112th Congress
While there is much talk about the lack of bipartisanship in Congress, legislation is pending that both sides of the House agree upon. Congressman Mike Thompson, a California Democrat, and Congressman Jim Gerlach, a Pennsylvania Republican, have authored legislation that garnered 300 House co-sponsors, including majorities of Democrats and Republicans, to restore policies that support land conservation.
The Arcata Fire Protection District has been awarded more than $600,000 in federal grant funds to update the Humboldt County Fire Radio Network.
Congressman Mike Thompson announced Friday that the grant was awarded through the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
The grant will be used to update mountaintop radio repeaters, the dispatch console in the command center and the infrastructure that supports it.
Tea Party politics and trillion-dollar-plus federal budget deficits have turned this year's transportation bill upside down.
Five-year transportation bills are traditionally bipartisan earmark fests that send hundreds of billions of dollars for highways, bridges, transit and other infrastructure to California and other states.
The Republican spending plan, known as House Resolution 1, is a continuing resolution designed to keep the federal government funded through the end of the current fiscal year in lieu of a new budget.
Congressman Mike Thompson (CA-1) is leading a group of representatives in calling on President Obama to protect the U.S. agricultural workforce from a harmful “enforcement-only” approach to immigration reform.
In a letter to the president, Thompson and his colleagues in the House wrote that if only mandatory worker verification methods like E-Verify were implemented without regard to workers and employers, it would risk the economic vitality of the entire American agricultural industry.
Representatives Mike Thompson (CA-1) and Lynn Woolsey (CA-6) today introduced an amendment to ban drilling on of California's North Coast. H.R. 3408, the Protecting Investment in Oil Shale the Next Generation of Environmental, Energy, and Resource Security Act would automatically open the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, Alaska's Bristol Bay, Southern California, and the Virginia coast for oil and gas leasing. The bill could also potentially open up California's North Coast to drilling - even if the state objects to offshore drilling in the region.