Foreclosures, formaldehyde, and contempt of Congress

Dear friend:

The debate in Congress continues over the escalating foreclosure rate.

According to the Associated Press, mortgage lending problems contributed mightily to the economic slowdown, but the stimulus package enacted by Congress did little to address foreclosures. That may change shortly.

The Washington political trade rags are looking for any hint of how an eventual vote in the House will go. The Hill thought a vote on a vaguely similar bankruptcy issue might be a clue. The Politico wondered whether a few Republicans from districts hard hit by foreclosures might break party ranks to support the bill. The Boston Globe examined the arguments for and against legislation to allow bankruptcy courts to modify mortgages.

The Politico also examined the role of Durham's Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) in the debate over predatory mortgage lending and Congress' response to the foreclosure crisis. I have relied greatly on CRL's expertise on lending issues for the five years that I have been in Congress.

The Science and Technology Committee's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight began looking at whether the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was too eager to please when examining health threats from environmental exposures. The CDC is now feverishly editing a report on contaminated sites in the Great Lakes Basin, after postponing the planned release of the report last July. And a year ago, the CDC issued a "health assessment" of the risk of formaldehyde exposure for Katrina and Rita victims living in FEMA "travel trailers." Apparently at FEMA's urging, the CDC considered only the risk of short term exposure, which is exposure of less than two weeks. There are about 100,000 people still living in FEMA trailers, two and a half years after Katrina and Rita. Independent tests showed that the formaldehyde fumes were as much as 75 times greater than the level allowed by workplace safety regulations.

Neither CDC nor FEMA have liked the attention. They've had a lot not to like, including articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Washington Post, the New Orleans Times Picayune, Salon, USA Today, Huffington Post, and U.S. News and World Report's blog.

One of the articles described my criticisms of FEMA and CDC as "scalding," and CNN described my interview with them as "harsh words" for FEMA, but I was being nice compared to this editorial in the New York Times.

Last week, FEMA and the CDC announced that they were moving everyone out of the trailers as soon as possible because of the formaldehyde exposure. That made me feel better about being so mean.

And the House last week finally acted on the refusal by the Bush Administration to cooperate with Congress' oversight investigation into the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys. There is ample evidence that the U.S. Attorneys were fired because they refused to make prosecutorial decisions based on political considerations. Rewarding friends and punishing enemies in criminal prosecutions is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and the rule of law. Elections have consequences, but elections in America should never have those consequences.

The Bush Administration is claiming "executive privilege" in refusing to allow aides to testify or produce documents about the decision to fire the U.S. Attorneys. The courts have recognized that some discussions between the President and some aides about some topics may be privileged, but the privilege that the Bush Administration now claims goes well beyond any privilege ever recognized by any court. Most important, a court should decide what documents or testimony is covered by the privilege, not the President by decree.

The contempt vote was probably covered more in progressive blogs than in the traditional media. This article was on the front page of Daily Kos. Here's the article from the Washington Post.

The Washington Post's blog profiled John Conyer's role in the contempt vote, but said he did have helpers.

Best,

Brad