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Saturday, April 23, 2016

GOP, leave the Library of Congress alone and work on important matters!

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COMMENTS: 
*  Can't pass a infrastructure bill, can't pass a jobs bill. Can't even pass a G.D. budget, but lets go after library catalog labels.
*  I am so freaking tired of them wasting time, and money on thing like this. FYI linguistics a term changes meaning over time. I.E. Gay use to mean happy it evolved into a label on people. Same as sick doesn't always mean actually being sick. This is the most ridiculous waste of time ever.
*  Who cares like the library changing this will not affect the term used throughout our society. How about Undocumented Alien but most here in this country will continue to use the term illegal which they in actual fact are.  Our politicians sure spend a lot of time on useless bills while ignoring the real work that is needed like finishing the process on all the approve and consent job for a variety of federal nominees from judges to department heads not even counting the SCOTUS judge opening. Yet they have the time to hold bogus committees on PP and Benghazi as well as stupid bills like this.  They act like the library of congress making these changes that they will now be forced to use the new terms forgetting they have freedom of speech.  This is showing how they can govern as promised by McConnel
*  What really enrages us about Washington, Rep. Black, is legislators who try to score political points with their "base" by opposing every action of government agencies that they happen to disagree with with legislation. What an effing waste of time and money your amendment is, ma'am.
*  I have always known republicans are not smart people.
*   Changes such as this should be the sole responsibility of the library. Repub thugs need to find something real to worry about. They are acting like fascists trying to censor the greatest library on the planet.
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GOP takes on Library of Congress on immigration terminology
By Andrew Taylor, April 22, 2016

Congress may not be able to reform the immigration system, fix the broken tax code or even pass a budget. But it's telling the Library of Congress how to label immigrants living in the country illegally.

That's how conservative Republicans are responding to a move by the library to drop the term "illegal alien" in favor of "noncitizens" or "unauthorized immigration" for cataloging and search purposes. The move came in response to a petition from the American Library Association to change immigration-related search terms to make them less judgmental.

The library's move, announced in a three-page statement last month, was met with outrage from conservatives, who asked that a provision to block it be added to legislation that funds the legislative branch and its agencies, which include the Library of Congress.

"This needless policy change by the Library of Congress embodies so much of what taxpayers find enraging about Washington," said Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., in a statement introducing similar legislation. "By trading common-sense language for sanitized political-speak, they are caving to the whims of left-wing special interests and attempting to mask the grave threat that illegal immigration poses to our economy, our national security, and our sovereignty."

The library makes cataloging changes 3,000-4,000 times a year, says Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the top Democrat on the legislative funding panel. She says the move inserts a "poison pill" into a normally nonpartisan annual funding bill.

"The Library is in the business of language and nomenclature and should be free to make these decisions outside of the political spectrum," said Wasserman Schultz. She likened it to dropping archaic words like "negro" and "oriental."

"What is so controversial about asking the library to use references that are found in the United States Code?" countered Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., who inserted the provision into the spending bill this week.

In fact, the library said in a March 26 statement that "the phrase illegal aliens has taken on a pejorative tone in recent years" and added that "aliens" can be confusing since it can also mean beings from another planet.

The bill funding the operations of Congress is the most obscure and little-watched of the 12 annual appropriations bills, making news only because it contains a freeze on lawmakers' pay and permits sledding on the Capitol grounds. But the legislative branch measure is closely watched by congressional leaders and is one of a handful of the bills that's usually guaranteed to enjoy bipartisan support. Injecting politics into it is frowned upon.

The immigration issue is but one of many policy topics that are added to the annual spending bills. As the appropriations work gets under way, the Senate is in the unusual position of taking the lead. The appropriations process, once a dominant feature of Congress' annual schedule, has withered in recent years, with Congress resorting to rolling the traditionally separate measures into a single giant, must-pass spending negotiated in secret at year's end, rather than through open debate and amendment over many months.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made reviving the appropriations process a priority. The first few bills to make it through the Senate pipeline have been mostly free of what Democrats call "poison pill riders," despite opportunities to try to block environmental regulations or President Barack Obama's mostly symbolic executive order on gun violence.
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