You already know that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be exempt from criminal proceedings while in office because they're just so busy. But Judge Kavanaugh has also argued that our Presidents can simply ignore laws they believe unconstitutional, and that courts would then have to force them to comply. You can too easily imagine a President concocting such a "belief" in order to avoid executing the people's will. And the fact that "signing statements" existed before today doesn't justify actual unconstitutional behavior from our Presidents. Hence another reason to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the Kavanaugh nomination. Our Whiner-in-Chief acts like law and order is for "little people" like us and keeps "busy" watching Fox News and twittering hateful, noxious crap; he surely doesn't need another enabler on our Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Issue One helps you tell the Federal Election Commission (or FEC) to prohibit "personal use" of candidate leadership PAC money. Leadership PACs have been around since 1978, so that candidates can donate money to other candidates (which our Supreme Court will no doubt call a First Amendment right if they ever evaluate the matter!), but in practice, leadership PAC money far too often winds up funding expensive dinners, golf outings, Broadway musical tickets, five-star hotel stays, and vacations to foreign lands. Candidates will claim that was all "work," but we're not schmucks, not least because we know what work is actually like. And I bet they also claim that they just "have" to spend all that money on expensive outings with power players in order to do a good job. But you don't have to do that to do a good job; you need only stay in touch with your constituents. And big outings with rich people ain't "staying in touch with your constituents."
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop trying to weaken Endangered Species Act protections, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Congress hasn't been able to gut the Endangered Species Act, even when Republicans run the whole show, for one reason: killing off endangered species so big corporations can put yet another coal or copper or gold mine in the ground is actually very unpopular. Hence our Administration makes a series of obscure-sounding tweaks to Endangered Species Act enforcement -- allowing "economic costs" to be tabulated when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species, allowing federal agencies to ignore scientific data before handing out oil and gas drilling leases -- that will be just as harmful as previous "reform" efforts coming out of Congress. Luckily politicians don't get all the say about everything: we do. But only if we speak out.
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