The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." You already know that this "free" trade deal will outsource our jobs to nations where workers get paid in dung pellets and will allow foreign corporations to nullify our laws and extract bailouts from taxpayers whenever one of our laws "costs" them money. But the EFF also reminds us that the pact's Intellectual Property chapter would export our government's efforts to sacrifice fair use and innovation at the alter of copyright. And, of course, foreign corporations could use the "investor-state tribunal" process to overthrow the FCC's net neutrality rules, by arguing that net neutrality "costs them money." You may have heard some members of Congress say they'll oppose the pact, for various obscure reasons. Don't believe them -- Sen. McConnell, by saying Congress shouldn't vote until after the Election, has all but announced that he will ram it through afterwards. But that only means we must instruct them as to our will until they adhere to it.
Meanwhile, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the most influential Justice of the post-Earl Warren era, passed on Saturday, and many Republicans, apparently unaware of the Senate's prescribed Constitutional duty, have said the next President should pick the next Justice. Don't believe the hype that it's somehow "against decorum" to debate and confirm a Justice during an election year -- as if we should expect routine cowardice from our Congressfolk! Do they assert that Mr. Scalia should simply have hung on until next winter? Republicans don't want President Obama to pick the next Justice simply because he may begin an era of center-left dominance on the Court -- and if one of the liberals were to die next week, Republicans will start talking deal with a quickness. Hence Roots Action helps you tell President Obama to nominate a staunch progressive to the Court -- why shouldn't we be demanding? Republicans always are! -- while both Demand Progress and MoveOn help you tell your Senators to do their advise-and-consent duty on whomever Mr. Obama's nominee might be.
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