If ever there was time for some tough love and hard lessons in fiscal responsibility, this is it! The Granny Peace Brigade is going to put Congress on notice - NO MORE BAIL OUTS FOR DEFENSE! - and we need your help:
Dial 202-224-3121 and ask for your senator or representative by name. The Washington phone lines of the New York senators are often busy so we leave messages at local offices. If your senators' DC phone are busy, get local numbers from their web sites.
Will you make seven phone calls this week? Let us know how any or all of them went at grannypeace@gmail.com.
2. Call your other Senator. Ask him/her to vote no to Obama's $33 billion request for supplemental war funding.*
3. Call your Representative. Ask him/her to vote no to Obama's $33 billion request for supplemental war funding.*
4. Before Wednesday, March 10 call your Representative. Ask him/her to co-sponsor Kucinich's resolution, H. Con Res. 248, requiring the House of Representatives to debate whether to continue the war in Afghanistan. It is scheduled to be debated next week. H. Con Res. 248 isn't a proposed bill it's a resolution calling for debate, so ask your Representative to co-sponsor and speak up at the debate.
5. Call your Representative and ask him/her to co-sponsor H.R.4650 - http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h4650/show - : To phase out the use of private military contractors. Sponsor: Janice D. Schakowsky, [IL-9].
6, 7. Call each of your Senators and ask them to sign on as co-sponsors to S.3023 - http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s3023/show - : To phase out the use of private military contractors. Sponsor: Bernard Sanders, [VT].
One phone call = bubkes. One million phone calls = peace. This is no time to sit on our hands. Our senators and congressional reps seem to have forgotten who they work for -- and it is our duty to remind them. And please, please let us know how you're doing. (grannypeace@gmail.com) Tell us what works, what doesn't and we'll do the same. Lets work together to become an effective road block to these continued fiscal and humanitarian atrocities.
- Fran Sears & Eva-Lee Baird for the Granny Peace Brigade
*Hill To Weigh War Supplemental Next Monthà ‚¬ ¨Defense Daily, March 2, 2010, Volume 245, No. 39, pg. 2à ‚¬ ¨By Emelie Rutherford
Congress is expected to start considering in mid-April President Barack Obama's $33 billion request for supplemental war funding for the current fiscal year, which is expected to be approved without any major skirmishes.
Though Obama pledged to end the Bush administration practice of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through such emergency appropriations bills, he has requested the $33 billion FY '10 supplemental to fund a buildup of troops in Afghanistan.
The House Appropriations Committee (HAC) is expected to kick off consideration of the measure with a markup session on or around April 15. That date falls on the week after a two-week congressional recess set to begin on March 27. Until then, the congressional defense committees will continue to be enmeshed in hearings on the Pentagon's request for a $548.9 billion base budget and $159.3 billion in war funding for FY '11, which begins Oct. 1.
Senate appropriators are also expected to take up the FY '10 supplemental soon after the congressional recess.
