“Not only would this proposed language undermine the self-governing rights of the people of the District of Columbia, it would deny low-income women access to basic, constitutionally protected, medical services,” DeGette, co-chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, said in a release. “Congress should not violate the District’s right to use its own tax dollars as it sees fit in order to simply advance congressional Republicans’ extreme assault on women’s access to quality reproductive healthcare.”

The political right has long championed local government over federal government as best to represent constituent interests. The Tea Party has leaned on states rights arguments, for example, in its aggressive opposition to the federal health care reform law passed two years ago.

The debate over the abortion restriction references the long struggle to grant the District of Columbia statehood. DC residents have no true representatives in Congress yet Republicans have long opposed statehood for the fact that the District’s largely liberal population would add Democratic votes on Capitol Hill.

The language opposed by DeGette appears in the Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill and is one of several attempts on the part of Republican lawmakers this year to limit access to abortion.

“This intrusive initiative sadly sends a clear signal that this Congress does not believe vulnerable women are worthy of the same access to quality health as their middle-class and wealthy counterparts.”

One of the clear effects of the law would be to price out abortions for any government employee unable to foot the bill out of pocket.

DeGette made her case to the committees staffers in a letter signed by 59 members of the House, including Colorado Rep Jared Polis, and co-authored with New York Rep Louise Slaughter.

“Washington D.C. is not Congress’ petri dish,” Slaughter said. “We should not be using federal power to experiment with the rights of women, which is why I encourage every member of the Appropriations Committees to reject any effort to limit the District’s control of local funds. “Congress should not be in the business of punishing low-income women and stripping them of their constitutionally-afforded rights. I believe we’d all do well to remember that.”

On Wednesday the Senate is scheduled to mark-up or consider again the various provisions of the appropriations bill.

The DeGette-Slaughter letter:

Dear Democratic members of the House and Senate appropriations committees:

As you consider Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations legislation, we urge you to protect the District of Columbia’s right to self-government as well as the health and reproductive rights of low-income women in the District of Columbia.  We respectfully request that you ensure that language that undermines self-government is not included in subsequent legislation as it was in the House Appropriations committee-approved bill.  Specifically, we urge you to not adopt Section 810 of the House bill, which prohibits local tax dollars from being used for abortions for women whose insurance is provided by the District government.

The autonomy of the District is necessary for democratic self-governance, and Congress should be mindful not to violate District residents’ rights to control their own tax dollars.  The Home Rule Act of 1973 was a result of decades of efforts to protect the rights of District residents.  Republicans have spent much of the 112th Congress interfering in local District matters.  Each time Democrats accede to violations of the District’s home rule, we embolden Republicans to continue their attacks.

By failing to permit the District of Columbia to spend local government funds on abortion, we are sending the message that low-income women should not have access to the same medical services that middle- and upper-income women can access.  Ultimately, this prohibition may threaten the health of medically vulnerable women and deny patients the right to access constitutionally protected medical services.  We must strive to expand health care services for Americans throughout the nation – not place barriers in the road of a woman seeking medical care simply because of the state, city, or district that she lives in.

The District does not have a vote in the House or Senate.  But other Democrats do.  We urge you to stand strong and to protect the democratic self-government of the District of Columbia.

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“I’m surprised, given that the number one issue right now is jobs, that the Republican leadership would make [this] extreme position one of their top three priorities of the session,” DeGette told Politico.

The six-term Congresswoman shouldn’t be surprised. She’s been battling hard against anti-abortion forces for the last year, long before Republicans controlled the House.

Broken tacit truce

In the days since the two new anti-abortion bills were introduced, analysts have been saying that they effectively end the truce that has existed for decades among lawmakers regarding public funding for abortion. Federal funding is now and has been for years restricted to pregnancies that endanger the mother’s life or that come as the product of rape and/or incest.

Rep. Chris Smith’s (R-N.J.) HR 3 “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” would eliminate tax breaks on insurance policies that cover abortions, permanently prohibit tax-funded abortions across all federal programs, like Medicaid, and end funding for abortions in Washington D.C.

Rep. Joe Pitts’s (R-Penn.) HR 358 “Protect Life Act” would strip federal funding for abortions that was included in last year’s national health care reform legislation and it would protect institutions opposed to providing abortions from being stripped of tax-payer support.

On Tuesday afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution Subcommittee took up HR 3. On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health will consider HR 358.

Opposition campaign

DeGette and Pro-Life Caucus Co-Chair Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) are leading a group opposing the bills that includes members from the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Judiciary Committee and representatives of pro-choice organizations such as the National Abortion Federation, NARAL Pro-choice America and Planned Parenthood. The group on Wednesday will host an event launching its campaign against the two bills.

A release from the Pro-Life Caucus Tuesday said the bills were not just about tax-payer funding, which can sound limited and bureaucratic. The bills would “actually cut off millions of women from the private health care they have access to today, even preventing them from using their own money for medically necessary procedures.” The release added that the bills would limit women’s access to care “even if their life is in danger” and that the bills put government in the way of “women’s rights to determine their own health care with their families and doctors.”

Smith’s bill originally aimed to recast the definition of “rape” in order to lower the number of pregnancies eligible for funding. Smith’s bill proposed that only “forcible” rape pregnancies be eligible. “Forcible” rape is not only not a legal term but also would vaguely seem to rule out statutory rape, date rape and rapes of drugged victims and so on. The term was clearly crafted by a man who has never been raped and who failed to genuinely consult rape victims in creating the terminology, and it offended widely, forcing sponsors to strip the language from the bill.

Freshman Colorado Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, who signed on as an original co-sponsor of the bill, said he didn’t support the redefinition of rape.

The fact that Smith and supporters like Gardner so quickly relented on or distanced themselves from that part of the bill suggested to some observers that it was meant all along as a bargaining chip.

Another jolt

Indeed, some pro-choice and women’s rights writers and activists are saying that pushing back against these bills is not enough. They say that pro-choice supporters are being outmaneuvered and that the debate alone moves the dial further against abortion. Merely opposing these bills, they argue, is the kind of reactive strategy that has seen women losing reproductive health rights incrementally year after year, an impression heightened last year when Michigan Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak spearheaded the move to limit access to abortion under the new national health care plan, winning over Democratic lawmakers in large numbers, including 64 Democrats in the House.

“Sometimes it takes a jolt to make people realize how serious the threat is to their rights. …And this was certainly a jolt,” DeGette said at the time. She then organized a group of about 40 Democratic lawmakers to say they would vote against President Obama’s health care reform if the Stupak language wasn’t removed.

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There was a brick thrown through my Niagara Falls district office and a voice mail referencing snipers that was left on the answering machine of my campaign office. The U.S. Capitol Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police departments are all aware of these incidents and are still investigating.

Even more disturbing, Slaughter claimed, has been the failure of Republican leaders to condemn the behavior of certain opponents of the Democrats’ health reforms. Instead, she said, GOP leaders have egged on the protestors, “fanning the flames with coded rhetoric.”

Michael Steele, the head of the national Republican party, said that Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be put on “the firing line.” Sarah Palin said “don’t retreat – reload.” And House Minority Leader John Boehner said that a Democratic member of Congress who supported health care reform would be a “dead man.”

To his great credit, Boehner toned down his rhetoric noticeably today, telling Fox News that “violence and threats are unacceptable.”

“[W]e are hearing reports that the Majority will try and ram this through without a direct vote on the Senate bill,” said GOP Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in a floor speech. “Madam Speaker, we should take an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill. I yield back.”

That language — “take an up-or-down vote” — belonged to Democrats just a few days ago, when they were spinning the use of reconciliation.

“Things were a lot better for the average person in this country when we had usury caps,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), head of the House Rules Committee, said in a statement announcing her bill. “Watching how credit card companies have exploited people by increasing rates up to 30 percent and more is criminal and this bill will allow us to put an end to this practice.”

Massachusetts Democratic Reps. John Tierney  and Michael Capuano will co-sponsor the bill.

They have a tough road ahead, for several reasons. (1) Even though it was the finance industry that was primarily responsible for the recent global economic meltdown, there’s a growing reluctance on Capitol Hill to apply strict new regulations just as the banks are re-stabilizing — a circumstance the banks are already celebrating. (2) Although Congress was successful in passing sweeping credit card reforms in May, an amendment to cap interest rates at 15 percent was killed in the Senate. And (3) the banks aren’t going to allow Congress to squeeze a profit source without coming up with creative ways to make up the difference elsewhere. This, The New York Times reported yesterday, is what’s happening in Australia, where card issuers have responded to new regulations by attaching new fees to airline tickets, among other purchases.

“[I]f regulators limit one fee or rate, banks are likely to find another way to keep revenue flowing,” The Times wrote.

Here’s what Jameel Jaffer, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, which has been fighting for release of those photos, had to say about the vote:

We are deeply disappointed that the House voted to give the Defense Department the authority to hide evidence of its own misconduct, and we hope the Senate will not follow suit. If this bill does become law, the Secretary of Defense should not invoke it. Instead, Secretary Gates should be guided by the importance of transparency to the democratic process, the extraordinary importance of these photos to the ongoing debate about the treatment of prisoners and the likelihood that the suppression of these photos will ultimately be far more damaging to national security than their disclosure would be. The last administration’s decision to endorse torture undermined the United States’ moral authority and compromised its security. The failure of the current administration to fully confront the abuses of the last administration will only compound these harms.

You can find the roll call here.

The provision was proposed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Ct.), as Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News explains, specifically “to thwart a successful FOIA lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union” which wants the government to turn over photos documenting abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody.  I wrote about the bill and its progress last week here. Although a federal appeals court ruled last year that the government must produce those unclassified photos under the Freedom of Information Act, the government has refused, and filed a petition to the Supreme Court for review.

The Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided whether it will hear the case, though, and given that Congress may resolve the matter by hiding the unclassified photographs with this legislation, Solicitor General Elena Kagan last week asked the court to put off deciding, since it looks like Congress is prepared to decide the matter — and conceal the photographs — on its own.

“From an open government point of view, it is dismaying that Congress would intervene to alter the outcome of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act proceeding,” writes Aftergood in his blog, which has done a terrific job of exposing the government’s efforts to hide what’s supposed to be public information. Aftergood adds that the move reveals Congress doesn’t have much confidence in its own Freedom of Information Act, the federal courts interpreting it, or the principles behind it, if it feels the need to exempt this specific set of photos from the law’s purview.

On the other hand, he notes that it could be worse: the Supreme Court could have taken the case and upheld the Obama administration’s right to exempt the photos “simply because they may pose an unspecified danger to unspecified persons.” “Such a Supreme Court ruling would have left a gaping hole in the Freedom of Information Act even larger than what the Obama Administration and Congress have now created,” writes Aftergood.

Or, of course, the Supreme Court might have just done its job, and recognized, as the two lower courts who’ve heard this case did, that unclassified documents can’t be concealed based simply on the executive’s fear that exposing government wrongdoing will incite anger at the United States and endanger national security. After all, if preventing anger at the United States were a legitimate reason to conceal unclassified information about the government, then there would be considerably less Information left for the Act to protect.

After the jump, Slaughter’s full remarks made this morning on the House floor about why FOIA should not be amended and the photos should not be concealed. 

There are few things that say more about our country and our trust in the public’s right to know than the Freedom of Information Act.

It’s one of the most powerful statements of openness and transparency we have. It affords ordinary people the ability to peer behind the curtains of power and see inside the many bureaucracies that define the federal, state and local governments in this country.

It’s a symbol for all that despite anything else that our government does in the name of the people, there should be no secrets.

Over the years, FOIA laws have been used for a wide range of purposes. FOIA helped us discover the ugly truth about the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the 1960′s. And FOIA was also used to uncover data showing that Ford Pintos were built with serious fuel

system defects that made them more prone to fire and explosions.

In some ways, FOIA is simply a reminder to the public that there is an avenue to pursue if they believe the government is keeping secrets. At the heart of FOIA is the concept that the people’s right to know is more important than the government’s desire to keep things secret.

The FOIA laws in this country have enabled reporters and citizens from all spectrums access to information that otherwise might never see the light of day.

Signed into law by President Johnson in 1966, FOIA laws allow for the full or partial disclosure of information and documents with only a narrow list of exemptions.

So it was with some dismay when we learned recently that the House and Senate conferees on the Homeland Security appropriations bill had slipped in a provision that gives the government the option of making old photos of detainee abuse exempt from FOIA laws.

This case has already followed a lengthy path, beginning with a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the Pentagon. Last spring, when it appeared that the lawsuit might go against the government, this Administration responded by asking some members of the House and Senate to insert language into legislation to make sure the photos stay secret.

Joining the ACLU against the Pentagon was the American Society of News Editors, The Associated Press, Cable News Network, Inc., the E.W. Scripps Company, Gannett Co., Inc., the Hearst Corporation, Military Reporters and Editors, the National Press Club, NBC Universal, Inc., the New York Times Company, the Newspaper Association of America, the Newspaper Guild-CWA, the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the Society of Professional Journalists and The Washington Post.

Never mind that the photos in question likely have very little value, given that a similar set of photos showing abuse were released under the Bush Administration. Despite some complaints that releasing the photos would put servicemen and women in danger, the fact is there was absolutely no increase in violence or attacks after the previous detainee photos were released. My guess is that if we were to release new photos the result would be the same.

And many observers argue that releasing the photos was actually a clear break from the abuses of the past – and a signal to our allies and everyone else that the days of this type of detainee mistreatment were over and that the United States is willing to come to terms with its past practices.

In June, I and other House leaders prevailed and the FOIA exemption was dropped from legislation.

However, the conferees – apparently under direct orders from the Administration – quietly put it back into the bill this month.

It’s hard for me to express how disappointed I am with that decision. I am sorry because I believe that we had turned a page from the cloud of suspicion and secrecy that marked the previous Administration. It runs so counter to our principals and stated desire to reject the abuses of the past. The FOIA laws in this country form a pillar of our First Amendment principals.

It’s unfortunate given that this Administration promised that openness and transparency would be the norm. We should never do anything to circumvent FOIA and I believe that our country would gain more by coming to terms with the past than we would by covering it up. I hope that the President will follow judicial rulings and consider voluntarily releasing these photos so we can put this chapter in history behind us.

Update: C-SPAN has video of Slaughter’s remarks, which begin shortly after the 50-minute mark here.

2nd Update: Here‘s the video.

Congressional insider trading is not, in fact, illegal. In a letter to lawmakers today, several watchdogs groups offer explanation:

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not have the authority to hold employees of Congress or the Executive Branch liable for using non-public information gained from official proceedings for insider trading. Under current law, ‘insider trading’ is defined as the buying or selling of securities or commodities based on non-public information in violation of confidentiality — either to the issuing company or the source of information. Most federal officials and employees do not owe a duty of confidentiality to the federal government and thus are not liable for insider trading.

The letter — signed by Public Citizen, Democracy 21, Common Cause, U.S. PIRG and the League of Women Voters — was drafted in support of legislation to prohibit congressional and White House insider trading. Introduced in January by Democratic Reps. Brian Baird (Wash.), Louise Slaughter (N.Y.) and Tim Walz (Minn.), the bill would prevent policymakers from profiting from their access to nonpublic information. At the time of the unveiling, Baird pointed to a 2004 Georgia State University study indicating that investments made by members of Congress return 25 percent more than those made by other Americans.

The watchdog groups point out another reason they say Congress should consider the bill quickly: The hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout cash coming out of Washington will provide wonderful investment opportunities for policymakers who know where the money is going before the public does. From the letter:

With the federal government assuming a far greater role over the financial services industry, the opportunity and temptation for federal employees to cash in on their insider knowledge of legislation, rules and even business trends that can have a dramatic and immediate effect on the stock market will become all the more dangerous. Members of Congress and federal employees should be required to live by effective restrictions on insider trading.

The bill, aptly, is called the “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act.”