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America’s 10 Worst Prisons: Walnut Grove

by 0df53x21 Posted on May 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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The youth prison’s record on rape was the worst “of any facility anywhere in the nation.” Richard Ross, Juvenile-in-Justice

Part 9 of an 11-part series.


#1: ADX (federal supermax)


#2: Allan B. Polunsky Unit (Texas)


#3: Tent City Jail (Phoenix)


#4: Orleans Parish (Louisiana)


#5: LA County Jail (Los Angeles)


#6: Pelican Bay (California)


#7: Julia Tutwiler (Alabama)


#8: Reeves Country Detention Complex (Texas)


#9: Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (Mississippi)

Read the complete introduction to our 10 Worst Prisons project.

Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of the problems we explore, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with criminal-justice reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy.

We will roll out the final contenders this week, complete with photos and video. Number 9 is a corporate-run facility where children allegedly have been subjected to a heartrending pattern of brutal beatings, rapes, and isolation.

Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (Leake County, Mississippi)

Number of prisoners: Capacity 1,450 (actual population in flux)

Who’s in charge: (current) Lawrence Mack, warden; (former) George Zoley, CEO, the GEO Group; Christopher B. Epps, commissioner, Mississippi Department of Corrections

The basics: Efforts are underway to clean up and clear out Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, which one federal judge called “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts” visited upon children as young as 13. For years, the kids at Walnut Grove were subjected to a gauntlet of physical and sexual assaults, and psychological abuse including long-term solitary confinement. All of this took place under the management of private prison conglomerate the GEO Group.

Check out photographer Richard Ross’ Juvenile-in-Justice project, with stories from youth facilities all over America. (And don’t forget his awesome photo book.)

The backlash: Evidence gathered for a report by the Justice Department and a lawsuit by the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center “paints a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world,” Federal District Judge Carleton Reeves wrote in a 2012 court order. The court found that conditions at Walnut Grove violated the Constitution, not to mention state and federal civil and criminal laws. Guards regularly had sex with their young charges and the facility’s pattern of “brutal” rapes among prisoners was the worst of “any facility anywhere in the nation” (court’s emphasis). Guards also were deemed excessively violent—beating, kicking, and punching “handcuffed and defenseless” youths and frequently subjecting them to chemical restraints such as pepper spray, even for insignificant infractions.

The guards also sold drugs on site and staged “gladiator-style” fights. “It’d be like setting up a fight deal like you would with two dogs,” one former resident told NPR. “They actually bet on it. It was payday for the guards.” Said another: “A lot of times, the guards are in the same gang. If the inmates wanted something done, they got it. If they wanted a cell popped open to handle some business about fighting or something like that, it just pretty much happened.” Kids who complained or tried to report these incidents faced harsh retribution, including long stints in solitary.

Judge Reeves wrote that the state had turned a blind eye to the prison company’s abuses: Walnut Grove’s charges, “some of whom are mere children, are at risk every minute, every hour, every day.” In accord with a court decree, the facility’s youngest residents have been moved to a state-run juvenile facility, and Mississippi canceled its contract with GEO—which still runs some 65 prisons nationwide. The contract was handed over to another private prison company, Management and Training Corporation, which also has been a target of criticism for advocates of criminal justice reform.

Also read: “The Lost Boys,” about what happens when you put kids in an adult isolation facility.

Watch: Local news report on a protest by Walnut Grove parents.

Coming tomorrow: An island prison where guards allegedly “use unlawful, excessive force with impunity.”

Read more: America’s 10 Worst Prisons index page.

Research for this project was supported by a grant from the Investigative Fund and The Nation Institute, as well as a Soros Justice Media Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations. Additional reporting by Beth Broyles, Valeria Monfrini, Katie Rose Quandt, and Sal Rodriguez.

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America’s 10 Worst Prisons: Walnut Grove

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We’ve Hit the Carbon Level We Were Warned About. Here’s What That Means.

by pwh63qn7 Posted on May 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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This interactive explainer originally appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over the last couple weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million. Thursday, we finally got there: The daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human history, NOAA reported Friday.

Don’t worry: The earth is not about to go up in a ball of flame. The 400 ppm mark is only a milestone, 50 ppm over what legendary NASA scientist James Hansen has since 1988 called the safe zone for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, and yet only halfway to what the IPCC predicts we’ll reach by the end of the century.

“Somehow in the last 50 ppm we melted the Arctic,” said environmentalist and founder of activist group 350.org Bill McKibben, who called today’s news a “grim but predictable milestone” and has long used the symbolic number as a rallying call for climate action. “We’ll see what happens in the next 50.”

We could find out soon enough: With the East Coast still recovering from Superstorm Sandy and the West gearing up for what promises to be a nasty fire season, University of California ecologist Max Moritz says milestones like these are “an excuse for us to take a good hard look at where we are,” especially as the carbon concentration shows no signs of reversing course.

Scientists first saw the carbon scale tip past 400 ppm last summer, but only briefly; the record reported today by NOAA is the first time a daily average has surpassed that point. For the last several years concentrations have hovered in the 390s, and we’re still not to the point where the carbon concentration will stay above the 400 ppm threshold permanently. But that’s just around the corner, said J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society.

“It’s clear that sometime next year we’ll see 400 consistently,” he said. “Avoiding the future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in greenhouse gases.”

Most scientists, environmentalists, and climate-conscious policymakers agree this will require, at a minimum, slashing the use of fossil fuels, and in the meantime, taking steps to adapt for a world with higher temperatures, higher seas, and more extreme weather. For example, according to Hansen, the world will need to completely stop burning coal by 2030 if returning to 350 ppm is to remain possible. What’s the holdup? Texas Tech climatologist Katherine Hayhoe blames “the inertia of our economic system, and the inertia of our political system.” But she, like most of her peers, believe it can—and must—be done: “We have to change how we get our energy and how we use our energy.”

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We’ve Hit the Carbon Level We Were Warned About. Here’s What That Means.

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Anna Jarvis, the Radical Behind Mother’s Day

by Ludie69E Posted on May 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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This cartoon was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

More from Steve Brodner on his website and Facebook page.

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Anna Jarvis, the Radical Behind Mother’s Day

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Benghazi Isn’t Watergate. But the White House Didn’t Tell the Full Story.

by testdonekAQW Posted on May 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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The latest revelations about the Benghazi talking points—as opposed to what actually happened at the US diplomatic facility at Benghazi, where four Americans died—do not back up Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s hyperbolic and absurd claim that the Benghazi controversy is Obama’s Watergate. But neither are they nothing.

As ABC News reported on Friday morning, the most discussed talking points in US diplomatic history were revised multiple times before being passed to UN Ambassador Susan Rice prior to her appearances last September on Sunday talk shows. The revisions—which deleted several lines noting that the CIA months before the attack had produced intelligence reports on the threat of Al Qaeda-linked extremists in Benghazi—appear to have been driven by State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who, it should be noted, is a career Foggy Bottomer who has served Republican and Democratic administrations, not a political appointee. Her motive seems obvious: fend off a CIA CYA move that could make the State Department look lousy. (The other major deletion concerned three sentences about a possible link between the attack and Ansar al-Sharia, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group; last November, David Petraeus, the former CIA chief, testified that this information was removed from the talking points in order to avoid tipping off the group.)

But here’s the problem for the White House: It was part of the interagency process in which State sought to downplay information that might have raised questions about its preattack performance. That’s a minor sin (of omission). Yet there’s more: On November 28, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Assuming the talking points revisions released by ABC News are accurate—and the White House has not challenged them—Carney’s statement was not correct. The State Department did far more than change one word, and it did so in a process involving White House aides. So, White House critics can argue, Carney put out bad information and did not acknowledge that State had massaged the talking points to protect itself from inconvenient questions.

This is not much of cover-up. There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi. My colleague Kevin Drum dismisses this recent Benghazi news (“on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 1.5”). But the White House has indeed been caught not telling the full story. Despite Carney’s statement, there was politically minded handling of the talking points. Yet in today’s hyperpartisan environment, such a matter cannot be evaluated with a sense of proportion. Obama antagonists decry it as a deed most foul, and White House defenders denounce the the critics. The talking points dispute is not a scandal; it’s a mess—a small mess—and not as significant as the actions (and non-actions) that led to Benghazi. Yet no mess is too tiny for scandalmongers in need of material.

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Benghazi Isn’t Watergate. But the White House Didn’t Tell the Full Story.

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Finally, a Real Scandal for Conservatives to Chew On

by Emily Collins Posted on May 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Hey, guess what? Conservatives now have a real scandal to tout! They’ve been complaining for a while that the IRS singled out tea party groups for audits, and it turns out they were right. Today, the IRS fessed up:

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups…”That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out. About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

In this case, conservatives will undoubtedly demand more information about how this happened, who was involved, and when top officials found out about it. And this time, they’ll be right to.

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Finally, a Real Scandal for Conservatives to Chew On

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State Department Forces Texas Law Student to Take Down Instructions for 3-D-Printed Guns

by Aaron Dempsey Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Defense Distributed, the Texas-based company specializing in 3-D-printed plastic firearms, took down its downloadable files on Thursday at the request of the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Control Compliance. The company posted a blueprint for the first fully-operational printed plastic handgun, “The Liberator,” on Monday at its site, DEFCAD; the file was downloaded more than a 100,000 times in its first three days.

In a letter to the company’s founder, Cody Wilson, the State Department alleged that the Defense Distributed’s file-sharing service violated the terms of the Arms Export Control Act, and demanded that it take down 10 of its files, including the Liberator, within three weeks.

“Our theory’s a good one, but I just didn’t ask them and I didn’t tell them what we were gonna do,” Wilson, a University of Texas law student, told Mother Jones. “So I think it’s gonna end up being alright, but for now they’re asserting information control over the technical data, because the Arms Information Control Act governs not just actual arms, but technical data, pictures, anything related to arms.”

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State Department Forces Texas Law Student to Take Down Instructions for 3-D-Printed Guns

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A (Very) Brief Benghazi Timeline Recap

by trasze2aja Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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I don’t want to spend too much time diving down the Benghazi rabbit hole again—seriously, I think I’d rather have my big toe cut off—but I do think it’s worthwhile to very briefly recap the three basic phases of Benghazi and what questions we have about them:

The months leading up to the attacks. Should the State Department have approved more security for both the Tripoli embassy and the Benghazi compound? Were they incompetent not to?

Quite possibly. Certainly, the State Department’s own investigation was scathing on this score (“Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels…resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place”). But there was nothing new about this in yesterday’s hearing, and certainly no evidence of cover-up or scandal. At worst, it was misjudgment that reflects badly on State’s security operations. At the same time, it’s worth keeping in mind that hindsight is always 20-20. There were also plenty of legitimate resource constraints, budget shortfalls, and deliberate policy choices that contributed to this.

The night of the attacks. Was the military response to the Benghazi attacks incompetent and chaotic? That’s possible, but like everyone else, I’ve read through the timelines and the evidence is thin. Republican investigators have continually dug up examples of things they think the military should have done (scrambled F-16s, dispatched FAST teams, etc.) and in every case the military has explained why they made the decisions they did. Gregory Hicks repeated many of these charges yesterday, and he’s obviously angry about what happened that night. But the fact that he’s angry doesn’t make him right. So far, anyway, the military’s explanations have always struck me as pretty reasonable. They certainly sound as though they understand the military realities better than Hicks and the other Monday morning quarterbacks do.

It’s also worth noting that there was simply no conceivable motive for the military not to respond forcefully to the Benghazi attacks. Maybe there was confusion and maybe there were bad decisions, but nothing more.

The months after the September 11 attacks. Did the Obama administration try to cover up what really happened in Benghazi? This is the deepest rabbit hole of all, and the conspiracy theories have flown faster and thicker than I can keep track of. But after eight months of throwing mud against the walls, nothing has stuck yet. For several days after September 11, the intelligence community said that the attacks were preceded by protests, and that turned out to be wrong. But it was just wrong, not a cover-up. The intelligence community also believed—and still does—that the attacks were essentially opportunistic, not the results of weeks or months of planning. And Susan Rice, in her Sunday interviews, infamously mentioned the role of the “Innocence of Muslims” video that had sparked the Cairo protests earlier that day, and it’s fair to say that she probably put too much emphasis on that. But only a little. There was, and maybe still is, evidence that the video played a supporting role.

And of course there are the notorious talking points, which have been subject to a deconstruction effort that would make Jacques Derrida proud. Did the interagency process sand them down a bit too much before the intelligence community released a public version? Perhaps. Were they wrong not to mention the role of Ansar al-Sharia? Perhaps. Should they have been more forthright about calling the attackers “terrorists” rather than just “extremists”? Perhaps.

But again: At most, this is evidence of misjudgment, not cover-up or scandal. And frankly, there’s not much evidence even of serious misjudgment. Nor any motive for it. The Republican theory has always been that Obama didn’t want to admit terrorist involvement because this would reflect badly on him, but this has never made any sense, either politically or practically. There’s just no there there.

Finally, we did hear one new thing yesterday: Gregory Hicks’ claim that he was demoted after he spoke with congressional investigators and questioned the State Department’s handling of the crisis. If that happened, it was wrong and Hicks is right to be angry about it. But I’d remain cautious about this. Hicks is pretty obviously bitter, but even with only his side of the story available to us, we have very little solid evidence of mistreatment. Was he asked not to speak to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) without a lawyer present? Probably, but that’s pretty normal. Did he do it anyway? Apparently so, and it’s not clear why. Did he get an irritated phone call about it from Hillary Clinton’s top aide? He says he did, but that wouldn’t be surprising, and we have only Hicks’ characterization of the conversation so far. Was he demoted to a desk job in retaliation? Maybe, or it could be a routine, temporary assignment while his superiors wait for something to open up for him.

We don’t have the State Department’s side of this because, of course, it’s a personnel matter and they aren’t allowed to talk about it. So I suppose we’ll have to wait on the inevitable leaks. But I’d be very cautious about swallowing Hicks’ story whole. It simply didn’t strike me as wholly credible. But we’ll see.

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A (Very) Brief Benghazi Timeline Recap

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Conservative Immigration Scholar: Black and Hispanic Immigrants Are Dumber Than European Immigrants

by Georgeysm Posted on May 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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Jason Richwine, the co-author of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s controversial study on the supposed $6.3 trillion cost of comprehensive immigration reform, has received much attention and criticism for his 2009 Harvard University dissertation that argued there was “a genetic component” to racial disparities in IQ. But this dissertation wasn’t the first time Richwine had expressed such views publicly. In 2008, he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that “major” ethnic or racial differences in intelligence between the Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants who flocked to the United States at the turn of the 20th century and the immigrants coming to the US today justified severely restricting immigration.

Richwine’s remarks, which he made as a resident fellow at AEI, did not receive much public notice at the time, but they go beyond the arguments presented in his 2009 dissertation. In that dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” which was first reported by Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post, Richwine argued for restricting immigration based on IQ differences, which he believes are partially the result of genetic differences between ethnic groups. In the dissertation’s acknowledgements, Richwine wrote that “no one was more influential” than AEI scholar Charles Murray, co-author of the much-criticized book The Bell Curve, which argued that racial disparities in IQ are partially the result of genetic differences between races. After the Post broke the story about the dissertation, the Heritage Foundation distanced itself from Richwine’s immigration reform study.

At the 2008 talk, Richwine said, “I do not believe that race is insurmountable, certainly not, but it definitely is a larger barrier today than it was for immigrants in the past simply because they are not from Europe.” The 2008 AEI panel focused on a book by immigration reform opponent Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict limits on all immigration. Krikorian’s book, The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal, began with Krikorian stating that the difference between modern immigration and immigration at the turn of the century “is not the characteristics of the newcomers but the characteristics of our society.”

Richwine firmly disagreed with part of Krikorian’s assessment. The “major difference,” he said, was the race of the immigrants: “There are real differences between groups.” He contended that today’s non-white immigrants are dumber. “Race is different in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ,” he said. “Decades of psychometric testing, has indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics and then blacks. These are real differences, and they’re not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason we have to address them in our immigration discussions and our debates.”

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Conservative Immigration Scholar: Black and Hispanic Immigrants Are Dumber Than European Immigrants

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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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Bills That Would Gut Wall Street Reform Overwhelmingly Pass House Committee

by Andrianayhv Posted on May 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, three bills that would gut the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill passed the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) in decisive fashion, with just six members of the 61-member committee voting against all of them.

The three bills passed over serious objections from the Obama administration. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wrote a letter to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the chairman of the committee, urging “members to oppose these bills and others like them that would weaken the important regulatory changes that Wall Street Reform has made to the derivatives market.” A year ago, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made a similar statement against a slate of nearly identical bills.

Financial reform advocates say that the three bills would do serious damage to parts of Dodd-Frank that deal with derivatives, which are financial products with values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates.

Only six of the 28 Democrats on the committee voted against all three of the bills—Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the senior Democratic member of the committee; Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.); Mike Capuano (D-Mass.); Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.); Al Green (D-Tex.); and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). Another six Democrats voted against some of the bills. Sixteen Dems voted in favor of all three bills. Thirty-one of the 33 Republicans on the committee voted for all the bills; Reps. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) abstained on two of the bills.

House Financial Services Committee members received some $14.8 million in contributions from the financial services and banking sectors during the last election cycle.

One of the offending bills would allow certain derivatives that are traded within a corporation to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. The second would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. The third would allow big US-based multinational banks to escape US regulations by operating through international subsidiaries. Financial reform advocates say it is way too early to start messing with Wall Street reform, especially since key parts of Dodd-Frank have yet to go into effect.

In an opening statement before the vote, Waters listed a series of financial scandals in the wake of the 2007 crisis that she argues make strong financial regulations imperative. “These scandals include, but aren’t limited to, money laundering to drug cartels, Libor interest rate manipulation, and the case of the ‘London Whale,'” the nick-name for JPMorgan’s massive trading loss last year, she said.

The bills will now head to the House floor for consideration, and have a good chance of being taken up in the Senate.

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Bills That Would Gut Wall Street Reform Overwhelmingly Pass House Committee

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