Govtrack data on Mike Thompson

(April 5, 2009)

If you follow this site and click on the links for the votes I report on, you will have seen that I usually link to www.govtrack.us. There is actually much more information about Mike Thompson at govtrack than there is here, but wading through it is quite time consuming. Ideally to cover Mike fully would require skimming the Congressional Record every day, which is in itself a full time job. After I report on one vote from last week I'll tell you some of the most interesting things I have learned from govtrack. (There are other Web sites that also follow Congress in detail. I like Govtrack because it summarized information about votes very nicely, with easy-to-find links to the summaries for and texts of bills.)

Mike voted Yes on the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 [H.R. 146], which passed 285 to 140 with 6 members not voting. This was the final vote patching up the House version of the bill with the Senate version. President Obama has signed it, so it is law. It mostly adds environmental protections to federal lands, in particular expanding wilderness areas. Including in the Humboldt-Toiyabe and Inyo National Forests. So way to go Mike.

That said, I learned that Representative Mike Thompson (there are two more Representative Thompsons in Congress!) sponsored 92 bills since January 6, 1999. 78 did not make it out of committee, and only 6 were successfully enacted. What this means depends on how you sort out the details. Members of Congress submit bills all the time to please there constituents, even though they know they will never make it out of committee, much less pass. On the other hand, this may not be fruitless: the ideas in bills may appear in other bills the committees do pass. Here is a link to the bills Mike Thompson has sponsored.

Mike Thompson is well off but not super rich. His net worth was in the range of $840,000 to $2.8 million in 2007, but like most of us he is probably poorer now that Congress's failure to provide oversight to the banking and securities industry has led to disaster.

The top contributor to Mike's election campaign in 2008 was AKT Development, or more correctly (since corporations are prohibited from giving money directly to campaigns for Congress), the employees of AKT, who gave a mere $27,600. That would seem to be the Sacramento and San Francisco based real estate developers, the Tsakopoulos family, who do not seem to have a Web presence I can link you to, but here is the Angelo Tsakopoulos Wikipedia page. For more details on Mike's contributors, which include the usual Democratic Party bound labor unions as well as timber companies, the alcohol-industry, and developers, see Mike Thompson campaign contribution data.

And in case you did not know, Mike is a member of two committees: House Committee on Ways and Means, and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.