Rep. John Kline: Another Of His Scams Exposed

Wikipedia defines a confidence trick or confidence game (also known as a bunko, con, flim flam, gaffle, grift, hustle, scam, scheme, swindle or bamboozle) as an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence.

A master trickster aka confidence man, con man, trickster, or con artist lears the mark in by laying out a story and getting the mark to bite....

Rep. John Kline (R-MN-02) tells voters of all the current massive wasteful government spending...and who doesn't want to cut that? Don't all good Americans want to cut wasteful spending...Aren't you a good American?

The confidence trick exploits typical human qualities such as  honesty, compassion, and naïveté. The common factor is that the mark (victims or CD2 citizens)  relies on the good faith of the con artist (John Kline). The victimized individuals come from all walks of life not just the young, elderly or poor.



Don't be fooled by Rep. John Kline's shell game!

John Kline then runs the YOUCUT game (scam, bunko) where you can cut the wasteful spending...'Play along', 'Come on', he shrills, 'You know you want to cut the wasteful government spending!'

Shills, also known as accomplices, help manipulate the mark into accepting the con man's plan

The GOP/John Kline sets up a YouCut websites and polls, they run testimonies, and promote the scam throughout their base...'Come on', they bark, 'YOU CUT the waste', 'Tell us which of the programs we picked to cut', 'You are in control and can make the call'.

The confidence trick (bunko, con, flim flam, gaffle, grift, hustle, scam, scheme, swindle or bamboozle) is then put into play with the desired ending.

Rep. Kline oozes pleasure....'We have a winner! You have spoken (WOW! all one quarter of one percent of registered CD2 voters!) and we will now cut the wasteful spending on the FreedomCar!'

And the scam? Well Rep John Kline and the Bush Administration started the FreedomCar wasteful spending in 2002...As mnpACT! points out:

"It [FreedomCar] was a Republican initiative and it was kept alive by the 2002 and 2004 Republican Congress.(of while Cong. John Kline was a member)."

So the GOP and Kline introduce the waste, then ask CD2 marks to vote it as waste under the Democrats, and then promises to do the job they (GOP and Kline) are paid for by eliminating the waste they introduced!:

'When Congress resumes Tuesday, Sept. 14, Congressman Kline will ask his colleagues to cut the project voted most wasteful by Minnesotans. The “FreedomCAR” and fuel partnership program provides federal funding for research on fuel cell technology, despite existing private-sector research and the market incentives. Eliminating this program would save taxpayers $2 billion over 10 years.'

Really Kline? If you were serious about government waste maybe you could have stopped it in 2002...this is just another gimmick...scam...hustle...scheme. Frankly the residents in CD2 are tired of your gamesmanship. How about just doing the job you were elected to do?

Coming soon to this blog...John Kline's 'A Pledge of America' scam

More Failing Grades for Minnesota's Rep. John Kline

 Rep. John Kline (R-MN-02) is the lead Republican on the Education Committee in Congress. And while, he talks of reform for education system, what he has done is offered up unproven mandates in the way of teacher merits raises, increasing charter schools, under funded student loans, and attempts to dismantle the teachers unions.
Through his Education Committee position, Kline has promoted the belief that teachers aren't doing their jobs well. He's even gone so far as to introduced a bill that would establish a 'Teacher Incentive Fund', seed money if you will, for states and schools to reward teachers for improving student academic achievement.

In Kline's own words he wants to:

"break the tenure stranglehold that the teachers unions have had all across the country. ... We [Secretary Duncan ] both agree that we need some way to remove the bad teachers and reward the good teachers."

Like John Kline's other educational suggestions,  it's smoke and mirrors but not much in the way of substance and facts. Kline has called publically to decrease spending for unproven educational mandate from the government.  But he must be making exceptions if they fall into his ideology of more charter schools, busting teacher unions, or establishing teacher merit pay.

"Challenging economic times are not the time for new and expensive experiments that siphon funds from existing programs and impose massive, unfunded mandates on state and local school officials"

Kline would have you believe that instead of fully funding schools, effectiveness and accountability of teachers is the corner stone to your children's eduction. Part of that equation is advocating against teacher unions while promoting merit pay. However a thorough study came out this week with the research to completely debunk his notion.  Education Week published a story Tuesday headlined “Merit Pay Found to Have Little Effect on Achievement.”

Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Issues conducted the teacher compensation study.  Researchers followed nearly 300 middle school mathematics teachers in Nashville, Tenn. to evaluate the hypothesis.  On average, students taught by teachers taking part in the program did not make larger academic gains than those taught by teachers in the normal wage group.

Merit pay doesn't work but now we have the research and facts to back up the claim. Most teachers would like and are entitled to more pay for the important responsibility of education our children. In Minnesota on average teachers make $45,000 a year, so obviously they didn't get into teaching for the pay! Kline's Bill implies that more money would make teachers better performers which would mean they aren't performing. We now know Kline's reasoning is faulty.

It's time that Rep. Kline put to rest his claim of  'teacher merit/incentive pay' and advocate for fully funding education. I applaud his work for special education and urge him to apply that same commitment to all our children's educational needs not just the ones that fall outside of his far right ideology.

Rep. John Kline Tries To ReRIGHT American History

Rep. John Kline (R-MN-02) attended a 'non-partisan' forum in Watertown last week. This 'non-partisan' event had the inclusion of many Republicans but they forgot to invite Democrats like the  DFL endorsed candidate Laura Helmer for senate in SD34 which includes Watertown,  and the DFL endorsed candidate from 34A, Leanne Pouliot Kunze. Still word got out and a few Democrats managed to showed up.


For a 'non-partisan' forum, Rep. Kline talked about some very partisan issues that negatively critique the current Obama administration... like criticism for high unemployment, needing smaller government, no more stimulus packages, no more government spending in general and lowering taxes. All in all, it didn't feel much like a  'non-partisan' speech but the one thing that was most upsetting is John Kline's statements on America's history and his focus on religion and fear:

“I’m standing here on this stage with a document [the United States Constitution] that was founded on those Judeo-Christian principles of belief in the almighty and belief in an all powerful God,” he added. “We opened this rally with prayer to that God, but we have many people sometime — nameless, faceless people — who are literally trying to erase God from the public square, from the nation’s capital.”

See John Kline's full speech in The UpTake video below. The Religious Right and John Kline's claims that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and thus the government can promote those principles is completely FALSE and not based on America's own history. In fact just the opposite is true: The Founding Fathers intentionally create a government that was totally neutral toward all things religious....When Kline is referring to 'nameless, faceless people', he is in fact referring to America's Founding Fathers!



....America's Constitution was crafted specifically by the Founding Fathers to stop a Theocracy. Our Founders wanted ALL men to make the choice for themselves and not be forced to adhere to one religion. That is why we have the FIRST amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"

In other words, the government did not need the permission of the Church in order to act nor did they want the government to be of religion but free from religion. The first amendment enumerates the right to; speech, religion, press, petition and assembly. This is not to suggest that 1st amendment rights are absolute or that they have not been impinged upon time and time again.

The U.S. Constitution is secular and does not contain the words God, Christianity, Jesus, Christ, or Judeo-Christian. The Constitution's only references to religion serve to exclude it from the government, by providing that there shall be no law respecting an establishment of religion, no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and no religious test for any public office. This was because most all of the Founders were Deists and Unitarians who rejected doctrines like the Incarnation

This is the opposite of what the Religious Right and John Kline's are claiming.  Kline's claim that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and thus the government can promote those principle is removed from the reality of what U.S. history has been. Since the earliest days of the nation until now, efforts have been made to amend the Constitution to include a recognition of God and Christianity. The repeated failure of those attempts has led to a new strategy in recent years, including what John Kline is doing by rewriting the history and claiming that God and Christianity have always been in the Constitution.


What John Kline is doing is trying to rewrite  reRight America's history...as a elected Representative to Congress, he among all people, should know better. Like our Founding Fathers, it is imperative that the church-state separation be maintained. This single principle has allowed for the freedom of all religions. Regardless of what Teabaggers and John Kline claim, America's history is based on separation of church and government. 

By the way Mr. Kline, even the phase 'In God We Trust' on our money and in our pledge were added on later (1950s) ...Below are some information and quotes from America's Founding Fathers regarding government and religion...

Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestos encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the war of Independence:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of...Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."

George Washington, the first president of the United States, never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous correspondence. Washington championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion is shown by his embracing Freemasonry


John Adams,a Unitarian and the country's second president, was drawn to the study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievements" but among the clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces". Late in life he wrote:

"Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"

It was during Adam's administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."

Thomas Jefferson,a Unitarian and third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, said:

"I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."

He referred to the Revelation of St. John as "the ravings of a maniac" Thomas Jefferson held most clergy and organized religion in low regard not so much for theology, but for abuse of power and attacks on liberty.

James Madison, fourth president and father of the Constitution, was not religious in any conventional sense.

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

Ethan Allen, whose capture of Fort Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire Congress and the country to pursue the War of Independence, said,

"That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words."

In the same book, Allen noted that he was generally "denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian." When Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised "to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature, and the laws those "written in the great book of nature."

Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, said:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble."

He died a month later, and historians consider him, like so many great Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a Christian.

All of these Founding Fathers had two things in common, they had the American government recognize your right to participate freely in the religion of your choice, and they insisted that religion be separate from that government. Rep. John Kline apparently doesn't know America's history or doesn't share those same time honored values, or just plain wants to rewrite-reright our American history.

CD2 Voters Reject John Kline's Latest Gimmick

Yesterday Rep. John Kline (R-MN-02) sent out an emailing touting his six weeks of effort that resulted in less than half a percent of registered voters in Congressional District Two participating in his latest gimmick 'YouCut'.

"Throughout the past six weeks, more than 1,000 Minnesotans like you have shared their thoughts and concerns by participating in my YouCut initiative. ...I received more than 1,400 votes and hundreds of suggestions regarding how the federal government could save money."

Yes, clearly the voters have spoken but not by participating as Kline infers but by rejecting John Kline's methods of turning our Democracy into nothing more than a “American Idol” gimmick — Clearly CD2 voters want real dialogue, with real solutions, not more of the same partisan obstructive behavior from Congressman Kline who offers PR gimmicks in lieu of solutions.

For all his effort in the last six weeks only 1,400 people played along with Kline's latest 'YouCut' gimmick. That's less than one half of one percent (.5%) of the registered voters in CD2. Being a registered voter wasn't a requirement to play so in all likely hood, participation was even less than one half of one percent! While I don't know the identity of those that played along, it's not hard to imagine that most were the radical fringe group of teabagger that the game is geared toward and John Kline seems to be positioning himself more and more with in ideology.

The last six weeks Rep. John Kline (R-MN-02) spent his Congressional time and energy trying to get Minnesotans in his district to participate in his latest GOP gimmick, the 'YouCut' game. As Kline and his party has no ideas, no solutions, and no accomplishments, it's easier to chose to obstruct instead of working across the aisle to find solutions. While other Congressmen are working at finding compromises and solutions, Representative Kline is tosses out spitballs.

Given the extremely low participation in Kline's latest gimmick, obviously his credibility with CD2 voters is running on empty. It's time Rep. Kline stops with the political chicanery that isn't serving his community and get back to working for his district. NO is not a solution, obstructing is not a solution, and wasting time on gimmicks is not a solution!

BTW, according to Kline

"The FreedomCar program was chosen by more than 55 percent of those who participated in my YouCut online vote."

So that would mean that less than a quarter of the one percent (.25) of the voters in CD2 voted...That's not much of a mandate and a huge waste of time and tax payer's money.  If Kline really wants to be fiscally responsible, he would have been doing his job all along while in WA, DC, and making cuts throughout the last decade and not spending tax dollars playing games to determine a spitball that the majority of voters reject.

Rep. John Kline, Host Of Partisan Games

Republican Congressman John Kline (MN-02) is shrilling for a new partisan game show called  "You Cut."  Briefly, five items are listed that Republicans like Congressman Kline promise to bring 'the winning item' to the floor for an up or down vote in a drive to reduce spending and bring the deficit down. That said, this is unfortunately just another gimmick intended solely as a partisan political game we've become so accustomed from Congressman Kline.

Instead of getting a professional representative, CD2 voters now have Rep. John Kline, the game show host of the 'You Cut' project. While Rep. Kline touts the event as 'listening to the people of his district' and voting accordingly, the exploitation of the 'You Cut' project belies that effort. The five items listed weren't chosen by the  people in his district, instead they were picked by the GOP leadership as programs THEY want to get rid of...any one of the five would be welcomed by them. This is a win-win GOP game.

If Rep. John Kline was really interested in listening to the people of his district (including the majority which is made up of Democrats and Independents) then the issues on the table should have come from us. Like how about a Congressional benefits and pay decrease? Fair taxes? Campaign finance reform? Lobbyist influences? War Funding? But no, the game has been fixed so that the outcome is one only benefiting the GOP leadership!

This is just another gimmick meant to intentionally polarize the elective base, while promoting a GOP agenda under the guise of everyone having a 'chance' to participate! Next thing you know, if you believe that John Kline will have a bridge he'd like to sell you along with some swampland in Florida!

If in fact Kline was doing his JOB, instead of spending his time as a partisan game show host, he would have spent the last 10 years in office actually bringing real cuts to the floor instead of the excessively wasteful spending he's voted for and supported including this gimmick!

John Kline's Taxing Problem

Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-profit, public interest research and advocacy organization focusing on federal, state and local tax policies and their impact on our nation has rated Rep. John Kline at 0 (ZERO). Rep. Kline continues to support and vote for the special interests of the corporations and the wealthy, and against the middle class and low-income families. CTJ used the following criteria in determining their rating of Rep. John Kline: 

• Requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share
• Closing corporate tax loopholes
• Adequately funding important government services
• Reducing the federal debt
• Taxation that minimizes distortion of economic markets

Soon the Bush tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 are scheduled to expire. House Republican leaders have offered an alternative plan: freezing tax rates for two years and cutting back government spending to 2008 levels. But almost half of Americans polled (44 percent) are in favor of President Obama's plan to extend the Bush-era tax cuts benefiting the middle-class, according to a new survey by Gallup, but allowing cuts for the wealthiest 2% to expire. As President Obama says:

"We're prepared to give the middle class, who haven't seen a wage increase, haven't seen incomes increased, who are most likely to spend any tax cut and recirculate in the economy to help grow the economy. We're prepared to do that right now."

It makes no economic sense for Rep. John Kline to claim a $50 billion investment in America’s infrastructure is a budget-buster, yet at the same time push to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. The price tag ($700 billion) for extending the Bush cuts for the wealthy is more than 16 times the cost of Obama’s infrastructure proposal. That $700 billion is what the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates it would cost the Treasury to continue tax cuts for top earners over 10 years.

By proposing business tax breaks that, according to nonpartisan analyses, would do more to stimulate the economy than extending the Bush tax rates for the wealthy, maintaining tax cuts for the middle class, and allowing tax cuts to expire on the wealthiest 2%, Obama is proposing a fair taxing policy that promises to repair the economic taxing damage over the past decade.

The argument most used by Republicans is that all the Bush tax cuts should be extended for two years because even letting those for the wealthy lapse would be “a blow to a very fragile economy”. Wasn't that similar to the argument used to fund the massive wall street bank bailout? They were too large to fail and would take down our 'fragile economy'. We now know better.  

Rep. John Kline says letting the cuts expire for those in the highest tax brackets would hurt small businesses, amounting to "a job-killing tax hike on small business during tough economic times." But that is misleading as most small business income (98%) would be unaffected. Less than 2% of small business incomes are filed by taxpayers earning more than $210,000 a year. If Kline's objection is based on helping small businesses, then the tax cut isn't the way to go as 98% of those small business owners would not benefit. Also according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan group, stopping the Bush tax cuts on the richest 2 %  would raise $36 billion a year. And it raises the tax rates of the wealthy to just 29.9 percent, which is still a historic low.


Rep. John Kline's demand for keeping tax cuts for the wealthy 2% reveals the underlying truth of the Republican party, which has very little real interest in reducing the size of government, balancing the budget or helping the middle class and everything to do with protecting the rich.

Rep. John Kline Signs On To Trading Our 'Essential Liberty' for 'Temporary Safety'

Going into the Labor Day Weekend, Rep. John Kline (R-MN-02) along with Rep. Michele Bachmann were among 66 other Congressional Republicans members who signed an amicus brief in support of Arizona's controversial immigration Law (SB 1070). Currently Judge Susan Bolton of Federal District Court has issued a preliminary injunction against sections of the law that called for police officers to check a person’s immigration status.

In many ways I'm not surprised by Rep. John Kline's position. He's always been willing to trade our Constitutional Rights for more political posturing on imaginary security/safety concerns. Kline has always favored protecting us with bigger- better- badder- boarder corporation, business, or military rights by trading away our basic civil rights. But John Kline would do well to remember the wise advise of one of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin:

 "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

While Kline may be willing to give up our essential liberties, Americans are not so willing to just yet throw away the Constitution. The Arizona immigration law's premise is that in giving up our constitutional right, we will be more secure. The law essentially legalizes racial profiling...

• The law puts communities of color in the cross hairs by requiring state and local government workers to determine if a person is illegally in the United States based on a “reasonable suspicion.”=
• Legal experts maintain that the law will result in racial profiling in a very diverse state with multiple generations of U.S. citizens. Three out of every 10 Arizonans are Hispanic, 1 out of 10 is American Indian, and 13 percent are foreign born.

The law undercuts our American Constitution and imbues local police with federal authority...another area that Rep. John Kline seems to think is okay...To Kline, it's okay under this law to not require search warrents or even suspect that some illegal action has occurred! It even makes solicitation of work criminal even though it is protected speech under the First Amendment.

 As Judge Susan Bolton cites:

“There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens by enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose, a distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.”

“Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked,” 

It's nice and neat to think that if we trade away just a few civil rights that we'll be protected and safe. But the question we need to ask, who will protect us once we have no more liberty? Reps Kline and Bachmann may feel it's okay to trade our Constitutional rights for so-called boarder safety/security problems but most Americans don't.

I find it ironic that these modern day Tea Party members conveniently forget Patrick Henry's speech 'Give me Liberty or Give me Death'  following the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Our forefathers and nation founders understood and risked their lives for the US Constitution that John Kline and Michele Bachmann are so lightly trading with  for their political gamesmanship in the name of safety/security. How disturbing is that?

The law will harm the state and local economies

Arizona already spends over a billion dollars annually on immigration related expenses, almost sending the state running for cash advances...can it realistically afford the massive cost of this law? Kline often uses the term fiscally conservative to define himself but there is nothing conservative about this unconstitutional law according to AmericaProgressive:

 

■The National Employment Law Project pointed out that smaller-scale anti-immigrant ordinances have cost individual localities millions of dollars. The Texas-based Perryman Group calculated that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Arizona, the state would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs.

 

■The Immigration Policy Center noted that, “with Arizona facing a budget deficit of more than $3 billion,” the new law will “further imperil the state’s economic future.”

 

The law will be expensive and take cops away from community policing

 

■The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police firmly opposes the law for fiscal and public safety reasons, noting that fear of government officials will diminish the public’s willingness to cooperate with police in criminal investigations and will “negatively affect the ability of law enforcement agencies across the state to fulfill their many responsibilities in a timely manner.”

 

■Local taxpayers will bear the heavy costs of lengthy court litigation.

 

■The costs to arrest, detain, process, and transport undocumented immigrants out of Arizona will drain local government treasuries. There were an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants in Arizona as of January 2009, making up 4 percent of the state’s population. If the federal government were to handle the entire undocumented population, the cost would be approximately $23,148 per person, based on a recent study by the Center for American Progress.

 

John Kline's Special Interest PAC Problem

As Shelley Madore challenges incumbent John Kline for the right to represent Minnesota’s Second District in Congress, it will become important to stay focus on ethics reform as a central issue. She’s got a good reason for doing so. Congressman Kline is so caught up in taking money from special interest PACS then voting their interests and against campaign finance reform, that he’s strayed far from the values of the people that have elected him to office.

Kline is owned by a series of PACS including health care lobbies, oil lobbies, banking lobbies and defense lobbies. In all of these areas John Kline's voting and campaign record show him taking big money PAC donors then voting their interests over the needs of the citizens in Minnesota’s Second District.

Raising over a million dollars of which 40% came from these special interest PACs, in the last two years, Kline has repeated voted in favor of their interests against the interest of the people who elected him

RETAILERS SPECIAL INTERESTS

So far this year Kline has taken in almost half a million ($450,701) from special interest PACS including $31,000 from misc. retailers like Target ($5,000), Best Buy ($3,500), and Home Depot ($8,500).

Kline siding for retailers and against Americans:

• Kline failed to vote for H.R. 2, a bill to increase the minimum wage, which is currently at its lowest point since the 1950s. The bill would only have returned the minimum wage to a level comparable to that of the 1980s, which is in turn much lower than the minimum wage level of the late 1960s. It is a shame that Representative Kline does not even have the respect for America's workers that they deserved 20 years ago.
• Recently Kline voted against eliminating loopholes which encourage companies to move operations offshore to avoid paying taxes and other purposes. in H.R. 1568
• Kline voted against H.R. 1257, a bill that would permit shareholders of public corporations to cast an advisory, non-binding vote to approve or disapprove executive pay packages, golden parachutes, and gigantic bonuses.

DEFENSE SPECIAL INTERESTS PACS

Besides retailers, John Kline has also taken in a whopping $47,200 from defense contractors like Lockheed Martin ($10,000), Boeing Co ($7,000) and Raytheon ($7,000). Kline has continued to support defense profiteers by his voting record.

Kline Votes for Defense Special Interests Every Time! 

• H.R. 897 is a bill that was killed in committee when the GOP controlled congress. It would have required Congress to be provided with descriptions of all contract work in excess of 5 million dollars performed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently Kline and his special interest defense donors are comfortable with hidden contracts and not having Congressional oversight.
• John Kline supports major funding for all our wars. Kline has continued to vote for additional supplemental spending for the wars, including money used for no-bid military contracts, voting for unwanted war jets, or simply lost and unaccounted BILLIONS in war money.

FINANCE AND BANKING PACS

Banking has contributed big to John Kline, giving $133,658 of which $86,000is from PACS in areas like insurances ($27,000) like USAA ($8,000) and Bankers like American Bankers Assn ($10,000) and US Bank Corp ($3,000).

• Rep. John Kline voted against authorizing bankruptcy courts to modify the terms of mortgages made on homeowners’ primary residences (H.R. 4173). The amendment would permit bankruptcy courts to restructure the debt on home mortgages by reducing the principal owed, extending repayment periods, reducing interest rates, and prohibiting, reducing, or delaying future interest rate increases saving countless homes for the working poor and middle class.
• Kline voted against Wall Street Accountability and Consumer Protection...sigh...naturally siding with big business and corporations. [HR 4173]
• Representative Kline voted to bailout our country’s financial sector, but later voted against a bill to strengthen oversight of these TARP funds and make more community banks eligible to receive assistance. [HR384]

Banking Votes against Minnesota Voters

• H R. 1490: Rule Providing for the Consideration of the Conference Report to Accompany H.R. 4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Kline voted against Wall Street Reforms.
• H R 5982: To Amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to Repeal the Expansion of Certain Information Reporting Requirements to Corporations and to Payments for Property, to Eliminate Loopholes Which Encourage Companies to Move Operations Offshore, and for Other Purposes
• H R 964: Providing for Further Consideration of the Bill (H.R. 4173) to Provide for Financial Regulatory Reform, to Protect Consumers and Investors, to Enhance Federal Understanding of Insurance Issues, to Regulate the Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets, and for Other Purposes, Kline voted No against implementing these oversights.
• Rep. John Kline voted against authorizing bankruptcy courts to modify the terms of mortgages made on homeowners’ primary residences (H.R. 4173). Kline voted against Wall Street Accountability and Consumer Protection...sigh...naturally siding with big business and corporations.