Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the infrastructure/jobs bill, and tell your Congressfolk to support Black history, get relief for folks from their utility bills, keep lead out of our drinking water, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!
Regarding that American Jobs Plan: the Environmental Defense Fund helps you demand that Congress pass a bill that addresses pollution and renewable energy, since Republicans don't think lead-free pipes and solar panels can be "infrastructure." Happy to let oil and gas corporations suck at the corporate welfare teat, they are, but not to do anything about it, even though God only gives you one life. Meanwhile, Progress America helps you tell Democrats, explicitly, "no climate, no deal" -- as in, if the American Jobs Plan doesn't address the issues I've already discussed in the first sentence of this paragraph (among other issues!), then it should die. Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that whatever they come up with had better not gut the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion. That's part of what "using unspent COVID money" means, since the monthly CTC expansion checks haven't started coming yet. The good news? Those first checks go out July 15, and good Americans with children will get used to them right quick, so if Republicans start talking about the "urgency" of "getting something done," know that they're sweating, and that we can wait them out. (If any of them say we're "weaponizing" the CTC checks, I will smack a pimp. Republicans weaponize everything, so they don't get to whine about "weaponizing" monthly checks they didn't vote for. You'd think they'd have some damn pride. I mean, some of them are going to meet their Maker sooner than I am.)
The Daily Kos Liberation League does some freaking alchemy with this action alert, which helps you tell your Congressfolk to, and I quote, "support Black history education in our K-12 schools and denounce the racist attacks by Republican leaders. That's what all the right-wing attacks on "critical race theory" are really about: preventing our children from learning any decent Black history in our schools. No, it's not about "banning white people" or "sending whites to reeducation camps" or "cancel culture" or whatever swill they're peddling; it's about trying to make sure you don't learn enough about Jim Crow that you can't tell that Jim Crow still operates in America -- more subtly, yes, but that's what evil does when you beat it the first time. And you have to beat it every day of your life.
Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act. As I'm sure you know, good Americans have been having trouble meeting their utility bills during this pandemic; S. 1783 would provide $30 billion to cancel water bill debt, electric bill debt, and broadband bill debt. All of these are essential services -- yes, broadband, too, or have we already forgotten how much work and school we had to do online this year? -- and you know what's far, far worse than the "moral hazard" of government forgiving people's bills? The actual moral hazard of cutting off their services so they can't stay healthy and contribute to society! Look, we can't all be hedge fund managers -- most of us have to do real jobs, and real jobs, as we have been reminded over and over again, don't always pay enough, particularly when we don't have them. The Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act can help more good Americans better endure these horrible truths, and thus better fight another day.
Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with local Led Zeppelin-related radio programming. What "moral hazard" will Republicans identify in a bill aiming to (as the title says) get lead out of lead pipes all over America, since literally any amount of lead in your drinking water can cause brain damage? Will they decry all the Big Gummint spending, as if private corporations will ever solve lead-pipe issues on their own? Will they lament all the regulatory bureaucracy supposedly inherent in forcing more lead-pipe disclosure in housing contracts? Will they claim that the bill's funding mechanisms (subjecting more large estates to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers evade taxes) will "kill jobs"? Yes, that all sounds incredibly absurd, and even if they were valid arguments, they still couldn't hope to meet the real moral hazard of exposing our children to brain damage.
Finally, pursuant to most of our goals this year, Public Citizen still helps you tell your Democratic Senators to end the filibuster. Do we care that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema say they won't support an effort to end the filibuster? Of course we don't! All we care about is that we express our will, and if we tell our Senators enough times, they'll start to look bad for not doing it. And, you know, I spent over a decade defending the filibuster, and arguing that we ought to make Senators actually talk their way through the filibuster like they did in the old days. But, honestly, I've fucking had enough.
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