By now you know that the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency has put the the Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) in clear peril, what with Mr. Trump himself having declared his hostility to all regulations and having vowed to abolish the EPA, with a "senior advisor" who calls people who care about clean air and clean water "greentards," and with a transition head who decides to make a big drama of tearing up the Paris climate accord, as if that's how a grown-up acts. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the EPA continues to protect good Americans from pollution. Because, after all, your elected officials are still supposed to answer to you, not their big donors, and that's true regardless of what they think. And nobody in America wants environmental "policy" that gives polluters everything and people nothing and that drives up health care costs far beyond the "costs" (mainly to CEO pocketbooks) of keeping our air and water clean. And if, like me, you were outside this past Christmas Day in 74-degree weather in the Northeast, you know climate change isn't some "hoax" perpetrated on the American people, and most Americans would seem to agree with you about that.
Meanwhile, the Oval Office's current occupant, President Obama, has lately (as in right after the election) asked Congress for another $11.6 billion to fight all those undeclared and unconstitutional wars we're currently waging in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Wait, you thought those last two were over? As if! Mr. Obama, if anything, has damaged our Constitutional war-making capability even more than Mr. Bush did, by failing, even, to make a show of coming to Congress to authorize adventures in Libya and Syria. (His Administration says the 2001 AUMF gives him all the authority he needs. Nobody could have predicted that power would get abused!) So Roots Action helps you tell our government to abandon plans to spend yet more billions of dollars on yet more undeclared wars. It's not enough to note that the U.N. instructs us that $11.6 billion could remove barriers to clean water for everyone on the planet, or that $11.6 billion represents all by itself more money than all but 15 nations (including the U.S.) spend on their military -- asking for more money for more undeclared wars in regions that don't pose an existential threat (seriously, now, are we ever surrendering to ISIS?) is not just unconstitutional, but immoral.
Finally, given reports about voters disenfranchised by the Interstate Crosscheck database and by organizations like the Voter "Integrity" Project, it's good news that six states (and the District of Columbia) have legalized automatic voter registration, where you get registered every time you get or renew your driver's license or get or renew other state ID. And despite what you may have heard, none of these states actually force people to register to vote; in each of them you can opt out of registration if you so desire. These six states include blue states like Oregon and California and red states like West Virginia and Alaska, so you'd probably figure that automatic voter registration has actual bipartisan support, versus all the stupid corporate crap that politicians and their "liberal" media enablers call "bipartisan." Hence Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to pass laws enabling automatic voter registration. As always, don't pay any regard to the arguments of haters, who say it's "already easy enough" to register. In states where right-wingers can challenge black folks' voting rights merely by alleging they've moved, and have their local governments simply toss the registration, it ain't all that easy.
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