Just Foreign Policy helps you remind Congress that Mr. Obama can't intervene militarily in Syria without Congressional authorization, just as the Constitution intended. Specifically, you'll be telling your Reps and Senators to support H.R. 2494/S. 1201, the Protecting Americans from the Proliferation of Weapons to Terrorists Act of 2013, and while I'd quibble with the title (how do we know all Syrian rebels are terrorists exactly?), the bill would cut off U.S. funding for any paramilitary operations in Syria while exempting humanitarian operations, and would require a joint resolution from Congress authorizing any military action before Mr. Obama could take it. Here's the kicker: five of H.R. 2494's seven sponsors are Republicans, ranging from the one you'd expect (Walter Jones) to the ones you'd never expect (Scott DesJarlais, Michele Bachmann), and S. 1201's co-sponsors distribute evenly among party lines (Tom Udall and Chris Murphy for the Democrats, Mike Lee and Rand Paul for the Republicans). I may never again suggest supporting something Michele Bachmann also supports, so seize the opportunity.
Meanwhile, both the People for the American Way and the Sierra Club help you tell Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act. You recall that in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court ruled that the pre-clearance formula from Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was outdated, thus representing an unfair burden by the federal government upon the nine states-plus who needed to "pre-clear" any changes in their voting laws, and was thus unconstitutional. (I may be giving Justice Roberts's argument too much credit in the preceding sentence.) But nothing prevents Congress from writing a new pre-clearance formula that reflects current circumstances. Current circumstances are this: any government, regardless of which political party runs it, will try to suppress the vote unless we stop them, and we stop them by asserting our rights and codifying our rights into law. In an era of voter "caging" and voter ID laws addressing nonexistent "fraud" by poorer and darker-skinned folks, it shouldn't be hard to come up with a formula that'll work. And if the Roberts Court vetoes any formula, conservatives will have a harder time claiming their judges aren't "activists."
Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell President Obama that relying on natural gas isn't a climate change "solution." Mr. Obama's well-received late-June speech, in which he outlined his plan to reduce the effects of climate change, touted alternative energy sources somewhat, but also touted natural gas, the production of which rates little better than coal production as far as greenhouse gas emissions go -- once you consider that methane, which just about always leaks from gas wells, traps a lot more heat than carbon dioxide does once it's in the atmosphere. Frankly, that's not a recipe for a climate change solution, let alone an "All of the Above" energy solution. I was one of those who didn't care when various Congressional attempts at climate change legislation failed -- they were, by and large, terrible bills ("let's totally defeat the revenue-raising purpose of carbon credits by giving most of them away!"), and the Supreme Court had already ruled that the Clean Air Act gave the EPA the authority to set carbon emissions limits. Of course, under these circumstances, we still have to tell the President to do the right thing.
Comments