Presidential Politics Overshadows Bipartisan ACHIEVEMENTS By Congress

Some highlights include:

• Passing the largest expansion of GI Bill education benefits since the program was created in 1945.
• Providing the largest veterans’ health care funding increase in history.
• Doing more to help working families send their kids to college than any Congress since 1965 by increasing the maximum Pell Grant by $750 and cutting college loan rates in half over the next five years.
• Preventing the President from cutting all student aid programs except Pell Grants and Work Study.
• Increasing the minimum wage for the first time in a decade.
• Extending unemployment insurance benefits to help strengthen the economy and help 3.5 million Americans.
• Passing a comprehensive response to the mortgage crisis, helping 400,000 American families facing foreclosure, helping communities recover, providing a tax credit for first-time home buyers, and helping restore market confidence in Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, which hold half the nation’s mortgage debt.
• Renewing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which helps to ensure that 7.1 million children can get the healthcare they need.
• Providing $50 million to help State high risk insurance pools increase access for almost 200,000 people who cannot obtain group coverage because they are medically high risk.
• Providing a 50% increase in funding, over the President’s objection, to expand dental health care around the country.
• Blocking the President’s attempt to chisel $18 billion out of federal healthcare funding for low-income children & seniors.
• Ensuring that Wisconsin seniors can continue to use the SeniorCare program for prescription drug coverage.
• Providing a tax cut for 19 million middle-income American families facing the AMT in 2007.
• Banning the use of genetic information to discriminate against individuals
• Passing the first new fuel efficiency standard in 32 years, requiring that cars be made more fuel efficient, and making an historic commitment to the development of alternative energy sources, like bio-fuels.
• Banning toxic toys and children’s products from China and other countries and strengthening the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
• Providing 3,000 New Border Patrol agents and new border security infrastructure.
• Saving the critical COPS program, proposed for elimination by the President.
• Implementing extensive lobbying and ethics reform.
• Creating the new independent Office of Congressional Ethics.
• Extending and expanding MILC, the dairy price safety net that protects dairy farmers.

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