New Bill Aims To Prevent White House From Dodging The Free Press; HuffPost, July 13, 2017

Kaeli Subberwal, HuffPost; New Bill Aims To Prevent White House From Dodging The Free Press

"A Connecticut representative has introduced a new bill Thursday that would require the White House to hold at least two televised press briefings per week, in response to the Trump administrations’s recent restrictions on press access.

“The Free Press Act,” sponsored by Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), comes in the wake of a series of White House actions that limit the media’s access to the executive. The White House has repeatedly prohibited news outlets from televising White House press briefings, and has increasingly communicated with reporters in restricted settings shielded from public view...

Himes noted that he did not expect the bill to garner much support from the Republican majority, but that he would keep pushing it.

“While a Republican might say, gosh this feels like it’s anti-Trump, it’s actually pro-transparency, it’s pro-democracy, and it would apply equally to future Democratic presidents as it does to this Republican president,” he said.

“When you’re talking about something as important as White House policy, I think it’s really important that American citizens can at least feel like they were in the room.”"

Rep. Jim Himes: Why I walked out of the House’s moment of silence for Orlando; Washington Post, 6/14/16

Jim Himes, Washington Post; Rep. Jim Himes: Why I walked out of the House’s moment of silence for Orlando:

"Then I thought about how Congress would respond to the latest atrocity. There would be, for the umpteenth time, a moment of silence. To “honor” the victims. We did it five times just last year: Stop talking about sports and dinner and Donald Trump for about 10 seconds, put on our most serious faces, wonder if we’d turned off our phones. For 10 seconds.

Done. Over. On to the next thing.

Not me. Not anymore.

If the House of Representatives had a solitary moral fiber, even a wisp of human empathy, we would spend moments not in silence, but screaming at painful volume the names of the 49 whose bodies were ripped apart in Orlando, and the previous victims and the ones before them. We’d invite parents and partners and siblings up from Orlando, and ask them to speak, openly, rawly, honestly about their pain. We’d listen. And maybe, just maybe, we’d hear...

All I know is that the regular moments of silence on the House floor do not honor the victims of violence. They are an affront. In the chamber where change is made, they are a tepid, self-satisfying emblem of impotence and willful negligence. It is action that will stop next week’s mass shooting.

I will not be silent."