Happy Wednesday, good Americans! It's time to call your Senators and tell 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. This week we add H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state; the House passed this bill late last week. Our Senators really have no excuses opposing any of these bills, so get in their grills and tell them to pass them now.
Meanwhile, over 180 corporations have stopped advertising on Facebook because of their years-long enabling of Nazi wannabes; Mr. Zuckerberg has explained away all this enabling, however obliquely, by talking about his unwillingness to restrict "free speech." Of course, our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from publishing houses, which Facebook most assuredly is, even if communications law doesn't currently define them as such. Saying "I have to publish every dung nugget from obviously bad human beings because I'm Facebook" is a little like saying "I have to accept every single manuscript that comes across my desk because I'm a publishing house." And, like, that's not how that works! Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Facebook during the month of July. And Sum of Us helps you tell Reddit to ban racist hate speech on its platform. Reddit bills itself, not without justification, as "the front page of the internet," but the Southern Poverty Law Center found it also to be the home of "violently racist" content as far back as 2015, so why should they be exempt from our fury?
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would prevent our Department of Agriculture from permitting road construction in areas where Roadless Rule regulations already prohibit them; yes, we actually have to tell our Administration to do this, because they're trying to work around the Executive branch's own regulations. Why not just rewrite them? Possibly because their efforts will ultimately fail in court, like most of them do! Our Administration ultimately aims to let loggers into the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which is a rain forest, yo, with, like, thousand-year-old trees in it. But I guess making desks and toilet paper from thousand-year-old trees is better than keeping thousand-year-old trees around and being able to study them and learn from them. Put six beers into our President and I bet he puts it pretty much like that. He'd probably also call you a LOOOZER!!!! for disagreeing with him. But he'd just be projecting, as usual.
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