Democratic achievements in Congress

Senator [..] Murray's port-security measure, the Security and Accountability for Every Port Act, also would get a boost from the war spending bill. [Republican-majority] Congress approved her port bill last September but stripped out most of the funding.

So Murray added $295 million to the Iraq spending bill. It would pay for port-security grants, cargo screening overseas and more customs officers. The Port of Tacoma would get $5 million to create a test project to screen cargo moving from ship to rail.

"The safe-ports act provides a comprehensive system to protect our people and our economy from terrorists," Murray said. "The White House has not put the dollars behind port security that are needed, so I'm doing it in the Senate."

If Bush really cared he would have proposed the money for Iraq in the regular budget instead of relying on a supplemental.

Thanks for sharing, Nimh. (BM)

Right, whatever it takes. The lives of our troops are precious to the Dems, if not to the Reps and Bush.

Advocate wrote:

Right, whatever it takes. The lives of our troops are precious to the Dems, if not to the Reps and Bush.

Thats why they proposed the "slow bleed" plan,designed to force the military out of Iraq by slowly denying them material and equipment?

Thats why they add all that pork,totally unrelated to defense,to a bill.

Thats why they pass a bill they KNOW the President will veto,because they "care" about the troops.

Thats why they pass legislation with a "timeline" for us to "redeploy".
BTW,another way to say redeploy is RUN AWAY.

The dems have said that we cant win in Iraq,that shows that they have no faith in or belief in our military.

They think our armed forces arent able to do the job.
The dems are wrong.

They want the US to run away by a certain date.
That gives the enemy the ability to claim victory,it allows them free reign to attack and kill or wound more troops,because they know we arent going to hit them back like we can,because the dems wont let us.

By announcing that there is a definite pullout date,it tells the enemy that if they want to lay low,then they can do whatever they want after we leave.

The dems sure do care about the troops,and their actions "prove it".
They care so much,that they have just made sure that there will be no money for them.

If they care,why are they waiting till AFTER the military needs the money to send the bill to committee to reach a compromise between the house and senate versions?

Why are they taking their spring break,instead of working on the bill?

During the 12 years that Republicans ran the House, their leaders didn't pay much attention to affordable-housing activists. Despite soaring rents and complaints of a deepening affordability crisis, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told his conference that he didn't want to see housing bills on the floor. He thought housing programs were unreformed welfare -- and they competed for the same pot of money in an annual funding bill as his beloved NASA.

But now that Democrats took over the House in November, their leaders are affordable-housing activists. Liberals Barney Frank (Mass.) and Maxine Waters (Calif.) run the two panels overseeing housing policy after agitating for years, without success, for increased government rent assistance. They came to office promising to pass the first major housing legislation since the early 1990s.

Last month, the House passed their bill, a measure to address the housing shortages that have festered on the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. After the storm wiped out 82,000 rental units in New Orleans, DeLay blocked a housing bill from Richard H. Baker (R-La.) because, sources said, the majority leader did not consider Baker a "team player." But Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), now speaker of the House, campaigned on Katrina inaction -- a prime example, she told audiences last fall, of the "do-nothing Congress" -- and vowed a fast reversal. The resulting Democratic bill includes several bold precedents, including a "right to return" for all displaced hurricane victims and "one-for-one replacement" for all demolished public housing units.

Democratic leaders say the Katrina bill -- which has yet to come up for a vote in the Senate -- is just a beginning. They hope to create a huge affordable-housing trust fund, restrict predatory lending, expand rent subsidies and tax credits for low-income housing, and push the federal government back into apartment construction.

"It's night and day," said Michael Kane, an affordable-housing advocate in Boston. "The atmosphere has totally changed."

But with housing -- as with higher-profile issues such as global warming and Iraq -- the new congressional leaders are trying to balance their ideas of what is desirable with their assessments of what is fiscally and politically possible during the Bush administration. So they are pushing low-cost measures that many Republicans can support, while promising their liberal base they will do more later.

"Everything we do is a political calculation; we're constantly thinking about what can become law," said Frank, the acerbic new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. "We're interested in getting practical results."

On the Katrina bill, that meant making deals beyond the Democrats' liberal constituencies -- and the sponsors' own inclinations. Republicans were allowed to offer amendments, and one barring felons from public housing passed over the opposition of Democratic leaders. Similarly, in an effort to ensure bipartisan support and a presidential signature, Frank quietly killed three Democratic amendments that would have subsidized tens of thousands of families who lost homes in Katrina, although he relented on one of them. And he berated one activist who urged him to do more.

Minimum wage hike long overdue

The Hattiesburg American

[..] Workers who now make $5.15 an hour will get a raise of 70 cents per hour before the end of the summer. Another 70 cents will be added next year, and by summer 2009, all minimum-wage jobs will pay no less than $7.25 an hour.

It's been a tug of war between Democrats and Republicans as to whether a minimum wage hike would pass. With Republicans in control of Congress since the early 1990s, and Republicans seeing the minimum wage as harmful to business, the likelihood of a raise was slim to none.

With gasoline prices well over $3 a gallon, and food costs as high as they are, minimum-wage workers will still see nearly half of their new hourly wages go toward the very basic of necessities.

How Congress ignored that for so long may go down as one of the great mysteries of government for ages.

Advocates applaud minimum wage hike

NewsOK.com
Sat May 26, 2007

Business groups and advocates for low-wage workers in Oklahoma said Friday raising the federal minimum wage for the first time in more than a decade was appropriate and long overdue.

The minimum wage will rise incrementally to $7.25 over the next two years from its current level of $5.15. The accord was part of a $120 billion U.S. Senate bill passed late Thursday funding the war in Iraq.

President Bush is expected to sign the bill.

"This is long overdue," said state Rep. Richard Morrissette, D-Oklahoma City, who has tried unsuccessfully for the past few years to increase the state's minimum wage. "If you don't pay people decent wages, you create problems down the line."

Incremental raise