And the hits just keep on coming! Donald Trump has nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to be the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Name ring a bell? It should: Mr. Pruitt has, since taking office in 2011, sued the EPA over cross-state air pollution rules, mercury and arsenic pollution rules, and air quality rules for public lands -- not to mention, of course, his ongoing involvement in the lawsuit against the EPA's clean power plan. Remember when George W. Bush tapped the environmentally-ambiguous Christie Todd Whitman as EPA administrator in 2000? Donald Trump isn't even trying to disguise his agenda, which is, in case you didn't know, to steal whatever's left that belongs to the people, and that includes the power to keep filth out of our air and water, and thus keep ourselves and our posterity healthy. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to oppose Mr. Pruitt's nomination to the EPA. The man can't even bring himself to admit climate change is actually happening! Couldn't be because of the $300,000-plus he's received from fossil fuel corporations since 2002, can it?
Meanwhile, Fix the Electoral College helps you tell your state legislators to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. What would this compact do? Well, once states comprising 270 electoral votes or more agree to it (currently 10 states, comprising 165 electoral votes, have passed it), those states will assign their electoral votes to the winner of the Presidential popular vote. Which makes perfect sense to me -- the President would be in charge of the Executive branch for an entire country, and if you protest that the Electoral College helps make states more important than they'd otherwise be, I'd simply respond that we've got Senators for that. Our Founders created an Electoral College partly so that the Electors could reject someone plainly unfit for office; these days, the Electoral College does not defy the popular will in this manner, and I wouldn't argue that it should. But no law or Constitutional article prevents states from telling their electors to vote according to the popular will. Indeed, it's kinda what we expect -- and haven't gotten in two of the last five Presidential elections.
Finally, Roots Action helps you tell President Obama to declassify the Senate torture report. Even Sen. Feinstein (D-CA), who too often poses as a "tough on terror" politician, called the report "a total exposé of the ineffectiveness of torture," but thus far only a redacted 500-page Executive Summary has seen the light of day, leaving at least 6,500 more pages that might never see the light of day if Mr. Obama doesn't do something. (You think a President Trump would release it? Not when he's trying to get us to torture more!) This isn't a big ask for him, especially considering he did absolutely nothing-zero-zip-zilch-bupkus to bring our government's torturers to justice in eight years as President. And given that his successor, as I've said, would like nothing more than to let torturers run rampant in our government -- though torture doesn't stop terrorist attacks in real life like it does in the movies, and, BTW, is also wrong -- maybe Mr. Obama would like to protect some part of that "legacy" we're always hearing about.
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