Today 124 Members of the House of Representatives led by Reps. Don Beyer (VA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Andre Carson (D-IN), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) introduced the Freedom of Religion Act to prohibit religious discrimination in our immigration system. The legislation was originally introduced in 2016 by Rep. Beyer in response to then-candidate Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban proposal, a version ... Read more

ABC News | Democrats have for months fired up supporters with the promise that control of the House of Representatives would finally allow them to seize copies of President Donald Trump's tax returns. They have argued the filings could produce a road map for investigations into Trump’s tangle of global businesses and provide a cure for anxiety caused by his refusal to share details about his wealth, debt, charitable giving, and potential conflicts of interests. At one point during the campaign, ... Read more

New York Daily News | The government can’t reopen itself — but it can apparently accommodate deep-pocketed lobbyists. The Treasury Department reinstated an Internal Revenue Service program essential to the mortgage industry this week after the powerful lending block launched a lobbying effort amid an ongoing government shutdown set to become the longest in history. Even though 800,000 federal employees are going without paychecks due the shutdown induced by President Trump’s border wall obsessio... Read more

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) announced today that he has received an appointment to the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, one of the five exclusive House committees. Ways and Means has a wide breadth of jurisdiction, including health care, trade policy and tariffs, and oversight of Medicare and Social Security. It is the House Committee directly responsible for writing tax legislation, and the oldest standing committee in the United States Congress. Beyer said: “I am thrilled to accept this appo... Read more

Washington Post | While many federal workers go without pay and the government is partially shut down, hundreds of senior Trump political appointees are poised to receive annual raises of about $10,000 a year. The pay raises for cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, top administrators and even Vice President Mike Pence are scheduled to go into effect beginning Jan. 5 without legislation to stop them, according to documents issued by the Office of Personnel Management and experts in federal pa... Read more

Congressmen Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly today wrote to the Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) seeking fixes to problems identified by a General Accountability Office investigative report into asbestos in federal buildings. The report found that the GSA has failed to abide by its own tracking and recording guidelines, including the operation of a tracking database called IRIS, which tracks asbestos surveys in GSA-owned buildings constructed prior to 1998. The Representati... Read more

Huff Post | Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has often said that he’s not afraid of a fight. In an interview with Breitbart News last month, the former Montana congressman and Navy SEAL dismissed reports that his days in the Trump administration were numbered as nothing more than rumors. “I’ve been in a lot of firefights. I don’t mind getting shot at,” he said. “It is better to charge up a hill under fire than cower in a foxhole.” ... Stepping down now “may spare Zinke some embarrassment, but it wi... Read more

The Hill | Democratic lawmakers joined conservation groups Saturday in cheering President Trump’s announcement that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is leaving his job by the end of the year. Zinke’s departure comes as Democrats prepare to take over as the majority in the House, which included gearing up to challenge policies created under Zinke and questioning a number of the secretary’s own ethical decisions. Under Zinke’s watch, the Interior Department carried out an aggressively pro-industry ag... Read more

Newsweek | Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will be leaving his post at the end of the year and top Democrat Chuck Schumer says “the swamp cabinet will be a little less foul without him.” “Ryan Zinke was one of the most toxic members of the cabinet in the way he treated our environment, our precious public lands, and the way he treated the [government] like it was his personal honey pot,” the Senate Minority Leader tweeted. Trump announced Zinke’s departure in a tweet on Saturday mor... Read more

Mother Jones | On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that his Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, will be leaving his position in the coming weeks. Zinke’s tenure overseeing the nation’s public lands has been controversial and has resulted in a number of federal investigations. (He reportedly used taxpayer money to purchase a $139,000 door, for example.) A new secretary will be announced next week. It would be an understatement to say that environmentalists and Democratic politic... Read more