John Ensign's Blog

KTNV-TV (ABC 13 in Las Vegas) reports on Senator Ensign's effort to replace the vandalized flag of Las Vegas-area resident:

Charles Husband always has an American flag flying over his apartment.

But last week, he put out a special flag for Memorial Day and it was burned.

"Careless folks get out there and vandalize a flag, obviously it's very outrageous," says Senator John Ensign.

The senator heard about the incident, when a local veteran called his office.

"I needed to replace the flag, I did what I thought was right," says Jeff Durbin.

Durbin had received a flag that had flown over the capitol when he retired from the Air Force, so he asked the senator if he could do the same thing for Husband.

"It's just a fun thing to be able to, it just makes you feel good to be able to do something like that," says Sen. Ensign.

Husband is going to put his new flag in a case, so he can display it proudly and not worry about it being vandalized.

He says the flag is special.

"It means freedom, glory, power, business, families, a great country."

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Last Friday, Senator Ensign went to the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay to tour the detainee facilities and receive a briefing on detainee policy.

After touring the detainee facilities, Senator Ensign concluded that it would be irresponsible to bring the detainees to American soil:

After seeing firsthand the facilities at GITMO, it is unnerving to imagine housing these detainees on American soil.

Guantanamo Bay is the appropriate location because it has state-of-the-art facilities to detain terrorists and conduct military commissions, as well as the advantages of isolation. Hosting military commissions anywhere without a high level of isolation would make it more difficult to protect the classified information presented. That's why we built a world-class facility at Guantanamo Bay.

If the American people saw all the amenities for the detainees, they would see that detainees receive first-class medical care and have access to a 14,000-book library, Arabic newspapers, USA Today and instructional classes teaching languages, literacy and art. Members of the International Red Cross have complete and open access to detainees whenever they want and without notice.

At GITMO, there are multi-level security facilities, depending on a detainee's behavior. The most common misbehavior is a detainee throwing feces or urine at our troops. Today we visited Camp 7, which is where high-value persons such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and others are held. As a way to gather intelligence from these sources, our interrogators used Enhanced Interrogation Tactics, which led to intelligence that saved thousands of American lives.

Senator Ensign pledged to block the closing of the detention facility, if that would result in detainees being brought to American soil:

Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Ensign (Nev.), returning from a trip to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said Friday that Republicans will try to block closing the U.S. prison there and may be successful.

Ensign, who traveled to Cuba with GOP senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mike Johanns of Nebraska, said the party plans to offer "three or four" amendments to the military supplemental funding bill being considered by the Senate next week, and that he believes some of them will pass because Democratic senators are unwilling to accept the possibility of detainees in the U.S.

Thanks to the leadership of Senator Ensign and Senate Republicans, Senate Democrats were forced to join Republicans in opposing bringing known terrorists to the United States.

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Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security withdrew the discredited "rightwing extremism" report issued last month.

Senator Ensign describes his effects to object to the report:

A few weeks back, a report was issued by the Department of Homeland Security stating that our servicemen and -women returning from active duty are candidates to commit terrorist attacks. While this is wildly absurd, this report raised some serious red flags about the mission of the Department of Homeland Security. I joined with Senator Coburn this week to send a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security for further clarification about this report. While a robust intelligence infrastructure is important, the report has no intelligence value and only serves to blur our constitutional protections, such as the Second Amendment. America's returning heroes should not be denied the very Constitutional rights they risk their lives to protect.

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Senator Ensign will be on Fox New Sunday this Sunday with Democrat Senator Dick Durbin.

• Check your local listings for time and station here.

Please tune in.

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Senator Ensign has joined a bipartisan group of Senators working to make the U.S. Senate more transparent by making Senate roll call votes more accessible:

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Senator Ensign will be on Bill Bennett's radio show "Morning In America" on Tuesday tomorrow at 5:30 am PST with former Senator Rick Santorum as guest host.

Please tune in:

• Find your local station.
• Listen online.

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The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported yesterday that Senator Ensign "refuses to get complacent" and is continuing to lead the fight against card check:

The Employee Free Choice Act has lost several key congressional advocates, but Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., refuses to get complacent.

Ensign, who opposes the bill, said Tuesday that he believes it still enjoys solid prospects for passage.

"It definitely has lost support, but there's a caveat," Ensign said. "They say they can't support the bill 'as it stands now.' I get nervous when I hear that saying. This bill is a terrible bill no matter how you write it."

Labor leaders said they agree the bill has a future, despite faltering congressional support for it.

...

Added Alison Omens, a spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.: "We absolutely believe that labor-law reform is going to happen in 2009, and that it needs to and that it will remain true to the principles of the Employee Free Choice Act ... ."

...

Ensign came to Las Vegas on Friday to foment grass-roots efforts against the bill. He and the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce led an informational meeting that drew about 200 attendees to the Lindell Road warehouse of janitorial supplier Brady Industries.

At the event, participants received cards urging them to sign up for a free lunch at a local restaurant.

The crowd later learned about the unreadable small print that said anyone who submitted a completed card had just agreed to let a union represent them.

"That's a perfectly legal way to get signatures for card check, and that is exactly how a lot of these card checks take place," Ensign said. "It's deceptive, and it's a common practice."

It was only an experiment -- no one actually joined a union Friday -- but it proved an eye-opener for Anne Sutorius.

Sutorius, owner of ATM/Annie the Maid, attended the meeting because she wanted more information about the act.

"I was horrified and shocked beyond belief at the duplicity involved in card check," Sutorious said. "The print was so small it could not be read. Everyone fell for it. Everyone who was there trusted Brady (Industries). That's the scary part. An employee, simply by trusting someone they know, can have that trust turned against them. It's so not the American way. It's difficult to understand how it's gotten this far."

Senator Ensign continues to uphold his pledge: "I will not stop until card check is dead."

Help Senator Ensign stop the Employee "No" Choice Act by joining the Protect The Secret Ballot Facebook group.

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Senator Ensign met with smmall business owners across the state of Nevada over the past week to discuss the Employee "No" Choice Act.

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Senator Ensign will be appear on CNN's State Of The Union show this Sunday at 6:15 am PDT to discuss homeland security and border security.

Please tune in.

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Senator Ensign met with community leaders, Chamber of Commerce members and business owners at a breakfast in Carson City where he discussed the economy yesterday. More from the Nevada Appeal.

Sen. John Ensign decried the huge projected deficits in the budget bill working its way through the U.S. Congress before a breakfast crowd at the Carson Nugget Wednesday morning.

"If you look at the budget bill as it stands, and take all of the debt built up from George Washington through George W. Bush, we will double that debt in the next five years, and triple it in the next 10 years," said Nevada's GOP senator. "It is unsustainable."

Addressing business leaders at the Northern Nevada Development Authority breakfast, Ensign said that to handle this kind of debt, the highest marginal tax rate would have to be raised to 88 percent.

"What we are witnessing is a Europeanization of America, taking over private industry, trying to tell how much we are going to pay CEOs, the bailouts, too much involvement in the marketplace," he said.

Ensign said the auto company bailout was one of the worst things President Bush did while he was in office last year.

"I believe in saving the auto companies, if they were savable, and that meant that they needed to go into Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy," he said.

Ensign talked about his alternative budget proposal that focused on the housing market.

"Housing is what brought the economy down," Ensign said. "We all understand that. It would make sense to me that if that's what brought the economy down, then you should fix housing first."

Ensign also called for lowering corporate tax rates, citing the success of Ireland as an example, though that country is now struggling with its worst economic downturn on record, according to its government.

Help restore fiscal discipline by joining Senator Ensign's Restore Fiscal Responsibility Facebook group.

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