Congress has all the planning skills and foresight of a teenager.

Y’know how when mom and dad are coming back from their weekend away, the kid tries to do all the chores for the weekend in the last hour? That’s Congress.

So as we wrap up the current Session, Congress is racing to do all the things it should have done all year long. Members are throwing every pet project they’ve got at the leadership, hoping to get it through before the Congress ends.

Sure, we’ve got spending decisions for fiscal year 2009, and this financial services bailout, but let’s try to get through dozens of other bills at the same time.

Here’s a look at all the bills that were on the House floor just yesterday. Lots of them are simple and straightforward, but nothing kept Congress from addressing them all through the year.

Congress waited until the last minute and most assuredly isn’t showing these bills, or the really big issues before it, the care it should. We citizens haven’t gotten much of a chance to look them over either.

H.R. 3018
The Family Self-Sufficiency Act of 2007

H.R. 3402
The Calling Card Consumer Protection Act

H.R. 3232
The Travel Promotion Act of 2007

H.R. 6950
The Stephanie Tubbs Jones Gift of Life Medal Act of 2008

H.R. 1014
The Heart Disease Education, Analysis Research, and Treatment for Women Act

H.R. 6946
To make a technical correction in the NET 911 Improvement Act of 2008

H.R. 1343
The Health Centers Renewal Act of 2007
Costs $102.88 per family

S. 2932
The Poison Center Support, Enhancement, and Awareness Act of 2008

S. 1810
The Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act
Costs $0.17 per family

S. 1382
The ALS Registry Act
Costs $0.62 per family

H.R. 6568
The Tom Lantos Pulmonary Hypertension Research and Education Act of 2008

H.R. 6901
The Meth Free Families and Communities Act

H.R. 6469
The Organ Transplant Authorization Act of 2008

H.R. 1157
The Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act of 2007

H.R. 758
The Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act of 2007
Costs $0.00 per family

H.R. 4544
The Code Talkers Recognition Act of 2007

H.R. 4120
The Effective Child Pornography Prosecution Act of 2007

H.R. 6045
The Bulletproof Vest Partnership Grant Act of 2008

S. 1046
The Senior Professional Performance Act of 2007
Costs $0.05 per family

S. 928
The Homeowners Protection Act of 2007

Issuing passports is one of those things that’s pretty close to the core of what we ask our national government to do. Yet the government is not doing all that great a job.

One brewing fiasco is a thing called the “e-passport.” This is a passport with a radio chip in it, used to share information from the passport over the airways.

The original e-passport plan would have let the radio chip report our identity information to anyone with the right kind of chip reader. They redesigned it, so now it must be unlocked with a digital “key.” (This negated any time-savings you might get from transmitting your identity ahead to the Customs and Border Control agent when you cross the border.)

But the problems didn’t end there. Apparently, the e-passport is still insecure.

Adam Laurie and Jeroen van Beek, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showed the Business Technology Blog how to capture and change information stored on chips included in new passports from many countries. . . . Laurie showed us his son’s British passport, in which he embedded a chip that displays Osama Bin Laden’s photograph. The passports have a key needed to access the electronic information, but it is taken from information found in the passport like the date of birth. Laurie was able in about four hours to decipher the key and use an RFID scanner to steal the digital information from a passport contained in a sealed envelope.

One is hard-pressed to find what Congress is doing to oversee things. One bill is H.R. 5752, introduced in April, which focuses on the fact some part of the U.S. passport manufacturing process happens in Thailand. The bill may have been introduced because of the security issues, or as a favor to federal government employees’ unions.

The security of passport isn’t the only thing. Recently, the government increased the documentation requirements for Americans returning from nearby countries - a program called the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Well, when the time came for the documentation requirement to go into effect, there was a rush on the passport offices, and the State Department fell behind.

H.R. 2745 is called the “Passport and Travel Cost Reimbursement Act of 2007.” It proposes to reimburse the passport processing fees and international travel costs of people who didn’t get their passports processed and so weren’t able to travel.

On the page for that bill, commenter Patty Meeks says, “Not only did my daughter and I experience financial loss, but my daughter’s senior trip was ruined. She will remember that for the rest of her life.” She notes that the bill hasn’t even moved out of subcommittee. Maybe the bill was just for show and not a real effort to make things right.

H.R. 4186 would repeal the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Maybe it’s a waste of everyone’s time to demand proof of citizenship from American high school seniors returning from Canada, Mexico, or the Carribean.

(more…)

This morning, the National Labor Committee released a report entitled “Nightmare on Sesame Street: Ernie Toy Made in Chinese Sweatshop.” Who could resist writing about a report called “Nightmare on Sesame Street”?

A release accompanying the reports says:

Workers making “Ernie” toys are forced to toil 13 to 15 hours a day, from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 or 11:00 p.m., seven days a week, going for months without a single day off. Workers are at the factory 104 hours a week. There are mandatory 19-to-231/2-hour, all-night shifts before shipments must leave for the U.S. or Europe.


The workers are systematically cheated of half the wages due them, earning just $36.55 for working an 89-hour week instead of the $77.84 they were legally owed. Management cheats the poor workers of over $100,000 in wages due them each month.

That’s mighty bad treatment.

There are at least two bills in Congress meant to curtail this kind of practice. H.R. 1910, H.R. 1992, and S. 367 are all called the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act. They would would amend the Tariff Act of 1930 to prohibit the import, export, and sale of goods made with sweatshop labor.

There are devilish details like what “sweatshop labor” is - there are places in the world where very bad conditions from an American perspective are quite a bit better than the alternatives - like not working. But the bills cleverly define “core labor standards” - the term of art used in the bill - as the laws that exist on some key issues in the countries where material is produced. That’s respectful of other countries’ decisions and doesn’t try to force American standards where they aren’t (yet) appropriate.

Here’s the current voting on S. 367. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki page: