The Ethics Committee has been inoperative for essentially all of this Congress and shows no signs of addressing numerous matters that have been and are before the committee.

The danger is that they are going to talk about a variety of proposals that will look more like window dressing than an institutional change in the way they do business.

I don't need to remind you about the scandals. You have unique power to restore our faith in elected leaders.

I really believe that states are laboratories of democracy.

I never thought I'd see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.

In Maine, we are fortunate to have a Clean Elections system that allows legislators to turn down corporate special interest money. At the national level, Congress should follow Maine's example by empowering the voices of small donors.

Incredibly, oil and gas companies don't have to pay certain environmental costs that amount to small change to them, while an offshore wind project start-up is faced with fees that could mean the difference between building a wind farm and packing up and going home.

I love to come home and work on one of my other jobs. Just to remember that the floors gotta be mopped, and that everything isn't centered around what you fought about in Washington last week.

The FCC can and indeed should do more to protect the Internet as the free and open environment people have come to expect and depend on - which is why we need to stand up to attacks on the FCC's authority.

It's clear that Rep. DeLay saw the writing on the wall and expects to be implicated like his close aides.