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Broadcast Flag Sneak Not Attempted
Trizero writes "THOMAS, one of the best sources for Congressional action on the Internet has shown that no amendments occured to the CJS Appropriations Bill. Monday, Slashdot covered the EFF announcing a rumor that a senator was attempting to sneak an amendment to bring the Broadcast Flag into law. From THOMAS (scroll down to the bottom): "6/21/2005:
Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. Approved for full committee consideration without amendment favorably." Translation: No one attempted to sneak the Broadcast flag into law." Update: 06/22 18:55 GMT by J : The EFF's new Activism Coordinator, Danny O'Brien, sees this as a victory for swift citizen action. Impressive numbers. Nice work by EFF and Public Knowledge, and everyone who raised their voice.
One of the most needed pieces of legislation in this country is a Federal-level law that states the amendments and provisions of a bill must directly relate to its topic. I know a few states have this now but Congress uses this backdoor to get all sorts of shady and illegal legislation passed every year.
"THOMAS, one of the best sources for Congressional action on the Internet"
That would be correct as:
"THOMAS, one of the best sources on the Internet for Congressional action"
English is a language with positional importance of words and phrases. Some verbs, like "action", more closely associate subsequent clauses as objects of their meaning than do clauses that preceed those verbs.
--
make install -not war
I've ranted before along the same lines. I'd kick in $100/year to buy some Senators who support expanding the fair-use rights of consumers, but only if enough other people kicked in so we'd reach $1,000,000/year. Anyone want to start it over at PledgeBank?
Getting the nonsense stopped is harder than it sounds.
The US Congressional procedures are very strange. Bills are created by committees; they don't usually go to the floor until it's been approved by the committee. After that, it's tricky to change the bill.
Most deliberative bodies have a "motion to split", which allows you to take a bill and chop it into pieces and vote the separate pieces. The US Congress rules of order don't have a motion to split. That means that you actually have to amend the bill to remove offending language. On the floor, debate and amendments are limited.
The point of not having the motion to split is to allow compromises to be enforced. If somebody says, "OK, I'll let you have your restriction on cadmium disposal, but only if I can have $15 million for my district to build roads." If you remove one piece or the other from the bill, the compromise falls apart.
It's hard to make compromises in a 435-member House (or even a 100 member Senate). That's why bills come out of committees, where there are usually a dozen people at most. In theory that also allows them to be experts (or at least have experts on hand) in transportation/defense/telecommuncations/etc.
The point is that your senator has less than 1% input into most bills. In theory he makes up for it with more than 1% input into other bills, depending on seniority. Of course it never works out that way, depending on favors he's done, whether he's in the majority or minority, etc.
So ultimately even when it comes down to the up-or-down vote, your senator could be forced to say, "I'm going to vote against this entire bill guaranteeing proper nutrition for kittycats because I don't like the broadcast flag that's gotten crammed into it." And when he runs for re-election, the opposition says, "Senator Bob vote to starve kittycats!"
The Republicans absolutely REAMED Kerry in the last election because of this. It's one reason that Senators haven't been elected to Congress in forever: they end up leaving these long track records of voting against things they agree with.
It didn't help that Kerry fumbled the answer, "Well, I voted for that bill before they crammed all that pork into it" (the correct answer) came out as, "I voted for it before I voted against it," and the election pretty much ended right then.
So Senators on the committee have massive power to write legislative pork and do favors for friends. That won't go away without a rewrite of the rules. Sadly, you'll discover that whatever party has 51% of the vote is not likely to vote to change the rules, since it tends to limit their power.
Viva la revolucion!
I'm not finding the amendment anywhere in the proceedings. Maybe I'm missing it, or maybe I'm missunderstanding what you're saying, Mr. Coward. Would you be so kind as to elaborate, and perhaps provide a link?
According to the latest EFF announcement, the campaign was in place to prevent the ammendment from being proposed - in other words, the EFF campaign is working.
--Mike Boos
The U.S. flag has 13 stripes, not 12. Please fix it.
It's not that simple unfortunately. A line-item veto did exist briefly during the Clinton Administration, but died upon it's first use.
President Clinton briefly had the power of the Line Item Veto between 1997 - 1998. It was Declared Unconstitutional in 1998, after President Clinton's first attempt to use the veto. If I remember right, Clinton knew that the Line-item veto wouldn't survive, and chose to use it in a mostly symbolic act.
The Courts said that this particular attempt at a line-item veto gave unprececented legislative power to the executive branch.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
It's not over yet.
Just between you, me, and a few other passing Slashdot folk, here's the extent of what we know: there's a senator who is (or was) friendly to the idea of dropping a BF amendment into the Senate Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill.
There are a number of opportunities for them to do this: drop it in sub-committee (Tues), full committee (Thurs), or even later in the passage of the bill.
If it's an uncontroversial amendment, and you're a sneaky senator, you're better off dropping it in early, because then the job is done, and someone else has to fight to get it out of the bill.
The more controversial it becomes, the later you should place it (when the bill has some momentum, and fixes are harder).
The BF got a lot more controversial this week.
The campaign switched this to becoming the "Broadcast what?" amendment, to the "Is this that Godforsaken thing that's been melting my staffers phones all week?".
It was always an even split whether the sneak move would go in Tues or Thurs (which was why it was a 48 hour campaign, and we've been targetting the full Appropriations Committee). They could still try and stick it in tomorrow, but that's becoming increasingly unlikely (we're betting 50/50 right now). Too hot a potato.
Next stop in this line of attack would be an amendment on the senate floor, but there's some time to go before that.
I've written about the effect of your messages on the EFF site, but that's mostly statistics on exactly how big the response was (summary: for a campaign targetted at a few senators in a short time-frame, it was huge).
I'm currently pulling together all the possible opportunities the broadcasters have for sneaking the flag in. I'm tempted to publish that, because it would give people a better overview, but there's a bit of me that thinks "Don't let them know what the opposition knows!". What do people think?
Reactionary does not mean what you think it means. This is a good English example of a "false friend"-- words that seem like they should mean one thing based on the apparent root, when in reality they mean something else entirely.
--Obyron
Thomas references a House vote. The EFF said this was action in the Senate....Two different bodies if I remember my civics lesson. Can anyone confirm that there was not a successful atempt to put this requirement in a SENATE bill???
I think you're referring to the "personal protection" (conceal and carry law) that was passed a few years back with another law. It was revoked late last summer on the technicality that it was added onto another law. Fortunately for everyone in Minnesota, an even better law recently passed this spring allowing responsible citizens to legally carry a firearm concealed and open.
"The truth suffers from too much analysis"
Sneaking something into an appropriations bill, by definition, requires it be "sneaked"... impossible to do, if everyone knows about it. 3 weeks from now, 3 months from now, 3 years from now, there will be another bill, people won't be on guard for it, and it will return.
And that's exactly why you should donate to the EFF, and stay on thier action alert mailing list - so when they do try again the EFF can raise the alarm and you can hear it to take action.
Basically now there's ALWAYS someone watching. And that is a REALLY good thing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley