Dump Jerry Weller

My U.S. Representative is, unfortunately, Jerry Weller. Weller is a typical Bush-DeLay robot who votes with numbing regularity for anything the Republican leadership tells him to. His voting record is appalling, as he has voted to weaken or kill Social Security and give tax breaks to big corporations while making it tougher for ordinary people to declare bankruptcy. He has voted against raising federal gas mileage standards. He is utterly in the pocket of Big Oil and the radical religious Right. He is, in short, atrocious. Check out his voting positions here. If anyone deserves to be thrown out in 2006, it's him. And, increasingly, people are sensing it. From today's DKos:

The 11th Congressional District of Illinois is the border territory between the southwest Chicago suburbs and downstate. It includes most of Will County, the fastest-growing of the large suburban Chicago counties, and its county seat of Joliet--politically marginal territory. Farther west, on bluffs above the Illinois River heading down to the Mississippi, are the factory towns of Ottawa and LaSalle and, to the south, Streator; this is LaSalle County, also politically marginal (it was Barack Obama's first Illinois campaign stop after the Democratic National Convention). South of Joliet is Kankakee; this is Republican territory. Redistricting in 2001 removed from the 11th the southernmost townships of Cook County, which were increasingly Democratic, and added two ungainly-looking appendages. One goes west to rural Bureau County; the other heads south at the intersection of I-80 and I-39 and includes most of Bloomington in McLean County, one of the faster-growing Downstate counties. The 2001 redistricting made this district more Republican than its 1990s incarnation; its partisan score is 48.5% Dem. The congressman is Jerry Weller, first elected in 1994. He took 64% in 2002, but only 59% in 2004. With the right candidate, Weller can be defeated.

There is a Democratic contender already. His name is John Pavich. Take a look at his website here. He'd be an enormous improvement on the rightwing robot we have now.