Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to reject anti-trans legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, amend our Constitution to allow reasonable campaign finance regulation again, investigate Justice Thomas's possible conflicts of interest, pass antitrust legislation aimed at big tech corporations, and pass the EQUAL 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.
Pennsylvania residents, take note: H.B. 972 is yet another state-level transgender athletic ban, and the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to oppose it. Look, this thing they pretend to fear, where boys become girls so they can dominate girls' athletics and bump girls out of scholarships to college? This does not happen, not just because federal regulations already require parental approval for trans kids to play sports. The people who pretend they think this happens display no evidence of ever having been a hormone-addled teenager, nor do they understand basic human greed -- people don't change sexes to dominate a sport only to be paid less than male athletes for the rest of their lives! Right-wingers love lecturing us on "human nature," but those of us who actually get it need to speak out.
Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You've heard enough over the years about banksters buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them like vampires until all the workers are out in the street. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would respond to that reality by taxing "carried interest" as regular income rather than investment income, forcing bankruptcy proceedings to take care of workers first, and stiffening penalties when banksters break the law. Note well the word "looting" here, as it reminds us (intentional or not, I couldn't say) that Ayn Rand, the right-wing thinker so many banksters worship, wouldn't call them "makers" but "looters." Hell, I'd call them takers! What a shame that today's elites would disappoint even the worst of our long-dead elites.
The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to overturn our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision and allow our government to restrain campaign finance again. Here's the amendment: "Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to forbid Congress or the States from imposing reasonable viewpoint-neutral limitations on private campaign contributions or independent election expenditures, or from enacting systems of public campaign financing, including those designed to restrict the influence of private wealth by offsetting campaign spending or independent expenditures with increased public funding." Virtually everyone in America supports this! So we should get it done.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas's behavior, particularly in re the January 6 attempted coup. The news hook there, of course, is his wife's incessant texting with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the need to overturn the will of 81 million voters in 2020, but Justice Thomas also failed to recuse himself in 2000, even though his wife worked with the Bush transition team, or 2012, when his wife lobbied against the Affordable Care Act, or 2017, when his wife made money from one of the organizations working to uphold the Trump Muslim Ban. He'll insist that he's done everything above-board, but hey, if it looks bad, we should at least see if it is bad.
Both Public Citizen and Antitrust Day both help you tell your Congressfolk to pass antitrust reforms in re big tech corporations. Specifically, both tools help you ask your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act; the former bill would stop big tech corporations from favoring their products in your search results, while the latter bill would stop those corporations from forcing their users to use only their app store. That latter item might be a bit mind-blowing -- you're likely used to getting all your apps from one store, and you may imagine that there's just no other way to do it! But this is America, the can-do country, and too often we see that the world is a whole lot bigger than big corporations would like it to be. That's why we keep pushing them.
Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1693, the EQUAL Act, which would at long last equalize crack and powder cocaine sentencing in America, without amendment. Our House already passed the EQUAL Act by a huge, actually bipartisan margin; look over the list of Republicans who voted for it and you're bound to find at least a dozen names of people you really don't like. (Yes, Matt Gaetz was one of them.) It's almost like they've finally figured out that there's no reason to make sentences bigger for crack than powder, except racism. The main danger, I fear, is that some Senator or other will attach some poison pill amendment that would never survive the light of day on its own; feel free to communicate your will about this particular matter more forcefully in your email.
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