By the looks of the descriptive title, S. 579 seems to be about tobacco regulation. It’s a “bill to establish a comprehensive Federal tobacco product regulatory program, to create a Tobacco Regulatory Agency, to prevent use of tobacco products by youth, and to provide protections for adult tobacco product users through the regulation of the tobacco products manufacturing industry.”

Again, the extremely careful reader can get a hint of a suggestion that this is a bill about tobacco regulation.

So, whaddya think? Here’s the latest vote. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

There’s nothing like headlines to get Congress’ attention. And the furor over the crazed chimp that mauled a woman in Connecticut last week has piqued our national legislature’s interest.

On Monday, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 80, the Captive Primate Safety Act. It would add nonhuman primates (monkeys, great apes, lemurs, etc.) to the definition of “prohibited wildlife species” in the law that prohibits the purchase or sale of such species. And yesterday, a companion bill was introduced in the Senate.

Now, versions of this legislation were introduced in previous Congresses, so these bills weren’t just slapped together for show. But bills that move in response to headline news should get a special second look. It’s the time when Congress is the least likely to be careful, and when the bill’s proponents will take advantage of headlines to roll their opposition. We call this wakeriding.

What’s the right and wrong on this? Should purchase and sale of lemurs be outlawed nationwide for all time because a single chimp went bonkers?

Here are the current votes on H.R. 80 and S. 462, both called the Captive Primate Safety Act. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki articles about the bills.

The activity on H.R. 503, the Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act, has gotten to be too much for our servers.

Our bad: We’ve had our bill pages set to display all comments and, with 2,000+ comments, each hit on the bill page requires us to serve a huuuuge amount of data. It was destabilizing the whole site.

So we’re going to take the page down until Monday when we’ll put together a fix for the page. Sorry for the inconvenience.

There’s a silver lining in this cloud, of course. You folks could use a break from venting at one another, dontchyathink? Debate is what this site is for, of course, and we support everybody saying their piece, but y’all will be alright taking it easy for a few days.

The issue will still be there for you when we resume service, and I’m sure you’ll all be at your most charming and persuasive with each other when we’re up and running again.

In the meantime, there are other bills to look at on the site. Check out some of the posts on this blog. And be sure to sign up for our email list so you can see what Congress is doing week in and week out.

Again, sorry for the break in service. We’ll resume with H.R. 503 shortly.

Or . . . I hate to say it . . . you can go after each other in the comments right here on this page . . . .

. . . there could be all this enthusiasm about putting bittering agent in antifreeze?

A bill to delay the transition to digital television will be on the House floor today.  It was introduced and passed in the Senate yesterday.

(Update: The vote to pass S. 328 failed. It was a suspension vote, requiring a 2/3 majority rather than just greater than 1/2. – Weds. 1/28 1:00 pm)

The big economic stimulus bill has been assigned the number H.R. 1. It’s called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Horses are one of the site’s most passionate subjects, as illustrated by this discussion.

Here’s a new bill: H.R. 503, which would prohibit “certain conduct” relating to the use of horses for human consumption.

The text of the bill isn’t available yet, but it may be the same as the bills with the same number in the 110th Congress, and the 109th.

Does “503″ have a particular meaning that I don’t know about? Or is it just the same bill number to keep continuity with past efforts? Please inform and enlighten.

And here’s the current vote. Click to learn more, vote, comment, and edit the wiki article about the bill.

An issue that has always generated passions here on the site is animal cruelty, specifically with regard to horses. The new Congress has already seen some horse protection legislation introduced.

H.R. 305 would prohibit the transportation of horses in interstate transportation in a motor vehicle containing 2 or more levels stacked on top of one another.

I’ve never seen a horse look happy in any trailer. (Then again, it’s hard to tell whether they’re happy from the appearance of the upper third of their hindquarters.) But they have to be transported somehow.

Is it always wrong to transport horses in double-decker trailers, so the practice should be outlawed? Or are there responsible transporters that use double-decker trailers?

The current vote on H.R. 305 is below. Click to vote, comment, learn more or edit the wiki article about the bill.

[Update: The bills referenced in this post appear to have been introduced now. While it's not a certainty that these are the bills to be considered on the House floor, H.R. 11 is a newly introduced bill dealing with pay discrimination, and a new bill dealing with gender discrimination is H.R. 12.]

The two major bills up for debate on the House floor this week are seeing their own little debates here on WashingtonWatch.com.

Take a look at the comments on H.R. 2831, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 and H.R. 1338, the Paycheck Fairness Act. They’re pretty much like the debates you’ll see in the House later this week.

Decide for yourself who’s right and who’s wrong.

(Note: These are not the actual bills being debated next week, but the versions of those bills in the 110th Congress which just ended.)

Today’s plan to bailout automakers comes in at $17.4 billion. That’s about $178 per U.S. family, or $57 per person.

It’s not clear that all this money is going to be spent outright – it may be in the form of loans (and who knows whether the loans would be repaid). So don’t treat that as a hard and fast cost estimate, but at least you have a sense of how much of your money is at risk.

Meanwhile, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of a congressional oversight panel for the bailout, has gone on record criticizing how the bailout is being handled.

They could have asked me . . . .

“[T]roubled assets from any financial institution.” That’s what the financial services bailout bill allowed the Treasury Department to buy: “troubled assets from any financial institution.” They were talking about bad mortgages.

But then the money got used to buy pieces of financial institutions themselves. Some Members of Congress raised a stink when word circulated that the money would be used to pay dividends – because it wasn’t their preferred violation of the terms of the bailout law.

Now the talk is of using the money to give loans to automakers.

Let’s take a look at what the law said again:

“The Secretary [of the Treasury] is authorized to establish the Troubled Asset Relief Program (or ‘TARP’) to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, troubled assets from any financial institution . . . .”

Now, it’s true – Congress left the definitions wiiiide open:

The term ‘troubled assets’ means–

(A) residential or commercial mortgages and any securities, obligations, or other instruments that are based on or related to such mortgages, that in each case was originated or issued on or before March 14, 2008, the purchase of which the Secretary determines promotes financial market stability; and

(B) any other financial instrument that the Secretary, after consultation with the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, determines the purchase of which is necessary to promote financial market stability, but only upon transmittal of such determination, in writing, to the appropriate committees of Congress.

But do you think that loaning money to automakers is a “purchase” of a “financial instrument”? Well, that’s a small hurdle. The Treasury Secretary can structure the loan to look like the purchase of a financial instrument, and voila.

I was a little hesitant when I wrote this post back in early November to call the $700 billion in bailout money a “slush fund.” But it appears now quite clearly to be a slush fund.

It’s a slush fund, a slush fund, a slush fund. Congress and the Administration passed themselves a law to create a slush fund. Now they’re debating how to dip into this slush fund.

I repeat: It’s a slush fund.