Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs), protect utility grid whistleblowers, demilitarize our police, and end qualified immunity, and tell Pennsylvania state legislators to stop whining about the 2020 election and reject any proposed "fraudit" thereof. 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.
Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. As you know, the last four U.S. Presidents have used the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) as excuses to launch unconstitutional military adventures at will -- but S. 2391 would repeal both those AUMFs, and about damn time, too. S. 2391 would also put more constraints on future AUMFs -- among other things, it would cut off funding for new military adventures after 20 days unless Congress approves them, and it would sunset all future AUMFs after two years. And then, with some diligence and oversight, we can get back to ensuring Congress declares the wars, not the President. Remember: "hamstringing the President's ability to act" is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug!
The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend whistleblower protections to workers who maintain our electric grid. That grid, as you might imagine, is suffering under the weight of climate change weather, and it's also like a big ice cream cone to folks who would want to terrorize good Americans -- and I want you to imagine other Americans, not foreigners, as the folks who would want to terrorize you, since that's likely how it'll be. And yet electric grid workers face retaliation if they report trouble on the grid -- even if they report, say, wildfire-related trouble. You imagine that you go through life doing the right thing, and standing up when the situation calls for it, right? In reality, most of us decide that losing our job and our family suffering isn't worth it. And that's why we need to better protect the people who do stand up.
The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to demilitarize our police. As I've said before, those right-wingers who think of Nazism whenever they confront a vaccine mandate or a sign telling them to wear a mask inside a store should more closely contemplate the spectre of police officers routinely using grenade launchers on protestors. Of course, many right-wingers have already contemplated this, and have decided that militarizing our police is necessary to the degree they use tear gas and rubber bullets on Those People. But it is entirely possible that, in the near future, our government will start going after the folks who bomb abortion clinics and try to overthrow our government, and it may take time, but I think many right-wingers will then see the utility of maybe not making every cop into a walking time bomb.
The Daily Kos Liberation League also helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. It's very, very hard to bring a bad cop to justice these days, not so much because of unions (even though other liberals say so!), but because our courts make it almost prohibitively difficult via the entirely court-created doctrine of "qualified immunity," whereby you can't bring a bad cop to justice unless your case almost exactly resembles a previous case which brought a bad cop to justice. And how many cases are almost exactly like others? This places the burden of proof rather far above "beyond a reasonable doubt" and into the rarefied air of "ain't never happening." And the good folks who've had their brother or sister or mother or father or son or daughter shot for brandishing a cellphone or a water gun deserve more than that.
Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any attempt at a 2020 election "fraudit" like the one they had in Arizona. When they're not whining about the utter absence of evidence pointing to widespread voter fraud that would have, say, wiped out President Biden's eight-million vote lead across the nation, they're saying things like if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear! Actually, that's not even true: you have the loss of taxpayer money, for one thing; you have the shame of throwing away that money for bellyaching, for another; and you also have voting machines that have to be decertified and replaced (also at taxpayer cost!) because the people conducting the audit have no fucking clue what they're doing, like the Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County, Arizona. When will Republicans feel shame over what they've done? When they look around and find no one supports their works. So let's help bring that about. It'll be better for all of us.
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