From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Tuesday 26JUN07 8;30 p.m. EDT


We lost 1st amnesty cloture vote today .... But a big improvement from May ... Victory in our grasp

THANK YOU, FRIENDS -- WE NOW HAVE THE MOMENTUM TO WIN ON THURSDAY,

Thanks to all of you who have already responded to our nearly two dozen separate fax and phone action alerts that we've sent out in various groupings since the Senate voted mid-day to reconsider the Kennedy/Bush amnesty bill (S. 1639).

Check out your customized Action Buffet corkboard to be sure you have done all you can do Wednesday to influence the Thursday vote.

I hope you have been consulting our home page at www.NumbersUSA.com throughout the day and evening as our legislative team has kept you informed of every step as it has happened.

Some people have been discouraged by the vote today after working so hard to kill the amnesty outright.

But please do not be disheartened. Sen. DeMint (R-S.C.) is truly right in claiming that the momentum is with us -- it just wasn't quite strong enough today.


We did much better today than in a vote a month ago that was nearly identical in its procedural purpose.

Then as now, Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-Nev.) brought up a cloture vote to violate Senate procedures and bring the Kennedy/Bush amnesty bill to the floor for a vote without going through a committee.

You were able to persuade only 23 Senators to vote NO in May.

Today, you got 35! That's a lot of progress in just a month.


We only missed killing the Kennedy/Bush amnesty outright by 5 votes today, and those 5 seem within reach.

It takes 60 Senators to pass a cloture vote. The amnesty people got 64 votes today. If you switch just 5 of them, we kill the bill.

It looks like we have at least 8 Senators who voted YES for the amnesty today who are saying privately that they don't like the bill and are leaning toward voting NO on the Thursday cloture vote. If you can talk 5 of those 8 (or any of the rest of the 64) into switching to NO on Thursday and persuade the 35 NO votes from today to hold, we will kill the bill.


ONE THOUSAND ACTIVISTS IN EACH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT!


Your activist army is growing rapidly.

We issued this statement to the news media this afternoon:

The insistence of Bush, Kennedy, Reid, McConnell and Lott to ignore the American people and revive this amnesty bill is causing frustration and anger in the grassroots.

The American people are eager to express their displeasure over amnesty, and we at NumbersUSA see this in an accelerated and booming membership growth:

This afternoon we have reached a new milestone of an average of 1,000 ACTIVIST members per congressional district -- 435,000 activist members (with a total email membership list of more than 1.5 million).

We are disappointed that more Senators didn't understand that there is nothing at all that can be gained by further debating this bill under a sham amendment process. Nonetheless, we are heartened by the continuing momentum toward killing this bill later this week.

Amazingly, about 125,000 of you getting this Alert tonight have registered on NumbersUSA and begun faxing and phoning Congress ONLY SINCE MAY 1!

Now, each U.S. Representative must answer to 1,000 activists in the District, on average, and each Senator must answer to more than 8,000 activists in the average state.

That's enough to make a difference if we all keep doing our part.

(By the way, newcomers, about 2,000 of your fellow faxers have been fighting this battle with NumbersUSA since before the 9/11 attacks in 2001. If they've stuck with it for six years, I know the rest of you can stick with it more than six weeks.)


TODAY'S CLOTURE VOTE ALREADY SCORED IN OUR IMMIGRATION GRADE CARDS


You can see your Senators' latest Career and Recent immigration-reduction grades, reflecting their vote today.

www.CongressGrades.org

Just click on your state and then on the Senator's name. Don't forget that you can click on VIEW HISTORY and see grades for the Senator in every Congress of his/her career.

And you can click on any of the subject grades (such as Amnesty or Interior Enforcement) to look into more details of how that grade was earned.

On every page, you can click VIEW ACTIONS USED FOR GRADE link to see every action and the weighting of each action.

These grades provide our activists with myriad ways to print and quote for good effect in lobbying.


EXAMPLE OF WHERE OUR OPPORTUNITIES LIE


Sen. Bond (R-Mo.) was a big disappointment today in voting YES. But on Hannity tonight he called the bill a “june bug.â€