The Space Access Society published an urgent alert late Thursday calling on people to contact their Senators in support of HR 5382. The Society’s Henry Vanderbilt recommends that those who wish to show their support for the bill should call or fax (but not write or email) their Senators by Monday. The Senate is scheduled to reconvene on Tuesday for a brief final lame-duck session that will be the last chance to pass the bill.
Vanderbilt said that the bill still has a “long-shot chance” at passage, although he added that apparently several Senators anonymously put holds on the bill when it came up for consideration last month, for reasons unknown. For that reasons, he said it makes more sense to ask all Senators to pass the bill rather than focus efforts on a single or small group of recalcitrant legislators. At his Cosmic Log weblog, MSNBC’s Alan Boyle said that the bill could have been caught in a “a cross-chamber dispute with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is pressing the House to move forward with boxing-reform legislation.”
As I’m one of McCain’s constituents, and the eligible to vote half of our household voted for him, I let him know that we would really, really like for him to let it pass.