Urgent Action

roy beck
Senate phones nearly shut down -- switch to local offices this eve & Thurs. morn
Can't get through the Senate switchboard or individual Senate offices in Washington?

Call their offices back in the home states. Many of our members are saying they are getting through fine right now.

Here's the link to your two Senators (just click on the "contact information" link for each Senator).

www.numbersusa.com/content/my/congress/quickview

And here's where you can get the home and Washington numbers for every Senator you might wish to contact (especially after reading some of the info below).

https://www.n umbersusa.com/content/congress/phone-numbers-and-mailing-addresses-memb.html

We're getting widescale reports from many of you who are phoning and phoning and not getting through in D.C. There are also signs that some Senators may have turned their D.C. phones off to keep from hearing from the people!
Overall, this is great news of a grassroots uprising that is sending great signals to the U.S. House to stay away from the S. 744 amnesty.
A number of you are pressing me to send out this one more alert today for a final hour or two of phoning -- especially for those of you in Central, Rocky and Pacific time zones where the local offices will be open awhile longer.
If the staff in the local offices says you should call D.C., tell them that the D.C. offices aren't answering their phones and you want these local staff to convey your message before the vote tomorrow on final cloture on the S. 744 amnesty bill.
=========================================
B ELOW ARE SOME ITEMS FROM AN ALERT EARLIER THIS AFTERNOON, IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THEM YET

  • IN THIS ALERT:
  • Chambliss, Chiesa, Enzi & Wicker joined our side in procedural cloture vote this aft -- up to 33 and growing
  • Red-stat e Dems take callous view toward struggling workers in their state -- especially Black Americans
  • Media coming to grips with bruising Senate battle making House far less receptive to amnesty this year[item] Send Immigration Grade Cards to the Senators who are so proud of themselves for engineering a massive increase in foreign labor.



Chambliss, Chiesa, Enzi & Wicker joined our side in procedural cloture vote this aftThose of you in Georgia, New Jersey, Wyoming and Mississippi, call and give heartfelt thanks to these four who on an interim cloture vote this afternoon joined the Senators who had also voted on the anti-amnesty side on Monday. (The key cloture vote happens tomorrow).
That brings to 33 the Senators who have been willing to vote to just end the whole process on S. 744 before getting to a final vote. That is up from only 15 who would take that stand nine days ago.
Horse-trading not yet moving any more 'NO' voters into the "YES' columnThanks to all of you who have been pounding the offices of all the Senators we told you about this morning who were reported by media to be hard-pressed targets of the Gang of Eight who have been offering various favors to get Senators to switch their votes to YES.
In the interim cloture vote this afternoon, none of the previous NO voters changed to YES -- as did Sen. Kirk (R-Illinois) on Monday after he was made a trade offer that he apparently wasn't willing to refuse.
Red-state Dems take callous view toward struggling workers in their state -- especially Black AmericansWe're getting disturbing information from citizens of these states.
Citizens who have lost jobs to foreign workers are being told that they just need to apply for higher-level jobs.
Black Americans are being told that, even though their complaint is that their unemployment is higher because of so much immigration, they should accept a huge increase in foreign workers because they should be supporting what their Black President wants.
It is as if these Democratic Senators in competitive states have taken on the worst characteristics of Robber-Baron-type Republicans.
Stopping a massive increase in foreign workers in the Senate always depended on the NO votes from at least a handful of Democratic Senators in competitive states who previously have voted against amnesties and who felt they had to cater to the wishes of the working-class voters of their states.
Thus far, every one of those Democrats has knowingly voted against their state's workers and for the corporate lobbyists and their demand for million s more foreign workers.
Please put on a last-minute blitz on Montana's Baucus and Tester, on Arkansas' Pryor, on Louisiana's Landrieu, on North Carolina's Hagan, on Indiana's Donnelly, on West Virginia's Manchin, on Missouri's McCaskill and on Michigan's Stabenow.
Media coming to grips with bruising Senate battle making House far less receptive to amnesty this year
Whether or not the Gang of Eight gets its amnesty through the Senate tomorrow, the conventional wisdom in the media now seems to be that the hard-fought Senate battle with huge grassroots opposition has for the moment scared off Republicans in the House of Representatives from joining the Gang.
Speaker of the House Boehner is reported to have met behind closed doors this morning with House Republicans and again promised them that he will not bring the Senate Gang bill to the House floor for a vote.
I will say more tomorrow about all the challenges we face in the House (we are going to have to deal with several smaller dangers right away). But there is n o question that the months-long opposition that all of you have waged with the Senate is having good results in the House.
But our ability to navigate the House is strongly connected to how much political pain can be felt by Senate supporters of the Gang of Eight.
And it is also connected to the extent to which our intellectual arguments get multiplied through various media.
Take Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard. Both he and the publication in the past have been quite open to the benefits of importing more foreign labor.
But both are strongly opposing S. 744 after considering the overall impact. Today, Mr. Last really nails the key points of why such a monstrosity of a bill could possibly get through the U.S. Senate, and it ain't a pretty picture of a bill that is little more than a bundle of gifts to special interests. His view seems to be catching on as people look more seriously at the strange timing of passing the largest foreign-worker bill in history during a time of very high unemployment.
There simply are no practical reasons for having this discussion right now.

Oh, but there are political reasons.
For President Obama and the Democrats, the political reasons are obvious. They see the Gang of Eight package as a chance to add a group of 11 million voters to the rolls (in the form of amnestied illegal immigrants) who could swing between 60 percent and 70 percent Democratic.
For Big Labor, it means adding more dues-paying members. (Even if it means lower wages for current union members; remember, unions care more about their institutional well-being than their members.)
For Big Business the current bill means increasing the labor supply -- which really means lowering wages. And increasing profits. It's not hard to see why the parties to this bill are pushing it so hard.
Send Immigration Grade Cards to the Senators who are so proud of themselves for engineering a massive increase in foreign labor.
If your Senators are pushing the S. 744 amnesty, you should soon this afternoon find on your Action Board a way to fax your Senators' Immigration Grade Cards.
We think there might be a sobering effect to see thousands of these very bad grades coming into the office, reminding them of the scarlet letter grades they will have to wear the rest of their career if they vote to give out 33 million new lifetime work permits to foreign citizens over the next ten years.