Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to invest in counselors-not-cops in schools, pass the College for All Act, the American Innovation Choice Online Act, and the Open App Markets Act, reject funding for certain nuclear weapons programs, pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. 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.
The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments that we need to invest in counselors and service workers in our schools — and not cops. The right-wing solution to every problem is “more cops,” but we live in a world where more teachers have foiled mass murderers in schools than cops have. And we just witnessed a mass shooting where police arrived but didn’t engage the shooter! And that’s not a good argument to put more cops in schools. I hope America has learned its lesson about making cops do every damn thing, but if not, I’ll keep teaching it.
Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at for all students at two-year community colleges, and for all working- and middle-class students at four-year public universities. (The bill would also eliminate tuition and fees for some students at private, historically Black universities.) This would be the way to do “free college”: by giving the most help to working families, who are most of the folks attending community colleges and public universities. If you’re an upper-class dude who wants to go to Harvard, you still can — and if you need financial help, this bill will do that better, too.
Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. The former bill would cover online platforms with more than 50,000,000 active monthly American users, and would prevent them from discriminating against competing products on their platforms and selling your private data willy-nilly; the latter bill would prevent app stores from discriminating against competing products or forcing app makers to use certain payment systems as a condition of using the market. Big tech corporations hate these bills, but what offends them doesn’t necessarily offend regular people, so let’s not let that stop us.
Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject more funding for the SLCM-N and B83 nuclear weapons. How useless are these weapons? So useless that President Biden, no great friend of reduced defense spending over the last half-century, has requested that our Congress not fund these weapons! The SLCM-N is a nuclear, sea-launched cruise missile, but our Navy already has conventional cruise missiles on its subs; would you like to be the one who launched the wrong missile? The B83, meanwhile, has the biggest yield of any nuclear weapon, but how well does “high-yield” do against IED-wielding terrorists? And remember: the first one to drop the bomb always loses.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7706/S. 4177, the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would make our Supreme Court Justices follow the same Code of Conduct as all other federal judges and prevent federal judges from holding any investments except those in “non-conflicted” funds (i.e., funds diversified enough that a judge or Justice would gain little or nothing by ruling a certain way in a certain case). We talk about the first item in the context of Justice Thomas’s wife running around trying to overturn the election on January 6, but the second item is also important, corruption being evil and all.
Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. Our Senate let that nomination twist in the wind so long that President Biden had to renominate her, but they’re still letting that nomination twist; why, it’s like they want to make sure net neutrality never comes back but they don’t want the blame for it! Voters love that sort of courage. And Senators from West Virginia (you know who) and Arizona (Mark Kelly this time!) say they just haven’t evaluated the nomination enough. They can’t do in 18 months what I did in 10 seconds? Ms. Sohn is one of the architects of net neutrality; that should be enough.
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