a complex profile of a congressman
When you think of psycho-conservatives and tenacious Republican partisanship, names like Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde come to mind but the name Dan Burton should definitely be on top of that list. Dan Burton, the Republican chair of the Government Reform committee and the representative of District #6 of Indiana has the reputation of a pit-bull in Congress. Burton was the House Republicans' point man in the 1997 investigation of political fundraising that focuses on money brought in by President Clinton's re-election campaign. This task gave him yet another crack at exposing misdeeds of the Clinton presidency in which he has already accused of ethics lapses. Many Democrats fear Dan Burton's attack-dog style because they know that he will not rest until he has uncovered the truth. In fact, Burton spent the first four years of the Clinton administration attacking the Democratic president with more tenacity than the most partisan of his GOP colleagues. He infuriated Democrats and shocked a large number of Republicans with his July 1994 floor speech when he questioned White House Deputy Council Vincent W. Foster's apparent suicide. The speach which proposed that he was murdered for the sake of a cover-up was one of the highlights
According to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, Congressman Burton had a 92.7% voting attendance record in the 105th Congress. His career voting percentage from 1983-1993 is 96.3 percent, one of the highest in the House. (He also has received special recognition and various awards from several organizations for his voting records in Congress(which I will list later). Despite Burton's past success, I believe he has reached the summit of his political career and will now begin to fall. With Gingrich, Hyde, and Helen Chenoweth all gone I think the age of ultra-Conservatives is coming to an abrupt end. Especially as many of the freshmen Congressmen come in and vote centristly and seek to compromise and establish by-partisan legislature. Despite all his efforts, Clinton is still in office and many believe that the GOP suffered the most of everyone as a result of the long drawn-out impeachment proceedings of President Clinton. In addition, many say that Burton is chairing a partisan investigation of the campaign finance issue seeking only to investigate Democratic violations while willfully ignoring any similar behavior within his own party. In January 1997, Burton voted against the reprimanding and $300, 000 penalty the House Ethics Committee recommended for his "fellow soldier" Speaker Newt Gingrich for violating House rules. In fact, in response to the Democratic-filed charges, Burton decided to strike back and he introduced a resolution to penalize law-makers who submit frivolous allegations to the Ethics Committee (H.RES.79). (One of the Democrats' favorite pastimes). This guy hates Clinton and he doesn't hide his desire to get rid of him at all! The Republicans entrusted him with unprecedented powers to subpoena Democrats, and access to as much as $15 million for a witch-hunt style investigation. Burton declared that the White House is actually behind all the leeks that seem damaging to the White House. Burton's other committee, the committee on Government Reform had its name changed from the Government Reform and Oversight Committee as not to confuse it with the committee on House Oversight. The change, however, does not indicate a change in the work of the committee. Oversight of the executive branch of government will still remain a function of the committee and a major portion of its responsibilities. Some of the things the committee deals with are waste prevention and illegal tactics by members of the U.S. Government (such as illegal campaign finance tactics). For example, the chairman announced for the first meeting of the year that the committee would focus on billions of dollars in waste and fraud in federal programs. He also announced that he plans to attack and better the serious management weakness across the Federal Government. (Estimated taxpayer costs from these failures in the federal bureaucracy are in the billions of dollars. Especially the Medicare fee-for-service program and the food stamp program which lose more than $20 billion annually to fraud and error). His key votes in the last few years include a YEA to banning "partial birth" abortions, approving the farm bill, denying public education to illegal immigrants, repealing the ban on certain assault-style weapons, approving a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, relaxing the Clean Water Act regulations, reducing projected Medicare spending, approving of GOP budget with tax and spending cuts and a NEA to increasing minimum wage, freezing defense spending, opposing limits on environmental regulations. As is blatantly obvious, you can't vote more Republicanly than that! In truth, there is nobody more persistent and diligent that Dan Burton. It seems that if you look through Burton's files for the 105th Congress everyday he made another move! His main focus was to get Clinton through Attorney General Janet Reno. He wrote her a myriad of letters telling her to have an independent council set up to investigate the President's
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Approximate Word count = 3127
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)
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