FreedomWorks Key Vote YES on Amendments to the House Commerce/Justice/Science Spending Bill

  • By: FW Staff
  • 06/03/2015

As one of our more than 6.9 million FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and ask him or her to support the following amendments to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill, H.R. 2578.

This list may be updated with further amendments as necessary:

  • Blackburn Amendment to reduce all spending in the bill (excepting FBI and other selected funding) by 1%.
  • Polis Amendment to prevent Department of Justice Agencies from collecting telephone records without a specific warrant under the Controlled Substances Act. This would stop agencies from conducting the sort of warrantless bulk collection of records that the Drug Enforcement Agency was recently revealed to have been conducting for over a decade before suspending their program in 2013.
  • Poe/Lofgren Amendment to prohibit the government from mandating or requesting that a private company build security vulnerabilities into their products to allow the government to more easily exploit them for surveillance.
  • Massie Amendment to prevent the National Security Agency (NSA) from consulting with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to reduce encryption standards in order to accommodate NSA surveillance programs.
  • Issa/Farenthold Amendment to prohibit federal funds for the use of "Stingray" devices without a specific individual warrant. These devices simulate cell phone towers and can take in large quantities of texts, emails, and call data at a time. Currently, the FBI and other agencies are deploying dozens of these devices with very little oversight.

FreedomWorks may count votes on any of these amendments as Key Votes when calculating our Congressional Scorecard for 2015. The scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress who consistently vote to support economic freedom.

Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe

President and Founder

FreedomWorks

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