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.

GOP: Pelosi needs to get back to work

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hard at work

Today, GOP Leaders from both chambers urged Speaker Pelosi to call the House back into session immediately to finish its work on the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill for the troops. Speaker Pelosi neglected to appoint House conferees before the two-week break, further delaying negotiations on a final bill. The joint letter to Pelosi is attached. Text follows: Dear Speaker Pelosi: We are writing to urge you to call the House back into session immediately so that Congress can finish its work on the emergency legislation to fund the Global War on Terrorism. This funding request has been pending since February 5, but your leadership team chose to leave town for more than two weeks rather than completing this bill. As a result, our troops have been put at risk. We are especially troubled by the House's failure to appoint conferees. The Senate appointed conferees on March 29, moments after passing its bill, but the House never did so despite passing the bill a week earlier. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the Senate that he hoped the House-Senate conference would begin on March 30. That hoped-for progress has been thwarted by your failure to act. It should go without saying that our military leaders are in the best position to know the needs of our troops, and they have left no doubt that this funding is needed urgently. General Peter Schoomaker, United States Army Chief of Staff, has written that, "without approval of the supplemental funds in April, we will be forced to take increasingly draconian measures which will impact Army readiness and impose hardships on our Soldiers and their families." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has also emphasized the dangers of delay: "This kind of disruption to key programs will have a genuinely adverse effect on the readiness of the Army and the quality of life for soldiers and their families." Our troops need this funding, and they need it soon. The Senate is in session and ready to work. We respectfully request that you cancel the remainder of your break, call the House back into session, appoint conferees promptly, and work in good faith to pass a clean supplemental funding bill that the President can sign as soon as possible. Every day we don't fund our troops is a day their ability to fight this war is weakened.