Wolpe served in the U.S. Congress for seven terms, and in 1994 was the Democratic nominee for governor. Wolpe selected Debbie Stabenow as his running mate, after narrowly defeating her in a contentious primary battle. The Wolpe-Stabenow ticket lost that November to the Republican ticket of John Engler and Connie Binsfield.

Wikipedia reports that for 10 of his 14 years in Congress, Wolpe was an expert and leader on African issues and affairs:

A specialist in African politics for ten of his fourteen years in the Congress, Wolpe chaired the Subcommittee on Africa of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. As Africa Subcommittee Chair, Wolpe authored and managed legislation imposing sanctions against South Africa, and over-riding President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the sanctions legislation (the Comprehensive Anti-apartheid Act of 1986). He also authored and managed the passage of the African Famine Recovery and Development Act, — a comprehensive rewrite in the 1980s of America’s approach to development assistance in Africa, that included the creation of the African Development Fund.

Former colleagues are remembering Wolpe, too.

From the Detroit News:

“Howard approached his work in Congress with intelligence, intensity, honesty and a complete devotion to improving the lives of working families and individuals around the globe,” said U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak, who served with Wolpe in Congress.

Also from the Detroit News:

“After he was done with politics, he continued to do great work in his area of passion, which was Africa,” said Brewer, who worked for Wolpe when he ran for Governor in 1994. “He’ll really be missed.”

And Rep. John Dingell also posted a statement on his website:

“Today our country lost a true patriot, a devoted teacher, and a wonderful statesman. He was a dear friend of mine who shared my love and care for the great state of Michigan. His impact on public policy in Michigan, our country, and across the world was a positive one. Howard contributed most of his life to bringing civility to government relations and making this world a better place, a passion I was able to witness during Howard’s 14 years here in the House of Representatives. He served Michigan ably and honorably and went on to serve as the Presidential Special Envoy to Africa’s Great Lakes Region, where he initiated peace talks and helped end civil wars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Debbie and I send our deepest condolences to his wife Julie Fletcher and his son Michael. Howard will be missed tremendously.”

Making the case as to why she should be considered for the 2012 Republican nomination for president, the Minnesota representative told Fox News last week, “I have been able to raise more money than any member of the House of Representatives in the history of the United States Congress,” according to The Washington Post’s ‘Fact Checker blog.

The Post found that Bachmann raised more money in the 2009-2010 election cycle than any other House member, bringing in $13.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; her contributions came mostly from individuals, 50 percent of whom contributed $200 or less.

“Bachmann is a prodigious fundraiser, but once again her talent for hyperbole has stretched the truth a bit,” writes the Post’s Glenn Kessler. ”Her statement would have been accurate if she had added the words ‘in an election cycle.’ But instead she choose to make a sweeping statement that, as of yet, is not quite true.”

Using CRP data, the Post found that Bachmann is in fourth place in terms of total fundraising by current House members, though those figures do not include money raised from leadership Political Action Committees:

• Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio): $26.4 million
• Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.): $21.7 million
• Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.): $20.5 million
• Bachmann: $19.6 million
• Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.): $18.5 million
• Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.): $17.6 million
• Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): $12.5 million.

Conyers is the longest serving African-American in Congress, and is second only to Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell in being the longest serving member of Congress.

But a plan to run for re-election in 2012 has complications, the News reports. For starters, Republican lawmakers have to draw redistricting plans that eliminate one seat in Congress. Chances are, they are not going to eliminate a Republican seat — which means they will target a Democratic seat. This means Conyers’ district could be expanded to include some Detroit suburbs.

That could make things more difficult for Conyers, whose wife is currently serving federal prison time on corruption charges stemming from her time on the Detroit City Council. MLive.com does a fairly good job of laying out the uphill battle Conyers could have in seeking a 25th term in Congress in the event lawmakers expand his district into the suburbs.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) (Photo by Mark Murrmann/ZUMA Press)

The Democrats’ proposal to terminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program would hike health care costs for some of the country’s low-income families, likely increasing the number of uninsured kids in the name of expanding coverage, several health policy experts and state health officials warned Friday.

Under the sweeping health reform bill passed by House Democrats last weekend, CHIP would cease to exist at the end of 2013, instead shuffling those kids into Medicaid or private insurance plans on a proposed insurance marketplace, called the exchange.

[Congress1] Supporters of that strategy — including many House Democratic leaders who have championed the program for more than a decade – argue that it will promote expanded coverage by allowing entire families to join the same insurance plan. But critics, including some children’s welfare advocates and policy experts, maintain that the proposal would shift an additional cost burden on millions of low-income families, thereby discouraging them from buying coverage at all.

Stan Dorn, senior health policy researcher at the Urban Institute, said there are certain advantages to scrapping CHIP. Both Medicaid and exchange plans, for example, would never require congressionalreauthorization — a process CHIP is subjected to every few years, he pointed out. But due to CHIP’s affordability, Dorn said “it’s clear” that kids “are much better off” under CHIP than they would be under private exchange plans.

“It’s not even a close question,” Dorn said during a children’s health care forum on Capitol Hill Friday.

Studies suggest Dorn’s concerns are valid. One analysis, conducted by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, an actuarial research firm, found that families living between 175 and 225 percent of the federal poverty level pay just 2 percent or less of treatment costs under CHIP. Under the proposed exchange plans, researchers found, those same families would pay up to 35 percent of their children’s health costs.

Nate Checketts, director of Utah’s CHIP program, noted that the move to more expensive exchange plans would only discourage low-income families already pinching pennies in the economic downturn. “Unless there’s a mandate, I don’t think those low-income families will sign up for it,” saidChecketts.

CHIP was created in 1997 with broad bipartisan support and renewed for five additional years last February. The popular program is designed to cover children in low-income families that are ineligible for Medicaid. The House bill would both expand Medicaid and dismantle CHIP, sending some kids currently covered under the program into Medicaid plans and others into private plans on the exchange.

The Senate Finance Committee also initially proposed to terminate CHIP when it unveiled its legislation in September. However, the committee last month approved an amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), to reauthorize the program through 2019.

Supporters of the House proposal argue the advantages of centralizing control over CHIP coverage. Because CHIP is managed by states, there is a fear among some lawmakers that lean economic times could lead to sharp CHIP cuts in some spots, leaving those kids without any coverage at all. Those fears were almost realized earlier this year when California, facing a severe budget squeeze, temporarily froze new CHIP enrollment. Some health policy experts have pointed out that it’s probably not a coincidence that many House Democrats pushing the CHIP repeal are from California, including Speaker NancyPelosi, Rep. George Miller, who chairs the Education and Labor Committee, and Rep. Pete Stark, who heads the Ways and Means health subpanel.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) has also defended the plan to terminate CHIP, arguing in a recent email that “enrollment of kids increases when the entire family can be enrolled under one plan.”

Checketts agrees, pointing out the difficulties that can arise when family members’ health coverage is scattered across different programs. “It is a good goal,” he said, “to get families on a single source of coverage.”

Yet some analysts have concluded that affordability is the more significant factor to ensuring coverage.

The advantages of providing families with low-cost access to health coverage for their kids, Dorn said, “significantly outweighs the benefits of putting parents and kids in the same health plan.”

Other children’s health care advocates are agnostic. Jocelyn Guyer, co-executive director at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, said Friday that, while CHIP has proven “a great success,” getting affordable coverage for kids is more important than what program provides it.

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a consumer health care group, also indicated that affordability is more critical for ensuring children have health insurance. “What are the out-of-pocket costs, and what is the care that they’ll receive?” Pollack asked, without endorsing either the House or Senate approach to CHIP.

If an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office is correct, the Senate’s plan to salvage CHIP is the more affordable option. Examining the Senate Finance Committee’s initial proposal to repeal CHIP, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted last month that “some of those children would be eligible for subsidized coverage in the exchanges but would not be enrolled in an exchange plan.”

The reason, Elemndorf explained, is “at least in part to the higher premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs that they would typically face in such a plan.”

The truth is a little murkier than that. The man was a supporter of fringe Democratic activist Lyndon LaRouche, whose LaRouchePAC has been running with the “Obama=Hitler” theme for a few months now. That “I’ve Changed” poster seen at the rally can be downloaded as a PDF from LaRouche’s Website.

Conservative blogger Stephen Gutowksi pointed out the LaRouche connection in a video linked by BlogProf, the Michigan conservative who questioned the Dingell event.

What’s this mean? It’s really not good for conservative opponents of Democratic health care reform plans when their fellow activists are pictured with signs comparing the president to Hitler or accused of painting swastikas on congressional offices. The solution: Blame these incidents on “plants” or call them hoaxes. If they want to know how hard this will be, though, they should ask the anti-Iraq War protesters who watched coverage of their events focus on the craziest, fringiest people there. The LaRouche cultists are not “plants.” They want, sadly, to be allies.

The Washington Post describes the bill as lending the FDA “broad new enforcement tools, including the authority to recall tainted food, the ability to ‘quarantine’ suspect food, and the power to impose civil penalties and increased criminal sanctions on violators.”

Among other things, the proposal would put greater responsibility on growers, manufacturers and food handlers by requiring them to identify contamination risks, document the steps they take to prevent them and provide those records to federal regulators. The legislation also would allow the FDA to require private laboratories used by food manufacturers to report the detection of pathogens in food products directly to the government.

Just one question: Why doesn’t FDA have these powers already?

It was no mystery that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) was intent on making environment-friendly changes when he swept the chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee from beneath auto-friendly Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) in November. And this week, that house-cleaning began in earnest.

In a reshuffling that will remove several Dingell allies from key environmentally sensitive posts, Waxman melded two E&C subcommittees — the Energy & Air Quality panel and the Environment & Hazardous Materials panel — to form the Energy and Environment subcommittee, of which Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) will be the chairman, the Boston Globe reported today.

Markey, who also heads the House committee on energy independence and global warming, has long been among the most fervent congressional environmentalists, pushing for increased fuel efficiency standards and protection of the Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, among a long list of pet causes.

Displaced in Waxman’s reorganization will be Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat who has long protected the interests of Big Coal. Boucher, who heads the soon-to-be-disbanded Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, will instead take control of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, a post currently held by Markey. Rep. Gene Green (D-Tex.), another Dingell ally who now heads the soon-to-be-extinct Environment & Hazardous Materials panel, is apparently out of a chairmanship.

Grist writer David Roberts has a nice wrap-up today of the implications of all this reshuffling:

This gives Markey a one-two punch: he can craft and help pass climate/energy legislation through the Subcommittee while using the Select Committee to educate other committee chairs about how the issue affects their jurisdictions. I can’t think of another committee chair who has the same kind of megaphone with which to drum up support for his own legislation, in the House and among the public.

With this move, Pelosi’s House further cements itself as the likely force for boldness on climate/energy issues in coming years. The Speaker is by all accounts a sincere and committed greenie. She has Waxman at the helm of the relevant committee. She has Markey running the relevant subcommittee and doing education/advocacy. Dingell and his allies — the go-slow lobby — have been cleared away. All systems are go.

Towns had angered Pelosi a few years back for voting with Republicans on a controversial trade bill (it passed by two votes) and disappearing during an important vote on the GOP budget (it also passed by two votes). As retaliation, she’d threatened to remove Towns from his post on the energy and commerce panel. With yesterday’s appointment, it looks like the Speaker has tempered that grudge.

In a Nov. 21 letter to Waxman, who defeated Dingell for the E&C chairmanship yesterday, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) urged the California liberal not to use his new powers to push legislation allowing his home state to set stricter vehicle emissions standards. California, along with more than a dozen other states, has submitted a waiver with the Environmental Protection Agency to install new allowances. The waiver, which would cut emissions 30 percent by 2016, was denied by the Bush administration. Dingell is also a fierce opponent.

Boehner, in his letter, outlines the reason that the automakers and their Washington supporters disapprove.

“This change would effectively bar the American auto manufacturers from competing in the largest market in America,” Boehner wrote, “unless they make substantial changes in manufacturing that would increase costs to consumers, making the “Big 3″ even less competitive — and making their collapse even more likely.”

There are several holes in that argument. First, the states currently waiting in line to adopt new standards sell 45 percent of the nation’s vehicles, meaning the change would force the automakers either to produce two sets of cars, or make California’s plan the national model. Daniel Becker, directer of the Safe Climate Campaign, said approval of the waivers would create “a de facto national standard.”

Second, many experts attribute the industry’s current troubles to a failure of the Big Three to produce the smaller, cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars that Americans want to buy. The very manufacturing changes Boehner suggests will kill the industry, these observers say, are actually its only lifeline. Lawmakers like Dingell who have resisted these reforms in the name of helping the industry, they add, have really just protected it to death.

David Jenkins, director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, said GOP leaders like Boehner should be careful not to go after Waxman and others who would push environmental reforms supported by the public. “That would be a big mistake,” Jenkins said. “If the party gets on the wrong side of that [the environmental debate], they’ll be on the wrong side of history — and they’ll be out of power for a long time.”

The debate might be unnecessary. President-elect Barack Obama, who also supports the California waiver, will have the power (through the EPA) to approve it without any congressional action. Indeed, he has already vowed to do just that.

The select committee, headed by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), was seen as a conduit for Democrats to get some of their more ambitious energy plans around Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich), whose defense of Detroit’s automakers have led him to oppose some of the central items on his party’s energy-reform wishlist. Dingell, who served as the Democrats’ top figure on the Energy and Commerce Committee since 1981, is a long-time obstructionist of tighter emissions allowances and vehicle-mileage standards.

In the wake of yesterday’s vote replacing Dingell with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) atop the E&C panel, there was some question whether Markey’s panel would be necessary any longer. Pelosi answered the question Friday. From The Hill:

“We do have a need for one more term, because our work is not done,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference with reporters. “We do not have the climate change legislation that I had hoped we might be closer to, at least at this point.”