Dear Senators: About Those Missed Votes...

Dear John (and Joe and Sam, and Chris, too),
This is the Senate. Do we need to reassess our relationship?
Yes, you're running for president. It steals your time. You spend days and nights and weekends away from the congressional home front, courting admirers in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina.
But what about voting, your chief chore in Washington?

Check out Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. He missed 90 percent of all Senate votes that year. Yet few people outside the Republican National Committee, the media establishment and the National Taxpayers Union probably gave it much thought.
The latter even tried to stick him with a bill.
The group reached way back to 1856 to find a law that would seem to put Kerry on the hook for repaying more than $90,000 in congressional salary. Two dozen other House and Senate members, some of whom ran for higher office, frittered away more than $500,000 in taxpayer dollars by missing votes, the group claimed.
Guess the pols didn't get the message; none heeded the call for restitution.
Eight months later, in August 2005, the Senate exempted itself from the law.
(editors side note: Ahh, the beauty of writing laws. You can make yourself exempt. Who woulda thunk?)

Check out the story here.