HR 3937 now a dead end; House Rules Comm results

["Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir@panix.com>]

[updated July 21, 1994 shabbir]

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Table of contents:
	Introduction
	Result of House Rules committee vote
	Status of the bill
	1994 Voters Guide

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INTRODUCTION

Voters Telecomm Watch keeps scorecards on legislators' positions on 
legislation that affects telecommunications and civil liberties.
If you have updates to a legislator's positions, from either:

	-public testimony,
	-reply letters from the legislator,
	-stated positions from their office,

please contact vtw@vtw.org so they can be added to this list.

General questions: 	vtw@vtw.org
Mailing List Requests: 	vtw-list-request@vtw.org
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Gopher URL: 		gopher://gopher.panix.com:70/11/vtw
WWW URL:		We're working on it. :-)
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RESULT OF THE HOUSE RULES COMMITTEE VOTE ON HR 3937

Based on information gathered by volunteers, we've been able to
piece together some of the positions of the House Rules Committee
as to how they voted for/against opening up HR 3937 to amendments on
the House floor.  [This is now somewhat moot, as is explained in the
next section.]

Extensive kudos go to
	Joe Thomas <jthomas@pawpaw.mitre.org>
	gaj@portman.com (Gordon Jacobson)
who both did extensive work to help find this information.

Here are the results we were able to obtain:

	[The committee voted 5-4 to open the bill]

		HOUSE RULES COMMITTEE MEMBERS

   Dist ST Name, Address, and Party       Phone            
   ==== == ========================       ==============  
      9 MA Moakley, John Joseph (D)       1-202-225-8273  
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

      3 SC Derrick, Butler (D)            1-202-225-5301 
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

     24 CA Beilenson, Anthony (D)         1-202-225-5911
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

     24 TX Frost, Martin (D)              1-202-225-3605 
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

     10 MI Bonior, David E. (D)           1-202-225-2106
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

      3 OH Hall, Tony P. (D)              1-202-225-6465
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

      5 MO Wheat, Alan (D)                1-202-225-4535
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

      6 TN Gordon, Bart (R)               1-202-225-4231
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

     28 NY Slaughter, Louise M. (D)       1-202-225-3615
	Voted "open"

     22 NY Solomon, Gerald B. (R)         1-202-225-5614
	Voted "open"

      1 TN Quillen, James H. (R)          1-202-225-6356
	Told a constituent he would vote for "open".

     28 CA Dreier, David (R)              1-202-225-2305
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

     14 FL Goss, Porter J. (R)            1-202-225-2536
	UNSPECIFIED POSITION

It is probably not worth the trouble to ask the remaining legislators
how they voted unless you happen to chat with their staff often. 
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STATUS OF THE BILL (updated 7/21/94)

If you read the appropriate newsgroups (or any major newspaper) you've
seen the news about the Gore/Cantwell compromise.  Since everyone
has reprinted it already, we'll not reprint it again, though we'll
happily send you a copy should you have missed it.

The upshot of this is that Rep. Maria Cantwell will not be offering
her amendment and therefore HR 3937 is a dead end this year for
liberalizing cryptography exports.  Since VTW is an organization dedicated
to working on legislation, and there is no longer a piece of relevant
legislation, we will be concentrating on other projects.  The "cantwell"
section of our archive will be reworked, and the records of legislators
that voted will be kept there for future reference.  [NOTE: these
voting records will also be rolled into our 1994 Voters Guide]

Here is the final schedule/chronology of the bill

Jul 21, 94  Rep. Cantwell and Vice Pres. Al Gore compromise on seven
	    principles, retreating on the Clipper chip; Rep. Cantwell
	    chooses not continue to press the legislation or the amendment
	    (see relevant articles in today's NY Times and Washington Post)
Jul 20, 94  HR3937 comes to House floor; a "good" amendement will be offered
Jul 11, 94  House Rules Committee marks HR3937 "open"; allowing amendments
Jun 30, 94  [*** vote postponed, perhaps till the week of 7/11/94]
	    House Rules Comm. decides whether to allow amendments
	    on the bill when it reaches the House floor 
Jun 14, 94  Gutted by the House Select Committee on Intelligence 
May 20, 94  Referred to the House Select Committee on Intelligence 
May 18, 94  Passed out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 18
	    attached to HR 3937, the General Export Administration Act
Dec  6, 93  Referred to the Subcommittee on Economic Policy, Trade and
Nov 22, 93  Referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

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1994 VOTERS GUIDE

Voters Telecomm Watch believes that you should be informed about your
legislators' positions on key issues.  We will be developing a survey
to give to current legislators and their challengers that will gauge
their positions on key issues involving telecommunications and civil
liberties.  These results will be made publicly available on the net
for you to use in casting your vote in November.

We'll be depending on you to help get legislative candidates to fill
out and return their surveys.  Please watch this space for the
announcement of survey availability in the coming weeks.

If you wish to participate in the development of the survey, feel free
to join the working list by mailing a note to that effect to

			vtw@vtw.org
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