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Dear Friends, Congress used its first week back in session allowing common sense legislation to expire, preparing an assault on the Bill of Rights, and generally ignoring the vast challenges facing the nation. As you probably already know, the assault weapons ban expired on Monday. The Republican leadership, as expected, refused to allow a single vote on the floor to extend the ban. Instead, on the day the assault weapons ban expired, we voted on the following national priority items: - Renaming a post office in New York - Renaming a Veterans Affairs building in Texas - Expressed support for freedom in Hong Kong - Recognized the birthday of Bill Clinton Meanwhile, the Republican leadership busied itself planning their next assault on the Bill of Rights, a law that would limit the Supreme Court's ability to uphold the Constitution by stopping them from overturning certain acts of Congress. In this particular case, the issue was flag burning. Delay and Co. tried the same thing several weeks ago when they proposed a bill that would block the Supreme Court from weighing in on laws banning gay marriage. No matter what you think about gay marriage or flag burning as issues, these proposed bills are outrageous assaults on our Constitution. There has never before been such an effort in Congress to take power from the Supreme Court and bypass the Constitution. Without judicial oversight, our Bill of Rights is just a meaningless piece of paper. While the GOP was preparing this un-American assault on our justice system, they had the gall to deem the rest of last week "John Edwards Appreciation Week", presenting a number of bills designed to poke at Edwards' background as a trial lawyer. It was a shameful attempt to disguise a political smear program as a legislative agenda, especially considering their clear disdain for justice in other arenas. After a 6-week recess, many members of Congress came back to address some of America's more serious issues --- doing something about our outrageous national debt and the deteriorating situation in Iraq, for example. Unfortunately, House leadership had other ideas. This election is the most important of our lifetimes. Our future is 46 days away. -- Jay Inslee
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