Rules Committee Report Is Now Available Online

The new report by the Rep. Louise Slaughter of the House Rules Committee is now available online.

You can find the full report here. 

And here's a link to Rep. Slaughter's post on Kos about her report:

Our Report from the House - America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption

According to Rep. Slaughter, here are some of the key findings of the report:

For the first time, this report tries to quantify the damage the Republican Congress and Bush White House have inflicted on our country.  Here are a few numbers to consider:

*14.2 million American seniors (including millions of our sickest and most vulnerable seniors) are stuck in a complicated, expensive, and inefficient Medicare prescription drug program because the Republican Congress and the Bush Administration allowed lobbyists from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to design this program.

*60 million American families who heat their homes with natural gas and 8 million families who heat with heating oil are paying higher bills this winter, even though the Republican Congress recently passed their "national energy plan" into law.  Although this plan gives the energy industry billions in new tax breaks and subsidies, it doesn't lower prices for consumers or make our country more energy independent.

*The 150,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq may not have the equipment they need because of waste, fraud and cronyism by the Republican Congress and the Department of Defense.  While Halliburton and other companies with Republican connections get their contracts, our soldiers still don't have the body armor and armored vehicles they need to fight the war.

*750,000 households in the Gulf region are still displaced today, more than 5 months after Hurricane Katrina hit that region, at least in part because the political hacks the Bush Administration put in charge of crucial homeland security functions were not adequately prepared to prepare for or respond to this disaster.

*More than 10 million students and their families will have larger student loans to repay because House Republicans, led by new Majority Leader John Boehner working hand-in-hand with his commercial loan industry allies, cut $12 billion from the student loan program in the recent reconciliation bill and shifted the costs on to students and their families.

These numbers, along with the many others documented in this report, should deeply concern all Americans.

This report is very comprehensive, but no doubt there in information about your Member of Congress that the Rules Committee staff either didn't know about, or didn't have room to include. So I've created a forum where you can post your reaction to the report, or add information about your own Member of Congress.