Circuit Writer

Here’s a post written for the Xenia Institute, which will be posted following the roll out of our new website and online magazine of opinion, reflection, and dialogue.  I’ll post a link to the article as soon as its available at our new site.

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Senate Bill 1965 was born on February 1, 2010 in the Oklahoma State Senate to Senator Harry Coates.  It passed from this life around April 4, 2010 in the House Judiciary Committee with numerous family members by its side.

The Oklahoma State Senate in session. (Photo by Becky J. McCray/Flickr, used under Creative Commons 2.0)

Senate Bill “SB” 1965 entered the world as an Open Meetings and Records Act, filled with hope for providing transparency in government and the freeing of information.  Showing great potential, “SB” was quickly enrolled in the Senate Education Committee where it excelled in athletics, maturing into an “An Act relating to schools; creating the Task Force on the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association.”  With a bright future before it, SB 1965 graduated, eagerly looking forward to life after education. continue reading…

Here’s a summary of President Obama’s discussion of energy legislation and climate change in the State of the Union address.

Watch the video here and then click over to Repower America to learn more.

“God’s Politics: a blog by Jim Wallace and friends” is a ministry of Sojourners, publishers of Sojourners magazine and other resources for the Christian walk.

Congress is hard at work on historic energy and climate change legislation. The House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill in the next few weeks, with the Senate to follow in early fall.

The bill is full of worthwhile provisions: investment in green jobs, modernizing our energy systems, and new pollution regulations. It also contains some less than desirable pieces like plans to give away the majority of pollution credits to industry in the initial years instead of auctioning them to create revenue for clean technology and assisting low-income consumers.

In my five years in Washington I’ve learned that supporting large pieces of legislation can be tricky. At Sojourners, we try to filter all of our policy work through the lens of caring for the most vulnerable, both in our country and around the world…

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