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US ARK Victory over 669 email

kathylove

kathylove

Pragmatic & Logical
Sorry - photos aren't showing up. But I am sure you can see them on the US ARK site. Join US ARK now, and you will get your very own emails in the future!! Kathy Love


VICTORY over HR669!!!

WE DID IT FOLKS!!!! Victory over HR669! You can thank yourselves and the Reptile Nation, for a hard fought Victory! Our nearly 50,000 grassroots letters and 1,000s of phone calls to the offices of the subcommittee members clearly prevailed at today's Insular Affairs Subcommittee hearing on HR 669. HR 669 in it's current form is finished. For anything to go forward it MUST be re-written from the ground up....and USARK will have a seat at the table along with other stake holders.
Delegate Faleomavega from Samoa said, "The letter and phone campaign hit the subcommittee like a BUZZ SAW". Harry Burroughs, of the subcommittee staff said, "I haven't seen a letter writing campaign like this in 30 years! You should be proud of yourselves." Take heart in the fact that the Reptile Nation stopped HR669 in it's tracks!!
We also need to thank Congressman Henry Brown, SC for helping us to focus our fight on the Subcommittee as opposed to the full House of Representatives. He is the one who instructed us to write real letters to be truly effective. He said emails are fine if that is all you can manage, but they can be filtered and deleted. There is no denying the weight of thousands of paper letters from American citizens. The Reptile Nation was responsible for 49,229 letters delivered to the Subcommittee in less than two weeks. Congressman Brown's staff made sure they all got in the door. 38,000 of those letters will be entered into the permanent record. Thank you my friends!
Credit should also be given to Bill Martin, a witness who testified at the hearing. He is the President of Blue Ridge Aquatics, a large multi-state Tilapia farming operation. They farm Tilapia as a food fish. He had some serious problems with the bill and the ear of much of the committee. His plain talk of how this bill would destroy hundreds of families hit home. What they do and the impact this bill would have on them parallels the plight of the Reptile Nation.
Senior Democrat staff from the House Committee on Natural Resources advised Subcommittee Chair Madeleine Bordallo that if she wants something to go forward she will have to go back to square one and draft a new bill. Then have another subcommittee hearing. When and if she does, USARK will be there to represent the interests of the Reptile Nation!! They probably will try, and that will be our challenge for another day. But Today VICTORY is SWEET!...... Celebrate today and rest, because tomorrow we must get ready to fight again.
Thank you Reptile Nation! Thank you Tom Wolfe. Thank you everyone who did their part.
Stay tuned... This fight has only begun!
USARK
A note from Tom Wolfe:
"The good news is, USARK engineered a significant victory which caught the attention of the entire membership of the Subcommittee and their staffs.
The bad news is this is just the first step in the process. Members of the Reptile Nation should be jubilant with this victory. However, our success should be measured, because the proponents of HR 669 will be back soon with another version of the same legislation. They will not rest, so we must not rest either.
Take satisfaction in a job well done and a victory well deserved, but know we all must rise up again to fight on because the battle has just begun!"


( pic above ) - USARK President, Andrew Wyatt presents Republican Staff Director Harry Burroughs the 38,000 letters that were admitted into the record of the official proceedings of the Insular Affairs, Oceans & Wildlife Subcommittee hearing on Thursday, April 23, 2009.

( pic above ) - Partial view of the 14 boxes and 11 USPS mail bins containing the 38,000 letters delivered to the Insular Affairs, Oceans & Wildlife Subcommittee.

( pic above ) - Insular Affairs, Oceans & Wildlife Subcommittee Ranking Republican Henry Brown, (SC-1) accepts one of the 25 containers comprising of over 38,000 letters from THE REPTILE NATION delivered to the subcommittee hearing on April 23, 2009. Left to right, Andrew Wyatt - President USARK, Congressman Henry Brown and Tom Wolfe - Washington representative for USARK.

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This is the Quote i love

Delegate Faleomavega from Samoa said, "The letter and phone campaign hit the subcommittee like a BUZZ SAW". Harry Burroughs, of the subcommittee staff said, "I haven't seen a letter writing campaign like this in 30 years! You should be proud of yourselves."
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Great news.....

Ricky87 said:
See, democrats aren't so bad after all!.
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lets just hope it doesn't appear in some back door legislation somewhere!

But Ricky, Dems or Repubs they're politicians, they have their ear to the ground and will sway the way the winds blows.

Congrats to everybody who slammed Washington and got this done.:smash:
 
I thought that in order for this to be "done" there had to be a vote? What ever happened to the 10 day "deliberation period" before the vote that I was hearing about earlier today?
 
I don't know...

I also thought they would do a vote in 10 days, too, after I watched the broadcast. Maybe they all got together and acknowledged it was a no-go? Maybe there will still be a vote, but they have already decided? Not sure. If I get another email with more explanation, I will post it.
 
Ricky87 said:
See, democrats aren't so bad after all!.
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See those woods across the stream? That's where we're we're goin', that's where we're gonna live, Ricky. It's gonna be so great! And we're gonna have rabbits, lots of rabbits.
 
elrojo said:
See those woods across the stream? That's where we're we're goin', that's where we're gonna live, Ricky. It's gonna be so great! And we're gonna have rabbits, lots of rabbits.
Click to expand...
Rabbits you say, Rabbits!. Oh Elrojo, you know just what to say to make a gal blush!.
 
"See, democrats aren't so bad after all!."

According to US ARK, EVERY Democrat on the subcommittee was our enemy. I am not so sure we changed their minds as to whether the idiotic bill SHOULD pass, only on whether it COULD pass - because of our impassioned fight against it.

I think most people tend to be very passionate about animal laws - whether they are humaniacs, animal keepers, or involved in some other aspect. So I think the politicians have already made up their minds (although SOME can be swayed by logic). But most care more about re-election than a particular cause, and that is where we can fight back.

I don't particularly like most politicians of either of those two parties. But when it comes to which party is more likely to try to strip us of our rights to pursue our brand of happiness (reptile keeping), I can see that I would have to be more scared of Democrats. Don't mistake that to mean that I agree with Republicans on a lot of other stuff they do, though!
 
I already sent a letter to my congressman Henry Brown (R-SC) who was instrumental in fighting the bill as well. I called his office yesterday and I had sent e-mails in the past about other bills that were being proposed. He is completely against any bill of this type and he was kind enough to e-mail me back to tell me that. I expect I'll get a response to my thank you note soon. To those of you who wrote letters and phoned (I did that too) WE ROCK!!!
 
Congratulations on a Job Well Done with HR669... but that was just the first Battle. We are fighting a war!

The effort put forth by the Reptile Nation in opposing HR669 was nothing less than monumental. A real letter campaign like that hasn't been seen in a long time. It made a HUGE impression. USARK is so very proud that the community has pulled together like never before to fight this bill. We gained an important preliminary victory... but this is far from over. It was just round one.

USARK has learned that the Defenders of Wildlife, Humane Society of the United States and The Nature Conservancy are going to meet with Delegate Bordallo's Subcommittee Staff in early May. The word is that they will be discussing a rewrite of HR669. They are expected to actually change the bill very little. The idea is to cut deals with the biggest opponents of the bill. We believe any proposal that involves a "white list" or a complicated permit system is a Deal Breaker for the Reptile Nation. That scenario we believe would eliminate the majority of animals and most hobbyist breeders. USARK will never endorse a deal that sacrifices any of our brothers and sisters.

This NEW bill is likely to be reintroduced under a new number in order to lose the stigma of HR669 as a tainted bill. It will cause confusion, but USARK will keep the Reptile Nation apprised of the facts as they develop.

Stay tuned to the latest developments on the USARK website. Prepare yourself for battle.

USARK
 
I was seeing a lot of posts on craigslist & other places calling for Non-Native bird owners, Non-Native mammal owners & the fish community to fight this bill, but read from some people on this site that those groups didn't do much? How active were they really? Does anyone know? And does anyone know how much support these groups might give the next time they try to get this bill passed?
 
Yes, I would also like to know how many letters the other groups (especially aquarium fish people - there are LOTS of them!) sent in, and how much they are likely to fight next time around.

Is US ARK in communication with our counterparts in other animal industries, either through PIJAC, or other organizations?
 
I saw a post on one of the fish keeping forums about it, and someone responded to say that they were hearing that this was pretty much DOA.. Of course that was pretty late in the game- I haven't been into fish that long.

Kathy, I agree that there is no coincidence that the bills sponsers were almost all Dems. I say that as a Democrat, that our fringe is at least as looney as the other sides fringe is. Unfortunately, I don't think their support of it was so much about their passionate feelings, but really their lack of ever having thought about it. How it would really affect people etc. I think they thought that the only people who really cared one way or the other were the PETA folks and their allies who were pushing them to do that.

This is really just the beginning of this I'm sure, and I do hope the party can get it together and figure out this is really a third rail issue that really hurts their ability to do things that are actually important to it's real interests: stealing money, socializing medicine, and buying everybody a house who's on welfare. Just kidding.

But seriously, I think the letters should be making that clear and I'm proud of our community. All politics aside, THIS is exactly how the system was made to work!
 
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