Democrats Get To Work

With still a month and a half before they become the congressional majority, Senate Democrats don't want to waste any time getting down to business. Here is a quick look at some issues they are working on...

First up- The minimum wage. Both Sen. Kennedy (who will become chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) and Speaker-elect Pelosi have made clear that raising the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 is a priority. This is not expected to be opposed by the President, who the AP notes "signaled readiness last week to consider some Democratic priorities such as a minimum-wage increase, overhauling immigration policy and finding compromise on renewing the No Child Left Behind education law."

Other issues Kennedy expects progress on? Stem cell research, increasing Pell Grant sizes, cutting interest rates on student loans, and health care coverage expansions.

Second up- Campaign/electoral fraud. Democrats have long complained about this issue, but haven't been in a position before to do anything about it. Majority Leader-to-be Harry Reid said one of the first 10 bills his Senate passes will be to make criminal penalties out of campaign scams that intended to harass or confuse potential Democratic voters. One issue there is the infamous 'robo-calls' many people received in the days close to the election, in a phone message claiming to be from the Democratic candidate (but actually from the GOP, with negative messages about the Dem); if they tried to hang up, the machine would repeatedly bombard them with more calls. The second scam was sample ballots and campaign literature listing as a 'Democrat' the candidate's name who was actually a Republican (hoping to trick Democratic voters into voting for the Republican on the actual ballot). As Salon says, "Call it a reminder of what oversight looks like".

Finally, third up- Rolling back the more unsavory aspects of the Military Commissions Act. Senator Dodd of Connecticut is introducing legislation called 'The Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act' which will: restores Habeas Corpus protections, narrows the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant' to individuals who directly participate in hostilities against the U.S. who are not lawful combatants, bars info gained through coercion (read: torture) from being introduced as evidence, excludes hearsay evidence deemed to be unreliable, authorizes the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces to review decisions by the military commissions, limits the authority of the President to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions without oversight, and provides for expedited judicial review of the Military Commissions Act to determine its constitutionally.

Sen. Dodd correctly notes that the current bill the Republicans passed for the President "will be the subject of endless legal challenges" and therefore a better bill is needed to a) avoid legal issues, and b) actually get the prosecution started quicker without endless battles. This announcement comes right on the heel of news that Gitmo hearings "called no witnesses, withheld evidence from detainees and usually reached a decision within a day as it determined that hundreds of men detained at Guantanamo Bay were 'enemy combatants'".

This all sounds good to me so far. What say you?