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Dear Friends:

Happy Holidays and all the best in the New Year!

I look forward to serving the next two years - it is an honor to do so and I sincerely appreciate all you did to provide this opportunity. As you know, we have challenges ahead, but I am ready to go to work to overcome them and make sure Congress does its best to meet each and every one of them, most importantly, getting people back to work and growing the economy. While Republicans are expected to make progress difficult on the matters about which we care most, I am determined to work with them and other Democrats to "bridge the gap" to get things done! We must and will give them every opportunity to work with us cooperatively toward that end.

As a year-end wrap up, I thought I'd share with you an excerpted copy of a recent article appearing in Bloomberg. It captures the untold story of the effectiveness of the 111th Congress (particularly the House, which got its work done early and is cited by Congressional historians as the most productive House since 1964) and the challenges ahead. As I mentioned earlier, we expect to meet those challenges head on and somehow persuade our new Republican House Majority to be focused on the middle-class and small businesses in action, not just rhetoric.

Have a great season and year.

Sincerely,

John

No Congress Since 1960s Makes As Much Law for Americans as 111th

By Lisa Lerer and Laura Litvan - Dec 22, 2010

However history judges the 535 men and women in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate the past two years, one thing is certain: The 111th Congress made more law affecting more Americans since the “Great Society” legislation of the 1960s.

For the first time since President Theodore Roosevelt began the quest for a national health-care system more than 100 years ago, the Democrat-led House and Senate took the biggest step toward achieving that goal by giving 32 million Americans access to insurance.

Congress rewrote the rules for Wall Street in the most comprehensive way since the Great Depression. It spent more than $1.67 trillion to revive an economy on the verge of a depression, including tax cuts for most Americans, jobs for more than 3 million, construction of roads and bridges and investment in alternative energy; ended an almost two-decade ban against openly gay men and women serving in the military, and is poised today to ratify a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.

…..“This is probably the most productive session of Congress since at least the ‘60s,” said Alan Brinkley, a historian at New York’s Columbia University. “It’s all the more impressive given how polarized the Congress has been.

Market Performance

The S&P 500 Index has gained 38.9 percent since Congress convened in January 2009, the biggest increase for a two-year congressional session since 1997-1998, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The S&P 500 Index reached 1254.60 yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average 11533.16.

Stimulus money created and saved jobs across the country, helping strapped state governments retain their workforces, according to government analyses. President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers said that in Ohio, for instance, the legislation created 122,000 jobs for teachers, police officers and construction workers.“These policies carried the economy along during a period when the private sector was not engaged,’ said Ethan Harris, head of developed-markets economic research in New York at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research.

Election Results

…..“What we did was work, and our reward was, ‘Get out of here,’” said Representative Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat and outgoing chairwoman of the House Rules Committee.

While Slaughter won re-election, five of her New York colleagues were among Democrats defeated. Party-line votes on most of the major measures engendered ill will among Republicans and helped stall in the Senate initiatives requiring significant bipartisan support. Blocked legislation included limits on greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming, a bill the House passed in June 2009, a measure offering undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and the administration’s attempts to curb growing income inequality with tax increases for higher earners.

Republican Agenda

Those are unlikely to be tackled next year, when the House’s Republican majority will turn its attention to dismantling the health-care law and cutting domestic government spending by $100 billion. …Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s No. 2 Democratic leader, saw it differently: “This whole two-year session has been dramatic in terms of its achievement and the changes that it’s brought about."

End of Era

The policies embraced by the 111th Congress suggested the end of an era in Washington, as Democrats pushed to reverse three decades of deregulation that began under President Ronald Reagan, say economists.“We’ve been in a trend toward an attempt to deregulate the economy,” said Harris. “You’re turning back the clock to an earlier period…

Congress scored its first big accomplishment weeks after Obama’s inauguration with passage in late February 2009 of a $814 billion stimulus bill. It has created or saved 3.3 million jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while also steering more funds to road construction, broadband technologies and renewable energy ventures.

…. An overhaul of the rules governing the financial services industry, approved in July, aims to prevent a repeat of an economic collapse that led to the failures of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Washington Mutual Inc. It included $4 billion in aid to help thousands of unemployed property owners avoid foreclosure, while the program has fallen short of its goals. Congress also passed laws to help ensure pay equity by enabling women to pursue lawsuits claiming they were underpaid, and to empower the federal Food and Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry, which includes restrictions on cigarette marketing.

New Justices

Additionally, lawmakers expanded state programs for health insurance for children, and they confirmed two Supreme Court justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor became the first Latino to serve on the court, and the pair increased to three the number of women among the nine justices.

Following the November elections in which voters handed Democrats what Obama termed a “shellacking,” Congress in a lame-duck session made significant additions to its accomplishment list. Lawmakers approved an $858 billion measure that continues for two years Bush-era tax cuts for all income levels, extends aid for 13 months to the long-term unemployed, provides estate tax relief and cuts by two percentage points worker payroll taxes during 2011.

Congress in its last days also voted to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on military service by openly gay men and women. Yesterday it cleared the biggest food-safety overhaul in more than 70 years, giving the FDA more enforcement power. And the expected Senate ratification today of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty will give Obama a key foreign-policy victory. “What we’ve been able to do in the lame duck has been not just bipartisan by a fingernail, but bipartisan on a broad basis,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat.

….Democrats say it will take years before the public recognizes their achievements. Many of the measures that passed were designed to forestall a bleaker recession, an argument that’s little comfort to many Americans as the nation’s unemployment rate has remained at 9.5 percent or higher for more than a year. “It was hard to tell people that we accomplished anything important when their lives are so difficult,” said Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and outgoing chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee.

Changing Direction

....The incoming House Republican leadership has promised to turn the focus of the Appropriations Committee from funding government to identifying spending cuts. Many of those efforts will likely fail in the Democrat- controlled Senate. And the party split between the two chambers is likely to bring the record of congressional productivity to an abrupt end in January. “There’s just nothing that’s going to be accomplished,” said Brinkley. “What really is disturbing is that this is a period in which there is a lot to be done.