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Pennsylvania Member of Congress Tracking Report (MoCTrack)


Welcome to the Pennsylvania Member of Congress Tracking Report for the week ending May 19, 2019.  It was a big week of voting, with some excellent action in the House and some frankly demoralizing confirmations in the Senate! If you like to read the report from top to bottom, you can find it here.  But if you prefer to visit individual sections, follow the bolded links below.
 
Don’t forget to check out our at-a-glance vote trackers for all of our legislators.  Visit here to see a running tally of how our PA House voted, and here for our two Senators. Each sheet has links that bring you to short explainers for all votes tracked. We update it each week with the bills covered in MoCTrack, and it is sortable by topic. And while you’re at it, check out the Trump-Tracker, the one number index provided by the fine folks at FiveThirtyEight to assess how our legislators stack up in terms of agreement with the Trump agenda.
 
VOTES
Both houses were in session this week
  1. The House passed a bill to lower Rx drug prices by changing rules around generics and bolster Obamacare against the Trump Administration’s sabotage efforts. Our MoCs had a lot to say about the passage of this bill to protect our care.
  2. The House also passed the Equality Act, to prohibit discrimination of LGBTQ people!  We also had a good bit of commentary from our congresspeople about that vote.
  3. The last big bill of the week concerns tribal rights… and our President’s desire to step in and help some business associates. It caused one of the most interesting vote breakdowns of this 116th Congress thus far.
  4. The Senate voted on the confirmation of Rod Rosenstein’s replacement, the number two at the Department of Justice.
  5. The Senate also pushed through three new judicial confirmations – we have a new circuit court judge who wrote horrible things about the LGBTQ community, a Louisiana judge with a vicious anti-choice background, and a new Texas judge who is a “birther.”  What a trio to get lifetimes seats in the judiciary!
 
TWEETS and MEDIA COVERAGE
Twitter was hopping this week, and we have a wide array of topics that saw a lot of action!  Our GOP MoCs provided coverage of President Trump’s immigration speech/proposal, while the Democrats shared their thoughts on the anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and the assaults on reproductive freedom coming from a handful of states.  MoCs of both parties shared their thoughts on Police Week and Infrastructure Week. And, as always, we have a round-up of promoted legislation from most of our MoCs and our assorted awesomeness section, highlighting the most notable tweets of the week.

So that you don’t have to read ALL the papers, we have volunteers who review the traditional media coverage of our Senators.  Senator Casey talked about Meals on Wheels, the awful anti-choice judicial nominee, and his bill for cutting child care costs. Senator Toomey did some economy cheerleading, had a lot to say about tariffs, and promoted his bill to mandate the death penalty for people who kill police officers.
 
OTHER SECTIONS
The Committee Corner was a busy place to be this week! We have contributions of our Pennsylvania legislators in hearings about…  In our Learning about Legislation segment, we take a dive into the recently passed Climate Action Now Act, courtesy of our environmental contributor… and while it may have passed the House, it needs some help to get to the floor of the Senate  Lastly, our Call to Action this week is to get to the polls for our election on Tuesday, May 21st!  And we also take a look at the concept of cross-filing.
 
PA-01
Bucks and Montgomery Counties, you know we wouldn’t forget about you! We have all your extra Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick coverage right here. He spent SO MUCH time this week doing Photo-ops, but we have the scant handful of policy content tweets for you, along with his traditional media coverage.
 
These MoCs work for you, so keep up to date with what they are up to! Read MoCTrack to get all the votes and quotes!​​

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.