Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, go big on the American Jobs Plan, lower drug prices, and make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, and tell President Biden to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. 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.
Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our Supreme Court blew a hole open in the Voting Rights Act, with their, shall we say, sunny claim that vote suppression isn't an issue in the South anymore, but our Court also said the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance formula (which they struck down) would be OK as long as it didn't "discriminate" against the South. Hence the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would install a formula requiring any state or locality, anywhere, with a history of vote suppression to submit its voting rights law changes in advance to our Justice Department for pre-clearance. That would have stopped a lot of right-wing state legislative efforts to restrict the vote, though not all of them. Anyone who votes against this bill -- or worse, won't let it come to a vote because they don't even have the courage to vote against it -- deserves defeat, dishonor, shame, and shunning. We might as well make them mark themselves off.
Daily Kos helps you tell Congressional Democrats to go big on jobs legislation. We say this as Republicans are pretending they have qualms about a "bipartisan" bill they intend to kill anyway, and as moderate Democrats are trying to reduce the size of the reconciliation bill as close to nothing as they can. You can say to Democrats: why do you think "not doing too much" will save your job? If you have a chance to rebuild broken bridges and replace lead-lined water pipes and your response is well, I wouldn't want to do too much, why do you think voters will respect that? Democrats moved cautiously in the face of the 2008 bankster Armageddon, and over five dozen House Reps and six Senators lost their jobs in 2010. If they don't learn from that this time, they not only deserve to lose, they deserve to be remembered as folks who pretended to be good but were actually evil. Hey, my goodwill only lasts so long. I'm getting old.
Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to (perhaps not surprisingly) lower drug prices this year. To sum: big pharma charges more for drugs here in America than they do in other countries because they can, socializes the risk but privatizes the profits because they can, charges absurdly high amounts of money for lifesaving drugs because they can, claims their main expense is "research and development" when they spend far more money on stock buybacks because they can -- there's a solution to all these problems in there somewhere, and that solution is to make it so they can't do any of those things. Let right-wingers call all that "socialism." Again, they never whine about "socialism" when taxpayer money funds the entirety of the Moderna vaccine, for example, but if "socialism" makes life-saving drugs more affordable, that'll just make socialism more popular.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The first of many monthly $250 or $300 checks for American families will start coming out approximately now, and they'll run until the end of 2021; the expansion itself will run through 2022, but families will get that expansion in one lump sum (that's not very smart of Democrats; wouldn't they want a monthly campaign ad in millions of houses every month until the midterms?) and then in 2023 it'll go away. There's no good reason it shouldn't go away, though. I mean, I guess Mob Boss Mitch will say "raging" inflation is a good reason, though he's old enough to remember what "raging" inflation was really like. But fear-mongering over inflation is a bad reason to put millions of children back into poverty.
Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center with a quickness. And not to listen to the not-in-my-backyard cowardice from Congressional Democrats this time! Guantánamo doesn't hold "the worst of the worst" -- if it did, they'd all be in jail now! Make no mistake, Guantánamo holds political prisoners, and why would we want the country we love to act like the dictatorships we look down on? Not just by holding them without charge or without access to a fair trial -- and as the greatest country on Earth, we're able to give "the worst of the worst" a fair trial without being afraid, right? -- but by torturing them. Almost 800 folks have passed through Guantánamo; now, 40 remain, and that's 40 too many. Our shame is nearly two decades old now. It's well past time we started to make amends, by closing Guantánamo Bay.
Finally, both Common Cause and Progress America help you tell our USPS Board of Governors and our President, respectively, to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who first tried to help Donald Trump win re-election by slowing down mail service, and who has lately proposed higher rates and lower service as the solution to all of our Post Office's problems. That's some real bold thinking, there! As usual, the American people have actual bold thinking -- we want to end the crippling pre-payment mandate Congress foisted on our Post Office in 2006 and restart postal banking for the first time in over 50 years long, long before we want to pay higher prices for worse service. I mean, this is America, and we deserve better than Louis DeJoy.
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