Saturday, January 10, 2009

Not All the News Is Bad

On the first day of the 111th Congress, Representative John Conyers (D-MI) introduced H.R. 104:
HR 104, National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties
Will establish a Blue Ribbon Commission comprised of experts outside government service to investigate the broad range of policies of the Bush administration that were undertaken by the Bush administration under claims of unreviewable war powers.
You can read the complete text of the bill here. According to the Free Dictionary, a "blue ribbon commission" is "an independent and exclusive commission of nonpartisan statesmen and experts formed to investigate some important governmental issue." Sounds good to me.

Although having a special prosecutor appointed by the attorney general would be optimal, work on this issue from any quarter is most welcome. We can't afford to wait ten or twenty or thirty years before the truth comes out. We need to reclaim our identity as a nation that upholds the Rule of Law as quickly as possible.

According to the Library of Congress Thomas website, the following representatives co-sponsored the bill:
  • Jerrold Nadler (D-NY),
  • Hank Johnson (D-GA),
  • Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX),
  • Steve Cohen (D-TN), and
  • Bill Delahunt (D-MA),
  • Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)
  • Bobby Scott (D-VA)
  • Rick Boucher (D-VA)
  • Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL)
The bill has been referred to committee.

Please write to your representative and ask her or him to support this bill.

An interesting resource I discovered while researching this bill is WashingtonWatch.com, a wiki site that gives information about legislation in the Senate and the House of Representatives, gives users a chance to vote on bills, comment on them, and track them. I added a widget on the right so that you can give HR 104 the thumbs up from here (please do!). You can also go here to comment on the bill and add it to your own watch list.

Update: The co-sponsors of the bill have been updated above. Apparently some of the co-sponsors didn't sign on until Jan. 7 (the bill was introduced on Jan. 6).

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