"Freedom of Choice Act" Facsist Eugenics In America!!!!!

Stop this EVIL law!!!!!

Dear Concerned American,

In July 2007, Barack Obama promised a group of his supporters that, if elected president, he would sign perhaps the most evil piece of legislation in the history of our republic.

It's called the "Freedom of Choice Act," or FOCA -- but don't let the Orwellian title fool you. It isn't about "freedom" or "choice" at all. It's about forcing each and every American citizen -- regardless of his or her view on abortion -- to support abortion-on-demand not just as a "fundamental right" but as a taxpayer-funded entitlement.

But the compulsion wouldn't stop there. Because FOCA would also run roughshod over the conscience rights of doctors, nurses, and hospitals that oppose abortion on religious or moral grounds -- forcing them to provide or counsel for abortion or face professional de-certification, loss of funding, lawsuits, and even prosecution.

Not only that, FOCA would immediately strike down any and all state restrictions on abortion -- even those with wide popular support, such as prohibitions on partial-birth abortion and parental notification requirements for minors seeking abortions.

Make no mistake: FOCA is the most radical piece of pro-abortion legislation ever proposed, one that would go far beyond Roe v. Wade in making abortion a government-protected and taxpayer-supported "right," through all nine months of pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood’s History of Eugenics

“The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” -- Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Women and the New Race(Eugenics Publishing Co., 1920, 1923)

Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the world. Founder Margaret Sanger was an avowed supporter of eugenics, the pseudo-science of breeding superior humans. Her extensive writings reveal startling plans to rid the world of “undesirables” through abortion, sterilization and birth control.

In April 1932, Sanger wrote A Plan for Peace, The Birth Control Review. She urged Congress to study what she considered population problems by appointing a “Parliament of Population.” This special congressional group would be tasked “to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.” To reach these goals, Sanger suggested a “stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”

Along with her colleague Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, Sanger developed what Gamble first dubbed “The Negro Project” in a 1939 memorandum to Sanger. Their plan was to target poor minority areas in the South with Birth Control Federation of America clinics, the forerunner to Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills. In his memorandum, Gamble suggested they hire “a Negro physician” and a “charismatic Negro minister” to put in charge of the project to make it appear to have the support of black leaders.

Sanger reportedly responded to Gamble on December 10, 1939, approving the project concept. She wrote, “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Sanger lured the black community into support for her plans through deception, much the same way Planned Parenthood continues to deceive today. Touting health concerns, community well-being and economic advancement, Sanger targeted poor minorities and lured many into her grasp.

The targeting of poor, minority communities continued as Sanger’s ideas brought together several birth-control organizations heavily populated by the eugenics movement to form Planned Parenthood. For instance, when Planned Parenthood opened over 100 school-based clinics in the 1980s, not one is reported to have been opened in a substantially all-white school or in a suburban middle-class school. All available data show the clinics were opened only in black, minority or other ethnic schools.

Because of the controversies surrounding the disproportionately high number of minority abortions, the pro-abortion movement makes every effort to suppress their actual numbers. In 1992, back when Planned Parenthood actually released their numbers, over 43% of abortions they performed were on minority women.

Eugenics Still Rules

The Guttmacher Institute is an organization which compiles reproductive health statistics. According to their studies, black women abort their children five times more often than white women and at twice the Hispanic rate.

In a July 12, 2009, interview with the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg in a candid moment confirmed that eugenics is the driving force behind the pro-abortion movement.

“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.”

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, senior fellow and national spokesman for the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), says the passage of FOCA would represent the completion of Margaret Sanger’s work in eugenics.

“If you begin to look at the connection between slavery, Darwin, eugenics and abortion you begin to appreciate the fact that this is the logical step in the final chapter of this march toward genocide,” Blackwell said. “All of this has started to stem around the fundamental thought that African-Americans were less than human, objects to be manipulated, subjects to be used. This is, in my view, most noted in the works of Margaret Sanger. She introduced to youths the notion of abortion as a way of purifying what she considered to be the human race and to rid it of inferiors. In this case she regarded African-Americans as being inferior. And if you don’t study the history of slavery and Darwinian theory, eugenics and abortion, then you’re doing a disservice to the stain that all of these developments had on American culture.”

Islamic Terrorist “Allegedly” Setting Bombs? Japanese “Allegedly” Bomb Pearl Harbor?

2010 JANUARY 8

Leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including Said al-Shihri second from the left.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Muslim Nigerian “charged” with the failed attempt on the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight now has a public defender. So we will be hearing a lot about “allegedly this and that” for the next few years. He will be tried in criminal court instead of a military tribunal despite the fact that “he was trained, equipped and directed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” according to Senator Lieberman.

The Left has always been consumed more by domestic politics over military affairs, at least since the Vietnam War. Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online notes that one-third of all terrorist plots since 2001 occurred last year, 2009. This has happened even as the Obama administration has nominally kept most of the Bush-Cheney policies in place, including those most loudly objected to by the left; the Patriot Act, renditions, military tribunals, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is a difference between a nominal policy and the degree to which one’s will is committed to them.

It is obvious that the president and his administration do not feel comfortable supporting an unapologetic militarily strong America. It is quite the opposite. It took 4 months to make a decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, when it was self evident this had to and would be done. Obama’s foreign policy speeches in 2009 have empathized with the criticisms of America’s stated enemies. Not only has this been irritating to Americans, but laughable to our enemies. The actions of Iran’s neo-fascist Muslim state toward Obama’s overtures demonstrate the ineffectiveness of this approach.

The reaction by the administration to the near disaster on Christmas day is a perfect demonstration of this weak sensibility. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s “the system worked” claim was Dali-esque. It is impossible to tell what she really thought as her statement was so transparently stupid. It is her lazy thought process, however, that is most terrifying. Some vague bureaucratic apparatus apparently operated smoothly, so she was pleased to inform us how safe we all are. Meanwhile, the Nigerian guy’s father has been warning the world about his son for years and he is on every watch list ever made. It would have been nice if she showed a similar outrage that every American was feeling instead of this placid response. But she is not outraged. Some process worked, so all is okay. This is the same woman who coined the term “man-made disasters” for just such events as this attempted bombing.

I have never been comfortable with even the concept of the Department of Homeland Security. The name is a bit too 1930’s German for my taste. More substantively, it simply added layers of management to an already heavily bureaucratic system Department of Homeland Security Reorganization Plan November 25, 2002. National security improves when those in charge have a passion for it to improve, not by rearranging reporting lines that can be as effectively ignored as the previous reporting lines. It is almost hard to believe what we as a nation put up with at airports. 19 radical Muslims from Saudi Arabia fly planes into buildings and we now all are subject to time consuming, rote, and ineffective scrutiny. Muslim Richard Reid plants a bomb in his shoe, so now we all have to walk barefoot through security lines. The Nigerian Muslim Christmas bomber uses a blanket in the last hour of a flight, so now all international fliers need to put books away in the last hour of flight. But not the first hour, or the third hour. It is a parody of common sense. What happens when the next Muslim bomber copies the techniques of “drug mules”, by inserting his explosive device in some bodily “cavity”?

What really gets Obama and his administration passionate is not terrorism, but the opportunity to control people’s lives. Real passion is expressed at the thought of restricting energy usage, based on fake science; and controlling how Americans consume health care, based on fake economics. But the occasional missed Muslim terrorist, like Fort Hood’s Hasan or Nigeria/England’s Abdullmutalab can hardly muster a coherent response. Instead we are instructed to not jump to conclusions over these “alleged” man-made causers of disaster. After all, the system works.

Home Schoolers Arrested in New York: Fascism In America

In a move designed to send a message to parents, a couple were arrested and ticketed for homeschooling their children and failing to register their them with the school district in Montgomery County, New York.

“Richard Cressy, 47, and Margie Cressy, 41, both of the town of Glen, never registered their four children or their home-schooling curriculum with the local school district, said the Sheriff’s Office,” reports WRGB, a CBS affiliate in Albany, New York. “The Superintendent of the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District confirmed the four children, ranging in age from 8 to 14, had not been registered with the school district for the last seven years.”

The couple may lose custody of their children. The case has been turned over to the Montgomery County District Attorney and the Child Protective Unit.

Local and state governments around the country have moved to criminalize homeschooling and force children to attend dangerous public schools. In 2008 in California, an appeals court ruled that parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children.

	Germany’s mandatory education laws are based on Hitler’s ‘Reichsculpflicht Gesetz’ (federal compulsory attendance laws) which were passed in 1938.

Earlier this year, a German couple asked for asylum in the United States after the German government ruled that homeschooling their children was illegal. Uwe Romeike and his family moved to Tennessee after the state threatened to fine him and take away his children. Romeike, an evangelical Christian, objects to German school textbooks containing language and ideas that conflict with his family’s values.

Provisions in the California Education Code require “persons between the ages of six and eighteen” to be in “public full-time day school,” or a “private full-time day school” or “instructed by a tutor who holds a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught.” The 2nd Appellate Court in Los Angeles argued that “keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where they could interact with people outside the family.” In other words, that court ruled that parents have no right to decide who their children interact with socially and that decision will be left to the state and bureaucrats.

The ruling dramatically affects more than 200,000 homeschooled children in California.

A study conducted in 2002 revealed that public schools are infested with drugs. Half of all teens — and 60 percent of high school teens — report that drugs are used, kept, or sold at their schools. Students at these schools are three times more likely to smoke, drink, or use illicit drugs than students whose schools are substance-free, according to the study.

According to officials in New York and California, parents have no right to protect their children from drugs or shelter them from social brainwashing contrary to their values.

As noted by Michael Farris, chairman and general counsel of the Home School Legal Defense Association, judges around the country are responding to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). “In the 2002 case of Beharry v. Reno, one federal court said that even though the convention was never ratified, it still has an impact on American law,” Farris explained on the LifeSiteNews website. “The fact that virtually every other nation in the world has adopted it has made it part of customary international law, and it means that it should be considered part of American jurisprudence.”

The CRC was adopted by the United Nations in 1989 but not ratified by Congress. If passed, it “would have a negative impact on domestic law and practice in the United States. Article VI of our Constitution makes treaties – and remember, conventions are viewed as treaties – ‘the supreme law of the land.’ The CRC would be treated as superior to laws in every state regarding the parent-child relationship. This would include issues regarding education, health care, family discipline, the child’s role in family decision-making, and a host of other subjects,” writes Michael Smith for The Washington Times.

Many believe under Obama the treaty will eventually be signed and legally binding for millions of parents in the United States.

Article 29 of the CRC limits the right of parents and others to educate children by requiring that all such schools support both the charter and principles of the United Nations and a list of specific values and ideals (for instance, the “principle” of world government, the demonstrably bogus climate change agenda, population reduction, in short the entire globalist program).

“Every conceivable sphere of human activity is being analyzed and then planned for so that it will come under the ultimate control of the United Nations. It is becoming a world legislature, world court, world department of education, world welfare agency, world planning center for industry, science and commerce, world finance agency, world police force, and world anything else anyone might want — or might not want,” wrote Ezra Taft Benson in An Enemy Hath Done This.

The Copenhagen summit on climate change revealed that the United Nations is a front organization for the global elite and its transparent humanist facade will be done away with after world government is established. The United Nations, by and large, is a debating club for leaders and dictators of impoverished third world nations.

Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as Senior Policy Adviser in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan administration, has documented how public education is designed to dumb down children and prepare them for “socialism,” that it is to say a world government dictated by an elite who are not “socialist” in the commonly held sense of the word. For the elite, socialism is the perfect control mechanism.

Millions of people now understand the agenda of the U.S. education system and are actively removing their children from the brainwashing and social conditioning – in addition to violence and drug addiction – factories known as public schools.

New York and California, operating under the color of law, are attempting in a feeble manner to intimidate home school parents.Future generations will be reduced to non-thinking and irrational jellyfish capable of only following orders which they don't know they are receiving.

Some government suites are a cult and they want to force you to join or ostracize you out of 'society'. In order to do this, they are turning our children into little Manchurian candidates.

Obama; A Liar Or Just Inept....

Just when we thought we might get the opportunity to shed some light on the process of building the single largest expansion of federal government in history, Obama's promise of transparency via C-Span for Health Care negotiations and debate has been flippantly brushed aside. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, piqued with White House pressure to accept the Senate health reform bill, threw an expected rhetorical elbow Tuesday at President Barack Obama, shirking his commitment to his 2008 campaign promises.

A leadership aide said it was no accident.

Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised.

A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.

“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.
People familiar with Pelosi's thinking wasted little time in explaining precisely what she meant by a “number of things” — saying it reflected weeks of simmering tension on health care between two Democratic power players who have functioned largely in lock step during Obama’s first year in office.

Senior House Democratic leadership aides say Pelosi was pointedly referring to Obama’s ’08 pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class, which she interprets to include a tax on so-called Cadillac health care plans that offer lavish benefit packages to many union members.

The House aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Pelosi has been miffed with Obama’s tilt toward the Senate plan and his expectation that the House would simply go along with the Senate bill out of political necessity.

Pelosi has repeatedly expressed her frustrations about the inclusion of the Cadillac tax in the Senate bill and has sparred with Obama about the issue during face-to-face meetings. Her hope now, House aides say, is to get the administration to accept a tax that starts on family plans worth $28,000 — $7,000 more than the threshold favored by Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

The White House has shown a clear preference for the Senate product in the months-long, bifurcated health care debate. And Reid holds the two best trump cards in the form of Sens. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman, two wavering moderates who have already threatened to vote against a final compromise if it deviates significantly from legislation the Senate passed late last year.

All year, liberal Democrats have been clamoring for Obama to get more involved in the health care negotiations, hoping he would weigh in to push their top priority — the public option. The president is now promising to take a much more active role in these final negotiations — his staff will convene a meeting with House and Senate aides as early as Wednesday to start laying the groundwork for the talks. But that might not be a good thing for the speaker or her liberal colleagues because of the White House preference for the Senate bill.

During a White House meeting Tuesday, Obama told the speaker and other congressional leaders that he would like to see them approve a final bill by his State of the Union address, set for late January or early February. Earlier in the day, House Democrats weren't convinced they could meet that deadline — and seemed ambivalent about whether they even wanted to try.

“We want our final product — as I’m sure everyone in the House and Senate would agree — to insure affordability for the middle class,” Pelosi told reporters after her leadership meeting.Democrats in the House are intent on forcing their counterparts in the Senate to shift money from other programs to make mandatory insurance coverage more affordable.

Reid struggled for months to corral all 60 members of his caucus to move a health care bill through the Senate. That gave individual senators, such as Lieberman and Nelson, the influence to command major concessions from the rest of their colleagues. Their demands, particularly Lieberman’s insistence on scrapping the public option, rankled Democrats in the House.

But the fact is that House Democrats have little recourse to impose their will in negotiations with the Senate unless they make realistic demands.

Party leaders were even forced to break from the traditional means for negotiating with the Senate because it would create additional roadblocks for Reid — and give Republicans more chances to derail the bill.

On Tuesday, the speaker and her colleagues were both forced to defend charges from their own rank and file that these abbreviated negotiations betrayed their own campaign promises to make deliberations public.

The two chambers use different methods to pay for the final bill, and House Democrats seem willing to accept the Senate proposal to tax high-end health care plans as long as they can raise the threshold for plans that qualify.

But they would have to find a way to pay for the lost revenue. One idea being circulated is to raise the amount of money wealthy Americans would be forced to pay for Medicare. The Senate bill already uses the tax to raise that money, and it touches on the House plan to impose a surtax on people with the highest annual salaries.

In the end, three points should be made regarding this circus of a process. President Obama clearly no longer commands the respect he thinks he deserves. The current congressional leadership will sink to almost any depths to accomplish their ridiculous goals in this current fluxing economy. Not enough attention has been paid to who truly benefits from these proposed plans, such as pharmaceutical companies and supplemental insurance companies such as AARP.

An additional point is to once again mention that this ambivalent congress has no intention of taking part in the new health care system, and they have allowed themselves exemption from any penalty or tax to help pay for this monstrosity of a bill.

Climategate~ "Oops, did I say that?"

For those who thought the exposed emails from Britain’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit would come and go without much play, think again. Surely the skeptics and even the agnostics wouldn’t miss an opportunity to jump on such devastating revelations, but the fact is ClimateGate is having immediate and possibly long-lasting effects all over the world.

In Australia, the emails could literally shift political powers in the land down under:

“Australian Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has been replaced by a climate sceptic, Tony Abbott, after ten of its most senior politicians resigned over its support for the Government’s plans for fighting global warming. They were, it seems, fired up by the hacked communications from the University of East Anglia. But this is not the end of it. The sceptics coup is likely to lead to a general election before long, fought on climate change.”

In the UK, the head scientist at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) is stepping down:

“The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.”

Back in the United States, Penn State University will investigate the role of Michael Mann in ClimateGate, a professor at PSU and one of the climate researchers at CSU involved in the email threads:

“Penn State officials, who will not discuss the matter, are investigating the controversy. If anything requires further inspection, the school will handle it, a spokesman tells the Daily Collegian. A panel will read every E-mail leaked and determine if climate change critics have any ground for their accusations, the report says.”

And Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is calling for hearings:

“In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the environment committee, Inhofe said the e-mails could have far-reaching policy implications for the United States. Both Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency are taking action to curb global warming based on a report that uses data produced by the Climate Research Unit.”

The American public has already cooled off on the idea of combating global warming with costly cap and tax legislation; the exposed emails are bound to raise even more eyebrows. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal offers another reason. It’s not necessarily about going green but more so about getting green:

“The European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.”

Time will tell how the rest of ClimateGate plays out, but it’s only been a short amount of time since the story broke and a number of significant events have emerged since and certainly more are likely to follow. Clive Cook says it best: “The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

The main point of this argument is not to disprove that there environmental climate issues. We can all agree that good stewardship of or planet is necessary. More importantly, let us be sure we are treating this with true empirical science rather that expedient conjecture and tampered findings when considering how to implement global organizations and governing bodies which will pose a serious economic threat to jobs and industry everywhere.

The Latest Milestone in Chinese Tyranny

For the last two decades, those committed to warm ties with Beijing have tried to tell Americans that the development of capitalism in China—albeit a capitalism that must operate in a system in which the rule of law and property rights are a matter of government fiat—would eventually transform the totalitarian system. But today, as theNew York Times reports, another milestone has been passed in which such hopes have been revealed as utterly unfounded.

The Chinese capital was the setting on Wednesday for the trial of Liu Xiaobo, one of the country’s leading human-rights advocates. Liu faces up to 15 years in prison for calling for open elections and free speech. His role in promulgating Charter 08, a manifesto in favor of Chinese political freedom, is the chief reason for the government’s latest attempt to silence Liu. As the Times notes, the document’s language that states “We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes” is itself viewed as a crime by the Communist Party.

The persecution of Liu is something of a history of China’s abuse of human rights since 1989. At the time of the Tienanmen Square demonstrations in 1989, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University but returned home to join the hunger strikers. When the Chinese army struck, he was arrested and held for 21 months without trial. In 1996, he was sent to the laogai—China’s gulag—for three years for calling for the release of others still imprisoned for their participation in the Tiananmen events. Since then he has been a thorn in the side of the Communist Party but the charter, which evokes similar protests by Czech opponents against the Soviet empire, has motivated the government to try and put him away again. Reporters were barred from the trial, as were other dissidents who bravely came to support Liu. This is all we know of the proceedings:


Liu Xiaoxuan, the defendant’s younger brother, was one of two family members allowed in the courtroom. After the trial adjourned, he tried to recall details of the proceedings — court officials had prevented those in the room from taking notes — and he repeated his brother’s final words, spoken to a judge. Mr. Liu, according to his brother, said that he came from a long line of persecuted thinkers and hoped he would be the last. “He said that if he was sent to jail, it might bring others freedom of speech,” Liu Xiaoxuan said.

It would be nice to think that were true. But neither the Obama administration—which allowed Beijing to humiliate the president during his recent trip there—nor its predecessors have had any interest in the fate of Chinese dissidents or the drive for pushing the world’s largest tyranny to change its behavior. The Chinese authorities have stepped up their suppression of freedom in the last year with a vengeance. Yet most Americans either don’t care or still actually believe the propaganda about the Chinese not caring about freedom, which business interests put forward about China and democracy. As with the successful campaign to stifle concerns about Chinese human rights that preceded the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government can count on the self-interest of the business community and the indifference of Washington to allow it to continue its abuses with impunity.

Yet the attempt by Liu to courageously invoke the example of those who challenged the seemingly unshakable grip of Soviet communism in 1977 ought to remind us all that even the most powerful of tyrants can be resisted and toppled. Provided, that is, that dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo be not forsaken by the forces of freedom elsewhere. Just as the West once embraced men like Vaclav Havel and Natan Sharansky, Americans must not allow Liu’s oppressors to triumph in silence.

By: JONATHAN TOBIN

If new Healthcare Bill is so great, why doesn't leadership want it for themselves?

Look who gets exempted!!

Why is Senator Reid trying to exempt Congressional staffers? Read below the email from my FNC colleague Trish Turner:

From: Turner, Trish
To:
Sent: Tue Dec 01 17:16:35 2009

Subject: URGENT: SenReid tries to exempt Congressional staffers from new healthcare reform

Members would get their insurance thru the new exchanges, but according to a new carve-out found by CRS (exposed by Grassley staff here), congressional staffers would be EXEMPT.

Note --- Grassley plans an amendment to reverse this to the original intent of the Senate Finance Cmte bill…..ALL members AND their staff get healthcare from the new exchanges.

From: Office, Press (Finance-Rep) [mailto:Press_Office@finance-rep.senate.gov]

Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 5:05 PM

Subject: more: Senate leadership staff carved out of health care exchanges, Grassley finds

As an addendum to the news release, here’s more on the language change:

“Official office” in the Reid bill refers to members’ personal offices, not any office associated with a committee or leadership position.

THE FINANCE COMMITTEE BILL (based on Grassley Amendment):

On page 81 "an employee whose pay is disbursed by the Secretary of the Senate or the Clerk of the House of Representatives."


THE REID BILL:


On page 157 "employees employed by the official office of a Member of Congress, whether in Washington, D.C., or outside of Washington D.C."

For Immediate Release

Grassley exposes carve-out in Reid health care bill

Iowa senator prepares amendment to reverse carve-out, also include White House in new health care exchanges

Senator Chuck Grassley said it is unacceptable that staff of Senate leadership and committees is now exempted from the requirement that members of Congress and congressional staff get their employer-based health insurance through the same exchanges that would be created for the rest of the country under the Senate Majority Leader’s health care legislation.

A Grassley amendment adopted by the Finance Committee in September established this requirement for all congressional staff, along with members of Congress.

“Careful examination by the Congressional Research Service of the bill that Senator Reid brought to the floor revealed that one of the things that happened behind closed doors was that leadership and committee staff ended up being carved out from having to live under the new health care exchanges that this legislation would create and impose on the rest of the country,” Grassley said. “This creates a double standard. It’s inexcusable.”

Grassley said he’ll offer an amendment to restore his amendment, which the Finance Committee accepted without objection, and which the Congressional Research Service said made clear that leadership and committee staff would be required to access the new exchange.

Grassley said his floor amendment also will expand the requirement to include the President, the Vice President and all political appointees in the executive branch. “The President, the White House staff and cabinet secretaries are working very hard for this massive overhaul of America’s health care system. It’s only fair and logical that if this bill becomes law, these leaders should themselves be subject to the reforms,” he said.

Currently, members of Congress, congressional staff, the President, Vice President, cabinet secretaries, and political appointees participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. The exchange that would be established by the legislation pending in the Senate is modeled after this federal employees’ program and is supposed to give participants the same kind of choices and options for health care coverage as federal employees.

Grassley’s interest in having policy makers participate in the exchange is consistent with his long-held view that Congress should live under the same laws it passes for the rest of the country. In 1995, President Clinton signed into law the Congressional Accountability Act, which Grassley authored and fought to advance for six years before it was enacted. Grassley’s Congressional Accountability Act gives employees of the legislative branch protections under 12 civil rights, labor and workplace safety laws by making those laws apply to Congress.

Before enactment of the Congressional Accountability Act, Congress had exempted itself from these laws:

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993

The Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute

Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973

Veterans’ employment and reemployment rights at Chapter 43 of Title 38 of the U.S. Code

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1989.

The Congressional Accountability Act was amended in 1998 to include certain provisions of the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998.