If nobody likes a bill, will it still pass?

By now, everyone reading this site should be fully aware of Senselessbrenner’s travesty of a bill HR 1528. Defending America’s Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment
and Child Protection Act of 2005. (see my earlier post)
If you haven’t taken action on it yet, you need to — and Students for Sensible Drug Policy have an Action Alert site on this bill as well (along with others I’ve mentioned earlier). So take a moment and tell your representatives.
The interesting thing about this bill is that it appears to be almost universally hated:
On the left? Check out these reactions by various commenters at Daily Kos:

Jeebus, that just sucks way hind tit.[…] Sensenbrenner, like many before him is grandstanding to divert people’s attention from his complicity in war, in the lousy economy, and in Tom DeLay’s continued presence as majority leader. […] When I first heard this one, I actually had to check Snopes.[…] I think we all ought to light up a joint right in front of the school, the jails will be clogged, and just refuse to pay any fines, and they will stay clogged, we need to make the “war on drugs” a monumental failure, waste of time and energy, and an even bigger waste of money

Now let’s go way over to the right and check out Free Republic:

Are you serious? Who proposed this bill, Senator J. Stalin? […] They should rename the act. Release child molesters and murderers early act. […] What has happened to the idea of a smaller federal govt.? […] 1984 is now…inform on your neighbor…like a good citizen. […] Insanity is being generous. The issue is making sure that there is a steady stream of “customers” for the prison industrial complex. […] Thought crime alert… […] Does it strike anyone else as odd that they are proposing making it a felony to not report a misdemeanor? […] Funny how some think that individual-as-cog-of-the-state is a ‘conservative’ position.

So I did a search on Google. Spent quite some time looking through the results and found some very… creative insults for Sensenbrenner and the bill. A lot of blogs warning people about it. Not a single site supporting it. There may be one out there, but I couldn’t find it.
Larger media sources have generally given it extremely limited coverage (although Yahoo news had it in the “Outrageous Outtakes” column).
I’ve begun to believe that Senselessbrenner and the people who testified at the hearing are the only ones who support it (and even those testifying had some reservations).
And yet…
How many times (particularly when it comes to the drug war) have I thought: “Well, certainly they wouldn’t pass a bill that stupid/horrible/outrageous,” only to be proven completely wrong.
So, if you don’t mind. Take a moment and let your Representatives know for sure how you feel.

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