Here’s the most up-to-date list of co-sponsors, courtesy of a renewable energy advocate closely following the legislation:

A review by The New York Times of federal tax records and House and Senate disclosure reports found at least two dozen charities that lawmakers or their families helped create or run that routinely accept donations from businesses seeking to influence them. The sponsors — AT&T, Chevron, General Dynamics, Morgan Stanley, Eli Lilly and dozens of others — contribute millions of dollars annually in gifts ranging from token amounts to a check for $5 million.

Since 2009, businesses have sent lobbyists and executives to the plush Boulders resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., for a fund-raiser for the scholarship fund of Representative Steve Buyer, Republican of Indiana; sponsored a skeet shooting competition in Florida to help the favorite food bank of Representative Allen Boyd, Democrat of Florida; and subsidized a spa and speedway outing in Las Vegas to aid the charity of Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada.

Just last month, they touted their largess with flags bearing their names near the tees at a golf tournament benefiting the foundation of Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina.

While the donations can’t be used by lawmakers to directly influence their reelection, the money often get funneled into their state or district in various forms, like scholarships, that benefit their constituents. Likewise, while many business executives claim they simply want to benefit a good cause, their contributions — which are sometimes not disclosed — often end up benefiting their corporations as well:

Altria, the cigarette maker, for example, sent at least $45,000 in donations over a six-week period last fall to four charitable programs founded by House members — including Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, and Mr. Clyburn, the Democratic whip — just as the company was seeking approval of legislation intended to curb illegal Internet sales of its cigarettes. An Altria spokesman said the donations were not related to the measure, which all four congressmen backed. (The other two are Mr. Boyd and Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan.)

Twice last year the Office of Congressional Ethics investigated lawmakers’ charities, but in each case it ultimately took no action. This was in no small part due to the fact that the House granted waivers exempting the politicians in question from prohibitions against receiving donations from companies with business before their committees.

In response, CREW’s Director Melanie Sloan released the following statement:

“Senator Ensign had an extended affair with a campaign staffer, who happened to be married to his chief of staff Doug Hampton, fired them both, and had his parents pay them off without properly reporting it to the Federal Election Commission. He then conspired to help Mr. Hampton to set up a lobbying business to lobby his own office, in violation of federal law. So what exactly are the things that Senator Ensign is being accused of that he did not do?”

There’s not much more to add to that.

“It doesn’t bother me that every Republican is standing up for the Constitution and the rights of Americans and the Democrats are opposed to that,” he said, referring to his attorney general, a Democrat, who has refused to file the suit through her office. ”That shows their partisan politics, and they’re becoming the party of, ‘No, don’t interfere with our attempt to take over all of the health care industry in this country.’ This is a serious, serious infringement and erosion of the constitutional rights of Americans.”

It’s at times like this that it’s worth mentioning that the individual mandate was first pushed by conservatives as an alternative to a proposed requirement that businesses offer health benefits to all their workers.

In a telling piece published earlier this year, NPR health care reporter Julie Rovner spoke with one of the architects of that proposal, the conservative University of Pennsylvania health economist Mark Pauly. More than 20 years back, Pauly told Rovner:

“A group of economists and health policy people, market-oriented, sat down and said, ‘Let’s see if we can come up with a health reform proposal that would preserve a role for markets but would also achieve universal coverage.’ ”

The idea of the individual mandate was about the only logical way to get there, Pauly says.

Additionally, the individual mandate was seen as a way to to prevent those without insurance from sticking the bill to everyone else in times of medical emergency.

“We called this responsible national health insurance,” Pauly told Rovner. “There was a kind of an ethical and moral support for the notion that people shouldn’t be allowed to free-ride on the charity of fellow citizens.”

Indeed, it was the individual mandate, Rovner writes, that Republicans included in a 1993 proposal that was designed to compete with the employer mandate pushed by the Clinton administration at the time. Some pretty conservative lawmakers — including Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) — were behind that proposal.

Funny that two decades later the idea is suddenly deemed unconstitutional.

Yesterday, speaking about jobs in New Hampshire, President Obama pointed out the obvious: In lean economies, people tend to spend their money on the things they need, rather than unnecessary luxuries.

“When times are tough, you tighten your belts,” Obama said. “You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices.”

Not really a provocative thought — unless, of course, you’re a politician representing Nevada. Indeed, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) shot out a series of statements (here, here and here) demanding an apology from the president.

Obama slams Las Vegas again. I am calling on the President to apologize for his remark.

Las Vegas is suffering through one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and we cannot afford

for the President to bring us down any further.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) soon followed suit, issuing a statement telling Obama to “lay off Las Vegas and stop making it the poster child for where people shouldn’t be spending their money.”

They seem offended that Vegas — which, to its lucrative advantage, has built its reputation and business model around the singular concept of excess — has become symbolic of that very idea.

Obama responded in a letter to Reid, telling the majority leader that he “wasn’t saying anything negative about Las Vegas.”

I was making the simple point that families use vacation dollars, not college tuition money, to have fun.

He’ll have a chance to prove it. Later this month, Obama will be in Vegas to stump for Reid, who’s facing a tough reelection in November.

Collins said in a statement that the fact that the FBI read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights “likely foreclosed the collection of additional intelligence information.” But over the weekend, The Associated Press published the most comprehensive account to date of Abdulmutallab’s interrogation and found no evidence that Mirandization inhibited interrogators’ access to valuable information. FBI interrogators, to the contrary, read him his Miranda rights after they were satisfied that he had no further information about any further attacks. From the piece:

The suspect spoke openly, said one official, talking in detail about what he’d done and the planning that went into the attack. Other counterterrorism officials speaking on condition of anonymity said it was during this questioning that he admitted he had been trained and instructed in the plot by al-Qaida operatives in Yemen.

The interview lasted about 50 minutes. Before they began questioning Abdulmutallab, the FBI agents decided not to give him his Miranda warnings providing his right to remain silent.

Lawmakers and commentators who claim that Mirandizing Abdulmutallab jeopardized his interrogation still can’t point to a shred of evidence. But they can point to an embarrassing and inconvenient bit of testimony from the top U.S. intelligence official, despite his attempts hours later to walk it back. If this forthcoming bill provokes an actual legislative battle, will Blair testify in favor of it? Or will he say it’s unnecessary, before a panel of justifiably skeptical conservative senators? Or will he not stick around in the Obama administration long enough for the question to matter?

The American Civil Liberties Union has already come out against the proposal. Its executive director, Anthony Romero, said in a statement, ”It is extremely disturbing that members of the U.S. Congress are essentially calling for Obama administration officials to discard the Constitution when a terrorist suspect is apprehended – as if the Constitution should be applied on a case by case basis. The whole idea of having constitutional protections is that they be applied across the board for all those accused of a crime. That is the only way for us to rely on our justice system and its results. Obeying the Constitution is not optional.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair (James Berglie/ZUMA Press)

If President Obama didn’t have enough headaches after the loss of the Democrats’ filibuster-proof Senate majority on Tuesday night, another one emerged for him at a Senate hearing on Wednesday morning: Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence.

During the first in a battery of congressional hearings about the failed bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253, Blair, the nation’s top intelligence official, declined to endorse the Obama administration’s decision to try would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in federal civilian court — a decision that Republicans and conservatives have subjected to weeks of criticism. Asked by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) whether Abdulmutallab should be tried by a civilian court or a military commission, Blair replied, “I’m not ready to offer an opinion on that in open session.”

[Security1] Blair told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the administration should have used its newly created interrogation team, known as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Unit or HIG, to extract information from Abdulmutallab. Republican lawmakers have suggested, without offering any specific evidence, that the U.S. lost access to valuable information from the al-Qaeda-tied Abdulmutallab after Mirandizing him and ultimately indicting him. Law-enforcement officials and Obama appointees, for their part, insist, also without offering specific evidence, that hours of FBI interrogations of Abdulmutallab yielded valuable intelligence.

“We did not invoke the HIG,” Blair said. “In this instance, we should have.” The HIG — which reports to the FBI and the National Security Council, not the director of national intelligence — has been previously described by knowledgeable administration officials as a tool for use almost exclusively in the interrogation of foreign-held detainees. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) quickly pounced on Blair’s statement, calling it a “guarantee” from the administration to opt out of the civilian criminal justice system in future cases of foreign citizens apprehended on U.S. soil in connection to terrorism, as many Republicans desire.

A senior administration official, speaking on background, contradicted Blair, saying the HIG is not yet operational — and, in any case, is supposed to be used for terrorism suspects detained overseas. “This is very basic, very clear,” the official said, expressing surprise that Blair would say the HIG should have been involved.

Blair — who is expected to appear before a classified hearing Thursday morning in the Senate intelligence committee — suggested that Abdulmutallab’s Christmas-time apprehension after Flight 253 landed in Detroit was more ad hoc and chaotic than the Obama administration has portrayed. Joined by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security and Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Blair said he was not consulted on the decision to charge Abdulmutallab. In a separate, simultaneous hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller said he was also out of the loop. Shortly after the incident, Napolitano famously said “the system worked” after Abdulmutallab was subdued on Flight 253.

“We need to make those decisions more carefully,” Blair said about not using the HIG for Abdulmutallab and the decision to charge him in federal court. “It was made on the scene.” Asked later to clarify who was responsible for deciding to Mirandize the would-be bomber, Blair replied, “The FBI agent in charge on the scene.” Mueller stated at his own hearing that “the decision to arrest [Abdulmutallab] and put him in criminal courts” was made by FBI “agents on the ground.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) expressed surprise that the decision to prosecute Abdulmutallab did not come from a more senior official.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the White House declined to comment on Blair’s remarks to the Senate panel, referring questions back to Blair’s office. But hours after the hearing concluded, Blair issued a statement conceding that the HIG would not have been a viable interrogation option in this case.

“My remarks today before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs have been misconstrued,” Blair said in the statement. “The FBI interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab when they took him into custody. They received important intelligence at that time, drawing on the FBI’s expertise in interrogation that will be available in the HIG once it is fully operational.”

Blair, a retired four-star admiral and former commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, has had a rocky tenure as director of national intelligence since Obama appointed him to the post last January. Last year, he tussled with the CIA director, Leon Panetta — technically Blair’s subordinate — over control of the CIA’s top intelligence officers in foreign stations. Blair lost that dispute, which had to be mediated by the White House. At Wednesday’s hearing, Blair occasionally appeared lost, misunderstanding senators’ questions and saying he wished intelligence officials leaking to the press would “shut the hell up.”

But Blair did not give cover to another line of attack from Republican senators: that Abdulmutallab should be tortured. Ensign asked Blair why it made sense to restrict interrogations of terrorism suspects to the techniques listed in the mostly-Geneva-Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on Interrogations, as Obama insisted in one of the first executive orders of his presidency. Blair strongly strongly defended the decision. “We looked at that quite carefully,” Blair said. “We do not know if the same information obtained through extra-judicial measures [could not] have been obtained without them.”

Some civil libertarians were concerned by the hearing’s occasional tendency to relitigate the principles of trying terrorism detainees in civilian courts and treating them humanely. “The senators’ claim that the government had the right to seize [Abdulmutallab] and turn him over to the military for secret imprisonment and harsh interrogation is the same radical and discredited claim that President Bush made about his authority to seize anyone, including citizens, found in the U.S. and hold them without charge,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. “The government went down that path, it flouted the rule of law and eventually had to be fixed by bringing criminal prosecutions.”

Additionally, some counterterrorism officials and outside experts have pushed back recently against the GOP talking point that Mirandization inhibits interrogation. According to a paper released Wednesday by the Center for American Progress’s Ken Gude, a detainee’s access to legal counsel is also not an obstacle to intelligence collection. “Terrorist suspects have given what U.S. officials call ‘an intelligence goldmine’ after meeting with attorneys,” Gude writes.

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Mueller backed up that proposition. “We’ve had a number of cases in which through the process — the criminal justice process of the United States — individuals have decided to cooperate and provided tremendous intelligence,” Mueller said. “That is not to say that there may not be other ways of obtaining that intelligence. But, yes, in answer to your question, the criminal justice system has been a — a fount of intelligence in the years since September 11th.”

Update: This piece has been edited for clarity.

During the holiday season, we are reminded to remember the less fortunate among us. In that spirit of empathy, TWI has compiled a list of the ten least successful politicians of 2009 — those most in need of our thoughts.

Click here to begin slideshow.

“I am seriously concerned that the Democrats’ health reform bill violates the Constitution of the United States of America,” Ensign said in a statement. “Is it really constitutional for this body to tell all Americans that they MUST buy health insurance coverage?”

Two thoughts: First, whatever Congress is empowered to do is not, ultimately, for Congress to decide — that’s a job for the courts. (And you can bet that there will be no absence of lawsuits if the individual mandate survives the process to become law.)

And second, why should Congress tolerate a system under which folks without insurance can still receive emergency care on everyone else’s dime? Indeed, even former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a thoracic surgeon, has said that requiring everyone to buy into coverage pools is “about the only way” to fix the nation’s dysfunctional health care system.

“We have 46 million people who don’t have insurance out there,” Frist told the Fox Business Network in September. “Somebody’s going to have to pay for that. If they can pay for it, they should be responsible to paying for it. And, if not, there are going to be taxes, excise taxes, user taxes on companies like Aetna, on individuals.

“And I’m hard-core Republican,” Frist added.

Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.) and David Vitter (R-La.) (WDCpix)

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) ruffled feathers this month when he drafted a detailed strategy for stalling the health reform bill moving through the upper chamber. Yet Gregg is hardly alone, and health-care legislation is hardly the only target of the GOP’s delay tactics.

[Congress1]Since being swept from power in 2006, Republicans on Capitol Hill have persistently sought ways to slow the Democrats’ legislative agenda, erecting procedural hurdles and proposing contentious amendments to block even those bills supported by GOP leaders. The tactic has targeted legislation touching issues as varied as credit card reform, unemployment insurance and Indian health care. In some cases, Republicans have simply slowed the process; in others, they’ve killed legislation outright. In every instance, the strategy has highlighted the difficulties facing Democratic leaders as they try to make good on a wide range of legislative promises, mark a clean break from the policies of the Bush administration and retain their congressional majorities in elections to come.

In the latest episode, Gregg, the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, issued a memo to his GOP colleagues last week urging them to lean on a host of procedural moves designed to slow the health-reform debate to a crawl.

“[I]t is critical that Republican senators have a solid understanding of the minority’s rights in the Senate,” Gregg wrote.

The memo incited a skirmish on Capitol Hill, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) decrying the audacity of the Republicans, not only to delay legislation providing millions of Americans with health insurance, but to put their tactics in writing. Gregg responded Friday by referring to Reid’s incredulity as “pathetic.”

But if Gregg’s memo stirred a political storm, it’s likely only because (1) there’s so much at stake surrounding the overhaul of the nation’s health care system, and (2) the memo provided written proof of what the Democrats have been charging all along. Yet the stalling on health reform is just the latest in a long line of similar episodes portraying a much broader, if unmentioned, trend.

Poison Pills

The stalling strategy is one that spans Congresses. In 2007, for example, Democrats tried to pass legislation granting the District of Columbia a voting representative on Capitol Hill. Republicans attached an amendment that would have effectively stripped Washington’s strict gun-control laws, essentially killing the bill. In a rerun of that episode, the Senate this year passed a similar D.C.-vote bill, but not before Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) successfully attached a similar gun amendment. The move has left the bill to wallow in the House, where leaders remain opposed to the controversial rider. Meanwhile, the residents of D.C. continue to be without any real voice on federal policy issues.

In a similar case, the Senate last year passed legislation to provide a long-overdue increase in federal spending for the Indian Health Service, which hasn’t seen such a hike in more than a decade. Attached to the Senate bill, however, was a contentious amendment — sponsored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) — to permanently ban the use of federal dollars for abortion services for Native Americans. While a similar restriction applies to all populations, it’s not permanent. The distinction left many lawmakers and health-care advocates to wonder why Indians should be subject to health care restrictions not applicable to other ethnicities. Some called the amendment overtly racist. Whatever it’s label, the amendment caused the House to set the bill aside, and it hasn’t been considered since. Meanwhile, the Indian Health Service remains underfunded, and the health-care situation on the nation’s reservations remains a disaster.

There are other cases. The House, for example, moved to electronic filing of financial disclosure forms in 2001, but the Senate still hasn’t done so. The reason? Another Ensign amendment that would force groups that file complaints with the Senate Ethics Committee to disclose their donors — something many non-profits are opposed to doing. Meanwhile, upper-chamber lawmakers continue to file their financial disclosures forms on paper, a process that Brookings Institution scholar Thomas Mann has said “serve[s] no legitimate public or private interest.”

The Stalled Bills

On those bills opposed by Republicans, the stall tactics make sense. With only 40 members in the upper chamber, Republicans have leaned on procedural hurdles and poison-pill amendments to mount the opposition that their numbers can’t. Yet Republicans have also stalled a number of bills that they themselves support, if only to  prevent other proposals from reaching the floor. Through the entire month of October, for instance, Republicans held up a popular extension of unemployment benefits, bogging down the bill with amendments on ACORN and the Wall Street bailout — contentious provisions that also had the distinction of being completely unrelated to the underlying bill. (The Senate had already voted on similar ACORN amendments five times to that point in the year.)

“Unlimited debate. Unlimited amendment,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said amid the unemployment debate. “There’s no need for the United States Senate if we don’t have that. … This is the body that protects the minority view.”

Yet when the measure finally came to the floor, it passed 98 to 0 — a clear sign that the Republican’s goal was simply to prolong the debate to prevent the Democrats from considering their other legislative priorities. Meanwhile, an estimated 7,000 Americans were losing their jobless benefits each day, providing those unfortunate folks with a lesson in frustration as well as political science in the age of entrenched partisanship.

More recently, the Senate finally approved an emergency funding bill for disabled veterans. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) had stalled the bill for weeks, protesting that the $3.7 billion price tag wasn’t offset by spending cuts elsewhere in the government. Final passage came only after Democratic leaders agreed to stage a vote on Coburn’s amendment to transfer funds earmarked for the United Nations to pay for the health bill.  Though the Coburn amendment failed, the final vote on the underlying bill was 98 to 0, with Coburn supporting it.

In some cases, Democrats have decided to hold their noses and adopt the controversial amendments rather than allowing them to kill the larger bill. That strategy was on display earlier this year during the high-profile debate on credit card reform, when Coburn attached a provision ending a long-standing ban on concealed firearms in national parks. Obama signed that bill into law in May.

The string of delays has created a logjam of must-pass legislation in the upper-chamber, where the health-care debate is certain to monopolize most, if not all, of December. Left undone remains legislation to hike the debt limit, a nascent proposal tackling the nation’s employment crisis, and a handful of spending bills needed to keep the government running.

Indeed, Reid has already floated the possibility that Congress might be back in Washington between Christmas and New Years.

Researcher Hannah Dreier contributed to this report.