Update [2004-6-7 15:18:23 by tyroneslothrop]: According to http://cq.com, the House and Senate have suspended legislative activity for today and tommorrow, which gives y'all a bit more time to contact your Senators about these votes.
The Senate resumes debate today on the 2005 Defense Authorization bill. Thankfully, the framers saw fit to give the Senate the power of unlimited debate, which means no rules committee, which means that there will be floor votes on many of the amendments that David Dreier and the House Rules Committee ruled out of order.
Votes on the amendments start tomorrow. From my perspective, few of these will be as important as the votes on new nuclear weapons funding, particularly the Feinstein/Kennedy amendment:
Sens. Feinstein (D-CA), Kennedy (D-MA), Reed (RI), Lautenberg and Feingold have offered amendment No. 3263 to delete funds in the bill for R&D on the nuclear bunker buster ($27.6 million) and advanced concepts ($9 million), money that could be used for research on small nuclear weapons. The Committee approved full funding for these two programs requested by the Department of Energy. These weapons are not needed because the U.S. already has 6,000 deployed nuclear weapons. Moreover, a U.S. decision to proceed with a new generation of nuclear weapons will undercut non- proliferation efforts.
The vote on this is expected to be VERY close, and if any of the following are your Senators, please consider calling them today and telling them to support this amendment and stop the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons:
Bill Nelson (Fla.)
Evan Bayh (Ind.)
Susan Collins (Maine)
Olympia Snowe (Maine)
Ben Nelson (Neb.)
Gordon Smith (Ore.)
Arlen Specter (Pa.)
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