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Immigration Bill Heads to the Full Senate, 200 Amendments Later

by kx0bq6uuw Posted on May 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a sweeping immigration reform bill on Tuesday, but only after sifting through more than 200 amendments. The bill would give the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants a 13-year pathway to citizenship, which would be the biggest change to the immigration system in years.

So, is it the same compromise that its authors, the so-called “Gang of Eight,” originally hammered out? The committee made a total of 141 revisions to the bill; here’s a quick look at a few of the most notable:

No protections for same-sex couples: Democrats reluctantly let this widely discussed measure die in order to keep Republicans on board. It would have allowed a foreign-born member of a same-sex couple petition for legal residency, just as straight couples may do. Because it was withdrawn by its sponsor, committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), it’s not technically a revision. “With a heavy heart, and as a result of my conclusion that Republicans will kill this vital legislation if this anti-discrimination amendment is added, I will withhold calling for a vote on it,” Leahy said. “But I will continue to fight for equality.”

Protections to keep families together: An amendment introduced by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) would require officials to ask immigrants in detention centers whether they are the parents or guardians of children so that the impact of their potential deportation on their families can be assessed.

Additional benefits for DREAMers: An amendment introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) would allow immigrants who arrived before the age of 16 to join the military and subsequently apply for citizenship as an alternative to deportation. Another amendment, introduced by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), would give high school grads access to financial aid (with the exception of Pell Grants).

Limiting the use of solitary confinement: Currently, immigrants being processed through detention facilities are sometimes held in solitary confinement for weeks on end: The New York Times recently reported 35 cases of immigrants held there for more than 10 weeks. Another Blumenthal amendment would largely prohibit involuntary confinement exceeding 15 days.

Visa allowances: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) won approval for an amendment backed by the tech industry that would allow companies to hire foreign workers with H-1B visas before first offering the jobs to qualified citizens, as it is now required, unless more than 15 percent of the current employees in a specific field within that company are already on H-1B visas.

Safer deportations: Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) authored an amendment to cut down on risky deportations. Mexican immigrants might still be dropped off in a border towns rife with kidnappings and gang violence, but Coons’ revision to the immigration bill would stop the practice of nighttime deportations.

Airport tracking system: Another amendment introduced by Hatch would set up fingerprint tracking systems in 10 major airports. Officials currently keep tabs on immigrants flying into the United States; this amendment would require immigrants to be fingerprinted upon both departure to a foreign country and arrival back in the US.

Overall, the immigration reform bill cleared the Judiciary Committee without any fundamental changes. But, in order to not upend the precarious bipartisan balance struck by the Gang of Eight, the committee rejected some more partisan amendments such as the LGBT protection measure and a border security measure from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Now it’s off to the full Senate, where senators will have the chance to offer even more amendments on the floor in June before voting on the final bill.

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Immigration Bill Heads to the Full Senate, 200 Amendments Later

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The Obama Administration Finally Admits Killing 4 Americans

by KlaraGuzm Posted on May 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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After nearly two years of (officially) keeping quiet about what the whole world already knew, the Obama administration on Wednesday formally acknowledged that the United States government had indeed killed four American citizens in drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. This had been fairly common knowledge ever since the strikes occurred in 2011, but the White House, CIA, and other involved parties have maintained (but not really) an official policy of not acknowledging that a targeted killing program exists.

Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that the administration had signed off on a drone strike that killed, without due process, the Al Qaeda-linked cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011 in a letter sent to congressional leaders on Wednesday, which was obtained by New York Times reporter Charlie Savage. The letter also acknowledged the killing of Samir Khan (killed in the same drone operation), Awlaki’s teenage son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (killed in Yemen later that month), and Jude Mohammed (killed in Pakistan in November 2011). However, all except Anwar al-Awlaki were “not specifically targeted by the United States,” according to Holder’s letter.

“Today’s disclosure builds on the administration’s effort to pursue greater transparency around our counter-terrorism operations,” an anonymous White House official told Fox News correspondent Ed Henry.

Here is Holder’s letter:

The letter was released the day before President Obama is scheduled to deliver a big speech on national security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. He is expected to touch on his administration’s controversial ramped-up use of drone warfare and the status of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The last time Obama publicly discussed US drone strikes and his administration’s targeted killing program was in a Google+ “Fireside Hangout” on February 14:

First of all, I think, there’s never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil. And, you know, we respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counter-terrorism operations outside the United States. The rules outside the United States are going to be different then the rules inside the United States. In part because our capacity to, for example, to capture a terrorist inside the United States are very different then in the foothills or mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

But what I think is absolutely true is that it is not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it that we are doing the right thing. I am the head of the executive branch. And what we’ve done so far is to try to work with Congress on oversight issues. But part of what I am going to have to work with Congress on is to make sure that whatever it is we’re providing Congress, that we have mechanisms to also make sure that the public understands what’s going on, what the constraints are, what the legal parameters are. And that is something that I take very seriously. I am not someone who believes that the president has the authority to do whatever he wants, or whatever she wants, whenever they want, just under the guise of counter-terrorism. There have to be legal checks and balances on it.

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The Obama Administration Finally Admits Killing 4 Americans

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Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

by Felixct7yh Posted on May 22, 2013

Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

By Claire Thompson

Canada obviously has a huge stake in the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline. If President Obama fails to approve it — a decision he recently put off yet again – the Canadian oil industry will have a tough time getting its abundant tar-sands crude to seaside ports. Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently came to the U.S. to make the case for the pipeline in person, as did Canada’s ministers of foreign affairs and natural resources and the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Let’s be friends!

And now our neighbor to the north is focusing its powers of persuasion directly on the American people. The country just launched a taxpayer-funded, multimillion-dollar marketing campaign extolling the virtues of tar-sands oil to U.S. citizens. From The Vancouver Observer:

To support the government position and its travelling ministers, Ottawa has launched a $16 million marketing campaign that includes a new website and newspaper advertisements in the US to promote Keystone KL. The thrust of the campaign is the promotion of Canada as a reliable supplier of oil and a “world environmental leader” in the field of oil and gas development.

The millions of dollars being spent on marketing efforts and road trips is unsettling to many in the scientific and environment community.

“I think it’s pretty inappropriate for government ministers to be salesmen for particular industries particularly when opinion in Canada is so divided,” Sierra Club of Canada Executive Director John Bennett told The Vancouver Observer in an interview. “We cancelled regulations, we backed out of the Kyoto Protocol, we’ve had four different plans with three different (emission reduction) targets and each time they announced targets they were weaker and further off.”

The federally funded campaign comes two months after the Alberta government purchased a full-page Sunday New York Times ad promoting the pipeline as “the choice of reason.” According to The Globe and Mail, ads “targeted at lobbyists and lawmakers” appeared last Monday, May 13, on Beltway-insider sites The Hill and Politico, and are slated to run later in other influential publications.

Go With Canada, the government’s newly launched website, promotes the idea of the Keystone XL pipeline as a crucial component of the U.S.-Canada alliance. “America faces a choice,” it states. “It can import oil from Canada — a secure and environmentally responsible neighbor that is committed to North American energy independence — or it can choose less stable offshore sources with much weaker environmental standards.”

The Globe and Mail reports:

The taxpayer-funded campaign doesn’t solely focus on TransCanada’s private $5.3-billion pipeline proposal designed to link the vast oil sands reserves with massive refineries along the Gulf coast and thus provide the vital access to major markets that will, in turn, permit further oil sands development. There also is a major effort to portray Canada as a leader in curtailing greenhouse gases and environmentally responsible. Both claims are apparently intended to deflect attacks by anti-Keystone XL groups.

But some of the figures the government’s website touts to back up those claims have already been called into question, says CBC News:

The site asserts that “Innovation and research drives improvement in the oil sands — GHG emissions have dropped 26 per cent between 1990 and 2011.”

In fact, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions more than tripled between 1990 and 2011. The emissions intensity per barrel of oil fell 26 per cent.

CBC also notes that this “current promotional onslaught has been years in the making,” with meetings as far back as March 2010 between the Canadian government and oil industry to start hashing out their communications strategy.

Will the marketing money work? Obama is, after all, the one with the final say — but it looks like the Canadian government, seeing what a fractious issue the pipeline has become, is counting on the president’s tendency to take what he assumes to be the politically safe route.

But when half of Americans don’t even know what the Keystone XL pipeline is [PDF], any information campaign — for or against — has its work cut out for it.

h/t: Fiona Woo at World Future Council

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

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4 Ways Apple CEO Tim Cook Spins Tax Avoidance

by london Posted on May 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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“I’ve never seen anything like this and we don’t know anybody who has ever seen anything like this,” Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said yesterday of Apple’s baroque tax avoidance strategies. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations today, is aggressively spinning the company’s tax strategies as patriotic, commonsensical, and no big deal. Here are the most remarkable talking points from his pre-released Senate testimony:

1. Apple’s taxes are straightforward
Spin: “Apple does not use tax gimmicks.”
Reality: Yet somehow, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, Apple has paid almost no income taxes to any country on its $102 billion in offshore holdings. Between 2009 and 2012, Apple avoided paying US taxes on some $74 billion in income, an amount equal to the entire budget of Florida.

2. Paying American salaries through a subsidiary based in Ireland saves American jobs
Spin: Apple and its Irish subsidiaries are engaged in a “cost sharing agreement” whereby the subsidiaries “partially fund R&D costs incurred by Apple Inc.” The agreements “play an important role in encouraging companies like Apple to keep R&D efforts—and the high-paying, income tax generating jobs associated with them—in the US.”
Reality: This is how Apple brings back money from overseas without having to pay federal taxes on it.

3. Apple is awesome because it runs huge data centers right here in the United States
Spin: “In 2010, Apple built one of the country’s largest data centers in North Carolina, and it is in the process of constructing two additional data centers in Oregon and Nevada.”
Reality: Apple only agreed to build the North Carolina data center after getting a $46-million state tax break, its local property taxes halved, and local taxes on its assets slashed by 85 percent—all for creating 50 jobs. To build its data center in deficit-plagued Nevada, it extracted an $88 million state tax break, the largest in state history. And Apple chose to build a data center in Prineville, Oregon because Oregon has no sales tax and Prineville is in a “rural enterprise zone” that offers a 15-year property tax exemption.

4. “Apple supports comprehensive corporate tax reform.”
Spin: “Apple recognizes that these and other improvements in the US corporate tax system may increase the company’s taxes.”
Reality: Cook wants to reduce the tax that corporations pay when they repatriate profits, which could save Apple a lot of money considering that 61 percent of its profits are earned overseas. But lowering the repatriation tax probably wouldn’t benefit most Americans. After Congress enacted a one-time repatriation holiday in 2004, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used to pay for dividends, share buybacks, or executive bonuses.

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4 Ways Apple CEO Tim Cook Spins Tax Avoidance

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GOP: Obama Is Responsible for "A Culture of Intimidation"

by RubinkJoseph Posted on May 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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Apparently this is the latest Republican thing. They can’t show that Obama has been actually involved in the IRS scandal—or in any of the other squabbles currently roiling Washington DC, for that matter—so now they’ve gotten together and agreed on a new party line: Obama is responsible for all of this stuff anyway because he’s relentlessly stoked a “culture of intimidation” against his adversaries. “The president demonizes his opponents,” Mitch McConnell said with a straight face on Sunday, and this is at the root of all our problems.

Paul Mirengoff correctly suggests that this sounds whiny—”the kind of thing I’d expect from Democrats.” But he agrees with the basic premise that Obama demonizes his opponents, and points us to an NRO piece by Eliana Johnson that provides the proof. I was curious, so I clicked the link. Just what has Obama done to strike fear into Republicans’ hearts?

Well, only three things apparently. First, he dissed Fox News and then tried to exclude them from the network pool. Second, at an explicitly partisan DNC fundraiser following the Citizens United decision, he castigated “harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country.” AFP, of course, is supported by the Koch brothers. And apparently Obama has also said some uncomplimentary things about Rush Limbaugh. This is the full bill of particulars.

I’ll give them the Fox thing. Trying to keep Fox out of the press pool was bush league nonsense. But really. Kicking back at the rancid bile that spews out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth on a daily basis? Telling a bunch of rich Democratic donors that they’re up against lots of rich Republican donors, so please open your wallets? This is a culture of intimidation?

Conservatives, of course, have fostered a culture not of intimidation, but of rank hatred so insane you can practically see the spittle flecks every time they talk about Obama. And yet, when Obama returns fire, even with his trademark restraint, it’s time to bring out the smelling salts. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic

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GOP: Obama Is Responsible for "A Culture of Intimidation"

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Investigate the IRS? Investigate Everybody!

by Cynthia Perez Posted on May 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Peter Kirsanow thinks that L’Affaire IRS (501gate? Cincygate? Teagate?) should be thoroughly investigated. I’m on board with that. But Kirsanow wants to go further. Much, much further:

But the investigation shouldn’t be limited to the IRS. Until last week, the IRS was denying that conservatives were being targeted by the agency. Now we know those denials were completely false. What about the Department of Labor, or for that matter, any federal agency with authority to investigate, regulate, or fine individuals and businesses? With few exceptions, the permanent bureaucracy in Washington leans heavily left. If IRS employees could target conservatives, what prevents the same mindset from prevailing in other agencies?

Congress must use its time and resources judiciously. But it would be shortsighted not to take seriously the complaints that citizens — regardless of ideology — have made about other agencies as well. Hey, we conservatives might be paranoid. But it looks like this time someone was, indeed, out to get us.

Good idea. This could be an excellent WPA-style works program, and it’s one that Republicans in Congress would be willing to fund generously. I recommend a citizen investigating force of at least 3 million drawn from all walks of life. There’s no sense in thinking small here.

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Investigate the IRS? Investigate Everybody!

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$1.9 billion wind project coming to Iowa

by f45 Posted on May 10, 2013

$1.9 billion wind project coming to Iowa

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ David LeeThis wind turbine in Iowa is going to get a lot more company.

America’s wind energy boom is about to deliver the biggest economic investment in Iowa’s history — and blow a whole lot of cheap, clean electricity into the appliances and lightbulbs of the state’s residents.

Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy Co. announced it would spend $1.9 billion building new wind turbines in the state, increasing the amount of wind energy generated in Iowa to about 6,000 megawatts, up from 5,000 megawatts today, according to a report in the Des Moines Register. The state aims to have 10,000 megawatts of wind operating by 2020. From the article:

The company said the project would “be built at no net cost to the company’s customers.” The added wind generation is expected to cut consumer rates by $3.3 million in 2015 and grows to $10 million annually by 2017, the company said. “This is real money back in the pockets of Iowans,” [Lt. Gov. Kim] Reynolds [R] said. …

[Gov. Terry] Branstad [R] and [Midamerican CEO] William Fehrman said green energy has been critical to attracting companies like Facebook, the social networking giant that last month announced it would build a $300 million data center in Altoona. State leaders expect Facebook to push its investment to nearly $1 billion over six years.

Facebook has pledged to get 25 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2015. …

Senate Minority Leader Bill Dix, R-Shell Rock, said he felt everything about MidAmerican’s announcement was positive for Iowa’s economy and for future job growth. “This is home-grown energy coming from right here in Iowa. It is renewable, it is clean, and that is all a good thing for Iowans,” he said.

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Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

by Aaron Dempsey Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Late Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a bill that would repeal part of a law aimed at fighting offshore tax evasion.

The law, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, was passed in 2010 and is supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2014. It requires foreign financial institutions to report information about Americans with accounts worth more than $50,000 to the IRS. Firms that don’t comply will be fined.

Tax policy watch dogs say the FATCA is essential to rooting out tax cheats. “The increased bilateral exchange of taxpayer information that…is crucial to cleaning up the worldwide shadow financial system,” Heather Lowe, director of government affairs for the advocacy organization Global Financial Integrity told Accounting Today earlier this month. “Foreign financial institutions should not harbor the illicit assets of U.S. tax evaders.”

But Paul’s bill to weaken the law was immediately hailed as “heroic” by the biggest independent financial advisory firm in the world. In an email press release from the deVere group, chief executive Nigel Green said, “Senator Paul’s heroic stance against this toxic, economy-damaging tax act is a landmark moment in the mission to have it repealed. He has taken a courageous stand against FATCA, a law that will impose unnecessary costs and burdens on foreign financial institutions.”

Paul, generally a die-hard anti-taxer, says the intent of his bill “is not to disrupt legitimate tax enforcement.” Instead, he says he objects to FATCA because it “violates important privacy protections,” by giving foreign governments too much access to US citizens’ tax information. Paul says he is only in favor of repealing those provisions.

But Paul has a long history of fighting the offshore-tax evasion law. Since FATCA was signed, the Treasury Department has been negotiating and signing treaties with over 50 countries to implement the law’s provisions. Paul has put a hold on Senate approval of all tax treaties since he was elected in 2010, and as such has been blamed for trying to block FATCA.

A companion version of Paul’s bill is expected to be introduced in the House soon.

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Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

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Koch-Linked Women’s Group Takes Credit for Mark Sanford’s Win

by ghd12australia Posted on May 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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Soon after Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina who resigned in disgrace in 2009, pulled off an upset win in his congressional race on Tuesday, a conservative group called the Independent Women’s Voice boasted of its role in his victory. “Independent Women’s Voice was the only outside group supporting Sanford on a significant scale, by educating voters about the facts about the Democratic candidate,” IWV president Heather Higgins said in a statement. IWV spent $250,000 on TV and print ads in the last week of the election, helping to power Sanford to victory over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional district.

And if the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are encouraged by Sanford’s win, they, too, can claim a degree of credit, for IWV has plenty of ties to the Koch political network.

IWV, a nonprofit group that doesn’t have to name its funders (and can’t make politics the majority of what it does), is the sister organization of the Independent Women’s Forum, another nonprofit focused more on policy issues. Higgins, who chairs IWF’s board, has staked out a position as a leading critic of Obamacare. She also argues that independent women voters are not destined to vote Democratic and, instead, these women are up for grabs on political and policy matters and can be won over by Republicans—if GOPers get their messaging right.

When IWV applied for tax-exempt status in September 2004, it listed Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former Koch Industries lobbyist, as its president. (She also had a leadership position at Independent Women’s Forum.) Pfotenhauer, who is currently a Koch spokeswoman, has filled a number of roles with Koch-linked groups. She was formerly the president of Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ flagship advocacy organization, and is now a director at AFP. She was a vice president for Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Koch-backed predecessor to AFP. She also advised John McCain’s during his 2008 presidential campaign.

IWV does not have to disclose its donors, but the group received $250,000 in 2009 from the Center to Protect Patient Rights, a money conduit for conservative nonprofits run by Koch operative Sean Noble. As the Center for Responsive Politics has reported, the Center to Protect Patient Rights handed out $44 million in 2010 and nearly $15 million in 2011 to an array of nonprofit groups including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the 60 Plus Association, which describes itself as the “conservative alternative” to the AARP. Noble spoke at a 2010 Koch donor retreat (PDF) in Aspen, Colorado. Pfotenhauer spoke at the same retreat, as did Higgins.

Higgins also briefly served on the board of the Center to Protect Patient Rights. There is no public information revealing whether IWV still receives financial support from Koch-linked sources.

There’s another curious wrinkle about IWV. In its 2004 application for tax-exempt status, the group said it would not spend “any money” on influencing elections. Yet in later tax filings, IWV changed its tune and told the IRS it spent $772,435 on elections in 2010. There are no tax filings available yet detailing IWV activity in 2012 or 2013.

IWV’s six-figure spending on Mark Sanford’s behalf was anything but a safe bet. But as it turns out, it was money very well spent.

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Koch-Linked Women’s Group Takes Credit for Mark Sanford’s Win

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FBI Agents Want Rep. Mike Rogers to Be Their New Boss. Here’s Where He Stands on Civil Liberties

by Christina Craig Posted on May 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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The FBI Agents Association, which represents thousands of active and retired FBI agents, announced Monday that it wants Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, to be the next head of the FBI. If nominated by President Obama, Rogers would take over from Robert S. Mueller III, whose term ends in September. Konrad Motyka, president of the Association, said in a statement that Rogers “exemplifies the principles that should be possessed by the next FBI director.” What are those principles? Here’s where Rogers stands on four key civil liberties issues:

1.) Online privacy

Rogers introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), not once, but twice (the bill has so far failed to advance through the Senate both times.) CISPA aimed to beef up US cybersecurity efforts by lowering the legal barriers that keep the government and tech companies from openly sharing your personal information. As dozens of privacy groups pointed out, this meant that companies like Facebook and Google could potentially give the content of your emails to government agencies without a search warrant or court order. As this handy infographic from Boing Boing shows, under CISPA, you wouldn’t necessarily need to be suspected of crime for the government to see your emails—being the unlucky target of a few key search words, like “marijuana,” could be enough.

2.) Due process

Since February, prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center have been on a hunger strike to protest conditions at the prison. President Barack Obama has acknowledged that Guantanamo is a “lingering problem that is not going to get better, it’s going to get worse. It’s going to fester.” Obama has put some of that blame on Congress. Rogers is one of the lawmakers who has blocked US funds from being used to transfer prisoners out of Guantanamo. He has said, of terrorism, “We do not need famed federal Prohibition agent Eliot Ness on the battlefield; what we need is Gen. George S. Patton.”

In a March op-ed published in U.S. News and World Report, Rogers criticized the Obama Administration for trying Sulaiman Abu Gaith, a man identified as Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, in a federal New York City court: “Recognizing we are at war means understanding it is dangerous and ineffective to bring the enemy to the United States, to grant him the same rights as U.S. citizens standing trial, including Miranda rights, the right to remain silent, and the right to a U.S. taxpayer funded attorney.”

When Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a US citizen, was read his Miranda Rights, Rogers called the decision “confusing…horrible, a God-awful policy, and dangerous to the greater community.” As my colleague Adam Serwer notes, “the only thing more embarrassing than being a federal prosecutor who doesn’t understand the federal rules of criminal procedure is being a former FBI agent who doesn’t understand them.”

3.) Wiretapping protections

As congressman, Rogers has supported extending the Patriot Act’s “roving wiretaps“, waiving the requirement to have a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for wiretapping at home and abroad, and allowing electronic surveillance without a warrant.

4.) Oversight of drone strikes

Even though President Obama could hypothetically use drone strikes to kill US citizens on American soil, and reports show the program has minimal congressional oversight, Rogers isn’t concerned: “I as chairman review every single air strike we use in the war on terror, both on the civilian and the military side when it comes to terrorist strikes,” he told The Hill in February. “There’s plenty of oversight there.”

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FBI Agents Want Rep. Mike Rogers to Be Their New Boss. Here’s Where He Stands on Civil Liberties

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