Another day, another "bathroom bill," this time in Tennessee, where it's passed out of one House committee (though not the full state House) and will get consideration in a Senate committee starting today. HB 2620 would force the state of Tennessee -- and thus the good taxpayers of Tennessee -- to pay all legal fees whenever a school district in the state decides to adopt a policy that would force transgender students to go to the restroom of their gender-at-birth. Surely its authors know that transgender students who sue against these kinds of policies under Title IX will win, and will likely win sizable settlements, so I must conclude that the legislature intends to cut off the nose of the taxpayer to spite the legislature's face. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state reps to reject that state's latest "bathroom bill."
Meanwhile, H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would undo the damage caused by court rulings (or a lack of thoroughness on the part of the Obama Administration, if you prefer) nullifying the Labor Department's 2016 overtime pay hike, by mandating that the Department of Labor raise its overtime pay threshold to the approximate point the Obama Administration originally raised the threshold, or about $48,000 annually. Thus folks making less than that would get paid time-and-a-half starting with their ninth hour in a working day or their 41st hour in a working week. The bill would also automatically update the threshold every three years, based on new income data. So a number of good government groups help you tell your Congressfolk to support better overtime pay for American workers by supporting the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.
Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to cap methane emissions from existing gas fracking wells. Gov. Wolf has gone the full Obama route on regulating the methane emissions that not only pollute our air and pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal, but help deprive good Pennsylvanians of the royalties they could earn from that energy source -- by capping emissions from new fracking wells, but not the thousands and thousands of old ones. Don't the old ones pollute worse? But that is, of course, a typical Democrat attempt at a cutting-the-baby-in-half "compromise," with an industry that doesn't care about anything but delivering money to its executives. And we have a few decades of data now to suggest that when you pander to big corporations, they just demand more. So let's stop compromising on clean air, since it clearly doesn't even buy us any time.
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