time spent: 30 minutes

The most important issues today for me surround the economy, jobs and taxes, so these will be the issues from which I will seek out information when considering the congressional candidates. I revisited the Library of Congress to get a sense as to how Congressman McDermott used his time addressing the Legislature when he had the floor. The link to locate the congressional records for each congress (the 111th congress presides today) is below:

http://thomas.loc.gov/home/r111query.html

On this page, you can make a more specific selection by member of congress, dates or sessions. I selected the congressman's name and a nice tidy list of congressional records appeared associated with his name. From this list, I could select from the various House Resolutions associated with my key interests. For myself, this link was a more user friendly approach than going through the congressman's link though I imagine I'll be referring to both throughout this campaign season.

For starters, I clicked on a link to Congressional Record 12 of 75 titled Senate Exercising Petty Partisanship on Unemployment Benefits. The words that caught my eye of course were 'unemployment' and 'benefits'. In this case, the congressman was given permission to address the House for 1 minute. From this 'sound byte' I could sense his passion and his position (in support of) the matter. The next step then was to locate the bill he was referring to and read it.

To do this I launched a new search for congressional records prior to Congressman McDermott's comments. From the link below I surmised his comments to be related to H.R. 3548, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009, passed by the House on September 22, 2009.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?r111:13:./temp/~r1118eIkNB::

This allowed me to return to the home page and do another search on the text of the bill. The search was not quite as simple as I thought, but I found the bill within 5 minutes.

Okay, I found a groove and am on my way, having found a method of tracking Congressman McDermott's record and comparing it to my own views as well as measuring his job performance against his job description.