2004 Congressional Scorecard

5/20/2004

Executive Summary

The state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) are nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest advocacy organizations. U.S. PIRG is the national advocacy office for state PIRGs across the country. With a combination of professional expertise, citizen power, and dogged persistence, the state PIRGs and U.S. PIRG work to preserve the environment, protect consumers, and promote good government. Now in its tenth year, the annual Congressional Scorecard has been one of the many citizenship tools used by U.S. PIRG and the state PIRGs to preserve the environment, protect consumers, and revitalize participation in our democratic process. Going door-to-door in cities and towns across the country, U.S. PIRG and state PIRG staff are distributing this year's Scorecard to one million households. The 2004 Scorecard looks at the most important public interest votes taken between January 22, 2003 and November 21, 2003 in the House and the Senate. These votes determined the direction of policy on critical issues, ranging from environmental preservation to health care to consumer protections.

The Continuing Attacks on the Environment & Consumers

For more than three decades, Americans have shown overwhelming support for a clean, healthy environment and strong consumer protections. Americans have worked together to protect our air, land, and water by convincing Congress to pass cornerstone environmental laws such as the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. Consumers demanded that Congress tighten corporate fiscal accountability, limit bank holds on consumers’ checks, require toy manufacturers to label toys for potential choke hazards, and criminalize identity theft.

Most Americans stand united behind strong environmental and consumer protections. Yet Congress and the Bush administration are helping the oil, timber, banking and a number of other industries roll back protections that Americans have come to expect through a growing series of attacks.

Recent Congressional Attacks
These attacks often focus on taking away the ability of local communities to pass strong environmental and consumer protections. For example:

• The fiscal year 2004 spending bill included a provision that prohibits all states but California from reducing air pollution from a number of sources.

• The Medicare legislation signed into law in December 2003 includes a provision that restricts the ability of states to use successful prescription drug-buying cooperatives to negotiate lower prices for consumers.

• The administration and Congress are backing sweeping proposals to eviscerate consumer rights under state laws by moving most class action lawsuits from state courts to federal courts.

• New legislation signed into law would permanently limit a state’s authority to enact tough credit reporting and identity theft legislation.

Behind the Closed Doors of the White House
Three years into his administration, President Bush and his appointees are still allowing big corporations to weaken our environmental laws so they can pollute our air and poison our water, cut down our national forests and make taxpayers, rather than polluters, pay to clean up toxic wastes. Recent anti-environmental actions include:

• Forty-three states now have fish consumption advisories in effect because of mercury pollution in local waterways. While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration warned women and children to limit their consumption of tuna because of mercury contamination, EPA has proposed a new plan to weaken and delay efforts to clean up mercury emissions from the nation’s power plants.

• More than 2.5 million people have submitted comments to the Forest Service about the popular Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted in 2001 to protect 58.5 million acres of wild national forest land from most commercial logging and road-building. Instead of protecting these wild places, the Forest Service has failed to implement the Roadless Rule and removed protections for the Tongass National Forest.

• This year, America's taxpayers will pay almost $1.3 billion to clean up abandoned toxic waste sites, more than four times the amount they paid in 1995, the year Superfund's “polluter pays” fees expired. The Bush administration has failed to support reinstating the “polluter pays” fees that help fund cleanup of abandoned toxic waste sites, slowed the pace of cleanups, and forced taxpayers to pick up more of the bill for the cleanups that are happening.

U.S. PIRG: Keeping Watch
The Bush administration and Congress should reverse their present course—keep our air, land and water clean and protect the last remaining wild places for future generations. U.S. PIRG will continue to be in the halls of Congress and in front of the Bush administration fighting for consumers and the environment.

Public Interest Heroes & Zeros
Three members of the Senate and 20 members of the House took the public interest position on every vote that U.S. PIRG tracked for the 2004 Scorecard—they are considered Public Interest Heroes. Six-teen members of the Senate and 59 members of the House did not take the public interest position on any of the votes that U.S. PIRG tracked—they are considered Public Interest Zeros. Scores reflect votes taken between January 22, 2003 and November 21, 2003.