Quick Fact: Congress Will Be Back in Session on Monday. The House Will Begin By Re-Fighting 2013

Following their holiday break, the U.S. Congress will be back in session on Monday.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) announced that, among the first items of business on that chamber's agenda, will be a vote on the reinstatement of federal unemployment benefits and a debate on raising the federal minimum wage.

In the other chamber, Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) has announced that he will introduce a bill in the House requiring the Affordable Care Act to protect consumer's private information.  This comes after Republican congressional leaders encouraged their members to spend some of their holiday down time meeting with constituents to discourage them from signing up for health insurance by warning that doing so could jeopardize their privacy.  (Consumer protection is already written into the law and security sweeps are done multiple times a day; but facts that don't fit Republican rhetoric are deemed by Republicans to not be facts at all.)  

If this Republican Party had been in place in 1908, party members would have been encouraging constituents to invest in horse breeding in order to protect themselves from Henry Ford.