The Colorado delegation voted strictly on party lines, with all four Republicans voting in favor of the bill and the three Democrats voting in opposition.

Perlmutter’s statement:

“My number one priority is to get people back to work because that’s the best thing we can do to pay our debt and move forward toward economic stability. While most of America was sleeping, John Boehner and the Republicans said “so be it” and essentially gave 800,000 people pink slips in the middle of the night. They said they wanted to cut – but what they really did was gut. Their plan guts a woman’s right to choose, takes cops off the beat and off Wall Street. Saturday morning, the hardworking people in Colorado woke up to a scenario where good-paying, stable, private-sector jobs in our state will be wiped out for so many engineers, scientists, teachers and construction workers. This is irresponsible, and does nothing to build jobs.

“I am serious about paying down our deficit, and that’s why I voted to make additional cuts in wasteful and fraudulent spending. But to move our country forward toward long-term economic stability, security and sustained job growth here in our country, we have to both cut our spending and reduce our debt, as well as make critical, necessary investments in education for our children and rebuild our aging transportation and energy infrastructure.”

Reacting to a rising tide of anger from gay and lesbian supporters at a series of slights and deferred promises, President Obama will tomorrow extend some benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

The move, which begins to mirror the policy of many large corporations, will have an immediate effect for many workers, but it is a deeply reactive response to a core Democratic group whose concerns have been festering for six months. The presidential memorandum  — scheduled for signing [Wednesday] at 5:45 p.m., may in the short term, give Joe Biden something positive to say at a June 25 fundraiser that has seen prominent guests drop out, a host sharply attack the administration, and which is expected to be marked by protests.

However, the Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the federal government from extending health and retirement benefits to same-sex couples, so the benefits are more likely to be marginal — like relocation assistance.

Well, what exactly does that mean?  What is “properly privileged or otherwise confidential”?

Yesterday, a coalition of good-government groups wrote to President Obama asking him to clarify, saying that his statement could be read as a warning to federal workers against acting as whistleblowers by communicating unclassified information to Congress. And that would contradict their legal rights.

The coalition, which includes such groups as the ACLU, American Federation of Government Employees, and Government Accountability Project, asked Obama to endorse legislation that would protect from retaliation federal employees who expose waste, fraud, abuse, suppression of federal research, and threats to public health and safety, and give them the right to a jury trial. The groups also asked that the president direct federal agency heads to institute “no-retaliation” policies for employees.

As I’ve written before, the stimulus bill, despite its many attempts at transparency at accountability, strangely neglected to fully protect federal employee whistleblowers. Watchdog groups hoped those protections would be passed in some other legislation, but so far they haven’t, and the president’s signing statement appeared to weaken the minimal protections that federal employees already have.

In their letter, the coalition — which otherwise praises Obama for saying during the presidential campaign that he’d support whistleblowers and for his executive orders and memoranda concerning open government and the Freedom of Information Act — asked the president to make clear that pulling the rug out from under federal employee whistleblowers is not really what he meant to do.

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As I reported earlier, that protection was left out of an earlier version of the bill, leaving employees of the contractors that are handling billions of dollars of stimulus money vulnerable to being fired for reporting misconduct within their company. An amendment by Senator Claire McCaskill fixed that problem.

The final language is here.

Still, federal employees, despite almost a decade of internal congressional wrangling about the problem, remain wholly unprotected. Although Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Todd Platts (R-Pa.) had proposed a bi-partisan provision on this that the House had adopted, the Senate conferees rejected it, apparently over concerns that providing protections for intelligence employees could somehow end up revealing classified information if they brought retaliation claims.

Tom Devine, legal director for the non-profit Government Accountability Project, is hoping to see federal employee protections in the near future. (There’s a bill on this already pending in the Senate, though as it stands now it still wouldn’t cover intelligence workers or provide jury trials.).

“It is not too late for accountability,” Devine said in a statement released today. “After nearly ten years of hearings and votes, there is no excuse to spend nearly a trillion dollars without safe passage for federal employees who risk their careers to keep it honest.”

Congress could still lock in federal whistleblowers protections before the money starts getting spent in 120 days, he said, adding: “The politicians owe it to the taxpayers.”