Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop passport data abuse, ditch the debt ceiling once and for all, and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice 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.
Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our State Department from giving law enforcement access to your passport data willy-nilly. Ideally law enforcement would need a warrant to get your passport application data, but our government has spent the last 20 years assaulting the very idea of getting a warrant – this, even though judges will get out of bed to give warrants if the situation’s that urgent, and even though getting a warrant was good enough for our government for over 200 years. No, 9.11 did not “change everything”! And people who think 9.11 “changed everything” are exactly the sort of people I do not want in my foxhole!
Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. Republicans said they’d take the debt ceiling hostage to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, so let’s take the weapon away from them before they break our damn country with it, shall we? The debt ceiling doesn’t do anything for America; politicians have only ever applied the notion of “fiscal restraint” to spending that actually helps good Americans, but time was our Congressfolk just raised the ceiling whenever we got too close to it. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get it raised, with Republicans the way they are now, so it was never any good coming or going, and have I mentioned that I really, really hate drama?
Finally, both Americans for Financial Reform and Color of Change help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. This bill would give our FCC the power to cap prices for phone calls from prisoners to their family, since now big telecom corporations charge an arm and a leg for that, and prisoners don’t exactly have an arm and a leg to spend. But when prisoners keep in touch with their families and get out of prison, they tend to stay out; folks still think we’re supposed to help criminals get better, right? So let’s help criminals get better by passing this bill. Putting profits above people is evil.
Comments