June 29 – Exactly as we predicted, and worse than we'd feared: Last night, just around midnight, fossil fueled fascists in the Senate cleared a key procedural vote, 51-49. Several Republican Senators are still saying they want changes and amendments to the bill (though that’s also what they said yesterday before they voted for the thing), and Senate Democrats are requiring a series of procedural votes, including forcing the entire 1,000 page bill to be read aloud, in order to slow things down. Best guess is that the Senate will clear the reading of the bill and procedural steps late tonight — again, around midnight Eastern time while absolutely nobody is or can be paying attention — setting up a final vote on the bill and passage sometime on Monday.

There were a couple more small changes, and a lot of pork-barrel, dirty, and absolutely nakedly corrupt provisions added in the dead of the night last night. One that’s not so bad: Sen Lee dropped some of his plans to sell off millions of acres of public lands — though the still requires and mandates massive amounts of public lands sales, as well as mandatory drilling for oil, mining for coal, and worse. Other changes included exempting just Alaska, and no other state, from certain work requirements related to federal food and healthcare assistance. So yay for Alaska, I guess. But as we said the whole bill is still absolutely horrible – it will kill American citizens, starve children, destroy the climate, and give the regime a massive secret police force with which to arrest, disappear, and deport any political opponents without due process.

Click here or call (833) 971-2490 and tell your Senators to vote NO and stop this climate and community killing budget bill.*

A picture of House leader Johnson, Trump, and Senate Leader Thune

*Note: Yes we know that because it’s a Sunday, and because they don’t want people to know what they are doing, most Senators offices are closed and some of them are refusing to even accept a voice message. As I'll explain below and in our blog, it's still worth trying because each Senator can make a unique impact in the final stages of this process. And that's what we need them to do. If you want to also send them an email, we have two different tools that still work – Click here to send an email with Sunrise and friends, or here with Bill McKibben’s Sun Day project.

Here's a bit more of a recap, and there's more in the blog you need a reminder on what's changed in the last few weeks.

A key last step in the process, which is unique to the Senate, is that before final passage any Senator can introduce an unlimited number of amendments, provided they’re all germane to the bill and pass various parliamentary rules. That makes every Senator uniquely important in this final stage: Any Republican Senator who’s said that they have a problem with cuts to childcare, healthcare, eldercare, or clean energy programs can offer an amendment to fix it. Senate Democrats can rally together and force every Senator to say whether they support building concentration camps, starving children, or giving tax breaks specifically to Elon Musk or polluting fossil fuel companies.

Most of those amendments wont pass, of course. Because, as we've said all along — this is a fossil fueled fascist regime. They want to kill people, put them in camps, destroy the climate, disappear their political opponents, and dissolve democracy in order to benefit billionaires and big oil. That's what Project 2025 is all about and they've never deviated from that dirty, racist, fascist vision board. But so far this bill has only over passed a full Congressional Chamber by a single vote. If we can use the Vote-A-Rama process to convince even ONE Republican in the Senate or House to change their mind, it’s worth it and the bill is dead. If we can save even one life, or get one megawatt of Renewable energy on the grid, or keep one person from getting abducted by masked agents of the regime – it's worth it to fight for that amendment. We have to save what we can, and that started by telling every single Senator that it’s their moral and legal obligation to fight this bill and vote no.

Click here or call (833) 971-2490 and tell your Senators to vote NO, and to fight for every amendment, delay, and improvement they can.

Thanks for all you do,

Drew & the 198 methods to stop a fossil fueled fascist budget crew

New Sources for June 29:

New Sources for June 28:

Sources:

They're trying to jam us with another midnight vote. Can you call now John?

They're trying to jam us with another midnight vote.
Can you call now John?