The explanation that Chris Matthews offers for his obscene and idiotic slander against Senator Ted Cruz is rather like saying, “The purpose of a rapist is to make women reexamine their preconcieved notions, therefore I’m comfortable calling Chris Matthews a rapist.”

Terrorism is the intentional targeting and killing of innocent civilians to achieve political objectives through widespread terror. Matthews knows that. He’s only pretending to be stupid because he knows what his audience likes. 

The House is expected to overwhelmingly approve a bill this week, likely support from some Democrats, to defund the Internal Revenue Service’s implementation of Obamacare and limit its 46 powers to collect taxes, distribute subsidies, collect information, and enforce compliance with the health-care law.

Representative Tom Price of Georgia introduced H.R. 2009, the “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act,” to bar the IRS from implementing or enforcing any component of the health law.

“President Obama’s Washington health care takeover allows a discredited government agency to be involved in some of the most personal decisions of our lives,” Price, a physician, said. “The IRS has proven either unwilling or unable to fairly and prudently enforce current laws and regulations of the federal government. How can we possibly trust them to implement a massive takeover of health care?”

But the House won’t be stopping there. In addition, the House Appropriations Committee has approved legislation that would cut the IRS’ overall budget 30 percent below its request and imposes requirements for strict oversight of its activities.

The Appropriates Committee cites numerous examples of “IRS’ troubles” that it says “are neither superficial nor simple” in its report accompanying the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill that contains IRS funding for 2014.

Chairman Harold Rogers (R., Ky.) has put the IRS on notice that it will not tolerate wasteful IRS spending or “inappropriate singling out of certain tax-exempt groups based on their political beliefs.”

“The Committee has taken steps to begin reforming the agency by reducing the IRS’ appropriation by 24 percent compared to the fiscal year 2013 continuing resolution level, which is $3.9 billion, or 30 percent, below the budget request,” the report says.

In addition to significant cuts to the agency’s funding, the bill requires detailed reporting on agency spending, listing the following “terms and conditions”:

• Withholds 10 percent of the IRS’ already-reduced enforcement appropriation until all of the recommendations contained in the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s (TIGTA) report on inappropriate criteria being used to identify tax-exempt applications for review are fully implemented.
• Prohibits funds for conferences until all of TIGTA’s recommendations regarding conferences are implemented.
• Prohibits funds for employee bonuses and awards until the IRS, with the assistance of the Office of Personnel Management, has determined the IRS’ employee recognition programs actually improve employee performance and productivity.
• Requires extensive reporting on IRS spending.
• Prohibits funds for the production of videos that have not been reviewed for cost, topic, tone, and purpose and certified to be appropriate.
• Provides TIGTA with $5,462,000 above the budget request to enhance its audit and investigative oversight of the IRS.
• The Committee continues to be concerned with the IRS’ role in implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate in particular. At a time when the IRS has demonstrated little ability to self-police or self-correct, the IRS is on the precipice having even more authority over policing Americans’ health coverage.
   

The Committee finds this expansion of IRS authority to be unacceptable and, therefore, prohibits funding to implement the individual mandate and prohibits transfers from the Department of Health and Human Services to fund the IRS’ implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
 

At a Ways and Means committee hearing this morning about Obamacare implementation, acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said that he would rather stay on his current health-care plan than the one provided under the law his agency will oversee. Werfel was responding to a question about why the IRS employees union had asked for an exemption from the law.

“For a federal employee, I think it is more likely — and I can speak for myself — I prefer to stay with the current policy that I’m pleased with rather than go through a change if I don’t need to go through that change,” he told Texas Republican congressman Sam Johnson. He expected that most IRS employees would agree with his assessment.

Overall, Werfel said that people who are satisfied with their current coverage are “probably in a better position to stick with that coverage.”

Mike and Ian object to Chris Matthews’s description of Senator Ted Cruz as a “terrorist,” but he seemed quite pleased with it last night.

Matthews initially caveated his description, calling Cruz a “a political terrorist,” but later appeared to abandon that qualification when pressed on it by Republican strategist Steve Schmidt. Schmidt disagreed with Matthews’ use, saying he was “uncomfortable with the word”; Matthews snapped back, “Then don’t use it — use your words, I’m comfortable with it.”

“The purpose of a terrorist — and you can use different meanings than blowing bombs — is to cause chaos, and to bring down a government because of the chaotic situation where no one has any trust in institutions,” Matthews explained. “You tell me how that’s not what he’s doing here.”

Mike: It helps me sleep at night to think that Chris Matthews is in a tingly legged class of his own, but, alas, his calling Ted Cruz a “terrorist” seems to have been derivative. On Morning Joe yesterday, Daily Beast editor Tina Brown beat Matthews to labeling Cruz a traitor:

Jon Favreau’s written a great piece in the Daily Beast about this whole trend now about not the small-government conservative, but the no-government conservative. That is what Cruz is a member of. This is the Taliban.

Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I think you can make the argument that a politician is extreme without calling him John Walker Lindh. Which, I suppose, means I will never have a show on MSNBC. Dream dashed.

I am very opposed to Obamacare — most particularly the centralized control element that will ruin medicine as it allows the government to engage in social engineering under the guise of providing healthcare. But I am not comfortable with trying to convince anyone not to buy health insurance. 

That is the message of FreedomWorks in a “Burn Your Obamacare Card” ad campaign:

Like compulsory military service, the health care draft will conscript private citizens to carry out a national goal dictated by Washington, and the burden will fall especially hard on young people . . . If all of us, especially millennials, were to become health care draft resisters, we could hasten Obamacare’s inevitable collapse and pave the way for a patient-centered system.

Clever, but very misguided. If the ad convinces someone not to buy health insurance, who then gets hit by a truck, FW will be a proximate cause of the financial pickle he or she will be in. It also sends the bitter message that putting people at significant financial risk is worth the price of stopping the law. Bad politics. Misguided emphasis.

An opinion article along the same lines by Dean Clancy in the Washington Times is far more responsible as it also explains how to get health coverage outside the exchanges. That should be a primary focus of the campaign rather than just “civil disobedience” part — since more people are likely to see the ad than read Clancy’s longer piece and people can get hurt if they go insurance naked. I strongly suggest a tweak of the ad along those lines.

West Virginia state senator Evan Jenkins announced yesterday he was switching parties and becoming a Republican. According to former congressman Artur Davis, Jenkins isn’t alone:

“It happens all the time in these more conservative states,” Davis says of Democrats becoming Republicans. “The reality is that the press rarely notes it.”

“In the state of Alabama, something like thirteen to fourteen elected Democrats have switched parties since 2010,” he continues. “The Alabama Republican-party chairman was telling me last year that at one point virtually every white Democrat in the Alabama legislature had reached out to them, with one or two exceptions,” to discuss switching to the GOP.

Read my full story here. 

July, you might be forgiven for thinking, was not a great month for Democrats’ outreach to women. Between San Diego mayor Bob Filner’s sexual harassment scandal, and the never-ending saga that is New York City politics these days, thanks to Eliot Spitzer of prostitute fame and Anthony Weiner’s newest sexting revelations, American women could well have been thinking that “R-e-s-p-e-c-t” was not exactly representative of the Democrat party’s attitude toward women.

But according to the Democrat National Committee, July was a terrible month for Republican outreach to women. Why? Well, because in some states, Republicans dared to make abortion slightly less conveniently accessible:

Governors across the country are signing legislation that severely limits women’s access to health care—and they are often doing it with no notice, late at night or hidden as part of larger unrelated bills. Why? Because these Governors and state legislatures know these types of restrictions that severely limit access to health care are not what the women in their states want.

Take a look at what the GOP has been doing in their attempt to reach out to women this July:

In Texas, Governor Rick Perry signed legislation that would close all but 5 of the 42 abortion clinics in the state requiring women to travel unreasonable distances making it almost impossible for some women to access these clinics.  [Politico,7/18/13]

In North Carolina, Governor Pat McCrory signed legislation that seriously limits access to abortions by eliminating abortion insurance coverage for city and county employees and barring state residents from paying for the coverage through state health exchange, among other restrictions. [Washington Post,7/29/13]

And the DNC memo continues on in the same vein, and if you’re in the market for the penance of reading deadly dull press releases, you can read the whole thing here.

First, one quick refresher: Forty-six percent of women are pro-life, according to a May Gallup survey. Only 47 percent – a mere point more! – are pro-choice. That means Republicans are reaching out to a heck of a lot of women by placing restrictions on access to abortion.

That aside, what does this say about the Democrats’ view of women? Don’t women voters, even those who are pro-choice, sometimes care about other issues besides abortion? Don’t they care about education and jobs and national security and the economy and the national debt and oh, a gazillion other political issues?

The reality is that most Americans support some restrictions on abortion.  A July Huffington Post/YouGov poll (and no, that mention of the Huffington Post was not a typo) found that 59 percent of Americans backed a federal ban on abortions after twenty weeks. And a July Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll found that “More women than men supported the state bans [that made abortions after twenty weeks illegal], 46 percent to 40 percent.”

When it comes to what many women want, the DNC is out of touch.

House Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte provided some new hints about how House Republicans plan to tackle immigration in a packet provided to colleagues offering instruction on how to talk about the issue over the August recess.

The document, obtained by National Review Online, includes a summary of all of the piece-by-piece bills that have been reported out of the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees. But its most newsworthy section is about a bill that hasn’t been written:

House Republicans are currently discussing a way forward on how to provide legal status to unlawful immigrants living in our country. However, the current unlawful immigrant population is diverse, so the solutions may vary. For example, while some knowingly broke our immigration laws, others were brought illegally to the U.S. As children by their parents. These children came here through no fault of their own and many of them know no other home than the United States.

Unlike the Senate immigration bill, we should not create a special pathway to citizenship for those who knowingly broke our immigration laws. It’s unfair to those who have waited in line and followed our immigration rules to create an entirely new, currently non-existent path to citizenship for those who knowingly broke our immigration laws. The Senate bill also provides legalization before border security. However, it is imperative that we secure our border and enforce our immigration laws first.

This is not exactly a new idea – Goodlatte has talked before about allowing illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship through the same process that non-resident foreigners have available. But up until now the idea has been something informally floated at town halls, and its inclusion in a document like this shows the GOP is getting closer to putting forth legislation on the topic.

A talking point offered in another section underscores that providing legalization is definitely a core part of Goodlatte’s plans: “Any immigration reform proposal must first strengthen border security and the enforcement of our immigration laws, improve our legal immigration programs, and find a way to fairly deal with those living unlawfully in the U.S.”

The recess packet also includes a list of the top ten concerns with the Senate Gang of Eight’s bill. The first: that it’s unconstitutional because it raised revenues and didn’t originate in the House, where, according to the Constitution, all tax bills must begin. The list calls the Corker-Hoeven amendment “hardly a border surge,” rips the interior enforcement provisions of the bill, and says the bill, championed by Senators Marco Rubio and Chuck Schumer, “contains a slush fund for liberal activist groups.”

Just back from braving the wilds of western New York, and I see that a federal judge in Dallas has dismissed a civil suit by ICE agents challenging the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty (Obama’s administrative version of the DREAM Act). The agents claimed that Obama’s illegal amnesty forced them to violate federal law, contrary to their oath to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution. The judge actually agreed that DACA is illegal, writing that:

Plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Department of Homeland Security has implemented a program contrary to congressional mandate.

But he dismissed the case on grounds that the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 establishes an administrative process for resolving employment disputes, and that the court didn’t have jurisdiction.

The agents’ attorney, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said “the fact remains that the Obama administration is ordering ICE agents to break the law, as recognized by a federal court. It is imperative that this attack on the rule of law be stopped, one way or another.”

Obama’s usurpation of congressional authority is something Congress has the power to rectify — you know, checks and balances, if they still teach that stuff in school. But they let the illegal DACA amnesty go unchallenged when it was announced last summer because the surrender caucus — a.k.a. the GOP leadership — was afraid that to do so would make them look mean. And then that same brain trust is outraged when the president illegally delays the employer mandate for political reasons. What did they think he was going to do? If even congressional Republicans let him get away with rule by decree on immigration, he’ll then extend it to other areas.

I keep quoting Gibbon, but only because it’s so apt:

In the exercise of the legislative as well as of the executive power, the sovereign advised with his ministers, instead of consulting the great council of the nation. The name of the senate was mentioned with honour till the last period of the empire; the vanity of its members was still flattered with honorary disinctions; but the assembly, which had so long been the source, and so long the instrument, of power, was respectfully suffered to sink into oblivion. The senate of Rome, losing all connection with the Imperial court and the actual constitution, was left a venerable but useless monument of antiquity on the Capitoline hill.

We might as well transfer management of the Capitol building to the Smithsonian, so they can properly outfit it for its true function: a museum.

Peter Magnus Flanigan died Monday in Austria, surrounded by his family. It was an amazing life. Here is the introduction I gave him last month at the Portsmouth Institute, the night after his 90th-birthday dinner at the New York Yacht Club in Newport, at which he included WFB in his list of “great men of ideas”:

Peter Flanigan ‘41 will introduce this evening’s speaker, George Weigel. A decorated fighter pilot in World War II and honors graduate of Princeton, Peter was a longtime partner at Dillon Read and regarded by many who worked for him there as a mentor and “the conscience” of the firm as Wall Street was transformed in the 1980s and 1990s. He was special assistant for international economic affairs to the President of the United States from 1969 to 1974. He has been active in many philanthropic and public policy activities, especially in the area of education reform, and was the founder of Student Sponsor Partners, an organization that pairs what we used to call yuppie sponsors with deserving but needy students in New York City’s Catholic high schools. Today SSP helps provide a quality education to over 2,000 students annually, over 90% of whom go on to college, but I remain proud of the fact that, in its inaugural year in the mid-1980s, out of the first 42 sponsors, 7 were Portsmouth alumni. Peter is the father and grandfather of seven Portsmouth graduates thus far, and still counting. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome an authentic member of the Greatest Generation who remains at the very top of his game today, Mr. Peter Flanigan.

(In typical fashion, Peter’s first line was, “Thank you, Jamie, but if you think this is the top of my game, you’re wrong.”)

Better than any words of mine, however, were Peter’s own remarks, entitled “Lessons in Liberty,” as an honoree at the Manhattan Institute’s 2004 Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner:

Thank you, John, for that fulsome introduction, and thank you ladies and gentlemen — friends of the Manhattan Institute all — for being with us.

I could not help wondering, as I am sure you were wondering, how I came to be included in such illustrious company on this platform.

Bob Bartley was a very dear friend, but more than that, an intellectual mentor. For 25 years his Wall Street Journal editorial page instructed us on how to think about national issues, on how freedom is best defended both at home and abroad, and why free markets and private property are the moral expression of man’s God-given economic creativity. Edith, Bob’s wisdom and memory will always be cherished at the Manhattan Institute.

Bill Buckley is another very dear friend and mentor. How many of us “classical liberals” were stimulated, educated, and nourished as young conservatives at his National Review’s knee? With me that stimulation continues at regular luncheons and sailing adventures from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas. Bill, may these adventures, intellectual and otherwise, long continue.

But the question remains — how did I get up here? Perhaps the reason is that I learned well from Bob Bartley and Bill Buckley about the need to fight for and to defend freedom. The battleground that I chose for myself in this fight for freedom is education.

Re Michael Shulan, the “creative director” of the 9/11 Museum who thinks that picture of firemen raising the flag is too “rah-rah America,” The New York Post’s Andrea Peyser asked Billy Eisengrein (third fireman on the right) to respond:

If it was up to me — and you can print this — if he thinks that picture is too rah-rah America, he should move someplace better in this world to live. I’ve had it with political correctness. It’s taking the country down.’

It’s remarkable that not even the Flight 93 memorial and the 9/11 Museum could avoid falling into the hands of the usual empty poseur equivalists like Mr. Shulan. You don’t need to blow up the joint when it’s that hollowed out from within.

Via Reuters:

Eleven Latin American countries refused to back an IMF move this week to keep bankrolling Greece, citing risks of non-repayment, and the Fund itself said Athens might need faster debt relief from Europe. The abstention by Latin American states from the IMF decision was revealed by their Brazilian representative in an unusual public statement on Wednesday, highlighting growing frustration in emerging nations with Fund policy to rescue debt-laden Europeans.

“Recent developments in Greece confirm some of our worst fears,” said Paulo Nogueira Batista, Brazil’s executive director at the IMF, who also represents 10 small nations in Central and South America and the Caribbean.

“Implementation (of Greece’s reform programme) has been unsatisfactory in almost all areas; growth and debt sustainability assumptions continue to be over-optimistic,” said Batista, criticising the IMF executive board’s decision on Monday to release 1.7 billion euros of rescue loans to Greece. This raised to 28.4 billion euros ($37.6 billion) the total amount of funds the IMF has so far committed to Greece – an amount that Athens might default on if it gets ditched by its euro zone partners, Batista warned….

The Europeans and the United States, which have a majority of voting rights at the IMF’s executive board, have so far solidly backed Greece. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew flew to Athens earlier this month to reiterate Washington’s support. Despite having used up almost 90 percent of its 240 billion euro bailout since mid-2010, Athens is still shut out of bond markets and remains in its creditors’ emergency ward.

And notice the reference to what the IMF is saying about the possibility that Greece might need faster debt relief. Over at the Daily Telegraph,  Bruno Waterfield looks at this question in more detail. The IMF is not only arguing that Greece faces a funding gap of 4.4 billion euros in 2014 and 6.5 billion euros in 2015 (not hugely surprising, but denied by the EU Commission) but is also coming close to suggesting  that political and economic realities may dictate that the euro zone should take a haircut (that’s a polite term for a partial write-off) on some of the credit it has extended to Greece over the last few years.

That could be a touch awkward for some politicians to Greece’s north. Waterfield draws attention to this report in Ekathimerini:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble have underlined their opposition to a new Greek haircut immediately after German general elections in September but have indicated that further support for Greece could be on the cards in 2014.  In an interview with the Maerkische Oderzeitung and Sudwest Presse, Merkel stressed that she did “not see” the possibility of a new haircut for Greek debt, emphasizing however that the German government supported Greece’s difficult economic reform effort. According to Merkel, a second haircut for Greek debt would be a multi-billion-euro burden for eurozone partners.

Schaeuble struck a similar note in an interview with German mass daily Bild, describing last year’s write-down of Greek debt as “a one off.”

Germany goes to the polls on September 22. Expect no haircuts before then, at least.

Embattled San Diego mayor Bob Filner has an unusual justification for why he’s asking that the city pay the legal fees in his sexual-harassment lawsuit: The city is actually liable for his behavior because it never provided him with the sexual-harassment training that was required by city policy.

Harvey Berger, Filner’s attorney, wrote in a letter to the city’s attorney that the city had scheduled such training, but that the harassment trainer “unilaterally cancelled, and never re-scheduled such training for the Mayor (and others.)”

“Therefore,” Berger says, “if there is any liability at all, the City will almost certainly be liable for ‘failing to prevent harassment’.”

Berger then paraphrases a Bob Dylan lyric, admitting “many might argue that ‘you don’t a weatherperson to tell you which way the wind blows,’ and an adult male should not need sexual harassment training.” But Berger say he has “conducted sexual harassment training scores of times over the years” and found that “many – if not most – people do not know what is and what is not illegal sexual harassment under California law.”

An eight accuser came forward on Tuesday, alleging that Filner kissed her and asked about and touched her wedding band during a one-on-one business meeting he insisted on.

In 2011, then-congressman Filner asked the woman, a local-university official, to have a business meeting with her alone, at which he “grabbed her left hand, twirled her wedding band and asked if it was real.” She explained, “He then asked me if it could come off while I was in D.C. and if I would go out with him. I said I really didn’t think so. And at that point, he pulled my hand closer to him and he reached over to kiss me. I turned my head at that moment and on the side of my face, I got a very wet, saliva-filled kiss including feeling his tongue on my cheek.”

“Had the City provided mandatory sexual harassment training to Mayor Filner,” Berger argues, there might never have been a lawsuit.

On Fox News Wednesday evening, Charles Krauthammer expressed the view that, even in light of the House Judiciary Committee’s report that Eric Holder misled Congress, the attorney general will not be punished for lying about the Justice Department’s investigation of Fox News correspondent James Rosen.

Holder is one of Obama’s “cronies,” Krauthammer remarked, and he is “too much of a friend of the president” to be thrown under the bus for this.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture may want to add Trayvon Martin’s hoodie to its collection, according to its director, Lonnie Bunch.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Bunch says he’d love to have it, explaining curators could use the hoodie to “ask the bigger questions” prompted by the Zimmerman case. “Because [the hoodie is] such a symbol, it would allow you to talk about race in the age of Obama,” he told the Post.

Another one of those questions, he says: “Are we in a post-racial age? . . . This trial says, ‘No.’” Al Sharpton, the story explains, also likes the idea of its residing in D.C.

The museum, which also has the handcuffs used to restrain Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009, is currently under construction on the Mall in Washington, D.C., scheduled to open in 2015.

Via Weasel Zippers.

The House Judiciary Committee has just released a report declaring that Attorney General Eric Holder misled House members during sworn testimony about the Justice Department’s investigation of Fox News reporter James Rosen. “The Committee finds that Mr. Holder’s sworn testimony in the Rosen matter was deceptive and misleading,” the report reads. They call for a shakeup at Justice: “No amount of law-making can restore credibility and professionalism to the Justice Department in the wake of these revelations. The only way to achieve this goal is through an improvement in the quality of leadership at the Justice Department.”

The Republicans on the committee accuse Holder’s Justice Department of “tarnishing a journalist as a suspect in a national security investigation,” referring to a DOJ affidavit signed by holder naming Fox News’s Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in its prosecution of State Department leaker Stephen Kim. On May 15, Holder claimed that he knew nothing about a possible prosecution of Rosen; he told the committee, “With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something that I have ever been involved, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy.” The affidavit seeking access to Rosen’s e-mails was disclosed shortly thereafter.

Pew has some interesting figures in their latest poll about how both ends of the political spectrum feel about their politicians’ compromising with the other side. Despite the common assumption that conservatives scorn compromise while Democrats have bent over backwards for it, it urns out the two groups have roughly similar views of their representatives’ willingness to cooperate.

Thirty-five percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters (including those who identify as tea partiers) feel that their party has compromised too much in negotiations in Congress, against 31 percent of Democrat and Democratic-leaning voters, a gap of only four percentage points. Meanwhile, 27 percent of Republicans think their party hasn’t compromised enough, while 32 percent of Democrats feel the same about their party — again, an almost meaningless gap. Almost the same proportions of the two groups think their parties have handled negotiations “about right,” with 32 percent of the GOP and 33 percent of Dems agreeing with the statement.

This should of course go without saying. But Chris Matthews just called Cruz a “political terrorist,” so it needs to be stressed. To their credit, both of Matthews’s guests, Obama adviser David Axelrod and GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, objected; but Matthews stuck to his formulation. He should change his mind — because it would be the right thing to do morally, and also because language like this hurts Matthews’s own political cause. Cruz is engaging in peaceful acts of attempting legislative reform, because he believes the president’s health-care policies will harm the American people. Many conservatives believe Cruz’s specific strategy won’t work and/or would do harm to the country; I share this view. But the language we use to characterize the Osama bin Ladens and Tsarnaevs is shockingly inappropriate to describe someone with whom one merely disagrees politically — inappropriate to such an extent that it is actually morally wrong to do so. In the conversation on Hardball, Ted Cruz was characterized as a “demagogue.” I propose a new rule: Anyone who calls a mere political opponent a “terrorist” is not allowed to accuse others of demagoguery.

Eni Faleomavaega, the congressional delegate from American Samoa, took to the House floor yesterday to appeal to members on an issue of “great concern” for the federal government: removing the trademark protections from the Washington Redskins’ team name.

“This should have never have happened,” lamented Faleomavaega, who asserted the name’s origins are rooted in the practice of scalping Native Americans (the real etymology is a matter of dispute by historians and the team’s fans).

“This is not even about sports, this is a moral issue,” he said.

Much of Faleomavaega’s speech centered around Rush Limbaugh’s comments that the government should stay out of the issue, which the Samoan Democrat called an attempt “to wash away years of suffering, pain, and humiliation.”

Faleomavaega, who penned a Politico op-ed last week laying out similar points to those he made in his House remarks, has been on the forefront of the anti-Skins effort. He’s sent a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as part of a Congressional Native American Caucus and is the lead sponsor on Non-Disparagement of Native American Persons or Peoples in Trademark Registration Act, which would prevent the Redskins name from being trademark-protected.