Pennsylvania Member of Congress Tracking Report (MoCTrack)
Click here for the FULL REPORT for the week ending January 13, 2019.
Welcome to the Pennsylvania Member of Congress Tracking Report for the week ending January 13, 2019. This week was an interesting contrast between lots of action in the House met with a minority rebellion in the Senate. If you want to read the full report in its old format, visit this link And now that there has been voting in both houses, both of our weekly-updated vote trackers have gone LIVE! Visit here to see a running tally of how our 18 PA House members voted, and here for our two Senators.
VOTES – we saw a handful of votes in both Houses.
- The House voted on a cluster of bills to fund various departments that have been closed by the shutdown.
- The House Democrats were joined by a few GOP members in passing a resolution that enables them to defend the Affordable Care Act in its legal challenges (since Trump’s Justice Department isn’t doing so).
- Both the House and the Senate passed a bill to pay the furloughed workers as well as those working without pay all the back pay they are owed as soon as the government re-opens.
- A group of 43 Senate Democrats and Independents have been enacting a strategy called “withholding consent” to try and force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring the bills to end the shutdown up for a vote.
We start out our traditional media coverage with a look at the two statements issued by our senators in response to President Trump’s prime time address about border security and the “crisis” at the southern border. We have the best Tweets of the week from our Senators, as well as a selection of offerings from lawmakers, media and our constituent response of the week. Most of the newspaper media coverage of each of our Senators focused on shutdown talk, but Senator Casey also had feedback on Elizabeth Warren’s presidential announcement, and Senator Toomey made a statement about Earned Income Tax Credits.
OTHER SECTIONS
In Learning about Legislation this week we take a look at where our senators landed in terms of committee assignments. For our Legislation of Interest section, we look at more of the day one legislative priorities of our PA MoCs in the House (some hadn’t gotten their bills in last week). And for our Call to Action segment, we look at what a bipartisan group of younger, tech-savvy MoCs have in mind to help modernize our IT infrastructure and improve our cybersecurity on the federal level.
PA-01
Bucks and Montgomery Counties, we still haven’t forgotten about you. MoCTrack got its start in early 2017 by following Rep. Fitzpatrick, and we still produce a version of the report that has extra Fitzpatrick coverage. This is the version with extra Fitz goodies… like his Twitter presence and his “in the news” segment… and wow was he all over the national news this week!
Despite the shutdown, Congress was incredibly busy last week. Make sure you know what is being done in your name! Read MoCTrack, because they work for you!
This is consolidated document with all of our Calls to Action related to legislation. These are bills worth calling our legislators to support, one from each week's report.
This is where we will keep our archive of older, previous weeks' MoCTrack Reports from the 116th Congress.
