First things first. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would enact a series of reforms in voting rights, redistricting, campaign finance, and ethics. You may know it as "the bill that would make Election Day a national holiday," but H.R. 1 would do a great deal more than that. Among many other things, it would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by empowering our Judiciary Department to go after states and municipalities when they suppress voting rights. H.R. 1 would also create redistricting commissions for every state, so that state legislators wouldn't be able to gerrymander districts toward the benefit of one party or the other, and H.R. 1 would also create a public campaign finance system and shine sunlight on big campaign donors. All of these things will help good Americans participate more in the democracy that belongs to them and should work on their behalf, so when Mob Boss Mitch or his ilk call it a "power grab," just remember that these folks have spent their lives engaging in actual power grabs. Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to support democracy by passing H.R. 1.
Meanwhile, our President has declared a "national emergency" at the border so he can get the money to build his vanity border wall there, and he has already shot himself in the foot by saying, out loud, to reporters, that he "didn't need" to declare such an emergency but just wanted his little wall "done faster." The courts will probably suspend or strike down his order shortly, but that ain't enough for this loser: the American people should also rise up and squash his "national emergency" like a bug, so Public Citizen, CREDO, and Amnesty International all help you do that. Congress can do that by passing a "resolution of disapproval" which would nullify our President's little Executive Order, but far too many of them are far too cowardly to do it without the people lending steel to their spine. Also, if you want to join a "President's Day Protest" against this "national emergency," then MoveOn, CREDO, and Win Without War help you find one near you; protests will occur at noontime today. This "national emergency" doesn't just insult our democracy, it insults our intelligence, and we should let our President know we won't let his insults stand.
Finally, in a related note, we should also send a message to the corporations thinking of building this vanity border wall for our President that maybe there'll be a PR price to pay if they do that, so Sum of Us helps you tell Nissan to cut ties with contractor W.G. Yates and Sons if the latter won't abandon its efforts to build this vanity wall. You know, it's just occurred to me that if some Nissan spokeshack responds well we can't know what all of our contractors are doing, then maybe the correct response is I just told you! Not even if you can't know things like this about your contractors maybe you're doing business wrong -- just I just told you! Although, truth be known, if they can't keep track of such things, then at the very least they need to hire more people to do that -- or accept that they're just too big to be allowed to survive in a civilized society. How often do you or I get away with "I can't keep track of everything" in our daily lives? Not nearly as often as big corporations do, I can assure you. And we should try to put a stop to that.
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