DCCC

DCCC Targets 19 Republicans Over Spending Cuts, Ethics Issues

Brian Beutler | January 31, 2011, 11:45AM

David Rivera

The DCCC is already targeting 19 Republicans from marginal districts with local radio ads.

For the most part, the ads criticize the members for supporting GOP spending cut proposals. But they're also going after a couple of members -- Reps. David Rivera (R-FL) and Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) -- who remain under ethical clouds.

"Did you know Congressman David Rivera is under criminal investigation for receiving secret payments from his mother's company?" says a narrator in the Rivera ad. "Tell Rivera to come clean so he can finally get to work for us."

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Mike Fitzpatrick

Reps. Sessions And Fitzpatrick Pen Apology For Swearing-In Snafu

Jon Terbush | January 7, 2011, 5:33PM

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA)

Perhaps chastened by all the trouble they caused, Reps. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who cast invalid votes on the first day of the 112th Congress because they missed the formal swearing in, are sending a written apology for their gaffe to every member of the House tonight.

In the letter, the Congressmen write:

[W]e are deeply committed to fulfilling our role in our constitutional democracy by maintaining the integrity of the People's House. Our absence on the House floor during the oath of office ceremony for the 112th Congress -- while not intentional -- fell short of this standard by creating uncertainty regarding our standing in this body.

Another excerpt reads:

While we immediately took steps to rectify the situation, we understand that our error allowed the integrity of this great legislative body's proceedings to be called into question," they write. "We regret that this incident adversely affected House proceedings and apologize for any individual inconvenience our actions may have caused.

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Mike Fitzpatrick

Sleazy But Legal? Sessions Swearing-In/Fundraiser SNAFU Skirts The Line

Evan McMorris-Santoro | January 7, 2011, 4:16PM

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA)

The legislative fallout from GOP Reps. Pete Sessions' and Mike Fitzpatrick's decision to skip the House swearing-in ceremony Wednesday has been neatly cleaned up by the pair's Republican colleagues in the House majority. But that doesn't bring an end to the story, which now shifts to whether Fitzpatrick and/or Sessions broke the law by holding a prohibited political fundraiser at the Capitol rather than going to the ceremony with the rest of their colleagues.

The event Sessions and Fitzpatrick attended instead of the swearing in was a reception for Fitzpatrick supporters held in the massive underground Capitol Visitors Center complex, part of the larger Capitol campus and attached to the Capitol basement. Sessions is the chair of the NRCC, so he spends a lot of his time appearing with/raising money for/spending money on House candidates. Fitzpatrick's victory was a sweet one for the GOP (he re-won the seat he lost in 2006 to Democrat Patrick Murphy) and it's not really surprising that Sessions might want to make an appearance at Fitzpatrick's victory celebration. Sessions apparently reserved the room for the event as well.

Exactly what that celebration was is the center of the continuing controversy about Wednesday. If it was a fundraiser -- which the Huffington Post's Ryan Grimm reported it was, pointing to a website set up for the event by Fitzpatrick's campaign -- then it could be a violation of election law. The law strictly prohibits fundraising on Capitol complex grounds.

Momentum is building around the idea a law may have been broken. But an election law expert I spoke to today says it's more likely that the only real law Fitzpatrick and Sessions violated was Thou Shall Not Allow Poor Optics.

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Pete Sessions

House GOP Bails Out Sessions & Fitzpatrick With Oops! Bill

Evan McMorris-Santoro | January 7, 2011, 11:40AM

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX)

The Republican-controlled House voted this morning to wash away the massive fail caused by Reps. Pete Sessions' (R-TX) and Mike Fitzpatrick's (R-PA) decision to skip Wednesday's swearing-in ceremony in favor of taking the oath to a television set at a Capitol complex event for Fitzpatrick.

By a vote of 257 to 159, the House voted in a special rule written for Sessions and Fitzpatrick to essentially rewrite Congressional history so the votes they cast as unsworn members-elect Wednesday and Thursday never happened.

"Be it Resolved, that the votes recorded for Representative-elect Sessions and Representative-elect Fitzpatrick on rollcalls 3 through 8 be deleted and the vote-totals for each of those rollcalls be adjusted accordingly, both in the Journal and in the Congressional Record," the resolution reads.

Read the full text of the two-page resolution here.

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Pete Sessions

House GOP Scrambles To Clean Up Sessions' Mess

Evan McMorris-Santoro | January 7, 2011, 9:47AM

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA)

House Republican leaders will be busy today constructing the parliamentary Rube Goldberg device they'll need to briefly turn back the House clock after Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) skipped Wednesday's official swearing-in ceremony, rendering everything they did between the moment the Republicans officially took over and yesterday afternoon unconstitutional.

Roll Call reports that House Rules Committee chair David Dreier (R-CA) is planning to nullify those votes via a rule in the procedures his committee is writing for the health care repeal process, the first major vote of the new Congress which is expected to come next week.

Basically, Drier's proposed scheme would allow Sessions' votes and other actions in the Rules Committee, of which he is a member, and Fitzpatrick's actions on the floor (including the reading of the Constitution yesterday) to be made Constitutional by a full vote of the House, which of course is now controlled by the Republicans. (The Democrats could have allowed the Sessions mess to be cleaned up by a unanimous consent decree, rendering all that the pair did before being sworn in Thursday to count retroactively, but Politico reports the Democrats weren't interested in playing ball.)

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Pete Sessions

Pete Sessions Breaks Rules, Briefly Shuts Down Rules Committee

Evan McMorris-Santoro | January 6, 2011, 5:17PM

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX)

Call it a stumble out of the gate. Or a failure to find the gate entirely. Veteran Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and freshman Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) failed to make the official swearing in ceremony yesterday, a violation of the Constitution that has sent Republicans scrambling and briefly brought an end to the new majority's push to repeal the health care reform law.

While the rest of the House was being made official in the chamber, Sessions and Fitzpatrick were outside the room at an event for Fitzpatrick supporters. The pair reportedly took their oath to a televised image from inside the chamber. Huffington Post's Ryan Grimm reports the event was part of fundraiser for Fitzpatrick.

Freshly-minted House Rules Committee chair David Dreier (R-CA) had to recess hearings on repealing the health care law after he learned that Sessions, a member of the committee, was not in fact a Constitutionally-valid member of the 112th Congress. Sessions had been casting votes all day like the duly-sworn members on the committee.

Dreier spokesperson Jo Maney told TPM that she "didn't know it happened" that Sessions wasn't sworn in, but after Dreier found out about it, he recessed the hearing to sort out the mess.

Sessions has now been officially sworn in as required by the Constitution, Maney said. The same goes for Fitzpatrick, she said, though that's of less concern to the health care repeal as he's not a member of the Rules Committee like Sessions is. But the failure to be sworn in could mean the rules package the House passed on Wednesday doesn't count, according to Roll Call. The action is now behind the scenes, as Speaker John Boehner tries to persuade House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to agree to a unanimous consent decree that would make all the work Sessions and Fitzpatrick did over the past day count retroactively.

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