Long story short: tell your House Reps to support a Constitutional amendment that would get big money out of political campaigns, and then tell your House Reps to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, the MORE Act, and the D.C. Admission Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.
People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could restrict campaign financing again. Go ahead and read the bill at Congress.gov; it's pretty short, and it would also allow governments to distinguish between "natural" persons (i.e., you and I) and "corporations or other artificial entities," which opens the door to banning corporate campaign contributions. Like many bills that don't pass, this is a very popular bill, and right-wingers will come at you with all kinds of hysterical stories about "what could happen" if governments were to regulate campaign finance again. Spoiler alert: they're all rubbish -- and you'll know they're rubbish because none of them ever happened between McCain/Feingold and Citizens United.
Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, and Black Lives Matter all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. You've seen those memes on Facebook about how you go get your COVID vaccine and no one asks you if you've got health insurance or cash on hand, and wouldn't it be wonderful if you got all your health care that way? Expanding Medicare to include all Americans would get us there, and no, you wouldn't be paying an arm and a leg more for it in taxes -- we could convert the money corporations are already paying for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, which wouldn't take one penny more out of your paycheck (since it's employer-side; the payroll tax splits Social Security taxes between employer and employee). Feel free to tell your Congressfolk just that. They'll either be impressed or scared; either reaction is fine.
The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Reps to pass the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would repeal the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police -- who then use it on protestors against police brutality! I'd call that irony, but aren't we supposed to get pleasure from irony? And don't worry that you've also called supporting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and/or the Stop Militarizing the Police Act, even if these bills have a lot of overlap -- if you voice your support for all of them, then you'll have told your Congressfolk "stop giving the police military weapons" several times, and that's what they most need to know.
The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Reps to pass the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, which would undo a lot of damage caused by the "war on drugs." No, really -- all the "war on drugs" did was put a lot of people in jail; and in the case of pot, it put people in jail because they used a drug that wasn't particularly dangerous, like cocaine or heroin. The MORE Act would make marijuana legal, invest in the communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records. 16 states have legalized pot now; maybe it's time for our federal government to get the message.
Finally, both People for the American Way and the Progressive Reform Network help you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. Why? Because it would admit Washington, D.C., as a state, that's why. It would be America's smallest state by a sizable margin (is that a sigh of relief I'm hearing from Rhode Island?), but it would not be America's least populous state (it's ahead of Vermont and Wyoming, and nipping at the heels of Alaska and North Dakota), plus it would be able to run itself the way other states do, instead of relying on our federal government to run it. (Sounds almost conservative, doesn't it?) Our government certainly left Washington, D.C. in the lurch on January 6, didn't it? If D.C. were a state, it'd have its own National Guard, and a lot of weekend fascists would think twice about trying that again.
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