Today in Washington D. C. - April 22, 2008

On the Floor: The Senate loves wasting time: They began at 10 AM and will recess between 12:15 and 2:30 PM for weekly policy lunches. Then the Senate will again recess from 3:30-4:30 PM for the unveiling of former Sen. Tom Daschle’s (D-SD) official portrait. Senators get paid by us to do this! Wonder who paid for the portrait that we are paying 100 Senators 1 hour to look at. Oh yes, two Democrat Senators are in Pennsylvania today where we pay them to run for President.

The Senators present after the picture hanging will continue consideration of the motion to proceed to a bill which would extend pension benefits to Filipino citizens who fought in the U.S. Army in World War II (S. 1315) Note: to extend benefits to means "take away money from" benefits for American vets" to fund bureaucrats administering a program allegedly for WWII Filipino adult citizens (vets) who fought 63 years ago with American forces to retake their own country. The life expectancy of a male Filipino born in 1955(10 years after the war) was only 46 years. It was less for those males born between 1920-1928 years (the average birth years for a Filipino serving with American forces). In 2000, the average life expectancy for males was 64.65 years. As of 1988 records, there was less than 1.5 % of the population who were males over 65 years (1,232,813). And the very few of these could have served during WWII. Most were children (not men).

Give us a break, the administrative cost of this program will probably exceed the amount of money going to those still living. We invested enough blood already and billions of dollars in the Republic of the Philippines, a country that asked us to leave. A cloture vote on the motion to proceed is scheduled for noon.

As expected, yesterday, Sen. Reid filed cloture on the motion to proceed to a bill to reverse last year’s Ledbetter v. Goodyear Supreme Court decision (H.R. 2831). A cloture vote could come tomorrow. According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), “H.R. 2831 would reverse Ledbetter, effectively eliminating the statute of limitations for filing discrimination claims.” NAM also warned that “employers would be forced to defend against an avalanche of decades-old, frivolous claims if Ledbetter were to be reversed.”

While Senate Democrats have decided to spend time on the floor this week on benefits Filipino vets and reversing a Supreme Court decision to open up a floodgate for pay discrimination lawsuits against employers, behind the scenes, the next crucial legislative battle over Iraq funding is shaping up.

In the House & the News: The scuttlebutt is that House Democrats will meet today to discuss how they want to handle the supplemental funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. Roll Call reports that House Democrats face the tug of different factions on the supplemental: some Democrats want domestic spending added to the bill, but Blue Dogs want PAYGO to apply to such spending; anti-war Democrats want a timetable for withdrawal, but Majority Leader Steny Hoyer would prefer to leave that out this time around. Roll Call writes, “Acknowledging that withdrawal dates are a dead end, Democrats said they will focus on proposals tailored to address all three of their concerns: that military readiness has deteriorated during the Iraq War, that the domestic economic downturn has a direct relation to the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the conflict and that U.S. national security has suffered because of the war.”

However, the head of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, the DCCC, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), told The Hill, “I would expect the House to pass legislation similar to that which we passed in the past … a date for the redeployment of the majority of U.S. combat forces.” Don't you just like the euphemism used by Democrats: "redeployment"! Ideally, Congress would pass a supplemental funding bill that did not try to micromanage troops in Iraq and was not a vehicle for massive domestic spending increases. Unfortunately, as related above, that doesn’t fit in to the Democrats’ various political calculations. We will have to wait to see how they plan to once again "pull the rug out from under" supporting troops funding.

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