Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4943/S. 2383, the CLOUD Act. Why? Because the CLOUD Act would let American police grab your private data -- your emails, your videos, your online photos, your chat logs -- no matter where it's stored on the planet (and it could be anywhere!), and it'd also let foreign police get your private data from American corporations. Never mind a little thing called a warrant. And it'd allow our President to enter into "executive agreements" with other nations that would let them ignore our privacy laws while presumably following their own, weaker ones, never mind a little thing called foreign entanglements. This is the kind of thing that has historically gotten conservatives very upset, but with today's "conservatives" little more than shells of their ancestors, you might be tempted to hope right-wing suspicion of foreigners helps defeat this bill. But we're better off hoping our own activism kills it.
Meanwhile, closer to home, we learn from a USA Today investigation Pennsylvania has more schools and learning facilities with lead in their drinking water than every other American state, and since any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, that's nothing to crow WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. But HB 2025 would mandate that every state public school test its water for lead every two years, make the results of those tests public, and cut off any drinking water sources with more than 5 ppb of lead. This'd seem like a no-brainer, but too often our leaders seem like they're the ones who've spent their whole life drinking lead-contaminated water, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support clean water and healthy child development by passing HB 2025. It's well past time we were able to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about something good our politicians have done, but we won't be able to, unless we speak out.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 54, the resolution that would end American war-making in Yemen without Congressional authorization, then Defending Rights and Dissent still helps you do that. Word on the street is that the Senate will vote on S.J.Res. 54 this week, so you want to get a word in before that vote. To sum: Saudi Arabia has been waging war, with our help, on the Houthi rebels in Yemen for years, and though you may debate the wisdom of that -- personally, I think waging war on the Houthi rebels who are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth is a bad idea, and that overplaying alleged Houthi ties to Iran is mere fearmongering -- you can't challenge the fact that Congress never declared war on Yemen, nor did Congress grant power to the President to act via the War Powers Act. Nor should you object that S.J.Res. 55 "hamstrings the President from acting," because, well, that's the idea.
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