Thursday, July 2, 2009

Next steps for MoveOn Councils

Dear MoveOn Council member,
On Monday, we asked MoveOn members whether to move forward with a massive effort to fix the energy bill in the Senate—and a whopping 95% of them said yes! This is consistent with how Council members responded late last week.
Now, we wanted to give a special update about our next steps in the Power Up America campaign—and get your feedback on where we go from here.
Read on for more, then click here to a complete a survey about our next steps:
http://pol.moveon.org/powerup/nextsteps/councilsurvey.html?id=16489-8727613-YfczcQx&t=1
Here's what the landscape looks like in the Senate:
Just like in the House, conservative Democrats are already fighting hard to make sure the big energy bill protects the interests of Big Oil and Coal. In fact, they're pushing to weaken the legislation even more than their colleagues in the House already did.
In the next few weeks, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will take up work on their own version of the bill. Many members of the committee, including Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, are supporters of clean energy—but they'll be under tremendous pressure to preserve the worst provisions of the House bill.
One big thing that's at stake: The version of the bill passed in the House would repeal a key Clean Air Act provision and prevent the EPA from cleaning up global-warming pollution from dirty coal plants. So we'll be asking Chairwoman Boxer and the committee to pass a bill which doesn't have that problem.
Meanwhile, the fight over health care—MoveOn's other big campaign right now—is also heating up in the Senate. And it's a similar story—some conservative Democrats seem to be siding with the health insurance industry and trying to scrap President Obama's proposal for a public health insurance option.
So we face some critical questions: How can Councils be most effective moving into the big Senate fight on energy? And should Councils also begin working on health care?
To plan our next steps, we need to hear from you. (If you responded to our email last week, thank you! And we'd love to hear more from you now.) Click here to take an important survey to guide our next steps on energy and health care:
http://pol.moveon.org/powerup/nextsteps/councilsurvey.html?id=16489-8727613-YfczcQx&t=2
And as always, thanks for all you do.

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