The American people sent Washington a message on November 2 – NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL.

The freshman class spent months knocking on doors, holding town halls and going to forums. They may be new to Washington, but they know who they are and why they’re here, and they’re ready to speak for the people who sent them.

I want them to be able to serve their constituents, so I want freshmen to be serve on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

If I’m chairman for a second term, we’re going to spend 2011 dragging the Obama administration to the Hill to explain what on earth it is doing in areas such as health care and energy. Nothing has gone quite so awry as the massive, government-run Obama health program, and it is plain that the individual mandate, the employee mandate, the abortion funding, the tangle of outsider/insider councils like the comparative effectiveness board and the effective nationalization of health care under grants of authority to the Department of Health and Human Services — all that has to go.

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This morning I posted an op-ed at Human Events about health care in the next Congress.

It looks as if voters were more than ready to show how much they’re fed up with the Democratic Party’s idea of healthcare reform by investing their trust in Republicans to repair the medical malpractice that took place under President Obama. Now it’s imperative that we Republicans respond with more than talk.

Delivering the goods should start with oversight hearings into exactly what went so wrong and the repeal of everything after the enacting clause of the law that set ObamaCare in place. The individual mandate, employee mandate, abortion funding, the tangle of outsider/insider councils like the comparative effectiveness board, and the effective nationalization of health care under grants of authority to the Department of Health and Human Services: All of those have to go. I hope we can move a repeal bill through the House in the first 90 days.

Next, we need the thoughtful creation and passage of healthcare reforms that make sense. I particularly want to ban insurers from rescinding coverage when their policyholders get sick and need to use their insurance. And an updated Patients’ Right to Know Act makes sense so that patients can know the actual price and quality of the care when making their healthcare decisions. This proposal would provide ways to collect and publicly disclose pricing and risk-adjusted quality data. Never again should patients get a bill on which a box of Kleenex tissues is featured as a pricey “mucus recovery system.”

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Today I wrote an open letter to the incoming House Republicans at The Daily Caller. It’s posted below.

An open letter to the gathering wave of new House Republicans:

In a turbulent campaign year, you are winning because you were honest with voters and you cut through the smog of media skepticism and Democrats’ acrimony. Those who win the trust of voters on election night will do so because you are the people in touch with America. I hope and expect that you will bring to Washington a perspective that’s been absent for too long, plus the determination to make it stick.

When you get here, there’s a fictional character that William Faulkner invented whom you’ll meet every day. He said, “Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain’t brave enough to cure.” Lots of people here think like that.

They’re the ones who walk the yellow lines in the middle of the highway and will tell you it’s okay to accept 8 percent unemployment because it beats 10 percent.  They will urge you to embrace tax hikes that are only moderately destructive. They will advise government spending that only grows twice as fast, and explain patiently that a deficit that swells by a trillion dollars is okay because, after all, it could be worse. It’s insidious, and I hope you will reject the philosophy that tells us to forget what we “ain’t brave enough to cure.” Now is no time to compromise with failure.

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By Reps. Joe Barton, Marsha Blackburn and Michael Burgess

On this page two weeks ago, Erick lamented the fact that American factory workers are losing jobs to China as a result of the de facto ban on the incandescent light bulb. Light bulbs seem to be a pretty simple part of our lives today. It gets dark, you flip a switch and presto – light happens. But a law passed by Democrats in 2007 – the Pelosi non-energy energy bill – banned nearly all use of the incandescent light bulb by 2014.

A recent Washington Post reported GE is shuttering a plant in Winchester, Va., killing 200 jobs in the process.

“‘Everybody’s jumping on the green bandwagon,’ said Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But ‘we’ve been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.’”

Turns out the compact florescent light bulb, or CFLs as they are commonly known, can’t be produced cheaply enough in America so we’ve turned to China, where virtually every CFL is produced.

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Five years to the day before 9/11, first responders told us they needed vastly more communications capacity in order to cope with a large emergency. Instead, we gave them silence, and the absence of reliable communications was held responsible for many deaths inside the World Trade Center. More years have passed since 9/11, and they’re still waiting for our help.

The scheduled Feb. 17 switch from analog to digital television broadcasting will give first responders the functioning equipment and broadcast frequencies they need. In fact, help was on the way for three years before the Obama transition team panicked and told Congress to delay. Last week, Congress tried to accommodate the White House, but the Senate’s DTV-delay bill failed to gain sufficient support to skirt normal rules in the House.

Now, all of us have work to do. Contrary to what you have heard, the digital TV transition program is neither stuck nor broke, and there’s no need for further delay. In fact, a delay could actually cause fewer people to be ready when their stations transition to digital.

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I hope that Speaker Pelosi’s recent letter to President Bush urging him to draw down oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve signals her recognition that the solution to today’s high energy prices is to increase supply in the market. Possibly she realizes that supply really does affect the price consumers pay at the pump, and that would be progress, but I don’t share her optimism that releasing “a small portion” of SPR oil would noticeably affect either world oil markets or the price of a gallon of gasoline.

What’s likelier to do the job is an end to the ban on exploring for oil off America’s own shores. The ban on drilling in the same Gulf that’s open to Venezuelans, Indians, Vietnamese and Cubans never made much sense except as a political barricade erected by anti-oil environmentalists in and out of Congress. Now that the president is voiding the old executive order, I hope the Democratic leadership can figure out a way not to automatically talk themselves into the kind of frenzied opposition that prevents real action to lower gasoline prices.

This used to be the sort of Washington spat that made drivers shrug, but hardly anybody’s shrugging since gasoline got to $4 a gallon. The president’s decision offers an opportunity for the speaker to be part of the solution, and I hope she will not simply reject it again because she’s a Democrat and the president is not. What’s happened lately isn’t encouraging. Whenever the issue of gasoline prices comes up, the speaker calls offshore exploration a hoax and reflexively pretends that evil producers are sitting on an ocean of oil under leases they already hold. Smirking and sneering when producers aren’t willing to spend millions to drill dry holes is propaganda, and the only hoax is that the speaker wants them to drill where the oil is not instead of where it is.

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