The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass President Biden's COVID relief plan, which he's dubbed the "American Rescue Plan." You can edit the Coalition's sample email to say the following things: one, that the stimulus payment should be $2,000, not $1,400, because that's what Democrats promised and you need to keep your promises. Two, the plan should include massive tax hikes on corporate profits and millionaire income. Three, your Reps and Senators should pass the American Rescue Plan via budget reconciliation -- literally no one in America cares more about "working with Republicans" than doing good works, and Republicans didn't care about the deficit when they gave the rich yet another tax cut and dumped $500 billion in corporate welfare on bankster cronies in the CARES Act; now that we're spending money to help people get well and get back to work, why should we care what they say?
Meanwhile, now's as good a time as any to tell your Senators to convict Donald Trump on the impeachment charge the House will transmit today. Mitch McConnell, ever the dogged obstructor, got an extra two-week delay out of Democrats to consider this charge, and surely they hope they can count on people just not being as mad that our President instigated a riot for the express purpose of overturning the election he lost by seven million votes. But seriously, if we're going to call that "just politics," then maybe this particular democratic experiment has failed -- when you do something that disgusting an awful, you should pay for it, at the very least by being barred from running for any kind of elective office again. And don't let right-wingers gaslight you about "the left's obsession with Donald Trump." How strange that we can't just let sedition go! And how "law and order" of Republicans to insist that we do!
In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The For the People Act, as you know, would mandate campaign finance disclosure, same-day voter registration, and automatic voter registration, plus it would prohibit states from using those stupid junk-mail-looking "address verification forms" that they only ever seem to use to de-register folks of color. The bill would also mandate 15 days of early voting for federal elections and make states use independent commissions to redraw districts. Remember: if your friend or neighbor calls this a "Democrat power grab," he has no claim to "being independent" or "hating both sides." And he should, at least, wonder why Democrats would benefit from making voting easier. It couldn't be that Republicans benefit bigly from vote suppression, could it?
Finally, the Pennsylvania state legislature is still mulling HB 38, which would turn statewide judicial elections into regional ones, and thus elect judges from regions of the state -- as if judges represent districts the way legislators do. Judges represent the law, period. You may wonder why the legislature wants to do something so inside-baseball to judicial elections. The reason is simple: Democrats have five out of seven seats on the state Supreme Court, and Republicans don't like it, because that Supreme Court threw out the Republican gerrymander of the last decade (just so happens Democrats and Republicans now hold an equal number of Pennsylvania's U.S. House seats!) and also ruled that Rep. Kelly's lawsuit over the 2020 election was bunkum. So you could call HB 38 a "judicial gerrymandering" bill, or you could call it a sore loser bill. Either way, the ACLU helps you tell your PA House Reps to reject HB 38.
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