What's interesting is there are $12 billion of breaks in the energy bill that passed, yet we see that the sixth major oil companies in America last year made $1.1 trillion.

Parts of the Voting Rights Act are due to expire next year if Congress doesn't extend them, including the section that guarantees that voting rights will be protected by the federal government.

The 55% of American households that make less than $40,000 will get a tax break of only $7 while the households that make more than $1 million will receive an average tax break of $32,000.

Regrettably, it has become clear that torture of detainees in United States custody is not limited to Abu Ghraib or even Iraq. Since Abu Ghraib, there have been increasing reports of torture.

First of all, I'm in favor of making price gouging a crime, and in fact, one the reasons I didn't vote for the Republican House version was because there were too many breaks for the oil companies.

We need a tougher enforcement program and, most importantly, we need to fix the badly broken ethics system.

The fact is I've been in Massachusetts for the last two weeks, and it seems over the last few days that the price is increasing by the hour at the pump, so there needs to be an aggressive investigation.