WASHINGTON– Today, Representative John Conyers, Jr. (MI-13) introduced the “Cancel the Sequester Act of 2015.” This one-sentence bill would repeal the across-the-board-cuts that are scheduled to go into effect once again this fall.
Dean of the U.S. House of Representatives John Conyers, Jr.
“Six years after the onset of the financial crisis, there are still millions of Americans seeking full-time employment and a livable wage. The misguided budget cuts known as ‘the Sequester’ would make life significantly harder for these hard-working people and the families they struggle to support,” said Conyers. “These across-the-board budget cuts are unique among American public policies for a simple reason: They were purposefully designed to be a bad idea. During the debt ceiling standoff of 2011, the Sequester was designed as a default option so revolting to both Democrats and Republicans that it would force the bipartisan “Super Committee” to form a workable budget plan. While that committee failed at this objective, the American people have been left to pay the price.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Sequester, if fully implemented, would put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk—including many associated with small businesses. Macroeconomic Advisers, an independent consulting firm, estimated that the first round of sequestration and the related budget battles of the 112th and 113th Congresses have cost the United States roughly $700 billion in economic activity.
“A new round of sequestration this fall would undermine educational quality, research output, and military readiness while leaving us with longer airport security lines, more untreated mental illnesses, more hunger, more homelessness, and fewer federal criminal prosecutions. We have an obligation to act. This legislation would repeal the section of the Budget Control Act of 2011 that created these job-killing budget cuts.”
Original Congressional co-sponsors of the Cancel the Sequester Act of 2015 include: Reps. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), Juan Vargas (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) , Gwen Moore (D-WI), James McGovern (D-MA), Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM), Frederica Wilson (D-FL), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Mark Pocan (D-WI), and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ).
WASHINGTON – On February 3, 2015, Congressman John Conyers (MI-13), joined by 44 Democratic Members of Congress reintroduced H.R. 676, “The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act.” The bill, which has been introduced in every Congress since 2003, would have the United States join the rest of the industrialized world in adopting a single-payer model for healthcare financing.
Under H.R. 676, every resident of the United States would receive a card at birth that would guarantee access to a full range of medically-necessary services that include primary care, dental, prescription drugs, mental health and long term care. The bill places no restrictions on choice of physician or health care provider.
Dean of the U.S. House of Representatives John Conyers, Jr.
“While Obamacare has been a step in the right direction, people across the country understand that a single-payer healthcare system is the only way to guarantee quality care and sustainably cut costs,” Rep. Conyers said. “While I continue to be a strong supporter of the Affordable Care Act, which has brought health insurance to 19 million Americans, I remain deeply concerned for the nearly 13 percent of U.S. adults that still lack coverage. H.R. 676 would also eliminate the out-of-pocket medical expenses that lead many to forgo needed treatment, prolonging illness and resulting in increased financial costs when the condition is eventually treated.”
The reintroduction of H.R. 676 comes after a new poll found that more than half of Americans—including 80 percent of Democrats and a quarter of Republicans—support expanding health reform to “Medicare for All.” The reintroductionalso came on the same day as House Republicans voted for the 56th time to undermine or repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Arecent studydemonstrated that 21 percent of Americans spent 5 percent or more of their income on out-of-pocket costs and 13 percent of Americans spent 10 percent or more.
“While the Affordable Care Act has made great strides in addressing these issues, it is time we leave the burdensome multi-payer healthcare model behind and join the rest of the industrialized world,” Conyers added.
The United States currently spends almost twice as much per person on healthcare as any other country, but key outcomes—life expectancy, infant mortality and preventable deaths—lag behind other nations. A recent Commonwealth Fund study ranked the US healthcare system last among 11 highly-developed countries on measures of quality, efficiency and access. Another recent study found that billing and insurance-related administrative expenses cost the American people $471 billion in 2012. At least 80 percent of that extraordinary cost was, according to the study, due to inefficiencies in our for-profit multi-payer healthcare system.
H.R. 676 has the support of 26 international unions, Physicians For A National Health Program, two former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, National Nurses United, the American Medical Students Association, Progressive Democrats of America, and the NAACP.
WASHINGTON – The mother of the modern civil rights movement received a Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was sought out by world leaders, popes and politicians as a symbol of quiet resistance and strength. A statue of her stands in the U.S. Capitol.
But Rosa Parks also had a recipe for featherlight pancakes. She liked to jot prayers that would come to her on slips of paper, or on the back of church bulletins.
For most of her life, she kept a handful of letters from a classmate who moved away when they were girls — the two gossiping in them about boys and their studies.
But there also are notes of her arrest and the important work and shared struggles between fellow icons of the civil rights movement, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And we also learn how much she missed her husband while fighting the good fight.
On Wednesday, the 102nd anniversary of Parks' birth, the Library of Congress will open to researchers a trove of 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photos from her personal collection; an archive of handwritten notes, mementos, honors and correspondence that had languished in warehouses in New York and Michigan for nearly a decade since her death in her adopted home of Detroit in 2005.
In them, she talks about the Jim Crow laws in the South she grew up under, and sketches notes about the seminal 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., she sparked when she was arrested for refusing a bus driver's order to give up her seat to a white passenger.
There are photos of her with Stokely Carmichael and Shirley Chisholm. There is a postcard from Rome from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"We are really in the thick of it now. Rev. King's home was bombed last night while we were at the First Baptist Church mass meeting. His wife and baby were in the house but not hurt," she writes her mother in a letter drafted after the Jan. 30, 1956, attack in Montgomery.
Pope and poll tax
But amid all the witness-to-history artifacts — a note after she's had dinner with future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, for instance, or her ID card for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's 1968 Poor People's Campaign, or a copy of a 1999 letter she sent to Pope John Paul II after meeting him — is the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane.
It is made all the more remarkable for it being hers.
A copy of a 1957 poll tax receipt for $1.50, a remnant of a now-forbidden Jim Crow practice forcing blacks and others to pay their way into the voting booth. A pocket-sized Gideon Bible she carried in her purse. A dues book for her membership in the Order of the Eastern Star, State of Alabama, 1940.
Snapshots of her husband, Raymond Parks, and her childhood home. A long-ago letter from a young niece. Her husband's barber certificate.
"I hope you are all right and that mother is well and you do not miss me too much. I am fine," she wrote to "Parks, my dear husband" in Detroit in October 1957 from Hampton, Va., where she — unable to find work elsewhere — had taken a job as a hostess at an inn for a salary of $308.33 a month.
She was looking for work for him there as a barber so he could join her, she wrote, even enlisting the help of someone who ran an all-white barbershop to let her know if he heard of any positions open.
"I miss you so very much and wish you were here," she continued. "The weather is not cold now but you should be here to warm my feet by the time winter comes."
Life in Detroit
The Parkses moved to Detroit in 1957, unable to work in Alabama, and much of the collection stands as a growing testament not only to their time in Michigan — a program from St. Matthew AME Church on Glendale, a program for a local African History Club and its annual tribute to Paul Robeson in a school auditorium — but to their troubles.
They were so financially strapped, they relied for a time on donations to help pay medical bills.
"I was so glad to get your letter and hope some money has come in, other than the $100. … Ralph Abernathy said the hospital bill was over $500 so I know you are in a bad fix," white civil rights activist Virginia Durr, a friend of Parks in Montgomery, wrote her in 1960, after she had returned from Virginia and was hospitalized with an ulcer.
Her financial troubles would continue until she helped elect John Conyers to Congress in 1964 — asking King for his help in doing so — and Conyers hired her. She worked in his office until 1988.
Loan to library
"I would say personal is the perfect way to describe it," said Margaret McAleer, senior archives specialist for the library. "These are the things she carried with her from home to home to home. And it's amazing it survived."
The collection came to the library late last year on a decade-long loan from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which purchased them from the estate for $4.5 million.
A sampling of items from the collection will be on display in glass cases in the library's historic Jefferson Building in Washington from March 2-30. And several items will be included in the library's exhibit on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which begins March 7 and runs through Sept. 12.
Researchers, meanwhile, will have access to all of the materials, which, taken together, will help inform historians about the civil rights struggle. They also paint a picture of an uncomplaining woman strong enough to weather personal troubles and who had a clear understanding of the oppressive culture she was born into.
She drafted letters and notes describing the times, talking about how blacks could work behind the luncheonette counters but not be served at them, and how white newspaper readers objected to referring to black women as "Miss" or "Mrs."
She spoke of the "lynch-murder of Young Emmett Till of Chicago," saying, "This case could be multiplied many times in the South. ... It is the custom to keep such things covered up."
She describes her feelings leading up to her quiet act of resistance: "I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it anymore. ...We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restrictions of Jim Crow. ... Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is."
"There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take. … the line between reason and madness grows thinner."
Considering her iconic status in the history of civil rights, it is easy to look at such writings and forget she was a woman, too. It is a myth much of the rest of the collection readily dispels.
Her pancake recipe calls for peanut butter. Her childhood friend, named Galatas, wrote saying she was sorry Rosa's new boyfriend — her husband-to-be — wouldn't cut her long hair because he loved it so.
Under the word, "Closing," Rosa Parks wrote on a loose slip of paper: "Oh, man, what doth the Lord request of thee: to do justly — to love mercy and walk humbly with thy God."
Contact Todd Spangler: 703-854-8947 or tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @tsspangler.
ABOUT THE ROSA PARKS COLLECTION
Purchased by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation last summer, the Rosa Parks Collection includes about 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photographs kept by the civil rights icon who died in her adopted home of Detroit in 2005. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which will house them on a 10-year-loan, will make them available to researchers for the first time beginning Wednesday, the 102nd anniversary of Parks' birth in Tuskegee, Ala.
A sampling of the items will be on display in glass cases at the library's Jefferson Building from March 2-30. Several items will be included in the library's exhibit, "The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom," March 7 to Sept. 12.
Washington, D.C. – TODAY at 2:00 p.m., House Democrats will conduct a press conference to offer their views on what Republicans in the House are doing – or not doing – on immigration reform. A series of hearings in the House Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security this week and next are a stage for Republicans to attack the President’s immigration executive actions but offer no hope that House Republicans will actually enact anything realistic to address border security or immigration reform. This comes as Senate Republicans continue to play games with the budget for the Department of Homeland Security which runs out of funding at the end of this month if the Republicans fail to complete action on a workable budget proposal.
DETROIT – Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (MI-13) released the following statement after the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office announced the dismissal of the remaining misdemeanor charges against Detroit Police Officer Joseph Weekley arising from the shooting of 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones during a 2010 raid [on her home] in pursuit of a murder suspect:
Dean of the U.S. House of Representatives John Conyers, Jr.
“Though the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office has decided not to go to trial for a third time in its case against DPD Officer Joseph Weekley, this action is unlikely to end the controversy over the incident. However, our community must not lose sight of the greatest tragedy of all in this situation – the loss of a 7-year-old innocent child, Aiyana Stanley-Jones.
“The troubling circumstances of this case further exemplify the urgency of enacting legislative reforms to address the legal hurdles often faced in creating a system for better police accountability and illustrate the need for major reform in our criminal justice system.
“It is imperative that we concentrate our passions over this case toward cultivating community-focused, smart policing that rebuilds trust between residents and law enforcement. That cultivation must start with basic reforms such as, police retraining and curtailed use of deadly force. As a result of today’s event, I plan to take two steps. First, I plan to review the matter very closely. Second, I plan to continue my work on police accountability and follow through by introducing legislation.
“I will continue to engage members of the community, law enforcement and clergy concerning the recent series of police-involved shootings. I extend my deepest condolences to the family of Aiyana Stanley-Jones during this very difficult time.”
WASHINGTON – Over two dozen Members of Congress, led by Reps. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Ted Yoho (R-FL), issued a letter to President Obama urging him to maintain his policy of refusing to transfer shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (“MANPADS”) to Syrian combatants.
The letter encourages the Obama Administration to uphold the policy towards Syrian combatants that have been vetted and trained by the U.S. Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency.
MANPADS can be fired at aircrafts by individuals on the ground and can be easily hidden or transported in the trunk of a car. U.S. and Israeli officials have expressed concern that they could be used by terrorists to bring down commercial airliners, including in Israel. Former CIA director David Petraeus said last year that the possibility of a civilian airliner being shot down by a MANPAD was “always our worst nightmare.” According to the Arms Control Association,thirty fatal MANPAD attacks have resulted in almost 1,000 civilian deaths since the first known use against a civilian aircraft in 1978.
In late 2014, the headquarters of the CIA-backed milita Harakat Hazm— one of the biggest recipients of U.S. arms including powerful TOW anti-armor missiles —was overrun by Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s primary Syrian affiliate. Harakat Hazm fled its positions, leaving behind many of their weapons that were seized by al-Nusra.
In the 113th Congress, Reps. Conyers and Yoho proposed a collaborative amendment to H.R. 4870, the “Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2015” that would have prevented the transfer of MANPADs to any party in the Syrian Civil War. The House of Representatives approved the amendment unanimously in June 2014.
In addition to Reps. Conyers and Yoho, the letter was signed by Reps. Peter Welch (D-VT), Steven Cohen (D-TN), John Garamendi (D-CA), Water Jones (R-NC), Rick Nolan (D-MN), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Alan Grayson (D-FL), Bill Posey (R-FL), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Peter DeFazio (D-OR), Joseph Pitts (R-PA), Jared Huffman (D-CA), Brian Babin (R-TX), Tom Rooney (R-FL), Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Randy Weber (R-TX), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jeff Miller (R-FL) and Curt Clawson (R-FL).
WASHINGTON – Today, during debate on the House Floor of H.R. 7, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) urged his colleagues to vote against the unnecessary legislation. Rep. Conyers delivered the following remarks, as prepared for delivery:
“Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 7, the so-called “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.”
“Today, on the 42nd Anniversary of Roe v Wade, the majority is launching yet another attack on women's health and constitutionally-protected right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term.
“Most importantly, this bill will make it virtually impossible for a woman to obtain abortion services even when paid for with purely private, non-Federal funds.
“It accomplishes this end by denying tax credits to income-eligible women and small business employers who choose insurance coverage that includes abortion.
“Through its novel tax penalty provisions, H.R. 7 departs radically from existing law, taking away women’s existing health care and placing their health and lives at risk.
“Despite the claims of its sponsors, H.R. 7 does not codify current law and it is notabout the regulation of federal funds.
“There is no federal abortion due to the Hyde Amendment, and the Affordable Care Act maintains that policy and law.
“For more than 30 years, Congress has prohibited federal funding of abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother, through provisions in like the Hyde Amendment in annual appropriations bills.
“Nothing in the Affordable Care Act changes this.
“So what is H.R. 7 really about? Plain and simple, it is an assault on women’s health and freedom.
“Members should understand that a vote for H.R. 7 is not a vote to codify existing law. It is, instead, a vote to attack women’s health and freedom.
“H.R. 7 also eradicates the authority of the District of Columbia to make decisions about how appropriated funds are used for the health care of the District’s citizens.
“If H.R. 7 should become law, the District’s discretion to make the funding decisions that best serve the needs of its residents will be permanently restricted.
“H.R. 7's permanent restriction on the District’s use of its own local funds should be rejected. Women and families who live in the District should not be subject to additional harm simply because of where they live.
“The Administration ‘strongly oppose[d]’ a nearly identical bill last Congress, saying the legislation ‘would intrude on women’s reproductive freedom and access to health care; increase the financial burden on many Americans; unnecessarily restrict the private insurance choices that consumers have today; and restrict the District of Columbia’s use of local funds, which undermines home rule.’
“The fact that this bill has been brought to the Floor at the last minute and that Members are foreclosed from offering any amendments today is yet further proof that this legislation is simply intended to be yet another polemic attack on the Constitution’s protections for certain members of
our society, an attack against our deliberative legislative process, and an attack against the citizens of the District of Columbia.
“Accordingly, I strongly urge my colleagues to oppose this egregious bill and I reserve the balance of my time.”
