House to Vote on Murphy Bill After Holiday

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The House of Representatives is slated to vote on Congressman Tim Murphy’s controversial mental health reform bill immediately following the July 4th holiday.

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24 COMMENTS

  1. Thank you Justin for hopefully getting the ball rolling & people alerted.

    This sneaky tactic of trying to distract and disrupt the opposition by using the July 4th holiday as a cover — hoping people will be too partied out to respond once they realize what’s going on — should enrage everyone and motivate people to demand the vote be postponed until people can reasonably be expected to present an opposing position.

    Not only was this vote announced late Friday when people were preparing their holiday weekend, it says in the official schedule that the rules have been suspended to allow the vote to be zinged right through. http://floor.majorityleader.gov/week-2016-07-03.pdf

    We need to defeat this cynical attempt to railroad this by being prepared to do a full day of phoning congresspeople on Tuesday, telling them to hold the f up.

    Those in the MIA community who have made Murphy their cause in the past please return and tell us the most useful ways to use our energy on Tuesday.

    Here’s Murphy’s Press Release https://iqconnect.lmhostediq.com/iqextranet/view_newsletter.aspx?id=151779&c=PA18TM

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  4. Frederick Douglass:

    “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages…”

    http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/

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    • Oldhead, who are you going to try to call tomorrow? I forgot my congressman is not only a cosponsor, but he is also a psychologist (apparently another Murphy even though he’s a Democrat), so that’s probably a lost cause. I’m thinking the ones who explicitly have civil rights as part of their platform are the best targets. My quick and dirty internet search yields John Lewis, Emanuel Cleaver, Donald Norcross, Bobby Scott, Elijah Cummings, Chris Van Hollen, and Jim Himes as congressmen to hit (and none of them are bill cosponsors). I have no idea how good or bad this strategy is, wish someone who actually knows about these things would chime in soon.

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      • God forbid the revolution should occur on a weekend, we’d be doomed. 🙁

        Lewis is a big Clinton supporter, democrats mostly want more money for “mental health.” Even Sanders’ positions suck on this stuff though I don’t know if he explicitly supports Murphy. So I don’t know who to call. I know a right wing issue has been people having their guns taken away after returning from military service on the basis of various service-related psychiatric diagnoses. The right wing is more suspicious of psychiatry than liberals right now, so there may some repubs who are not in lockstep with Murphy.

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        • Well, we may be doomed either way, so I thought I’d trying to wager a guess (can someone from please MIA advise soon, I am busy Tuesday PM and plan to try calling the AM).

          Your analysis is what I would have originally thought, but the bulk of the cosponsors are from the GOP, not Democrats. In the hearing in the fall, the original vote was cast along party lines pretty evenly (GOP for and Democrats against).

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          • We’re caught in a proxy war like they used to talk about when the U.S./U.S.S.R. were competing for world dominance.
            The way the party politics supposedly play out according to the tracking link above is that we are pawns in a chess game about “gun control,” with the dems claiming that the existence of guns is the cause of mass shootings, and the repugs claiming that “mental illness” is the cause. The answer, of course, lies in neither explanation. So what more powerless scapegoat can they find than the psychiatrically labelled to divert the issue and tell their sheeplike constituents that they’re “doing something about violence”?

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          • I don’t know why anyone here is talking about anything else right now.

            So is your gamble that we should focus on democrats? It does make sense. Just that the fact of Orlando happening caused such a shift shows that these people are thinking in terms of superstition and not any sort of rationality. It’s very scary.

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        • The problem is that neither the Left nor the Right are friends of those of us who’ve been in the system and those who are still in the system. Everyone wants to give us “more treatment”, for our own good of course. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are friends when it comes to this.

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  6. Give them enough rope and they will hang themselves…. If it passes its not like psychiatry will ever solve any of societies problems. As I always write on these Murphy bill stories I think this bill will create more anti psychiatry activists and create more of an us against them attitude by people exposed to psychiatry.

    If they want to run psychiatry more like the criminal justice system don’t be surprised if people start acting more like defendants then patients. Thats going to happen.

    Pray for the best but prepare for the worst. All you writers out there start planning those posts about the new rules and use them to get our message out.

    This Murphy bill is going to backfire, unintended consequences and costs will start piling up till it breaks.

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    • Cat, Psychiatry didn’t solve my problems.

      After coming off the drugs (with help) my hospitalizations stopped my suicide attempts stopped and my disability dependence stopped. If I was to do something wrong I would expect to get arrested – but this didn’t happen either.

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  8. Everything helps. Even delaying the vote would help.

    I find it very disappointing that MIA and those who have made Murphy their cause have largely dropped the ball on this and fallen for the “weekend” ploy. If someone had been monitoring Murphy’s website they would have known something was up.

    Meanwhile this has been going on since Friday and still no one here has provided any specific instructions on who to call & what to do.

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  9. Maybe email your congressperson and including links to MIA articles about forced treatment?

    I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not. I’ll give it a shot. I called the representative’s office also.

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  10. Their eyes are sewn shut. The only thing that will help is the threat of constituent dissatisfaction. Please call your congressional “representative” TODAY, tomorrow is too late. Demand they vote against the bill or to postpone the vote.

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