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Pennsylvania Member of Congress Tracking Report (MoCTrack)


​​​Welcome to the Pennsylvania Member of Congress Tracking Report for the week ending July 14, 2019.  The House saw a pair of important votes, and the Senate plowed through a quartet of confirmations. 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.
 
It’s now been 6 months since the start of the 116th Congress, so it’s worth taking a scroll through to see your MoC’s legislative activity and we have special sites for that info. Visit here to see a running tally of how our PA House members voted, and here for our two Senators. Each resource has links that bring you to short explainers for all votes tracked.
 
VOTES
Both houses were back in session this week after their July 4th/week-long break
  1. The House took on the 2020 Defense spending package. We have a lot of spirited PA MoC feedback from that vote.
  2. Remember that video clip that was circulating last month of Jon Stewart getting furious at Congress about a 9/11-related bill that was stalled? The House took that vote this week, and we have their feedback about the permanent reauthorization of the fund.
  3. The Senate pushed through three bureaucratic confirmations this week – we have an EPA position filled by a former corporate attorney for Dow Chemical; a charter school lobbyist filling a position at the Department of Labor; and a small-state-level bureaucrat with no federal experience to help out Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education.
  4. The Senate voted on a judge to fill a vacancy in the Ninth Circuit, and he managed to get three different progressive judicial advocacy groups riled about three separate reasons why he is completely unsuitable.  
 
TWEETS and MEDIA COVERAGE
We’re happy to announce that we have a new MoCTrack volunteer helping out with our Twitter coverage. @ElastigirlVotes is a Twitter machine, and we hope you’ll enjoy what she brings us each week.  This week we provide a digest of what our MoCs had to say about the continued GOP attacks on the ACA, their reactions to the litany of horrors about how migrants and children are being treated by the Trump Administration, MoC Independence Day wishes, their promotion of existing legislation, and we close out with tweets of the week.

We also have traditional media coverage for our senators.  Senator Casey talked about the threats to the ACA in MANY media outlets, but we’ve provided his best quotes on that topic. Senator Toomey fretted about tariffs, bolstered the Fed Chair, and complimented the Berks ICE facility where detained children are kept here in Pennsylvania for its “nice and comfortable environment.”
 
OTHER SECTIONS
Committee Corner this week runs down a selection of hearings held last week – like one on the Trump Administration’s response to the 2017 storms that ravaged Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands – and provides links to video and supporting documents. We have additional information on some hearings of note coming up this week (Russian Disinformation Attacks on Elections sounds particularly interesting). Lastly, our Call to Action this week is for a bill introduced in the Senate titled the “Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act.”  It’s brand new, and we need your help to pressure our legislators to move it along quickly.  It’s designed as a companion to the funding bill that passed in late June, and it provides the humanitarian guidelines that were missing from that funding package.
 
PA-01
If you are looking for extra Fitzpatrick coverage, we have it here in the PA-01 version of MoCTrack. We have extra tweets, a teensy bit of traditional media (Fitz talks about ticks, clean water, and Ukraine), and some scripting for this week’s CTA that is designed especially with our representative in mind. And in case you missed it, we have the full text of Fitzpatrick’s recent Op-Ed about immigration and the abuses at the border.  It has disappeared behind a paywall, so we have it in full in MoCTrack. And because I cannot let his awful Op-Ed be promoted without offering a retort, check out this thread from Indivisible activist Laura Rose that demolishes his position!
 
We provide MoCTrack each week so you can follow the votes and quotes coming from our Pennsylvania legislators.  These MoCs work for you, so keep up to date with what they are doing and saying! 

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.