[NFBWATlk] State and national legislative update

[Marci Carpenter]

Greetings,

Below are some Legislative updates. We will be forming an NFB of Washington Legislative Committee this year. If you are interested in learning more about and working on local, state and national legislation please contact me at 206-604-5507 or mjc59 at comcast.net. Any member of our affiliate can serve on this committee. You don’t need a lot of knowledge about how legislation gets passed. We will be holding legislative seminars during the year and at our state convention in November.

State legislation:
Contact your state Senators now. ESHB 1852, the prescription drug label bill, was passed out of the Senate Rules Committee and is now on the list of bills to be voted on by the entire state Senate. They have not voted on it yet. The Senate meets again at 10 AM this Monday morning. We need everyone to contact your Senators and tell them you want them to vote on this bill and you want it to pass. The last day of this legislative session is this Thursday, March 10. Here is a link to the state Senate webpage where you can find your senator and their contact information: https://leg.wa.gov/Senate/Senators/Pages/default.aspx
Although bills are listed in a certain order they aren’t following that order so we do not know exactly when they will hold the vote on our bill. If you want to watch the Senate floor debate on Monday you can go to https://tvw.org/

National legislation:
We have made great progress on our national legislation. We have added cosponsors since Washington Seminar but we still need you to contact several members of Congress and ask them to cosponsor our legislation. Below is a list of our bills in Congress along with the names of Congresspeople and Senators from Washington state who are cosponsoring them. If your Congressperson is on this list please call or email them and thank them for cosponsoring our legislation. If they are not on the list please contact them and ask them to cosponsor our bills.

HR 431, Access Technology Affordability Act Cosponsors:
Suzan DelBene
Rick Larsen
Jaime Herrera Beutler
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
Derek Kilmer

S 212
Patty Murray

HR 4853, Medical Device Nonvisual Accessibility Act cosponsors:
Jaime Herrera Beutler
Adam Smith

No Senate bill yet

HR 2373, Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act cosponsors:
Suzan DelBene,
Jaime Herrera Beutler
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
Derek Kilmer

S 3238, no Washington state cosponsors at this time

Twenty-First Century Websites and Applications Access Act:
We don’t have bills introduced yet but it’s still important to encourage members of Congress to support this when it gets introduced.

Congressional offices keep track of how many people contact them in support of bills.

Ways to contact your Senators and Representatives:
1. Call the US Capitol switchboard at 202-225-3121 and they will connect you to the offices.
2. Go to https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative to find your Representative and their contact information.

If you want to monitor our national legislation and find out how many cosponsors there are on a given bill go to https://www.congress.gov/
This website has a search box where you can type in any legislation, such as “HR 431“, and learn about the cosponsors and the bill’s progress.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Marci Carpenter