The attacks on public safeguards continue in the 109th Congress: Unfunded Mandates: This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act. The original vision of UMRA was a simplistic but devastating principle: "no money, no mandate." Making important federal safeguards, such as the Clean Water Act, contingent on full federal funding would have put many safeguards at stake, but state and local governments have been duped into believing a bigger, badder UMRA would somehow help them, when it would actually imperil many people whom the state and local governments are supposed to serve. Fortunately, the version that passed ten years ago did not incorporate the "no money, no mandate" principle. Congressional Republicans, reflecting on how devastating the White House budget and preemption policies have been to state and local governments, very likely see a beefed-up UMRA as a means to weaken public safeguards -- thereby benefiting the corporate sector -- while simultaneously recovering states' rights credibility. One very important step in that direction is currently before Congress right now: the Senate budget resolution contains a provision that would subject UMRA points of order in the Senate to a 60-vote override requirement. DHS Above the Law: Meanwhile, the House has pushed the must-pass Iraq war supplemental out the door, with a particularly ugly rider attached to it like a barnacle: the provisions of H.R. 418, the Sensenbrenner immigration bill, which includes provisions that would empower the Department of Homeland Security to waive any and all law in the course of securing the nation's borders and removing obstacles to the detection of illegal immigrants. Although the press has largely characterized the measure (when it deigns to report on the subject at all) as though it merely (!) waives environmental law in order to hasten completion of a small section of fencing near San Diego, the language is in fact drafted much more broadly that that. Click here for more information. Politics