Washington, DC - Earlier today, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee unanimously passed the ALS Registry Act (S. 1382) by a bipartisan voice vote! This is yet another victory for advocates across the country and comes just less than a month after the House of Representatives passed their version of the bill by a 411-3 vote. The bill is now cleared for consideration by the full Senate, nearly the final stage of the legislative process!

The Committee’s action is a testament to the effectiveness of our strategic outreach, as some Members of the Committee have previously blocked action on many other disease-specific health bills. In order to move the bill through the Committee as quickly as possible, the Advocacy Department launched a coordinated and focused campaign that included broad outreach to the entire Senate, such as the first-ever national “Call for a Cure.” Our goal was to obtain 60 cosponsors, a level of support that could not be ignored by the Committee. We are pleased to say that advocates had even more success, as 66 Senators had cosponsored the bill prior to today’s vote!

We targeted individual Committee Members, working with both grassroots and grasstops advocates to build support on the Committee and commitments from Members to vote for the ALS Registry Act. We worked behind the scenes with the bill sponsors, Harry Reid (D-NV) and John Warner (R-VA), as well as with the Committee staff and the staff of individual Senators to address specific concerns and secure bipartisan cooperation. And we also joined with Senators Reid and Warner to provide a “walk through” briefing specifically for each Committee Member’s staff. In the end, the combined efforts of the entire ALS community produced results this morning: unanimous bipartisan support to pass the bill and take one more step closer to enacting the ALS Registry Act!! (more…)