Legislative Achievements
1) Semiautomatic Assault Weapon Ban (Rep. Stark, D-California) – from 1989 through 1991, I served as the lead House staff member in the development and advancement of bipartisan legislation to limit the production, importation and sale of semiautomatic assault weapons. Worked closely with Congressman Tom Campbell (R-California) to draft the first major bipartisan legislation (H.R. 1190), and then focused the next two years as a liaison with major law enforcement organizations and gun safety groups such as Handgun Control to advance the measure.
Achievement: Major elements of the original legislation were adopted in the 1994 Crime Bill, an achievement recognized as the first major legislative defeat of the National Rifle Association (NRA) since passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968.
2) Anabolic Steroids and the Controlled Substances Act (Rep. Stark) – in 1989, I drafted the original legislation to restrict sales of anabolic steroids through the U.S. postal service. I recruited U.S. Olympic track star Carl Lewis to testify on behalf of the measure before the House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee. As a result, the proposal was adopted into a bipartisan and bicameral approach to amend the Controlled Substances Act to include anabolic steroids as a medication likely to be misused and abused, and thus require a prescription by a licensed physician.
Achievement: The legislation, H.R. 995, was incorporated into the House and Senate bipartisan measure that became the 1990 Crime Bill. The expansion of the Controlled Substances Act was the first major expansion of the statute since its creation in 1968.
3) ‘Junk’ Fax Ban (Rep. Stark) – in 1990, I drafted the original proposal to ban the unsolicited sending of ‘junk’ faxes, a nuisance similar to problems associated with later technologies and ‘spam’ emails and ‘robo’ telephone calls.
Achievement: The bipartisan measure passed the House and Senate overwhelmingly, and became law shortly thereafter. The statute was challenged in Federal court, and was upheld as constitutional since it regulated commercial speech. That ruling became the foundation for other measures, such as laws on ‘spam’ emails and ‘robo’ marketing telephone calls.
4) Satellite Television Access to Programming (Rep. Stark) – in 1992, during the House-Senate conference committee on the passage of the Cable Television Reregulation legislation, I organized a bipartisan coalition of House Members to demand for the addition of a legislative clause to ensure that satellite television broadcasters, such as Direct TV and EchoStar, would have fair and equitable access to cable programming content, and at market competitive rates. Prior to 1992 the cable content providers often denied their programming to satellite providers, or made the programming available at onerous or non-competitive rates, a practice which thwarted the development of the satellite TV industry. The bipartisan coalition of House Members included several California House Republicans who had originally voted against the House Cable Television Reregulation measure, but changed their votes with the promise of a new satellite dish manufacturing facility in Long Beach, California.
Achievement: The provision prevailed in the House-Senate conference committee, despite not being included in either the House or Senate legislation passed earlier. President Bush subsequently vetoed the new cable law, but with the change of the handful of southern California Republican votes the President’s veto was overruled. It was the only instance of overruling a veto by President Bush, and telecommunication analysts credit the access to programming provision with spawning the growth of the satellite television industry.
5) Genetic Discrimination Ban (Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, D-Massachusetts) – in 1996, I conceived and developed a provision to the House version of the Kennedy-Kassenbaum health care legislation to prohibit health insurance companies from using an individual’s personal genetic information to deny or limit, or otherwise determine the costs of, employer-provided health insurance coverage. I recruited and organized a bipartisan and bicameral coalition of Senators and House Members, namely Senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Connie Mack (R-Florida), and Reps. Kennedy, Nancy Johnson (R-Connecticut), and Cliff Stearns (R-Florida). The proposal was strongly supported by Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the Human Genome Project and currently the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Achievement: the provision was incorporated in the Kennedy-Kassenbaum health care law, thus protecting every American with employer-provided health care coverage from having their genes determine the access and cost of their health care. This measure also became the foundation for a Presidential Executive Order issued by President Clinton in 1997, and which was further extended by President Bush in 2001 and President Obama in 2009.
6) Expansion of ‘529’ College Saving Plans (Rep. Kennedy) – in 1996, I conceived of and organized a bipartisan House coalition to introduce legislation to expand the existing tax-deferred provisions, known as ‘529’ College Saving Plans, named for the section of the tax code for educational tax law, which encouraged individual saving accounts for a child’s future higher education expenses, to include tuition, room and board.
Achievement: the measure passed and was included in the Small Business Job Protection Act, which was signed into law in 1996. The Senate authors were Senators Bob Graham (D-Florida) and Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), and the measure is widely credited for spurring the development of college-savings plans nationwide. From 1996 to 2000, thirty States developed and implemented a Section 529 plan, thus dramatically increasing overall college savings by providing tax-deferred incentives for millions of American families to save for their child’s higher education opportunities.
7) Biological Weapons (Rep. Kennedy) – in 1996, I conceived of and developed bipartisan legislation to strictly limit access to potentially-dangerous biological chemical agents, such as certain pathogens and bubonic plague, to licensed university-based research scientists. The proposal followed alarming news report of the arrest in May, 1996 of a white supremacist in central Ohio who had acquired bubonic plague from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) using a forged document, in preparation for an apparent terrorist attack. This proposal was embraced by the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who was then championing the passage of a comprehensive Anti-Terrorism proposal which had passed the Senate the previous year following the May, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. With Senator Hatch’s active support, the provision was included by the House Republican leadership in the House anti-terrorism proposal.
Achievement: this measure was incorporated into the Anti-Terrorism Act, and became law in 1996. Prior to this episode the NIH had no existing regime for approved research scientists, and this measure would require the NIH to establish a system of background checks and a data base of academic research scientists with a legitimate need to access these biological agents.
8) Small Business Innovative Research Grants (Rep. Kennedy) – in 1996, and late in the night before the annual debate of the FY97 Labor-HHS Appropriations funding bill, I identified a provision hidden in the bill which would have severely limited the ability of thousands of American small business firms to compete for medical research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program. I quickly organized opposition from several key small business organizations, and drafted a compelling floor speech for Rep. Kennedy, who managed during the House floor debate to convince the Labor-HHS Subcommittee Chairman, Rep. John Porter (R-Illinois), to drop the provision from the funding measure.
Achievement: the exclusion of the provision successfully preserved the ability of thousands of small businesses to participate in competitive medical research grants from NIH.
9) ‘Drug War’ Treatment Corps (Rep. Stark) – in 1990, I conceived of and developed bipartisan legislation to expand the categories of physicians eligible for the National Health Service Corps to include drug, alcohol and addiction treatment professionals, where in exchange for a commitment to serve in underserved rural and urban areas, eligible physicians have their medical school loans paid for by the federal government.
Achievement: the initiative was incorporated by Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee Chairman Henry Waxman in the reauthorization of the law.
10) Anti-Auto Theft Legislation (Rep. Stark) – in 1992, I conceived of and developed bipartisan legislation to significantly expand the types and scope of automobile car parts required to be stamped with a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) which is a means by which law enforcement departments are able to investigate automobile thefts. The problem originated from so-called “chop shops” that would steal automobiles for the purpose of dismantling the vehicle’s parts, which are then resold to repair shops and then to unsuspecting customers. I worked with law enforcement organizations and major auto insurance companies to advance the proposal, and it was included in the 1992 comprehensive anti-crime law in the House.
Achievement: the proposal became law in 1992.