During consideration Thursday of the Consolidated Appropriations Act (HR 7148), United States House of Representatives members rejected by a vote of 268 to 164 an amendment to offered by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), along with cosponsors Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA) and Chip Roy (R-TX). The amendment would eliminate funding to implement a mandate included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (HR 3684) that President Joe Biden signed into law in 2021. That mandate requires vehicles to be manufactured so they include a “kill switch” that empowers government to remotely disable the vehicles if surveillance technology the mandate also requires to be included in the vehicles indicates there has been “impaired” driving.
Tag: amendment
Special interests are continually finagling to gain more support from the United States government that oversees a vast trove of money and power. A vote just after midnight Friday morning in the US House of Representatives suggests that the government of Israel is at the top of the heap of special interests when it comes to being able to extract benefits from the US with very widespread support from American legislators.
A year ago, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was pointing out that the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act being used by Democratic leadership in the United States House of Representatives as the vehicle for marijuana legalization was actually delaying progress toward marijuana legalization on the national level. If the Democratic leadership really wants to end the US government’s marijuana prohibition, Massie argued, it should ditch the MORE Act with its extraneous provisions that turn off most Republican House members and even some Democrat House members and instead bring to the House floor a “straight up clean” bill eliminating the US government’s criminalization of activities related to marijuana.
The Democratic leadership did not follow Massie’s advice last year. Instead, it kept pushing the MORE Act, resulting in the bill passing in the Democratic-majority House in a very partisan vote but going nowhere in the then-Republican-majority Senate. In the new Congress begun this year, the House’s Democratic leadership is again pushing the virtually Democrats only MORE Act, designated as HR 3617 this Congress. It makes one wonder if the power behind the scenes either thinks the new razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate will deliver approval of the bill or, it seems more likely, thinks it is fine to score political points with the very partisan bill while ensuring the US government’s marijuana prohibition stays in place.
It is a good rule of thumb that bill names in the United States Congress are misleading. A prominent example of that is the USA PATRIOT Act that, instead of supporting the freedom for which American patriots have fought, provides to the US government extensive means to infringe on that freedom.
On Thursday, though, House of Representatives members were offered in an amendment vote the opportunity to replace one such misleading bill name with a name that informs the American people what the bill is really about. Forty-seven House members voted for the change.