Open Thread for Tuesday

Barbara Levy Boxer is the current junior U.S. Senator from the State of California.

A member of the Democratic Party, Boxer was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. She is generally classified as a progressive in the left wing of her party and is often in conflict with conservative groups.

Boxer was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1982, where she represented California District 6 (Marin County) for five terms.

During this time she has focused on human rights, environmental protection, military procurement reform and pro-choice issues. She was also involved in seeking protection for whistleblowers in government, and pushed for higher budget allocations for health, biomedical research, and education.

Boxer, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, exposed, with the help of the Project on Military Procurement (now POGO), the '$7,600 Pentagon coffee pot' and successfully passed more than a dozen procurement reforms.

However, Boxer also was involved in the House bank scandal in which congressmen, herself included, wrote bad checks in large amounts, an issue that the Sacramento Bee covered in a March 1, 1992 article quoting Boxer as admitting she didn't pay enough attention to her House bank account. More specifically, that meant 143 bad checks totaling $41,417 over a three-year period that she had written on the House bank.