The Center for Effective Government helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend long-term unemployment insurance already. Congress let it lapse at the end of 2013, because why work on anything but what might get the most rage-addled knuckle-draggers to the polls to re-elect you? Certainly they don't work on anything that might help the over three million folks who've been cut off, three million folks still facing a struggling economy, three million folks still facing corporations who'd rather pay them less to do more if they have to hire anyone at all. Congressfolk will all return to their districts to raise money from their sugar daddies meet with constituents, not at actual townhall meetings if possible (or at townhall meetings good citizens have to pay to get into! No, a few Congressfolk -- including Paul Ryan -- did this in 2012! Like we owe them something, and not the other damn way around!). Chances are that Congress won't act to restore long-term unemployment benefits, but at least we can shame them on their way home. No, really, that's something -- too many people feel shame for the wrong reasons, and not enough people feel shame for the right ones.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to support S.J.Res. 19, the Constitutional amendment that would allow state and federal governments to set campaign finance limits again, then Food and Water Watch provides one more. My own junior Senator responded to my missive last week with more slippery-slope arguments against the amendment -- I hadn't heard them before, but then I don't pride myself on my collection of Stupid Things Other People Say. He wrote that the amendment would allow Congress to "ban challengers from running any ads during an election, while allowing incumbents to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money," adding that our government "could ban books that criticize that government or seek to expose corrupt officials." But amending the Constitution to allow governments to set campaign finance limits does not automatically mean that any conceivable campaign-finance related law would be Constitutional. Favoring one candidate over another or banning books -- and what campaign finance reformer has ever proposed either one? -- would run into fairly obvious First Amendment roadblocks.
Finally, Congress hasn't raised the minimum wage in five years, S. 1010 and H.R. 460 still haven't received actual votes in the Senate and House respectively, no less a personage than Mitt Freaking Romney has said that the minimum wage should go up and Republicans should stop fighting it, polls consistently show more than three out of five Americans supporting a minimum wage hike, and minimum wage hike opponents can't prove their case without wrenching facts out of context or ignoring compelling alternative evidence -- and yet we still don't have a minimum wage hike. What will it take? More noise, that's what! So NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a minimum wage increase. Please do not abide the fool who says WHY STOP AT TEN DOLLARZ AN HOUR WHY NOT FORTY OR A GAZILLYUN!!!!! The proposal does not set the minimum wage at $40/hour, or $1 gazillion/hour; the proposal sets the minimum wage at $10.10/hour. You need not ever abide fools who would make you into a straw man, for those fools are desperate people who know they've lost the argument and commit all manner of evil in a vain attempt to win it.
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