Well, Congress has returned from their unofficial recess and has started to take up some pieces of legislation that have been garnering some attention. Here is what they've been up to:

On December 4, HR 3688 passed the Senate by a vote of 77-18. This bill approves the U.S./Peru trade agreement reached on April 12, 2006. This is a link to the text of the agreement on the web site of the United States Trade Representative.



On December 6, the Senate took a pair of votes on HR 3996, the Temporary Tax Adjustments Act of 2007. The first vote was a vote to invoke cloture. This vote failed 46-48. An amendment was then adopted that cut much of the language from the bill, and the bill passed 88-5. The summary is available on our site for the cloture vote right now. Look for the summary on the version that passed the Senate very soon.

Congress also had some action on HR 6, the energy bill that was initially passed by the House during their "First 100 Hours" campaign in January. The bill was passed by the Senate in June in an amended form. Last week, the House had a concurrence vote with their own amendment, which passed 235-181. The 1038 page bill is back in the Senate, where a cloture vote has failed, but they are expected to act on it probably this week. A summary of the House concurrence version will be on our site shortly.

For those of you who may not be particularly familiar with the formatting of the summaries and votes here on the Project Vote Smart website, here are some user tips. Votes are organized by state by default. If you would like to organize the votes by the names of the officials or by the way the officials voted, just click on the appropriate column heading. On the summaries, if we have more than one summary for a piece of legislation, there will be a link to any other Project Vote Smart summary at the bottom of the summary you are viewing. For instance, if you use this link to the House Concurrence summary of HR 6, you can scroll down to the bottom and click on the link that says "Senate Passage With Amendment: 06/21/2007 : Bill Passed: 65 - 27 (Record Vote Number 226)" and click on the "Bill Passed: 65-27" to jump directly to the Senate passage summary. For HR 6, the link to the original House passage in January won't show up here because of a software switch we are working on, but this link will take you to that summary if you would like to view it.

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Thank you for your time and interest, Informed Voter.