Senators strengthened education benefits for veterans and extended unemployment benefits for the jobless. Sanders cosponsored the new GI Bill. Oil prices, fueled by unregulated speculators, set another new record and Sanders pressed for legislation on two fronts; he wants to put reasonable limits on speculators, and he advanced a bill to double home heating assistance. Congress debated a new domestic spying bill that Sanders opposed on civil liberties grounds.

Home Heating Vermont lawmakers are facing a $19 million hole in the state's low-income heating assistance program. A panel of legislators met Thursday to address the coming winter heating crisis. In Washington, Sanders told fellow senators that "every American understands that we now have a national crisis in terms of outrageously high prices energy." He also pressed to double funds for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Majority Leader Harry Reid said he hoped to take up the Sanders bill within 30 days. Speaking on the Senate floor, Sanders said, ""I want take this opportunity to thank the majority leader for completing the…process of placing this bill directly on the Senate calendar yesterday. I also want to express my deep appreciation to him for his goal of moving this legislation forward within the next month. I think there is widespread support, in a nonpartisan way, for this legislation, which impacts people when the weather gets hot and it impacts people when the weather gets cold. This bipartisan bill is being cosponsored by Senators Leahy, Snowe, Brown, Sununu, Cardin, Coleman, Kerry, Collins, Kennedy, and Smith and I expect that the numbers of senators from both sides of the aisle who will be supporting it will only grow. The bottom line here is pretty simple. With the cost of energy soaring, we have many millions of Americans wondering next winter how they are going to be able to stay warm, and we have got to expand LIHEAP funding to match the inflationary costs of home heating fuel. Oil prices, meanwhile, climbed to a record above $141 a barrel on Friday.

GI Bill In a 92 to 6 vote, the Senate late Thursday passed and sent to the White House a GI Bill cosponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders that will expand education benefits for a new generation of veterans. Sanders, a member of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, said the legislation guarantees a full scholarship to any public, in-state university for veterans who served three years in the military, including activated National Guard troops and reservists. The expanded benefits also could be used for students at private colleges and for graduate schools. "Today's GI benefits do not come close to covering the cost of a college education. That is why it is so important that we update these benefits," Sanders said. "People must understand that caring for our service members is part of the cost of going to war," he added. "We are spending nearly $12 billion a month in Iraq. Surely we can spend a little more to provide a college education for the brave men and women we send to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan." Unlike the GI benefits that transformed American society after World War II, veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have discovered that current GI benefits cover only half the national average cost for tuition, room and board. The legislation offers improved education benefits to those who served in the armed forces after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Wiretap Law "I happen to believe that with strong law enforcement, with a strong and effective judiciary, with a Congress working diligently, we can be vigorous and successful in protecting the American people against terrorism and we can do it in a way that does not undermine the constitutional rights which people have fought for hundreds of years to protect--the Constitution, which today remains one of the greatest documents ever written in the history of humanity," Sanders told colleague during debate on House-passed bill that also would gave telephone companies immunity from about 40 pending lawsuits over their role in a Bush administration surveillance program instituted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "If we grant them retroactive immunity, what it really says to future presidents is, ‘I am the law because I'm the president and I will tell you what you can do and because I tell you what to do or ask you what to do that is, by definition, legal.' "That is a very bad precedent," Sanders continued.

Pentagon Waste A new government report found cost overruns on more than 70 new weapons systems. One reason could be the large number of former military officials that end up working for defense contractors. A GAO report found that in 2006 alone more than 2,400 senior DOD officials left the government to work for private defense contractors. Senator Bernie Sanders blames the revolving door as one reason taxpayers paid nearly $300 billion in cost overruns for military weapons systems. "We want to make sure the taxpayers get the value for what they are spending. And I think the time is long overdue for the Congress to take a very, very hard look at the waste and fraud that's taking place within the Department of Defense," Sanders told CNN.

Medicare Doctors face a 10 percent cut in Medicare payments next week, following the Senate's failure to take up legislation that would have averted the cuts. Republican senators blocked efforts by Democrats to call up the bill, which was approved Tuesday in the House by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 355 to 59. In the Senate, supporters fell two votes short of the 60 needed to close debate. The vote was 58 to 40.

Supreme Court As the Supreme Court ended its term, justices decided that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for personal use. The court ruled 5 to 4 that there is a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self defense. The landmark ruling overturned the District of Columbia's handgun ban, the strictest gun-control law in the country. The court also struck down a law meant to level the financial playing field when rich candidates pay for their own political campaigns, a law that came into play in Sanders' 2006 Senate race against a multi-millionaire opponent. In a major rebuke to the Bush administration, another 5 to 4 majority decided that a section of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was unconstitutional. Sanders, when he was in the House of Representatives, voted against the law that the court voided. Ruling in a death penalty case, capital punishment was declared an unconstitutional punishment for the rape of a child. The decision overturned death penalty laws in Louisiana and five other states. Sanders told XM Radio the holding may reflect mounting opposition to capital punishment in the United States because "a number of people have been executed who may, in fact, have been innocent."