Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and expand Social Security, tell your Senators to confirm Rohit Chopra as Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Judiciary Act. 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program in the upcoming reconciliation bill. Their constituents would actually like this, since they all have families and they all get sick but they rarely get paid time off unless they have a collective bargaining agreement, but these are Democrats we're talking about, and they're as likely as not to say "we just can't afford it right now." Most folks, confronted with that excuse, would respond we can't afford not to do it! And they'd be literally correct -- while politicians say "we can't afford it" based on some nebulous budgetary scheme that gets thrown out the window as soon as corporations want some welfare handouts, too many Americans literally can't afford to miss a day's pay, or lose a job that won't accommodate their family needs. I say go with the people's will, not the politicians' excuses.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As Congress guts the For the People Act just to appease the West Virginia Senator and his content-free complaints the bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act remains a strong response to our Supreme Court's own gutting of the Voting Rights Advancement, as it would reinsert and strengthen the provision our Court hated because it "discriminated against Southern states." Which have rushed to restrict the right to vote much, much more over the last eight years! What a coincidence! H.R. 4 would reestablish federal pre-clearance of voting rights changes, but for any state or locality that has demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression. And if that happens to include Southern ones, then they need to do better! I ask so little.
Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. "Conventional" "wisdom" has it that we need to cut Social Security benefits because of some time in the future the Trust Fund will supposedly run out of money, but we've blown past a few of those deadlines! Which means you shouldn't trust the AAAAAAAAAAH ENTITLEMENTZ MUSTZ BE REFORMEDZ!!!!! crowd. Better to trust simple math: if we lift the payroll tax ceiling, currently around $142,000 annually, then income over that can finally be taxed into the Social Security system. And then we can increase benefits, improve cost-of-living increases, and improve benefits for surviving spouses and children, among other things. Will the cost-of-entitlements crowd ever shut up? Probably not -- they tend to be rich folks! But if we improve Social Security, they'll have less credibility, and Social Security will be safer.
Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to confirm current FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra as our next Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) Director. The Trump Administration tried to turn our CFPB into a lapdog for the financial industry -- the same financial industry that crashed our economy in 2008, like no one remembers basic facts! -- but we have every reason to believe that Mr. Chopra will reverse that weak, sorry mandate and turn our CFPB back into an agency that will protect good Americans from financial predators, as it did during Mr. Corddray's tenure. Mr. Chopra even has experience in the CFPB as the official in charge of cracking down on student loan predators, something the Trump Administration found controversial, for some reason. It's too rare to have good people running our government; let's encourage that wherever we can.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. With Texas having essentially nullified Roe v. Wade (yeah, that's what a six-week abortion ban does, since most women can't even tell they're pregnant until afterward!), Congress needs to step in and ensure that women can get abortions when they need them. And it's not very much about "not wanting children" -- it's more about needing an abortion because it's put your life in danger, or needing an abortion because the fetus isn't viable. Right-wingers strut about how only they care about human life, but they demonstrate again and again they don't care about human health care. This is America, of course, so they shouldn't get all the say about everything. Even when they wave guns in our faces.
Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would expand our Supreme Court from nine Justices to 13. Daily Kos cites our Court's recent refusal to intervene in the aforementioned Texas anti-abortion law as the most pressing reason to expand our Court, but we could cite a host of others. Chiefly, however, we have 13 Courts of Appeals, and having one Supreme Court Justice preside over each one would better ensure every appeal that needs hearing gets heard. Both the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have avoided hearing a whole lot of cases, but we can at least put pressure on them to do more of the work they're supposed to do. And if Joe Biden gets to appoint four more Justices? Too bad -- Republicans got enough unearned Court appointments over the years.
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