Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. I know a lot of folks don't want to hear about voting rights, paycheck fairness, and the minimum wage right now because they want to get back to normal. But if we pass these bills, we can get a much better normal than the one we used to have. That normal wasn't good enough for a lot of Americans anyway.
Pennsylvania residents, take note: our reactionary state legislature advanced a pair of pro-pollution bills, HB 2146 and SB 327, on Earth Day, because HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW SNORT. Seriously, those of us who try to do better by our planet every day hardly have time for the sophomoric behavior of certain politicians. But HB 2146 and SB 327 would block state executive branch agencies from implementing any new clean air or clean water regulations until 90 days after our Governor's emergency declaration ends, because what says GAAAAH TEH EMERGENCIEZ!!!!! like "make sure big corporations can pollute more"? Seriously, it's like our politicians don't understand regular people like us -- as we look at this pandemic and say how do we pay the water bill this month?, they look at this pandemic and say "how do we let polluters pollute more?" The one way to get our legislators' attention, of course, is to communicate our will to them; the more they ignore our will, the bigger the chance they'll be looking for work come Election Day. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect us from polluters by rejecting HB 2146 and SB 327.
Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Governor that we can't "reopen the economy" until we all have paid sick leave. I know, we all have a temptation to write sentences that go "we can't reopen the economy until (we do this thing that I always say we should do anyway)," but it's actually true with paid sick leave, because when workers don't have paid sick leave, they go to work sick, and they get their co-workers sick, and they get their customers sick, and if they get everyone sick with COVID-19 because Governors and Presidents tell everyone to get back to work already, then all the work we did trying to keep ourselves safe goes for nothing. And then we get to fight another round of trillion-dollar corporate welfare handouts! You have to wonder if that's our President's goal: to stoke the crisis wheel, and put us in the deepest possible fiscal hole, until we have no choice but to cleave to him. If that's his game, of course, I intend that he lose it, because I don't cleave to politicians, and I bet you don't, either. We cleave to the truth, and we tell the truth, and if the politicians don't get it, we tell it until they do.
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