New Bills in Congress: Affecting sex offender issues

1-29-2013 Washington DC:

The following bills have been introduced in Congress and MAY have some applicability to former sex offenders, and now the text of these bills is available for review. These cover varying issues which folks may or may not wish to address.

These bills link to the NEW Congressional website which -we feel- is a bit more difficult to deal with. But Congress will be switching to this site in the near future, so we need to learn how to deal with it. Each link takes you to a SUMMARY of the bill and lets you look at different things about the bill (TEXT takes you directly to the wording of the bill). We have also located another site which shows an abbreviated view of each bill: see (Consolidated view of bill.) following our short description of the bill.

Note: Congress has a habit of pushing bills through in January, so if folks wish to address these It is important to do so quickly. Hopefully, this year they will not slip something into another bill like they did last year (Plugging a sex offender item into a Agriculture bill. grrr)

S-1911 Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills Act. This bill will retroactively make sex offenders ineligible for the benefits of this bill. (Consolitdated view of bill.)

S-1936 A bill to improve the response to missing children and victims of child sex trafficking. This bill is supposed to improve law enforcement response time when a child is missing. The Bill also change "Child Prostitution" to "Child Sex Trafficking" in the Missing Children's Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5773(b)(1)(P)(iii))). (Consolitdated view of bill.)

S-1956 A bill to direct the Secretary of Defense to review the discharge characterization of former members of the Armed Forces who were discharged by reason of the sexual orientation of the member, and for other purposes ## Normally we do not review Military Bills, but list this one because it has a restorative affect on some former folks, and maybe you want to know about this. (Consolitdated view of bill.)

HR-3898 To prohibit students who have been convicted of a criminal hazing offense under State law from receiving assistance under title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 The bill title tells us what it is about, if one is convicted of a "State Hazing Crime" (some of which may involve sex crimes) then that offender is no longer eligible for benefits under the Higher Education Act of 1965. While I cannot say I am very familiar with hazing law or crimes, it does seem the Congressional intent here is to say the former offender -after completing whatever court sentence there was- is no longer redeemable and not worth spending any money on to teach him/her how -to again- become a productive member of society; instead such a person becomes an addition to welfare laws, which makes no sense to me. (Consolitdated view of bill.)

HR-3902 To amend the National Child Protection Act of 1993 to establish a permanent background check system The apparent intent is to require covered entities (`covered entity' means any business or organization that provides, or licenses, certifies, or coordinates individuals or organizations to provide, care, care placement, supervision, treatment, education, training, instruction, or recreation to children) to perform comprehensive background checks when children are involved. (Consolitdated view of bill.)

HR-3905 To improve the response to missing children and victims of child sex trafficking See S-1936 above, this is a House version of the same bill. (Consolitdated view of bill.)

HR-3911 To amend the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act to include bullying and harassment prevention programs This is a "prevention, policy, programs and statistics type" bill and is mentioned because it includes "sexting" protections under cyberbullying section. Good things given some of the articles resulting in deaths, we have read recently. (Consolitdated view of bill.)

HR-3923 To amend the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 to expand the authority of governmental social service agencies with child protection responsibilities to access the national crime information databases This unusual bill REMOVES a current restriction "to be used by such agencies only in investigating or responding to reports of child abuse, neglect, or exploitation." so that agency can access NCIC for whatever purpose they see fit. I would say her bill serves no AWA purpose, and empowers an agency where Congress did not intend there be powers when AWA was enacted. There is no apparent purpose for doing this;my opinion. (Consolitdated view of bill.)

Our comments above -pretty much- show what we feel, so now its time for readers to form your own opinions and contact your Washington DC Representatives and Senators and tell them how you expect them to vote when these bills come before them.

For now, have a great day and a better tomorrow.
eAdvocate

## Military law is not something easily understood and gets into military rules and regs, often is not available for public review. Hence we merely let folks know about these bills.

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