It's a rare situation when we are compelled to dedicate two consecutive issues of the wastebasket to the same issue. But, the Energy Bill is in dire need of being put out of its misery and we need your help in giving it a knock-out punch.

As TCS staffers have walked the Senate halls this week, they heard phones ringing off the hook with constituents urging their elected officials to vote this thing down. Combine that with the number of newspapers across the country, in big cities and little, whose editorial boards have urged the Senate to kill this thing, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the only reason why some senators support this bill is they had a pork payoff.

An editorial that ran in the Wall Street Journal stated: “The GOP leadership has greased more wheels than a Nascar pit crew. Perhaps the rest of us will see more energy supplies as a result, but we're sure going to pay for the privilege.”Fortunately, the Senate voted today to put the rights of taxpayers ahead of the rights of big energy to raid the federal treasury of tens of billions of dollars. Senators who voted against the bill sent the message that they will not tolerate backroom deals behind closed doors that blow record deficits sky-high.

Fiscal principles won over political pay-offs and pork. Unfortunately, we have only won the first battle, but the war is not over. It is expected that the proponents of this bill will stoop to new lows of even bigger political payoffs and other shenanigans to get this bill to the President's desk.

We need your help in stopping this bad proposal from becoming national policy. If your Senator voted nay, please call to thank them for their vote and encourage them to keep voting that way. If they voted yea, encourage them to vote in the best interests of their constituents by voting to kill this bill once and for all.