U.S. Congress

Both the House and Senate are in session this week, with each chamber expected to debate and consider several important bills and resolutions. Highlights include:

• The Senate will continue to debate a comprehensive immigration bill. Amendments expected to be introduced include several making it easier for employers or family members to sponsor green card applicants and one which would permanently ban immigrants who have received deportation notices from obtaining visas.
• The House is expected to consider a Senate-passed bill which would lift President Bush’s 2001 ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. The House passed a similar stem-cell bill in January, but the Senate version includes additional language promoting alternative types of stem-cell research.
• The House will take up the 10,000 Trained by 2010 Act, which would authorize the National Science Foundation (NSF) to award grants to higher education institutions that develop and offer educational and training programs for healthcare workers and professionals in new medical information technologies.
• The House will consider the Afghanistan Freedom and Security Support Act (AFSSA), which would authorize $1.6 billion per year over the next three years for economic and security assistance programs in Afghanistan.

After the jump is a full listing of this week's Senate hearings, courtesy of GovTrack. The House is not in session until Tuesday (June 5), so hearings have not yet been made available.

Managing Editor's note: This is a guest blog by User:Paul Blumenthal, one of SourceWatch's citizen editors and a staffer for the Sunlight Foundation who blogs at In Broad Daylight. It does not necessarily represent the views of the Center for Media and Democracy.

After several months of empty posturing against the war in Iraq, politicians in Washington have made what Democratic congressman James P. Moran called a "concession to reality" by agreeing to give President Bush virtually everything he wanted in funding and unrestricted license to continue waging the increasingly detested war that has made Bush the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon.

This is the outcome that we warned against two months ago when we wrote "Why Won't MoveOn Move Forward?" In it, we criticized MoveOn for backpedaling on its previously claimed objective of ending the war in Iraq immediately. Anti-war sentiment was the main factor behind last year's elections that brought Democrats to power in both houses of Congress. Once in power, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a "compromise" bill, supported by MoveOn, that offered $124 billion in supplemental funding for the war. To make it sound like they were voting for peace, the Democrats threw in a few non-binding benchmarks asking Bush to certify progress in Iraq, coupled with language that talked about withdrawing troops next year.