Monday: Passed 3 Bills

Sorry about the late post. There has been technical difficulties going on lately. Here is what we did on Monday 11/15:

We got into our party positions and after we did that, us as a Senate Chamber, we had six items on our agenda, five of which we went over.

1. Bill #0002 

We went on to the Final amendment.

-We did not discuss this for the first half hour of the Senate Session. 

2. Removing the ban on Stem cell research~ It passed.

3.Bill #3263~It Passed

4. Removing the Electoral College~It Passed

5. Bill #20005 child nutrition~ It Passed

6. Bill #10004 Assault weapon of 2010

So, we didn't really go over the last item in this list. I believe that we will go over that along with the first item on this list tomorrow morning during our Senate Session.

Meanwhile, I  just can't believe that three bills have been passed. I am so happy. :) This means that progress is arriving.
Just so that everybody knows, the removing of the ban on stem cell research is not a bill, it's basically an amendment that we changed in the Senate.

There will be more updates coming your way soon.

Bill #0002 Discussion part 2

Hello, here is an update of what we have discussed on Wednesday (11/10).

On Wednesday, we didn't have that many items to talk about. However, we had six Items on our agenda, one of which we went over for the entire senate session.

Same as the previous day (11/9), we went over Bill #0002 which is the act of to ensure that every student is able to go to a higher institution or education.  I found one interesting aspect about this act.

This act does relate to interest rates. So, if a high school student has a higher grade point average, they will receive a low interest rate. However, if they have a lower grade point average, chances are, they will receive a high interest rate for their loan.

This bill is still pending. So, on Monday we will definitely go over this bill during our Senate Session. :)

There are other items that we were supposed to look over. These five items are:

•  Removing the ban of stem cell research
•  Bill #3263 of commerce
• Abolishing the Electoral College from the senator of Alaska
•  House Bill #0005 for Child Nutrition
•  House bill #1004 assault weapon act 

There will be more information coming your way soon.

Bill #0002

Hello again....I'm sorry about the delay. There have been technical difficulties occurring lately.

Anyways, I have here updates from Tuesday (11/9) and since we worked on something completely different in the Senate Chamber the following day (11/10), I will make sure to send a separate update shortly after that.

On Tuesday, we have talked about three orders of the day. Here is what we worked on in the senate:

 1) We have talked about Bill #0002 and this bill was from the Senator of Oregon. This bill is to ensure that every student is able to go to a higher institution or education. The students are scared of paying tuition. Not to mention that they are also scared of the deathly interest rate of 40%. That's why we are here to help. We would be able to pay them a loan and to provide aid. As long as they maintain a descent Grade point average, they would be able to get aid. If they don't pay their loan, the banks would gain interest so that would mean the more responsible people would get the advantage of paying their bill.We can look at this as a long-term investment for our banks and the students might gain on a short-term profit.

We did limit the debate for about 4 minutes. As of that particular day, the bill is pending. We don't know yet whether it's going to pass or not. We have debated on this bill first thing the day after in our Senate Session along with other Bills in mind.

2) The Second order of the day was to review a Bill for Stem Cell Research.

3) The last order of the day was to review Bill #3263. The act is entitled: Prevention of Artificial Intelligent Rights.

There will be more information coming to you shortly. :)

Committee of Science, Transportation and Commerce

Today I found out that all along, I was signed up for the committee of Science, Commerce and Transportation. I guess I forgot that I myself was signed up for this Committee. Anyways, we are writing up a bill for Embryonic Stem cell research. We should finnish writing up this bill by the end of this week.

But, since we already have enough information to compile a bill for this matter, we can create a bill for a different topic.

Our Committee needs to research more information on a new topic in which that has been transferred to our committee. This Topic is called Encourage Free, Fair, and Balanced Trade.

After we Research more information on this particular subject, then we can bring the information in tomorrow during our next committee meeting. Hopefully we will have enough time to be able to talk about this particular topic and how we can create the bill.

Tomorrow 11/9, we will also be holding debates for bills in mind of passing from other committees. I will make sure to leave an update here tomorrow on which bills that have been passed and which bills that have not been passed. I'm sure that the Senate Session will take a while considering that there are many bills that we would need to go over with.

Tax Reform Bill

I have here more important updates of what came about in the Senate Chamber: 
On Thursday 11/4 and in the beginning of Friday 11/5, we went over House Bill #0003 with our parties.This bill is called the Tax Reform Act of 2010.

It specifically states that whoever spends under $300,000 will be reduced by 5% from the rates established in the bush era tax cuts. If the rate of income tax for households making between $300,000-$900,000 will be increased from 35% to 38.6% the rate prior to the bush era tax cuts. The rate of income tax for households making $1,000,000 or more will be raised from 35% to 45%.

Our party (Democrats) was thinking of passing the bill. After we moved to a debate, the motion to kill the bill did not pass. We have debated the House Bill #0003 throughout Thursdays Senate Session. Although there  were more agenda items on the list, we didn't pass the bill yet. We continued the debating of the bill the following day during the senate session but we didn't get a chance to go over House Bill #3263.

On the following day (11/5), we still tryed to close the debate on the House Bill #0003. To me, it felt as if it was going on and off. We would open the debate and then we would close the debate due to the effect of not having a 2/3 vote. We were able to add an elimination of the debate for 20 minutes but the motion did not pass. On the other hand, the voting did pass and after the chamber voted, the bill for the House #0003 have been successfully killed.

For the rest of the Senate Session, we went over what each committee is working on. There have been some committees that are still in the process of creating a bill(s) and there are some Committees that already finished creating their bill(s). Since there are so many committees to go over, I will update the news of the committees and their bills for the next congress blog update.

In addition, since we didn't really get a chance to go over House Bill #3263 on Friday's Senate Session, I have a feeling that we will also go over that bill either on Monday (11/8) or on Tuesday's (11/9) senate session's.

Several Options

I know that this announcement page may be out of date. I have here important updates of what came about in the Senate Chamber.


First, I will start off by explaining the basic motion instructions considering that many people outside of the House White may not know the procedures.

When you begin an Agenda Item, you start by adding a Motion. Then that motion goes to 2nd and it will go to the debate. The debate is simply a discussion between two senates. Chances are, there would one senate from each party who would converse a debate about that particular agenda item that we are voting upon. After the Debate is over and done with, that amend will go to a vote. If the Amend doesn't get passed to the vote, then we would need to go back to the Debate. The Speaker of the House will ask if the senates are all ready for a vote. There should be an unanimous vote in order to transition to the vote. Just so you know, moving bills to a committee always have to be unanimous.


After the vote has passed, then we move on to the next item of the day. In a way, the instructions do sound complicated mainly because there are many different procedures that goes on throughout one Agenda Item. Such as, if you announce that you want to close the debate, then there would need to be a 2/3 vote from the Senate Chamber in order to completely close the debate. There will perhaps be a time where all of the Democrats would rise and majority of the Republicans would sit down. That would count as 2/2 of the Senate. Not exactly what we need.


Here's what happened on Wednesday (11/3):

On Wednesday, we particularly went through our previous agenda items that, of course, will have priority over new agenda items.

We were able to complete six Agenda Items.

• First Order of the Day: Move Artificial Intelligence to the Government Affairs Committee. We moved it to a debate, vote and after we put a motion to move the Artificial Intelligence Bill #2363 to the committee of Government Affairs, it passed.
• Second Order of the Day: To Amend the process to Seconding. After we put the item to a debate, amendment and to a vote, the speaker of the house said that the motion did not pass mainly because it was not unanimous

• Third Order of the Day: To move the motion to move the topic to committee of commerce of science and transportation. There was a senator that seconded that motion. There is no debate on this topic. When we moved on to Amendments, there are no Amendments. After we moved on to a vote, the motion did not pass.

• Fourth Order of the Day: Motion on Lowering college costs. It was originally moved to the Banking,Housing and Urban Affairs Committee but it is going to be moved to a different committee. After moving to the debate, we cleared the motion the topic of lowering college costs from banking, housing and urban affairs to the committee of finance. After moving onto another debate, there were senates that mentioned that it was relevant to the banking, housing and urban affairs. So, we decided to have it stay in the committee that it is right now. A Republican in our chamber mentioned that since banking is already by the governor it should be saved for the committee of Finance. Motion to close the debate has passed and there are no objections on moving the lowering college costs to finance.

• Fifth Order of the Day: To Move the Issue of Agriculture to the Finance Committee. Moved to a closed debate passed. I'm also assuming that the motion to move the Issue of Agriculture to the Finance Committee has passed.

• Sixth and Final Order of the Day: We decided to end by moving the topic of Children's of Public schools to the Committee of Agriculture. After putting the topic to a debate, vote, and putting a motion to the committee of agriculture, the motion has been passed and is moved to that committee.

There will be more information coming to you shortly.

Hello again ...it's another update from Congress.

Hello, I have come back online with more interesting and useful information from the Senate Chamber.

Today, we have found time to gather into our Committee Groups. At first, I was not quite sure which group I belonged to. I'm quite sure that I am in the Environmental and Public Works Committee. It seems correct mainly because since last Wednesday 10/27 while the Speaker of the House (Annabel Wallace) was calling out each Committee in terms of signing up for one of them, I remembered standing up for the Environmental and Public Works Committee and that was when I was told that I was in that Committee.

Anyways, what we did today was after we gathered into our committees, our task for our committee was to find a bill on our Committees Website that we believed that we would want to support. Our goal was to find a bill to review and since we didn't have one at the moment, we had to find one on the Environmental Committee's website that we thought would best suit our purpose. Also, since everybody in my group, including myself, is considered a Democrat, we decided to pick an issue from the Minority Page and with much deliberation, we have decided to choose the issue of National Security and Energy Independence. We did think of using Global Warming as our original Issue but that was out of the question. We wanted to choose a bill that seemed important and that needed a lot of awareness.

In the meantime, we will continue our research on the following Bill and will post more information soon.