Tag Archives: Topic: Congress

USA Today: “Eight Republican senators who voted in favor of President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee last year are not yet ready to say what they are going to do about the second. A USA TODAY survey of the Senate offices Wednesday found none of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s Republican supporters ready to commit on Elena Kagan’s lifetime appointment. A Judiciary Committee vote on Kagan’s nomination is likely by July 20, setting the stage for a confirmation vote in the Senate.”

Catholic.net: “The U.S. bishops’ conference pro-life committee chairman is urging lawmakers to uphold current policy prohibiting U.S. military hospitals, and other federal health facilities, from performing abortions. Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities, stated this in a letter sent Tuesday to the U.S. senators. He asked that the lawmakers, when they review the National Defense Authorization Act for 2011, would ‘remove from the bill a misguided committee amendment’ that authorizes abortions at military hospitals both in the United States and worldwide.” | Full text of DiNardo’s letter.

ChristianNewsWire: “Care Net, a network of more than 1,100 pregnancy centers, calls a summer attack by the abortion industry and its advocates, ‘just another attempt to shut down the competition.’ NARAL, an abortion activist group, has launched an effort to harm pregnancy centers’ ability to advertise their services online. In addition, abortion rights proponents in Congress, Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Sen. Robert Menendez, have re-introduced a bill that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to set up new rules to regulate pregnancy center advertising.” | S.2793 – Stop Deceptive Advertising for Women’s Services Act | Open Congress

The Georgia Bulletin (CNS): “The briefing, ‘Pornography Harms: What Congress Can Do to Enforce Existing Laws,’ was led by Patrick Trueman, a former chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section … During his presentation, Trueman spoke about an argument used by some that fighting pornography limits the adult entertainment industry’s constitutional right of free speech.”

Associated Press: “Republican Sen. John McCain says he plans to vote against confirming Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. … McCain says Kagan is unlikely to exercise judicial restraint, based on her decision as dean of Harvard Law School to bar military recruiters from the campus career services office because of the ban on openly gay soldiers.”

“The recess appointment was somewhat unusual because the Senate is in recess for less than two weeks and senators were still waiting for Dr. Berwick to submit responses to some of their requests for information. No confirmation hearing has been held or scheduled.”

Sunshine State News: “The leading Republican candidate in the race for U.S. Senate, former House Speaker Marco Rubio, announced Tuesday that he opposes President Barack Obama’s nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court of the United States. … ‘Initially, my concerns with this nomination centered on her role in implementing the ban on military recruiters while she was dean at Harvard Law School,’ said Rubio. ‘Also, since she has no history as a judge, I hoped the confirmation process would reveal greater insight into her views on the role of judges and the judiciary in America. After all, the proper role of a judge is not to create laws, but to interpret and apply the law within the parameters of our Constitution.’”

Politico: “[T]he GOP has more than just a math problem with Kagan. It has a passion problem — the party, which has used judicial nominations to stoke the culture wars for more than a decade, appears to have lost its edge on judges. … some Republicans griped privately over what they saw as Sessions’s largely unfocused attacks, which failed to provide a compelling counternarrative about her nomination. … After denouncing the filibusters Democrats used against George W. Bush’s nominees, including an unsuccessful attempt with Associate Justice Samuel Alito and successful filibusters to prevent conservative icon Miguel Estrada from becoming a federal judge, top Republicans don’t now want to look like hypocrites.”

Breitbart: “Republican Leader Mitch McConnell saying that he wasn’t sure she could ‘constrain the ardent political advocacy that has marked much of her adult life.’ … One member of the committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, announced Friday that he would be voting against Kagan, despite his approval of her as solicitor general last year. … Hatch’s announcement was soon followed by similar statements from McConnell and GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.”

“Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has scheduled a committee vote for Tuesday, July 13, according to a notice sent to reporters this afternoon.”

Huffington Post: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has some advice for her Senate counterparts: Try majority rule for a change. Pelosi, in an interview with the Huffington Post, called for an end to the filibuster, which she labeled ‘the 60-vote stranglehold on the future.’ … Senate Democrats are eying January as the time to reform the filibuster, when the Senate convenes a fresh Congress and votes to establish rules.”

An excerpt from the conclusion of Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith’s written testimony in support of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, via Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy (see also the post’s lively comments section): “The President of the United States is entitled to choose a judicial nominee whom he believes reflects his judicial philosophy; and his decision to nominate a highly qualified individual who swims in the broad mainstream of American legal life – a description that Kagan easily satisfies – warrants deference from the Senate. Some Democratic members of this Committee implicitly or expressly embrace this principle today but did not do so during the hearings for Justices Roberts and Alito. Some Republican members of this Committee implicitly or expressly embraced this principle during the hearings for Justices Roberts and Alito, but not today. The Democrats are right now and the Republicans were right then. But the opportunistic embrace of the principle, and the often-extremely-uncharitable characterization of the records of nominees of presidents of the opposite party, can only mean that neither side really believes in it.”

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown write at Townhall: “Elena Kagan is a radical. Barack Obama and his allies in the left-wing media have made every attempt to paint Kagan as a ‘moderate,’ but this truth is evident if you listen to her answers. She has a life-long history of extreme and radical left-wing political activism and her personal history clearly indicates that she will not hesitate to pursue Obama’s far-left wing agenda from the bench.”

Wall Street Journal editorial: “Reconfirming John Roberts” – full text via Google News: “Pardon us for asking, but was that really Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing this week? We’re double checking because Senate Democrats seemed preoccupied with refighting the 2005 nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts. … The list of Democrats who devoted a chunk of their camera time to deplore the Chief included [Franken,] Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse, Ben Cardin and Chuck Schumer, rather like a political campaign.”

The Hill: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation vote sets up a difficult political decision for a half-dozen or so Republicans. … Republican senators will be under heavy pressure to vote against President Barack Obama’s second nominee to the Supreme Court in an election year characterized by an angry electorate fed up with incumbents.”

SCOTUSblog: “SCOTUSblog is offering live coverage of the fourth day of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The session was expected to begin promptly at 4:00 p.m Eastern, but may begin a bit late. For the first three days we also offered a video feed from PBS’s NewsHour, but that coverage ended yesterday.”

Christianity Today (see page 2): “[Gregory Baylor] of the Alliance Defense Fund said the constitutional issues at stake are still up for debate. ‘The conflict still exists,’ said Baylor. ‘The Hastings policy actually requires CLS to allow atheists to lead its Bible studies and the College Democrats to accept the election of Republican officers in order for the groups to be recognized on campus. We agree with Justice [Samuel] Alito in his dissent that the Court should have rejected this as absurd.’”

WLTX: “Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham addressed rumors that he is a homosexual in an interview with the New York Times, telling the Times that ‘I ain’t gay.’”

Miami Herald: “Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who last December introduced the first immigration reform bill of the current congressional session, announced in May that he intends to add provisions that would include same-sex couples and their families. Gutierrez plans to incorporate into his bill language from the Uniting American Families Act, offered by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., a longtime proponent of the measure.”

Victoria Advocate: “A motion to add a provision that would ‘audit the Fed’ to the financial overhaul bill failed Thursday. U.S. Rep. Ron Paul sponsored the audit the Fed bill previously supported by 320 members of the House. But the audit add-on failed by a vote of 229-198.”

“Charles Grassley (R-IA) asked, ‘Do you believe that marriage is a question reserved for the states to decide?’ This question, Kagan pointed out, was the subject of a high-profile suit now in the courts, making comment improper. Then Grassley asked whether she considered a 1970 case on the issue, Baker v. Nelson ‘settled law.’”

National Right to Life News: “What we know for sure is, as NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson once put it, ‘The bottom line is that thousands of additional babies were mostly delivered alive and then stabbed through the back of the head, thanks to the deceptive but successful political strategy, to which Elena Kagan lent all of her considerable talents, that blocked the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act from becoming law during the Clinton Administration.’ In slip-sliding around her real role, Kagan is demonstrating the very qualities that make her critics nervous: a political adroitness at fudging her true role in providing political cover for pro-abortion Democrats.”

George Neumayr writing at The American Spectator: “Don’t be surprised when the polished and polite Elena Kagan finds a constitutional right to gay marriage within the shadows and penumbras of Thurgood Marshall’s Constitution. As the dean of Harvard Law School, she made it clear that she thinks homosexuals have an inalienable right to change the ethos of the United States military. If that’s a right in her mind, then marriage, which is an even more basic claim than access to soldiering, has to be one too.”

Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “Kagan has now testified that not only does she find the Founders’ concept of “unalienable Rights” irrelevant to Constitutional interpretation, but she also declined to say if the Constitution prevents Congress from telling Americans what to eat. Her evasive non-response to Coburn’s Commerce Clause inquiry shows that she would indeed be a rubber-stamp for almost any part of the Obama agenda that Congress enacts.”

Blog of LegalTimes: “‘You have followed the pattern which has been in vogue since Bork,’ he said, referring to conventional wisdom that Supreme Court nominees have been hesitant to say much about their legal views after the nomination of the very substantive Judge Robert Bork failed in 1987. ‘It would be my hope that we could find some place between voting no and having some sort of substantive answers, but I don’t know that it would be useful to continue these questions any further.’”

New York Times: “Republicans on Wednesday stepped up their pressure on Elena Kagan to defend her decisions involving abortion and the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, trying to knock her off her stride even as some of them conceded that her confirmation to the Supreme Court appears all but assured.”

LifeSiteNews: “U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner pledged Tuesday to the 40th annual National Right to Life Convention (NRLC) that he would sign on to legislation, soon to be introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), that would make the Hyde amendment barring taxpayer funding for abortion permanent law.”

LifeNews: “House Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor announced today they will sign discharge petitions promoted by Reps. Steve King and Wally Herger that would force votes in the House on legislation seeking to undermine the pro-abortion health care bill President Barack Obama signed into law.”

The Hill: “A debate is emerging in the Senate over key aspects of recently introduced cybersecurity legislation, including which agency should be in charge of protecting the country’s civilian networks and how much authority the president should have in the event of a cyberattack.”

The Hill: “Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is fighting party leaders’ decision to name Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) interim chairman of the Appropriations Homeland Security subcommittee. … The subcommittee has jurisdiction over the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will play an important role helping Gulf Coast residents recover from the BP oil disaster.”

The Hill: “The executive director of West Virginia’s Republican Party said Monday afternoon that the party is ‘examining its legal options’ after it was announced that there will be no special election this year to fill the seat of Sen. Robert Byrd (D), who passed away early Monday morning.”

NJ.com: “The bill makes the Interdistrict Public School Choice Program, which started in 2000 and has continued as a pilot program since expiring in 2005, permanent. It passed 38-0 and is set to be taken up by the Assembly this afternoon.”

SCOTUSblog has “linked to the prepared statements provided by several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee following today’s session of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings. Additionally, Kagan’s prepared statement is available here.”

Blog of LegalTimes: “‘Senator Kyl, I think it’s law all the way down,’ she said. ‘The question is what the law requires. Now, there are cases where it is difficult to determine what the law requires. Judging is not a robotic or automatic enterprise, especially on cases that come before the Supreme Court…. But it’s law all the way down, regardless.’”

Blog of LegalTimes: “Why, [Feinstein] asked Kagan, should the Supreme Court’s two recent rulings on gun rights be considered settled law if they were both decided 5-4? ‘Once the Court decides a case, it becomes binding precedent,’ Kagan replied. … Kagan said the Carhart ruling was specific to the abortion procedure in question at the time. ‘I think that the continuing holdings of the Court are that a woman’s life and a woman’s health must be protected’ in abortion statutes, she said.”

LifeNews: “The nation’s Catholic bishops have a message for members of Congress: don’t turn American taxpayer-funded military base hospitals into abortion centers. They are oppose language in a Senate bill that would overturn the ban on abortions at the approximately 250 military base hospitals.”

Associated Press: “Kagan says that international law can be used as a guide, but it should not ordinarily be considered binding when deciding Supreme Court cases because the Constitution is a unique document.”

ChristianNewsWire: “Moments ago, responding to a line of questions from Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Kagan confirmed her belief that ‘Roe (v. Wade) and Doe (v. Bolton) require’ that any state ‘regulation’ of abortion protect the ‘health’ of women seeking abortion. Kagan isolated the Supreme Court’s holding in the 2007 case, Gonzales v. Carhart — which upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban of 2003 without a ‘health’ exception — by stating that the Gonzales decision only pertained to a particular abortion procedure.’”

Law.com: “The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee followed through today on plans to press Elena Kagan about her handling of military recruiting while dean of Harvard Law School. … Kagan repeatedly replied that the recruiters, even without the assistance, had full access to students and that recruiting actually increased after she issued the rule, which was based on a long-standing anti-discrimination policy.”

The Blog of LegalTimes: “Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was the only Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotomayor a year ago. Today, he continued to drop hints that he might be willing to vote for Elena Kagan, too.”

Breitbart: “To those hearty souls who tuned in to C-SPAN on Monday it must have sounded like a tale of two Kagans. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the panel, previewed the GOP lines of attack—reaching all the way back to her college thesis on socialism, which he said ‘seems to bemoan socialism’s demise.’ … For every GOP thrust, there was a Democratic parry. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont called her legal credentials ‘unassailable.’”

Wall Street Journal Editorial: “What the world has now reached instead is a Keynesian dead end. We are told to let Congress continue to spend and borrow until the precise moment when Mr. Summers and Mark Zandi and the other architects of our current policy say it is time to raise taxes to reduce the huge deficits and debt that their spending has produced. Meanwhile, individuals and businesses are supposed to be unaffected by the prospect of future tax increases, higher interest rates, and more government control over nearly every area of the economy. Even the CEOs of the Business Roundtable now see the damage this is doing.”

Associated Press: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan pledged Monday to be properly deferential to Congress if confirmed as a justice, while striving ‘to consider every case impartially, modestly, with commitment to principle and in accordance with law.’”

LifeSiteNews: “Some Republican senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee indicated their opposition to Supreme Court hopeful Elena Kagan’s pro-abortion and homosexualist agenda, as well as her activist leanings, amid opening remarks at the first in a series of Senate confirmation hearings today.”

LifeNews: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is drawing strong condemnation from Republicans on the Judiciary Committee in their opening statements on the first day of her nomination hearings. Even Democrats are pointing out she has little record on which to examine her judicial philosophy. … Sessions also pounded Kagan on abortion, saying ‘Kagan was also the point person for the Clinton Administration’s efforts to block Congressional restrictions on partial-birth abortions.’” | Committee on the Judiciary

FindLaw (AP): “Elena Kagan, a trailblazer for women and the law, is hitting a new path that could be strewn with a few rough patches: the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings. Kagan’s chances are bright as she heads into a marathon week of high-pressure vetting before the Judiciary panel, pressing to portray herself as a mainstream, impartial addition to the court. She’s set to break weeks of public silence in sworn testimony before the panel reviewing her nomination.”

Associated Press: “What’s new is the experience level of committee members. Three have chaired confirmation hearings before. There are no rookies; even the junior senators toward the end of the dais participated in the questioning last year of Obama’s first nominee for the high court, Sonia Sotomayor. … Republicans are examining her experience from other angles. She’s never been a judge. As an adviser to President Bill Clinton, she showed a political shrewdness that GOP lawmakers say isn’t appropriate for an impartial justice. Most of all, they’ve taken aim at Kagan’s brief refusal to give military recruiters access to the law school’s career services office, over the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy against openly gay soldiers.”

Washington Post: “Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.), the longest-serving senator in the history of the United States, has died. For more than 50 years he represented the people of the Mountain State.”

Lori A. Ringhand and Paul M. Collins, May it Please the Senate: An Empirical Analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009 (June 25, 2010). UGA Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-12. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1630403

“This paper examines the questions asked and answers given by every Supreme Court nominee who has appeared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee since 1939. In doing so, it uses a new dataset developed by the authors. This database, which provides a much-needed empirical foundation for scholarship in emerging areas of constitutional law and political science, captures all of the statements made at the hearings and codes these comments by issue area, subissue area, party of the appointing president, and party of the questioning senator. The dataset allows us to quantify for the fist time such things as which issues are most frequently discussed at the hearings, whether those issues have changed over time, and whether they vary depending on the party of the appointing president and the party of the questioning senator. We also investigate if questioning patterns differ depending on the race or gender of the nominee. Some of our results are unsurprising: for example, the hearings have become longer. Others, however, challenge conventional wisdom: the Bork hearing is less of an outlier in several ways than is frequently assumed, and abortion has not dominated the hearings. We also discover that there is issue area variation over time, and that there are notable disparities in the issues addressed by Democratic versus Republican senators. Finally, we find that female and minority nominees face a significantly different hearing environment than do white male nominees.”

Baptist Press: “With Elena Kagan’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing set to begin Monday, conservative groups are pushing back against the media storyline that says President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is a blank slate on hot-button social issues.”

Jeremy Rabkin writing at the Heritage Foundation: “What are Elena Kagan’s views on foreign policy? What does she think about America’s role in the world? At one time, such questions would have seemed irrelevant, if not impudent, for a Supreme Court nominee. Not anymore. Recent Supreme Court decisions, and commonly expressed views among commentators, seem to embrace a new role for international institutions, foreign practices, and foreign opinion in shaping American law. Although very little is known about Kagan’s judicial philosophy, or her opinions on great constitutional issues, her record, such as it is, cries out for questioning on these matters. It remains unlikely that Kagan will jeopardize her confirmation by giving forthright answers to such questions. But Senators should not pass up the opportunity to put her on the spot by pressing for clear and direct responses to fundamental questions about her judicial philosophy. Here are particularly compelling reasons to raise these questions with Elena Kagan.”

Washinton Examiner: “The [DISCLOSE Act] is full of draconian restrictions on individual political speech expressed via corporations, but gives privileged status to the Democrats’ union masters. A provision pushed by Pennsylvania Democrat Rep. Bob Brady, for example, allows unions to transfer unlimited funds among affiliated groups to pay for political ads with no disclosure whatever. That makes campaign funding more transparent?” | More from the Examiner’s Mark Hemingway: “So unions now get nearly unrestricted, undisclosed political spending. … Further, under the DISCLOSE Act if a company has more than $7 million in government contracts, it has no right to political speech. But public sector unions can spend millions of recycled tax dollars campaigning for Democrats, no problem.”

Concerned Women for America: “Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, stated: ‘The DISCLOSE Act is designed to stifle Americans’ legitimate right to political speech and carves out exceptions for powerful special interest groups and unions. It places onerous regulations on small business owners and grassroots groups if they attempt to educate the public on candidates and issues.’”

CNSNews: “Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) each refused to say whether Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan should have to justify her view on abortion at her upcoming confirmation hearing.”

Associated Press: “Elena Kagan’s a politics-driven liberal, her detractors say. She’s a judicial activist. She treated military recruiters like second-class citizens during wartime. … ‘There will be a huge theme about whether the political activist part of her life and career, and her lack of legal experience, either as a judge or a lawyer – whether that will overcome the responsibility she has to be faithful to the law,’ said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Judiciary panel.”

The Hill: “Reps. Dan Burton (R-Ind) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) questioned whether Soros, who backs a number of liberal causes and Democratic candidates for office, had invested in a Brazilian oil company, Petrobras, with the knowledge that President Barack Obama might temporarily ban deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.”

LifeSiteNews: “According to House Republican sources, the House began meeting at 10:00 a.m. for legislative business and are now taking up [H.R. 5175], the ‘Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act’ that has pro-life, pro-family groups, and even the ACLU crying foul. The Act would force grassroots organizations to release the names of donors and members of their organizations into a publicly searchable database, and frustrate the ability of grassroots entities to communicate effectively with the public about public policy.”

LifeNews: “The leading Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee says there is still a possibility that Republicans will mount a filibuster against pro-abortion Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. She has drawn strong opposition from a number of pro-life organizations that cite her support for abortion, human cloning, and assisted suicide. ‘I wouldn’t take it off the table,’ Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, a pro-life Alabama lawmaker, said, according to USA Today.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State: “Americans United for Separation of Church and State today urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to question Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan about her views on crucial religious liberty issues. In a letter to Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy and ranking minority member Sen. Jeff Sessions . . . ”

The Hill: “House members on Wednesday received a letter signed by 305 organizations urging them to oppose the Disclose Act. The bill is slated to be vetted by the Rules Committee later today and be subjected to a floor vote on Thursday. ‘This legislation is a threat to the First Amendment rights of businesses across the country,’ the letter states. ‘It represents a significant departure from past campaign-finance legislation, which sought to treat unions and corporations comparably and was framed in a genuinely bipartisan manner.’” | Related: House Democrats Cancel Vote on Disclose Act Opposed by Pro-Life Groups | National Right to Life Committee Urges U.S. House to Reject ‘Disclose Act’ as ‘Unprincipled, Unconstitutional’ Political Attack

Voice of America News: “Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan begin Monday in Washington. Kagan is President Barack Obama’s choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the high court’s leading liberal thinker.” | US Senate Committee on the Judiciary

National Law Journal: “The U.S. Senate this morning broke deadlocks on more than 60 presidential nominees, including those for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the D.C. Superior Court.”

Boston Globe: “Filings say Republican Snowe and her husband, former Maine Gov. John McKernan, have assets worth between $12 million and $46 million. The couple’s largest asset is common stock in Education Management Corp. and falls in the category of being worth between $5 million and $25 million.”

McClatchy DC: “McCaskill, a first term Democrat, apparently has persuaded enough of her colleagues to back her effort to take the ‘secret’ out of the Senate’s practice of secret holds. If her bill gets to the floor, which is appearing more likely since every Democrat supports it, plus enough Republicans to grease passage, no senator would be able to block on a nomination or a piece of legislation without leaving fingerprints . . . ”

Providence Journal: “On the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s debate on the McConnell nomination, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce alerted senators that their votes on whether to seat him could become part of the organization’s influential scorecard on members of Congress. . . . The consideration of McConnell’s nomination is playing out against a partisan backdrop. The Providence lawyer, 51, is a longtime state Democratic official, a major contributor to the party and a leading plaintiffs’ lawyer. He has given more than $432,000 to federal election campaigns over the years, including those of Whitehouse and Jack Reed.” | Via Instapundit.

WorldNetDaily: “The mass deportation of Christians ordered by authorities in Morocco in recent weeks now is getting attention in Washington. Counsel Roger Kiska of the Alliance Defense Fund said a hearing is scheduled Thursday before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. ‘Christians shouldn’t be targeted for deportation simply because of their beliefs,’ Kiska stated. ‘None of the preconditions for lawful deportation under Moroccan law was met by the government officials in this case.’ ‘It is vital that no precedent be set that will lead to more human rights violations of this sort, where Christian volunteers can be mass expelled simply because they are Christian,’ he said.”

“‘Our efforts today are not partisan because the protection of children, violence against women, addiction and sexual trafficking are not partisan issues. Nor are we here today to quarrel with Attorney General Holder,’ said Patrick A. Trueman, former chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, U.S. Department of Justice.”

(Warning graphic images, descriptions, and language)

Stephanie Mencimer writing at Mother Jones: “On Tuesday, a group of anti-porn activists and scholars arrived on Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress and their staffs and to call for beefed-up federal enforcement of obscenity laws. . . . Christian-right groups have been complaining about porn forever, of course, and Trueman, a lawyer with the anti-gay Alliance Defense Fund, falls within that camp. But technology has made the right’s argument far more compelling, as the Internet has brought pornography to a far bigger and more vulnerable audience than ever before. . . . [A]ccording to Trueman, much of the explicit material found on the Internet these days isn’t protected speech but obscenity, which is prosecutable.”

LifeNews: “The scene in Washington right now pits Democrats against Republicans on the annual appropriations bills that are passed to allow the federal government to function. However, the lack of any spending bills could result in passing an omnibus measure that may overturn pro-life provisions . . . ”

AP: “The vote Tuesday to repeal the mandate failed 187 to 230.”

Politico: “House Republicans will try to force a vote on repealing the individual mandate in the Democrats’ health care overhaul, using a procedural maneuver to score political points on one of the most controversial provisions in the health care law.”

Keen News Service: “Only one question this year: Besides the measures on the House and Senate Defense authorization bills to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, name the other 25 LGBT-specific bills pending in Congress right now.”

Click here to learn more about tomorrow’s event at the Capitol Visitor’s Center.

GOP Leader Blog: “House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH), in a meeting with President Obama and Congressional leaders at the White House today, asked President Obama to provide the American people with a progress report on the implementation of his Executive Order which purports to ban taxpayer-funding of abortions. Leader Boehner noted that in her recent ‘progress report’ to Congress on the implementation of ObamaCare, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius did not make any mention of efforts by the administration to implement the president’s Executive Order (EO).” | Via The Corner.

The Hill: “Democratic leaders are scrambling to prevent the Senate from delivering a stinging slap to President Barack Obama on climate change.”