Legislation

By Brian Beutler, the Media Consortium

Last night, Chris Dodd took to the floor of the Senate and made an impassioned plea to his colleagues not to support the House FISA legislation. The video, and text are available here.

Written by: Aaron M. Watkins (amwphilos)

President George W. Bush announced yesterday that he was to veto a bill allocating federal funds for stem cell research. This being the third bill passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate that Bush has vetoed, it comes a year after an almost identical bill was considered.
The Senate just barely lacks the two thirds majority to contest Bush's veto, but the House is well under the two thirds majority meaning the veto is not likely to be overridden.

As usual, Bush makes little to no sense when citing his reasons behind the veto. In a message to the House of Representatives, released yesterday (June 19, 2007) on the White House's website, Bush writes, "Under the policy I announced 5 years ago, my Administration became the first to make Federal funds available for this research, but only on embryonic stem cell lines derived from embryos that had already been destroyed."

It has been over a week now since President George W. Bush vetoed the proposed Iraq spending bill. As we know, the bill passed in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, an obvious indicator that the majority of the American people are fed up with the War in Iraq; yet the incumbent insists on ignoring the will of the people, and even defying our own Congress. Bush claimed that the $124 billion dollar bill contained too many binding issues, and that he could not “in good conscience”, sign such a bill into law. The omission of a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq (a never ending war) is the only way that Bush will accept a proposed war spending bill; meaning that he would rather our troops remain under-funded and under-equipped just to keep them there in Iraq.