opinions, or does it reach a decision first, and then the justices prepare the opinions that explain it?

A: Usually the latter. The court spends surprisingly little time deliberating. Before the argument, the parties to the case, as well as others who participate as “amici curiae,” or “friends of the court,” submit lengthy written arguments, or briefs. The justices, together with their law clerks—mostly young people shortly out of law school—review the briefs. Each justice is likely to discuss the case with his or her own clerks or receive a written memo from a clerk assessing the argument. The whole court then assembles to hear the oral arguments in the courtroom, which in this case took about an hour and a half. At some point during the week of argument, the justices then reassemble for their “conference,” which is generally the only time the justices are all together outside of when they hear argument. The conference is private—no law clerks or other personnel of the court are present. The junior justice (in this case Justice Sonia Sotomayor) generally has the task of being the doorkeeper and passing notes to staff waiting outside if the court needs anything. The justices then go around the table, each stating his or her views about the case briefly and voting on the outcome. It takes a majority of the nine justices—that is, five votes—to arrive at a particular result, though as I mentioned above the justices may have different reasons for that result. Once they’ve voted, the conference ends very quickly and they return to their chambers and tell their law clerks what the vote was. Usually at that point, the case has been decided, even though the decision won’t be released for many more weeks.

Q: Does that mean that the justices have already decided what they’re going to do in the Citizens United case?

A: Probably. The decision was probably made within a day or two of the argument, possibly that very afternoon, depending on when they held their conference. But the decisions made in the conference are not unalterable until the decision is actually handed down by the court. In fact, the Citizens United case itself is an example of how things may change after the conference. When the case was first argued last March, there was probably a vote about how it should be resolved. And the vote at that time probably wasn’t that it should be reargued—if that had been the vote of the conference at that time, the reargument order probably would have been issued immediately. Instead, it came down on the very last day of the court’s term, two months later. That suggests that the court changed its mind about what it wanted to do with the case sometime pretty late in the process.

But with all that said, the bottom line is that there likely was a decision made in early September in the case; we just don’t know what it is yet, and it may change over time as the justices work on the opinions.

Q: Okay, so what happens after the justices take that first vote?

A: The next step is for the chief justice or the senior justice in the majority to assign the drafting of an opinion for the court to one of the justices. If the chief justice is in the majority, he assigns the opinion, but if not, the longest-serving justice in the majority will assign it. In this case, it is pretty certain that the chief justice, John Roberts, will be in the majority whatever the outcome, because he is the swing vote on these kinds of issues.

Sometimes it’s apparent that there will be no majority opinion because although there is a majority for a particular outcome (that is, which side wins and which side loses), there may be sharp disagreement about why. For example, in this case, some justices might end up saying that Citizens United ought to win because the type of broadcast at issue here (on-demand satellite programming) shouldn’t be covered by the law, or because Citizens United is a nonprofit corporation that takes only a little money from business corporations. Others might vote for that same result on the theory that all corporations, even for-profit ones, should have unlimited rights to spend money on campaigns. Similarly, if our side wins the case, different justices might have different reasons for concluding that restrictions on campaign expenditures by corporations are constitutional.

But even when the majority is divided, the chief justice or senior justice in the majority will assign someone to write a lead opinion for the court. Other concurring justices may at that time decide among themselves who will write an opinion expressing their views, or they may decide to wait and see what the lead opinion looks like. Similarly, the senior justice among the dissenters may ask one of the justices to take the lead in preparing a dissent, or the dissenters may plan to write separately.

Q: How do the opinions get written?

A: It varies a bit from justice to justice, but the general practice is that the justice who is assigned to write will work with his or her law clerks to produce a first draft. Some of the justices write their own drafts, which their law clerks then provide suggestions on; others let law clerks do an initial draft, and then edit or rewrite it. The process of producing an initial draft usually isn’t very collaborative with other justices. Sometimes justices do work together on opinions as co-authors, but usually an opinion is attributed to a single justice, and other justices “join” it if they agree. The opinions range from less than 10 pages to dozens and sometimes more than 100 pages long, so they take varying amounts of time to write. Some justices (and some law clerks) tend to be faster than others. But it’s unusual for a draft of an opinion to be ready for circulation much less than two weeks after the conference, and sometimes it takes a lot longer than that.

Q: What happens once the opinion is drafted?

A: At that point, it is formatted as if it were ready to be printed, and then circulated to the chambers of the other justices. The custom of the court is to circulate a draft opinion simultaneously to all the justices, whether they are part of the majority or not. Sometimes, however, justices may give previews to some of the other justice on their side in order to get input into what they will circulate to the full court.

Q: What do the other justices do when they receive the draft opinion?

A: Well, of course they read it, and so do those of their law clerks who have worked with them on the case. Then they send a memo to the author, usually cc’d to the rest of the court, giving their reaction. Sometimes the memo will just tell the author that another justice wants to join the opinion. Sometimes the memo will say that a justice plans to write a dissent or concurring opinion. A justice who expects to join in a dissent or concurrence but doesn’t plan to write it will usually send a memo saying “I will await further writing.” And sometimes a justice will respond with a memo making more or less extensive comments and suggestions for editing of the draft opinion. The reaction of the other justices often will lead the author of an opinion to revise it in order to attract more sign-ons, and multiple drafts of the lead opinion may circulate as the author tries to get a majority for it.

Q. When are the concurring and dissenting opinions written?

A: Usually they are prepared once the lead opinion has circulated, because they often devote a good deal of space to shooting at the arguments in that opinion. They are circulated in the same way as the lead opinion, and justices who haven’t yet signed on to the opinion for the court may send memos joining the separate opinions and/or proposing changes in them. And it often happens that once a dissent or concurrence has circulated, some justice will realize that his or her own views are different both from the lead opinion and the dissent or concurrence, and will write yet another opinion. And so on. It can take some time.

The lead opinion also usually is revised to respond to the points made in the concurring and/or dissenting opinions, and they then may respond in kind. Sometimes it degenerates into a battle of the footnotes, and it can be difficult to stop the process until someone is satisfied to let someone else have the last word.

Q: When are the decisions finally released?

A: Well, it doesn’t ultimately happen until everyone has either written or signed on to an opinion, and all the authors of the opinions are satisfied with everything in them, down to the punctuation. Sometimes in the process, a dissenting opinion attracts enough votes to turn into a majority, or what was supposed to be a majority opinion may turn out to be merely a plurality opinion, or even less than a plurality opinion. The lead opinion for the court sometimes attracts fewer votes than a concurring opinion. In that case, the narrowest ground for the outcome is taken to be the court’s “holding.” But in any event, the opinions can’t issue until they’re finished and every justice has chosen which one he or she agrees with.

Once that happens, the opinions are printed up, and they are announced by the court on some day when it is “sitting”—that is, when it has convened either to hear arguments, or just to hand down orders and opinions.

During most of the court’s term, it will hear arguments two weeks a month and sit on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays of those weeks. Opinions usually are announced at the Tuesday and Wednesday sittings. The court also usually sits on the Monday of one non-argument week each month to hand down orders and opinions.

Q: So what can we expect in this case?

A: Well, the court is likely to be divided, and there will undoubtedly be multiple opinions. And the issues are of a magnitude that the opinions will probably be lengthy. So it’s no surprise that they haven’t yet been issued. I would expect the most likely time for the opinion to come out would be December, as I think the reason the court heard the reargument before its fall term formally started was to try to get the decision out before the 2010 election campaigns—which the opinion will have a major effect on one way or another—really get going. It’s possible that the opinions could come out earlier than that, but there will be a lot of writing to be done before they are released. One benchmark is that the 2003 decision on the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold law, which was also argued in the first week of September, came out shortly before Christmas. (The decision, of course, is one of the ones the court is now thinking of tossing out the window.)

The bottom line is that the decision could come down on any of these days: Nov. 3, 4, 10, or 16, or Dec. 1, 2, 8, 9, or 14.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?

A: Well, I think the take-away point is that the silence so far shouldn’t lead us to forget that this huge decision is still looming out there. The die is probably already cast; we just have to wait to learn what the decision is, and what implications it will have for our democracy. And we have to—and will—be ready to respond with actions to try to restore our political process if the worst happens and the court throws out the precedents that currently protect our political campaigns from turning into corporate free-for-alls.

The House Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) – an advisory panel to the regular House ethics committee established this year at the prodding of the reform community – is alive and well despite the barrage of attacks by lawmakers opposed to its very existence.

After years of ethics violations in Congress going uninvestigated by the regular House ethics committee, which is run by lawmakers themselves, OCE was created as a panel of outside experts charged with conducting preliminary investigations of possible ethics violations by lawmakers and their staff and then referring cases with merit to the House ethics committee for a final determination. OCE’s underlying purpose is to prod the ethics committee into fulfilling its mission of enforcing congressional ethics rules.

As the Washington Post reports, an accidental leak of confidential records by a staffer of the House ethics committee shows that the House ethics committee is indeed reluctantly carrying out dozens of ethics inquiries, mostly in response to OCE preliminary investigations.

And the House ethics committee and many lawmakers do not like it. Today, in dismissing one of the OCE-referred complaints, the House ethics committee publicly condemned OCE, alleging that the advisory panel did not provide the lawmaker with exculpatory information during its preliminary investigation. The charge is baseless. The attack on OCE is nothing short of a coordinated effort by some lawmakers to bring an end to OCE – and an end to active investigations of ethics violations. Even some congressional Democrats long for the days of Tom DeLay’s lack of ethical standards.

We cannot let that happen. OCE is a critical component in helping drain the swamp of ethics transgressions on Capitol Hill. As some lawmakers seek to dissolve OCE, it is imperative that we defend it – and defend it we shall.

Jamie Leigh Jones

By now, you are probably aware of an amendment to a bill funding the Department of Defense that would prohibit the U.S. government from doing business with defense contractors who deny employees who have been raped or sexually assaulted, like Jamie Leigh Jones, the right to hold them accountable in court. This amendment, introduced by Senator Al Franken, passed the Senate 68-30, with all 30 “no” votes coming from Republicans. The vote has received a great deal of attention and prominent commentators have both criticized and defended these 30 Republican senators for their votes (mostly criticizing).

But the bill has yet to become law – the House and the Senate still need to agree on final language – and there is troubling news coming from Washington. The Department of Defense initially opposed the amendment on the floor, and has cited problems with “enforcement.” The White House has kicked this issue over to the Pentagon and has said little more publicly than that they support “the intent of the amendment,” though it’s unclear exactly what that means. There were also early reports that the provision might be weakened in Congress.

The amendment is currently in limbo, but we need to ensure that it is not removed or weakened. Senator Franken’s amendment is important to the untold number of women who have already been sexually harassed or assaulted overseas. Jamie Leigh Jones was not alone – other women have reported similar cases, to say nothing of the women who are, understandably, reluctant to come forward. It is also important because it will change the lawless environment that companies like KBR have let fester in Iraq. If these contractors can be held accountable for allowing their employees to be abused, they will have an incentive to prevent future assaults.

Some Democratic challengers have already begun using this tough vote against Republican incumbents like David Vitter and Richard Burr. It would be the height of political hypocrisy for Democrats to chide the Republicans who voted against the amendment on the one hand, while watering down the provision’s protections on the other. Republicans are already responding by basically saying, “Hey, we’re on the same side of this as the White House.” (See here, here and here.)

Contractors and politicians are making their voices heard, but it’s time for someone to speak up for the victims. Please join us in telling the members of the House and Senate conference that you want the Franken anti-rape amendment to become law:

Senator Daniel Inouye (Chairman) (HI)

Senator Robert C. Byrd (WV)

Senator Patrick Leahy (VT)

Senator Tom Harkin (IA)

Senator Byron Dorgan (ND)

Senator Richard Durbin (IL)

Senator Dianne Feinstein (CA)

Senator Barbara Mikulski (MD)

Senator Herb Kohl (WI)

Senator Patty Murray (WA)

Senator Arlen Specter (PA)

Senator Thad Cochran (MS)

Senator Christopher Bond (MO)

Senator Mitch McConnell (KY)

Senator Richard Shelby (AL)

Senator Judd Gregg (NH)

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX)

Senator Robert F. Bennett (UT)

Senator Sam Brownback (KS)

Rep. John P. Murtha (PA)

Rep. Norman D. Dicks (WA)

Rep. Peter J. Visclosky (IN)

Rep. James P. Moran (VA)

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (OH)

Rep. Allen Boyd (FL)

Rep. Steven R. Rothman (NJ)

Rep. Sanford D. Bishop, Jr. (GA)

Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey (NY)

Rep. Carolyn C. Kilpratrick (MI)

Rep. David R. Obey (WI)

Rep. C.W. Bill Young (FL)

Rep. Rodney P. Frelinghuysen (NJ)

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (KS)

Rep. Jack Kingston (GA)

Rep. Kay Granger (TX)

Rep. Harold Rogers (KY)

Rep. Jerry Lewis (CA)

Also, we need to call on the White House (calls are better than e-mails) to speak out publicly and unequivocally in support of the Franken amendment.

Several thousand citizens made their voices heard this week in Chicago at the American Bankers Association convention, telling the banksters that enough is enough. We’re sick of them taking trillions of dollars in taxpayer cash and supports while handing out millions in bonuses to their executives. It’s time to break up the big banking firms and re-regulate the financial markets. The videos above and below are from this week’s protests; the Huffington Post has some more. You can also get a lot more information and find out how to take action at Showdown in Chicago.