The People's Email Network helps you tell the Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) to score H.R. 676, the Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care bill (and also tell your Senators that you want the CBO to score the bill). The CBO's scoring of the Trumpcare bill has become quite famous, mainly for predicting that more than 20 million Americans could lose their health insurance over the next few years, but the CBO has never scored H.R. 676, though it's been introduced in each of the last eight Congresses and (more to the point!) it's the bill that most resembles the popular will on health care, since, as you know, polls repeatedly show majorities of Americans wanting a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care system. Wait until they find out how much it costs! the haters will say, but health care already costs more in America than it does just about everywhere else. So let us have more options than the narrow, corporate ones politicians in both parties constantly offer, because we deserve more.
Meanwhile, the Tennessee state legislature is mulling another "bathroom bill," because apparently they have nothing better to do than to condemn transgender students to more bullying and more depression by making them use the public restroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, rather than their actual gender at present. Bill numbers are HB 888 and SB 771, and the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to oppose them. I'm wary of telling these bozos that their state's economy will suffer, just as North Carolina's economy did after the notorious HB 2. Of course Tennessee's economy will suffer, and that's a shame -- why, Chattanooga has one hell of a community broadband service! -- but these bozos shouldn't even have to consider that; they should already know it's evil to manipulate your most rage-addled voters into keeping you in office. But since they don't know that, we'll just have to tell them, again -- and again and again and again if need be.
In other news, President Trump has nominated yet another Goldman Sachs product, Jay Clayton, to run the Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC). The SEC's mission is to protect investors from being screwed over, so if you're thinking maybe Donald Trump isn't the guy to find that great protector, or that finding that great protector at Goldman Sachs maybe isn't the best idea anyone ever had, chances are you're already lukewarm toward the nomination. But wait, there's more! Mr. Clayton has lobbied against the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because it, gets this, "incentivizes other countries to take a 'lighter touch'" toward going after corruption! After all, when you do the right thing and someone else does the wrong thing, you're always supposed to give up and just do the wrong thing out of fear that some crony or other will lose money! So Demand Progress helps you tell the Senate to reject Jay Clayton's nomination as SEC head.
Finally, Mr. Trump's Muslim Ban 2.0 may be temporarily blocked by two federal courts, but that may not last forever, so Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 608, which would nullify the executive order. Over three-quarters of the Democratic caucus in the Senate has co-sponsored the bill; guess how many Republicans have joined them? Precisely zero -- not John McCain, who used to be the face of moderate immigration policy; not Dean Heller, whose state has a sizable immigrant population; and certainly not putative "moderate" Susan Collins. Naturally, the five most endangered Democrats up for re-election in 2018 (Donnelly, Heidtkamp, Manchin, McCaskill, Tester) are also not among those Senators who've co-sponsored the bill, but all five of them are (as Mario Cuomo might put it) walnuts in the batter of eternity, each of them likely to lose by 20 points no matter how much they suck up to the 46% President who struts around like he got 66%.
Comments