Our House passed the HEROES Act almost a week and a half ago, but our Senate still hasn't moved on it, so let's start off the week by calling our Senators and telling them to pass it already. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're looking at it on your cellphone). You probably know the reasons we should pass the HEROES Act: because it would give funding to states and localities, because it would fill shortfalls in our Post Office's funding, because it would expand tax credits for working families, because it would roll back corporate welfare for certain very well-off individuals, and because it provides another one-time stimulus check to Americans who don't make six figures. But in your phone call, you may also want to ask them to strike a provision allowing defense contractors to bill our government rather more than they need to in order to keep their workers afloat. The provision allows those corporations to bill our government for executive pay and marketing expenses, and we don't need to accept that as the price for doing good works.
Meanwhile, a federal district judge ruled in late March that our Army Corps of Engineers (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) did not "adequately discharge() its duties" when expediting permits for the infamous Dakota Access pipeline in 2017, and thus ordered the Corps to conduct a more thorough review as required by law. As Rep. Grijalva (D-AZ) put it, "(i)ndustry needs to learn that if you throw in with (this) administration, you will bear the costs of its reckless incompetence." Given the number of regulatory changes courts have already thrown out because our Administration thinks the law is for little people like us, you'd think corporations would have learned their lesson by now. I guess that means they're not good actors, either! We might better be able to influence our Army Corps of Engineers, however, since they're required by law to listen to us, hence Environmental Action helps you tell the Corps not to grant any new permits for the Dakota Access pipeline. The pipeline, of course, leaked upwards of five times just in 2017, including a 200,000-gallon-plus spill in November, so I would say it ain't just the people who have spoken on this matter.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to make online voter registration available to all Americans in advance of the November election, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Online voter registration won't necessarily help folks who can't get online (and there are quite a few of those!), but it would help those who have internet access and who can't get to the local DMV or the local election office because COVID-19 has shut them all down. I presume our President's votaries will squeal TEH VOTERZ FRAUDZ ALL TEH DEADZ DUM-O-CRATZ DOINGS TEH VOTINGZ!!!, but if you look over actual research on the matter -- you know, versus hysterical collections of accusations, insinuations, and things-you-just-know -- you will find researchers have a very, very hard time finding actual incidents of voter fraud. A Loyola law professor found 31 credible incidents of voter fraud out of one billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014; even Tha Bush Mobb looked very hard for voter fraud between 2002 and 2007 and managed to convict a grand total of 86 people. As Mr. Bush himself might have said, there's just no there there.
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