As our President and our Senate Majority Leader fiddle on a new COVID-19 relief package, folks now face water shutoffs all over America -- you know, because they haven't been working, and it's hard enough to pay the bills when you are working? -- so Food and Water Action helps you tell our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) to issue a nationwide moratorium on water shutoffs. How does our CDC have the authority to issue this moratorium? Well, the short answer is "because the law allows it" -- specifically, the Public Health Service Act. The long answer is that our CDC can issue such a moratorium if public health demands it, and just so happens it does, since we can't actually expect people to wash their hands repeatedly for 20 seconds at a time if they don't have, you know, access to clean water. Furthermore, folks who don't have access to clean water are more likely to get COVID-19 than folks who do -- but as long as we have folks who don't have access to clean water, then the folks who do are also more likely to get it. And, yeah, we don't expect this Congress to do their job, so our CDC must do theirs.
Meanwhile, given the litany of news reports about our President's taxes lately -- ranging from the revelation that he paid $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018 to $21 million in "highly unusual payments" which may have broken our few remaining campaign finance laws -- Americans for Tax Fairness helps you demand that our IRS and our FEC investigate our President's tax maneuverings. Our President may have borrowed multi-million dollar sums, funneled it through a shell corporation, and then not only donated it to his 2016 campaign, but wrote it off as a business expense! He calls such maneuverings "smart," but the rest of us call them corrupt. No one expects, at this late stage, any of his multitudinous votaries to renounce him -- that would involve admitting you're wrong, a task the best of us have trouble with. But our IRS and our FEC belong to us and work for us, and regardless of how many Presidential appointees they have, or how many career employees our President has driven away, they still have legally-mandated jobs to do.
Finally, now that our Supreme Court has said our Administration can end the 2020 census early and thus leave many good Americans uncounted, Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to keep working at the census until everyone's counted. Because, as Public Citizen's latest email missive instructs us, "public outcry may be our best hope for compelling" our Administration to count everyone; yeah, I know, they've never demonstrated that they care very much about what we think, but duty is duty. Everyone knows the COVID-19 pandemic has made conducting our census harder than ever -- so much of our census depends on door-knocking, after all -- but we also know that our President wants to use that as an excuse not to count undocumented immigrants, even though they are people who live here and who thus must be counted so federal dollars can be budgeted appropriately. I mean, do people really think that starving areas with undocumented immigrants will induce them to leave? No, it'll make things harder for everyone, which I'm sure is our Administration's aim. Remember: they only need you for your pain.
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