Dig this: our President has used the Arms Control Act of 1976 to declare yet another "national emergency" so he can sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE without Congress's approval. If you're wondering what possible "emergency" could exist to justify such a sale -- presumably we don't need Saudi Arabia to protect us from invasion! -- you're not alone. Of course the "emergency" is Iran, though it's more likely kids on Yemeni school buses will feel the blunt end of the weapons sales. But if everything's an emergency, then nothing is an emergency -- and if a President faces so many "emergencies," it kinds reflects badly on him. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to stand in our President's way on this matter.
In a related matter, CREDO still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. So far, our Administration's efforts to go to war with Iran have included lousy intelligence and boasting from elected leaders that a war with Iran would be easy; remind you of anything? I suppose a war with Iran would have important differences -- per John Bolton, we'd be sending 120,000 troops there, which is even fewer than we sent to Iraq in order to subdue a nation with less than half the population of Iran. Also, evacuating non-essential personnel from the Baghdad embassy is a dramatic touch I don't recall Mr. Bush contemplating. You know what else is different, though? Americans have seen this play already and have more vivid memories of their disgust with how the Iraq war turned out than they do of 9.11, which is almost old enough to vote now. Our duty now is to remind America of that disgust.
Meanwhile, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would prevent states from enacting medically unnecessary abortion bans that block women's access to health care. We don't "leave it up to the states" here, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision explicitly prohibits leaving this matter up to the states. And that makes sense -- if our Constitution protects a right to abort a pregnancy, why would women need to get an ultrasound in one state and not another? Why would abortion be legal only up to six weeks into a pregnancy in one state and 24 weeks in another? Politicians could make all of this moot by putting a Constitutional amendment before us; wonder why they don't. And by "wonder why they don't" I mean "because they'd rather keep voters enraged than actually do something." The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health everywhere by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to let our IRS offer free online tax-filing, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. You know that our government has an, er, arrangement with certain tax-filing corporations in which our IRS doesn't offer free tax-filing services online as long as these tax-filing corporations do -- and you may also know that these corporations do their damnedest to hide these free tax-filing services online so that you can't actually take advantage of them. But you may not know that TurboTax also diverts our soldiers from the free tax-filing services they're entitled to receive by offering "military discounts" that force them to pay for tax filing! That's a damn dirty trick, so go ahead and refer your Senators to the ProPublica article to which we've linked in the previous sentence. If they don't know about it, they need to know about it.
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