Tag: chris smith

The 2012 election season has seen a surprising uptick in the number of employers willing to wade into voter intimidation gray areas by notifying their employees that their jobs depend on who wins the White House. The not so subtle message: Vote the way your boss wants you to vote.

In response to the slew of anti-abortion bills introduced on Capitol Hill this year, Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette has launched "Women's Health Wednesday," where beginning today House members will deliver rapid-fire one-minute speeches exploring the issue on the floor of the chamber.

Less than a week after conservative law firm Americans United for Life (AUL) sent U.S. House members a lengthy report alleging 20 years of federal-funding violations committed by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, at least eight representatives — most of them freshmen — have shown interest in potentially launching an investigation.

Last year Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann led the Republican charge against health care reform legislation, arguing that it would be the worst kind of big government intrusion. She warned it would insert government between Americans and their doctors and that the Obama Administration would let loose an army of IRS agents to knock on doors and force citizens to pay up for insurance. Yet, as Mother Jones reported last week, Bachmann and other anti-abortion Congressional Republicans this year have proposed a series of bills that would put government between women and their doctors and set loose the IRS to investigate how women who had abortions became pregnant and how they paid for their abortions.

Colorado U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that the series of Republican anti-abortion bills introduced in the House this month presents pro-choice lawmakers with an opportunity to shed light on the motivations driving such bills. They said that, given the facts, the mainstream American public and complacent lawmakers will not only rally against these specific bills but also more readily stand guard against similar future efforts to cut back on women's rights.

Colorado Representative and head of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus Diana DeGette is surprised to find herself doing heated battle on a number of fronts in the war over abortion rights this early in the year. This session of Congress was supposed to be about jobs and the economy, she has said, but the new Republican majority right out of the gate has gone full steam ahead with two bills aimed at expanding restrictions on federal abortion funding while, outside of Capitol Hill, conservative media activists have launched an attack on Planned Parenthood, using cut-and-paste undercover videos to spur Congress to slash all federal aid to the organization.

Republican California Rep. Duncan Hunter with Colorado Rep. Doug Lamborn as cosponsor has introduced the "Restore Military Readiness Act," which would require the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to independently sign off on repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy prohibiting gay Americans from serving openly in the military. Lamborn told the Colorado Independent he's concerned that implementing the repeal, which was passed in December, could divert resources from winning the war in Afghanistan. Yet Colorado U.S. Senator Mark Udall, who spearheaded the repeal effort, told the Independent that he asked the same military branch chiefs to address these same concerns at the widely publicized hearing on the matter held at the capitol before lawmakers voted in favor of repeal.