For far too long, Congress has relied on short term, stop-gap funding bills to keep the federal government open and running — and have done so when up against holidays and midnight deadlines. Take the most recent continuous resolution: last month, as a member of the House of Representatives, I voted around 5:30 AM on a Friday morning against […]

Serving on the House Appropriations Committee gives me a valuable and unique opportunity to participate in the conversations surrounding funding for the various functions of our federal government. It’s hard to believe it, but the debates on funding for the Fiscal Year 2019 have already begun. I’ve been glad to be part of these important […]

On my radio program last week, a regular contributor mentioned that a bill to eliminate payday lending had passed the Alabama Senate, and I was surprised. Having dealt with the issue back when I was in office, I think payday lending gets a bum rap out in the mainstream media. These short term loans are […]

America may be a country of immigrants, but it’s also a country of laws. No one is exempt from those laws regardless of what some local officials in sanctuary cities may think. As you may have seen on the news recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced a lawsuit against the State of California for […]

Do you want to alleviate poverty in Alabama? Do you want to curb the power of special interest groups over government agencies? Do you want more affordable goods and services in basic industries?  Do you want to help disadvantaged groups find good jobs and become productive citizens? Do you want to reduce the population of […]

Students across the nation walked out of class for 17 minutes today – one minute for each victim in the recent school shooting in Florida – demanding that Congress pass gun control legislation. The protest was organized by the youth branch of the Women’s March, which claimed that students were calling for universal background checks, […]

Between late 2010 and the end of 2014, the state of Alabama did not hire a single state trooper. Despite this freeze, we still had over 400 state troopers. Now we have less than 300. That leaves us over 700 men and women short of the number that we need (1000) according to the Center […]

  (Opinion) When I began attending Birmingham School of Law in early 2013, my wife was pregnant with our youngest son, Jaxson, and she utterly refused to move to Alabama. Let’s be honest, Alabama has a dirty past when it comes to the treatment of African-Americans. We both are northerners. I’m from Chicago, she’s from New […]