"Urgent: getting this information to activists depends on folks sharing this. Please help.
Currently (1:37 a.m.) all of the websites for Republican State Senators are down. This is very curious considering the democrat sites are all working and the fact that not having email or a contact form will disenfranchise a lot of people, greatly reducing the number of grassroots activists who contact their legislators.
Today, massive numbers of limited government activists will be trying to contact their senators to tell them to vote no on ObamaCare.
And I've provided it below, along with some additional intel.
Now, to be fair, if you Google searched a particular State Senator specifically his/her page would open just fine. You could also use the "contact" link on their Michigan Votes profile to bring up their office page. But if you tried to go to your senator's page from the main senate contact list page, or if you tried to pull up the Republican Caucus from that page (or from anywhere), no dice, though the democrat pages (including the caucus homepage) came up just fine.
Evidently, the party "leadership" has made up their mind how they want the vote to go this week on 2013-HB-4714 and don't want us liberty-minded network types peeling off enough votes that Randy Richardville (RINO, District 17, Monroe) will be forced to call the question without a majority of his own caucus onboard with this particular act of legislative malfeasance. Worse, enough phone calls and/or e-mails and/or in-person visits to these senators might just result in solidifying enough "nay" votes to kill this thing if the question is put before the summer recess. So these geniuses seemed to figure that breaking the links will silence the voices of their constituency. That's unfortunate, now we're going to have to spend potentially the rest of the week playing hardball.
Funny thing, though; the intel file that I would have sworn I had buried in my desk drawer (that I thought had the personal phone numbers and home addresses of each of these senators) turned out to be a house-only file . . . from December 2010, thus quite useless for my original intent. So my wife (a professional genealogist who knows how to dig up this information) and I started doing address lookups, with the idea in mind that I might still be able to get the original version of this article (or something close to it) up early enough that the original purpose could still be realized.
Also, I'd noticed that whatever was broken on the Republican Caucus page had been fixed (around lunchtime), and I'm sure that some suitable excuse has been concocted. Nevertheless, I still hold that our senators need to be reminded, as politely and as personally as possible, that there is an expectation that we have of them; failing to measure up will have consequences. As I was doing follow-up phone calls to verify the address look-ups that Christie and I were doing, I started getting a good bit of information on where particular senators stood on the issue, and thus this article mutated quickly into a session-eve whip count estimate. Some of the intel might interest you.
Following is as complete a list as I have of the contact information on each member of the Republican Senate Caucus (listed alphabetically by surname). I've also included their position on 2013 House Bill 4714, as of the most recent intel (changed where I was unable to confirm it personally):
Position on 2013-HB-4714: personally confirmed leaning "nay" (his comment to me was that he wants to know how we're going to pay for this when the federal money dries up, and where the reforms are that the lobbyists are claiming) . . . voted "yea" on 2011-SB-693, but would have voted "nay" on 2013-HB-4111
Position on 2013-HB-4714: confirmed leans "nay" at this time, though he did vote "yea" on 2011-SB-693 . . . his office did, however, confirm for me that the senator flatly opposes any expansion of the Medicaid program (to the extent that he introduced 2013-SB-0041 back on January 16th, 2013, which prohibits Michigan from expanding Medicaid eligibility consistent with ObamaCare, and 2013-SB-0422 on June 11th, 2013, which creates a low-income health plan, and low-income health plan trust fund, funded and operated entirely by the state)
Eligible for re-election in 2014: yes
Campaign address and phone: 8940 East Bacon Road, Hillsdale / 517-523-3067
Position on 2013-HB-4714: personally confirmed "on the fence," but did vote "yea" on 2011-SB-693 . . . stated he opposes both ObamaCare and the Medicaid expansion in principle, but will not comment on the bill until he's read it (so realistically, he's probably more of a "leans no")
Campaign address and phone: P. O. Box 1508, Traverse City / 231-922-8000
My original intention, fifteen hours ago, was to have this up so that the liberty-minded network could spend all day pressuring the "lean nay," "on the fence," and "unknown" senators . . . as institutional retribution for the caucus page being taken down. Also, I wanted to make sure that we had the option of contacting personally the senators who were committed to killing this thing, so as to reinforce them against the arm-twisting that's likely well underway. Instead, what I have is a ballparked whip count of where the Senate Republican Caucus stands on House Bill 4714 (2013), in advance of an anticipated vote sometime tomorrow (though the bill still isn't on the Senate Calendar)
Also, note that when referencing the senators' position on the issue, I've used the terms confirmed and believed. "Confirmed" means that I've personally spoken with the senator's staff (or the senator himself), and "believed" means that I'm relying on Wes Nakagiri's intel report. Either way, this is where the whip count in the caucus stands on the question of concurring with 2013-HB-4714, as adopted by the House:
4 - confirmed or believed "yea"
1 - leaning "yea"
9 - unknown or "on the fence" (including Calley)
2 - leaning "nay"
11 - confirmed or believed "nay"
Now I figure that at least four of those fence-sitters are "oppose" votes in disguise, and that at least one fence-sitter (other than Calley) will come down in the "support" column before Tuesday's opening gavel. If we operate on the assumption that all 12 democrats will vote "yea" as expected, then Richardville needs only to peel off one more "undecided" vote, while Schuitmaker needs to get them all.
Because 2013-HB-4714 isn't officially on the Senate Calendar, the vote may not be called on Tuesday . . . but that's not the scuttlebutt I was hearing today. That the caucus website was down leads to the impression that Richardville may not allow the question to be called without at least 14 confirmed "yes" votes, so that he has an in-caucus majority, but you never know. You have the contact information; you know the drill; make sure that your public servants remember to whom they truly answer (and keep the pressure on until Friday).
And if this doesn't work, then we may just have to go medieval on their asses. A Gadsden-themed rally on the capitol lawn would most certainly be in order.
