Democrats, their progressive allies, and others have been for months playing defense against a rising tide of largely Republican-led, state-level laws designed to limit the access millions of Americans have to vote. House Democrats have now introduced federal legislation designed to take the issue head-on.

Democrats and other advocates complain that these laws, such those which require only certain forms of ID — but don’t allow others – for instance, were crafted specifically to keep Democratic-leaning voters away from polling places this fall. Up until now, the fight against these initiatives largely has been about trying to overturn them where possible — but mostly about getting the word out, registering voters and helping those affected cope with the new requirements.

A number of high-ranking Democrats on Thursday introduced the Voter Empowerment Act, which they describe as comprehensive voting rights legislation to modernize the nation’s voter registration system, ensure equal access to the ballot box for all Americans, and combat state-level attempts to restrict the ability of Americans to vote.

“All Americans have a fundamental right to participate in our electoral process.  Far too often, however, voices are silenced with discriminatory barriers, and many across the country are not only enforcing those barriers but enacting new restrictive measures,” says Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, leader of the House Democrats. “That is why House Democrats took action today, rolling out the Voter Empowerment Act to protect and promote voting rights.  Rooted in the simple, basic principle that we must ensure the right of every citizen to vote and every vote to be counted, this critical legislation achieves three key goals: improving access, protecting integrity, and ensuring accountability.”

The flurry of statutes enacted over the last year or so, usually at the direction of Republican governors and state legislators in states as farflung as Alabama, Florida and Wisconsin, will have a direct impact on the ability of 21 million American citizens who do not have a government-issued photo ID, voters to cast their ballots this year, critics of these laws contend. The majority of those people are young would-be voters, the elderly, African Americans, Hispanics, and those earning $35,000 per year or less, they add.

The Voter Empowerment Act aims to open voting through a number of means, its sponsors say, including authorizing an online registration option and same-day registration and permitting voters to update their registration data on-site — while also protecting against deceptive practices and intimidation.

“We’re proud of the fact that we’re the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. One of our responsibilities – moral, ethical, legal – ought to be to make sure we facilitate, not impede, a person’s ability to vote,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, the second-highest ranking House Democrat, says in an interview with MSNBC. “Facilitate access, facilitate ease of registration, facilitate getting on the rolls, and being able to cast your vote. And America has a responsibility as I said – moral, ethical, and legal – to make sure every American can exercise that.”

Democrats, however, face steep hurdles in approving this legislation in a House currently controlled by Republicans.

WATCH A VIDEO OF HOYER’S INTERVIEW ON MSNBC HERE:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nearly two dozen advocacy organizations have teamed to oppose legislation that would limit patients' right to malpractice awards.

While public attention might be on this week’s second anniversary of healthcare reform — and next week’s legal challenges against it at the Supreme Court — consumer advocates already have moved onto the next battle for patients’ rights in Congress.

Nearly two dozen consumers’ groups wrote a letter Wednesday to GOP House Speaker John Boehner, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, and other lawmakers to object to H.R. 5, the Help Efficient, Accessible, Low-cost, Timely Healthcare (HEALTH) Act.

Although its supporters argue the legislation — which has been on the table since Republicans retook control of the House last year — would help contain healthcare costs, opponents say the opposite would be true.

The letter to congressional leaders signed by Consumer Watchdog and 21 other prominent public interest groups called the legislation “an outrageously broad proposal that covers not only cases involving medical malpractice, but also cases involving unsafe drugs and nursing home abuse and neglect.”

The organization calls on Congress to “focus on improving patient safety and reducing deaths and injuries, not insulating negligent providers from accountability, harming patients and saddling taxpayers with the cost, as H.R. 5 would do.”

H.R. 5 would cap non-economic malpractice damages at $250,000 per case.

The letter from the consumer groups cites an Institute of Medicine study more than a decade old, which found up to 98,000 deaths in hospitals due to medical errors. Experts agree that there has been no meaningful reduction in medical errors in the United States since then, the letter writers say.

For example:

• About 1 in 7 hospital Medicare patients experience a medical error, 44 percent of which are preventable. These errors cost Medicare $4.4 billion a year.
• Medical errors occur in one-third of hospital admissions, as much as 10 times more common than previously estimated.
• Lost lives and disabilities caused by medical error cost between $393 billion and $958 billion in 2006, equivalent to 18 percent to 45 percent of total U.S. health-care spending.

The medical malpractice liability limits in H.R. 5 are modeled after a California state law that failed to reduce malpractice insurance premiums or overall health costs, the purported aim of the federal bill, according to Consumer Watchdog, one of the signatories to the letter. Medical malpractice insurance premiums increased 450 percent in California in the 13 years after liability limits were enacted, the organization adds. California voters approved an insurance rate regulation law in 1988. In the first three years after the insurance regulation law was approved, malpractice premiums fell 20 percent and then stabilized even as premiums across the country continued to fluctuate, Consumer Watchdog says.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

As a woman who grew up in the midst of the feminist revolution and fought to win women’s rights on issues like abortion and birth control, I have been appalled by the latest efforts by the right wing zealots to control women’s rights on these issues.

Nothing however has appalled me more I believe than Rush Limbaugh’s misogynistic comments about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student “who was denied the right to speak on the controversial all-male conception panel at a hearing last month.”

The conservative radio host’s remarks sparked an angry backlash from House Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. But instead of heeding their requests for an apology, Limbaugh doubled down against what he called the “conniption fit” of the House Democrats.

Echoing Foster Friess, the single largest donor to the pro- Rick Santorum’s super PAC, Limbaugh said that he would “happily buy [Fluke] all the aspirin she wants.”

Limbaugh was referencing the comment Friess made in February when he said the “gals” in “his day” put aspirin between their legs in lieu of contraception. Limbaugh then expanded his offer to include the university’s entire female student body.

“I will buy all of the women at Georgetown University as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want,” he said.

Rush Limbaugh is a vile, misogynistic pig, who doesn’t know when to back down. I’ve had enough!!!

The DSCC has this petition up to sign - I signed it, please join me in signing this petition to Republican members of Congress to Denounce Rush:

Republicans refused to allow Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke to testify on why contraception should be covered by insurance. Democrats later gave Fluke a chance to testify, and top GOP megaphone Rush Limbaugh weighed in what it means when a woman seeks affordable contraception:

“It makes her a slut, right … a prostitute … Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives … we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Demand that Rush Limbaugh apologize for these incredibly appalling and ignorant remarks. Misogyny must be called out, especially when it comes from a mouthpiece of the Republican Party.

I want to take a moment also to note that young women need to get involved with this fight against the war on women, if they are not. We fought to get you your rights for abortion and birth control – please get involved to keep them!

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa chaired a hearing on Capitol Hill today on religious freedom and the new mandate that health insurers cover contraception. 

As the hearing got under way,  an argument broke out over Democrats could add a female witness to the all-male panel.

“Where are the women?” the minority Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked early in the hearing.

She criticized the Republican committee chairman, Rep. Darrel Issa, for wanting to “roll back the fundamental rights of women to a time when the government thought what happens in the bedroom is their business.”

“We will not be forced back to that primitive era,” she said.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There were NO women invited to testify. NONE.

Among witnesses invited to attend the hearing, by Rep. Issa, “was a representative of the Catholic bishops, who oppose the Obama administration “accommodation” on birth-control coverage” and ”many other men of other religions.”  

Not invited, complained Democrats, were representatives from the Catholic Health Association, which is run by a woman and actually runs the Catholic hospitals, nor Catholic Charities, both of which said Friday they supported the president’s plan.

Seriously… This isn’t about religious freedom. We all know that… It’s all about the Republican War on Women. Keep them home, in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant!

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi chastised the “House committee examining the Obama administration’s contraception rule that included an all-male panel of witnesses.”

“Imagine having a panel on women’s health and they don’t have any women on the panel,” she told reporters Thursday. “Duh.”

It appears that a majority Republican men are still not at all education about women’s health,
as we also witnessed today in an interview with Rick Santorum supporter, Foster Friess. Friess is the “single largest donor to the super PAC supporting Rick Santorum’s presidential bid.” 

His comments “shocked MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell in an interview” today when he “suggested a novel approach to contraception.” 

[...] the 71 year old Wyoming multi-millionaire offered this retort when Mitchell pressed him about whether he agreed with Santorum’s stance on contraception.

“Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” Friess said. “The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

Friess was also quoted as saying “Who cares?” when Andrea Mitchell “pressed Friess again on Santorum’s position on contraception.”

Keep the little woman down… Stand behind your “religion” and keep the little woman down. Makes me sick… 2012, and we”re still fighting for our rights!

Video of the Day… via Politico:

“If the far right thought that Romney could win, they might be more enthusiastic about him,” Pelosi told POLITICO’s Mike Allen during Tuesday’s Playbook Breakfast. “But they question what he stands for and they don’t think he’s going to win. So what’s the sell? I’m not sure he knows what he stands for, and that makes it harder too.”

I have to say, I agree 100% with Nancy Pelosi… Romney can’t win and the GOP knows it!

Nancy Pelosi warns that the work of the so-called deficit supercommittee "cannot be the product of secrecy."

Even as lawmakers wrangle over the details of the work of the so-called supercommittee, the top House Democrat is calling for more openness in the decision-making of the bipartisan deficit-reduction panel.

Created by last summer’s federal debt deal, the members of the supercommittee have just until Thanksgiving to find $1.2 trillion over 10 years in deficit-reduction.

Members of the panel, known officially as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, have been conducting all of their important negotiating entirely behind closed doors.

Predictable partisan jostling began this week as details of those talks began coming public.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi warned that the final package put forward by the 12-member supercommittee “cannot be a product of secrecy.”

“You know, they may want to narrow issues that will be made that judgments have to be made over, but that has to be done in a public way. And I think you are you absolutely right; in order for our Members to embrace this, they have to know more about it and know why it has come to the place that it has,” she told a reporter Thursday. “And we hope that it will be, as I said, big, bold, and balanced, but, at some point, the discussion has to be more public.”

Pelosi is only the highest ranking lawmaker to complain about the super-secrecy of the supercommittee. Others also have already done so. However, the Deficit Committee Transparency Act, which would require final committee recommendations to be made publicly available online for at least 72 hours before a committee vote, has just five cosponsors in the House and has not even been introduced in the Senate.

Supercommittee members might want to remain private as they narrow their issues down to what the “real decisions will be,” but hammering out those final recommendations “should be in the public domain.”

Pelosi named three Democrats to the supercommittee, Reps. Xavier Becerra of California, James Clyburn of South Carolina, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.

She says she continues to have “great confidence” in those three members.

“They have knowledge, they have judgment. They share the values of our Caucus, and they know that we want to have an agreement, a big agreement,” Pelosi says.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.