Free Republic

21st House Democrat planning to step down at end of term Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) will not run for another term. Murphy, who co-chairs the Blue Dog Coalition, said Monday she will not seek to continue representing Florida’s 7th Congressional District because she wants to spend more time with her family. “These last few years have been some of the most rewarding moments of my life, but also some of the most challenging. Public service is not without personal sacrifice, and as a mom of two young children, my time away from them has been hard for them, for me,...

In the hotly contested 1st congressional district primary race, late entry Ed Case soundly defeated his opponents in Democratic Party voting today. Case, who jumped into the election in June and changed the dynamics of the field, had 44,788 votes to Lt. Gov. Doug Chin’s 28,284, a 39 percent to 25 percent lead, with most of the votes counted late last tonight.

The president’s push to turn health care reform into a catalyst for the rest of his agenda is getting mixed early reactions on Capitol Hill, where Democratic leaders' desire to take advantage of healthy majorities before the November elections must contend with lawmakers’ survival instincts. White House aides told POLITICO earlier this week that an emboldened Barack Obama plans to parlay his win on health care into a crackdown on Wall Street excesses, a rewrite of education and campaign finance laws and possibly a climate change bill — all before the fall's midterms. But aides and members, Republicans and Democrats...

House healthcare negotiations dissolved in acrimony on Friday, with Blue Dog Democrats saying they were “lied” to by their Democratic leaders. The seven Blue Dogs on the Energy and Commerce Committee stormed out of a Friday meeting with their committee chairman, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), saying Waxman had been negotiating in bad faith over a number of provisions Blue Dogs demanded be changed in the stalled healthcare bill. “I’ve been lied to,” Blue Dog Coalition Co-Chairman Charlie Melancon (D-La.) said on Friday. “We have not had legitimate negotiations. “Mr. Waxman has decided to sever discussions with the Blue Dogs who are...

Forty-five House Democrats in the party’s moderate-to-conservative wing have protested the secretive process by which party leaders in their chamber are developing legislation to remake the health care system. The lawmakers, members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, said they were “increasingly troubled” by their exclusion from the bill-writing process. They expressed their concerns in a letter delivered Monday to three House committee chairmen writing the bill, which House leaders hope to pass this summer. Representative Mike Ross, an Arkansas Democrat who is chairman of the coalition’s health task force, said: “We don’t need a select group of members...

The Blue-Dog Democrats in the House have been somewhat disenchanted with the Democrat leadership, and have been wanting to flex their muscles. They realize that they are in districts that could go Republican in 2010, and may be the key to defeating the stimulus package. Today, a letter signed by 49 Blue Dog Democrats was sent to Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, requesting that more spending be cut from the bill. The letter stated that many of the members of the Blue-Dog Coalition voted for the original bill because they were assured of cuts in the Senate and in the...

Congress just started the 111th Session just four weeks ago, and already some Democrats have had enough of Nancy Pelosi’s ham-handed tactics. A rebellion has begun to brew among moderates in Pelosi’s caucus that wants a return to “regular order”, in which the committees return to their normal process of crafting and modifying legislation instead of a select group of elites ramming it down their throats. They may draft Steny Hoyer, the Majority Leader, as their savior: A group of more than 50 House Democrats has penned a letter to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) imploring him to “restore this...

Democratic lawmakers and leaders are hoping to work out a compromise as early as this week with the National Rifle Association (NRA) on legislation to further loosen gun laws in the District of Columbia. Reps. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) are working with the gun-lobbying group to head off a discharge petition filed last week that would bypass committee to bring a D.C. gun bill directly to the floor. “Dingell and Tanner are going to negotiate a compromise with the NRA and then show it to the leadership,” said a Democratic aide. The NRA has threatened to make...

Blue Dog Coalition 12-point reform plan for restoring fiscal sanity 1. Require a balanced budget. • Blue Dogs support a Constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget every year except in times of war or national emergency. • Blue Dogs believe a Balanced Budget Amendment is the only way to ensure fiscal discipline in Congress. • The Blue Dog Balanced Budget Amendment would require a three-fifths vote of both the House and Senate to increase the debt limit or to waive the balanced budget requirement. • In addition, the Blue Dog Balanced Budget Amendment protects Social Security from benefit cuts...