Action: redistricting, and drug pricing.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your PA state legislator to support real redistricting reform by co-sponsoring HB 722/SB 22. HB 722/SB 22 would, as you know, take the decennial redistricting process away from the state legislature (which has tended to redraw districts according to its members' interests, rather than the interests of the good citizens of the Commonwealth) and give it to a redistricting commission composed of elected partisans in equal number as well as folks who don't hold elected office and who are selected by the partisans (and, again, with an equal number of partisans, they'd have to agree, rather than having one side or the other ram their choices down the other side's throats). Fair Districts PA asks that if your Rep or Senator already sponsors the bill, you tell them to talk to Sen. Former and Rep. Metcalfe to schedule hearings in their respective committees. HB 722/SB 22 has actual bipartisan support in both houses of the legislature, which is rare -- but we've still got to keep the ball moving.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to oppose H.R. 1223, which would let big pharmaceutical corporations hold onto certain drugs' exclusive rights for even longer, then both and CREDO and People's Action still help you do that. Why should we compel big pharmaceutical corporations to let other corporations use their property so those latter corporations can make cheaper, generic versions of those drugs? Part of the answer lies in the phrase "their property" -- big pharma depends so much on taxpayer assistance to begin with that we can easily establish a right to oversee "their property" for the public good, since it's also our property. And we can also establish that paying less money for medications people need to take, in order to be healthy enough to exercise their freedoms under our Constitution, is a public good, a more important public good than letting big pharma exercise absolute property rights on drugs that don't exist without government research or funding. In short: our freedoms matter more than big corporate freedoms.