Wanna know what lawmakers did today? What they said in committee, on the floor, on the news shows and elsewhere? What articles, shows, Internet videos and more grabbed their attention? Who sniped at whom, and why? Get the inside scoop at “Hill Tweet News,” a Twitter-based service of AirCongress.
Here are today’s Top 5 tweets, followed by the rest of today’s edition of “Hill Tweet News“:
@donmanzullo Getting calls from nonprofits upset with president’s plan to hike taxes on charitable contributions for upper incomes.
AirCongress today began tracking the best “tweets” that members of Congress post to Twitter, a mini-blog service that limits posts to 140 characters. Some of the AirCongress posts will be word-for-word “retweets” of what the lawmakers wrote (the abbreviation for a retweet is RT); others will summarize the content of one or more tweets on the same subject.
This new feature is called “Hill Tweet News,” or HTN for short.
As part of the service, each day at AirCongress.com I will post a sample of the latest tweets from @AirCongress and a button so readers can subscribe to @AirCongress in order to access the full version of HTN via Twitter.
Here are the samples from today’s first edition of the new weekday feature:
@askgeorge is dining with Obama on Wednesday and soliciting questions. Topics — economy, health care, education.
RT @TomCoburn Was just shut out from offering amendments on the Floor to the omnibus.
RT No. 1 pork project for today is $951,500 for Sustainable Las Vegas. See @SenJohnMcCain for the other nine.
Click the button below to subscribe to “Hill Tweet News” and get access to the other news and information available through @AirCongress, including links to the YouTube channels for members of Congress.
It’s free for the first week, and after that, the introductory rate is only $3 a month. But subscribe now before the fee increases!
Did “evil tax cuts” cause the tragic bridge collapse in Minnesota this summer? Or is Congress to blame because lawmakers are more interested in spending federal money on pet projects in their districts and states rather than on the most pressing infrastructure work? Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., thinks Congress is to blame, and he tried unsuccessfully to force a change during debate on the transportation spending bill this year.
“The real problem is a lack of common sense in Washington,” Coburn said in his appearance during the second half-hour of today’s episode of Heading Right Radio. He added that “vast majority” of the Senate, which voted against his proposal, “thinks we ought to spend it on their political careers instead of on repairing roads and bridges, and it just shows how out of touch the Senate is. … To me, it’s astounding. What we’ve decided is in the arrogance of the Senate is that we know better.”
Two Senate Republicans today made the case for new rules to govern the disclosure of special-interest spending earmarks, but their request for unanimous consent to consider the proposed rules was defeated. Here are video excerpts of the floor speeches by Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma:
DeMint
“My proposal, S. Resolution 123, creates a new Senate rule that requires public disclosure of the earmarks contained in bills passed by committee. This disclosure includes the name of the member requesting the earmark, the name and address of the intended recipient of the earmark, the purpose of the earmark, and a certification that the requesting member and his or her spouse have no financial interest in the requeted earmark. These are simple transparency ideas that the American people need.”
Coburn
“There shouldn’t be one earmark, one special favor, one indication of anything done at any level, authorization or appropriation, that the American people aren’t fully aware of who has the vested interest in that. … The American people deserve transparency. The American people should have transparency. And the only way we can truly be held accountable by the American people is if they can see everything that’s going on.”
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., objected to the unanimous consent request.
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