Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject yet another vote suppression scheme, and tell your Congressfolk to stop spying on us without a warrant, end warrantless collection of private money transfer data, and pass the Supreme Court Ethics 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.
First things first: Cedar Key Progress helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 2390, which would outlaw polling places on college campuses. A normal person who’s not well-acquainted with politics might well say: well, that seems like a total waste of time! But, sadly, too many of us who are familiar with politics figure that Republicans are just trying to suppress Democratic votes and throw up our hands, thinking it’s just “partisanship” and “both sides do it.” But “partisanship” and “both sides do it” are never good reasons to enable evil. And have liberals proposed closing polling places in rural areas and suburbs? No, we have not.
The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the section that enables our government to collect all sorts of private information about us without a warrant. I use the italics hammer on that phrase to dissuade folks who think "our government has to do something to fight terrorism!" If our government wants to fight terrorism, they can get warrants – there’s a big gulf between wanting to terrorize people and actually terrorizing them, after all, and real terrorists will out themselves enough before then to justify a warrant. Our government doesn’t need to spy on the rest of us, though.
Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to end warrantless collection of private money transfer data. So every time you use Western Union or MoneyGram, an Arizona-based non-profit collects the data, and then allows federal, state, and local law enforcement (including FBI and DEA personnel) to access that data. Warrants, schmarrants! If you’re old-fashioned, like me, you don’t want police to gobble up money transfer data without a warrant – even if it catches drug traffickers! – because then they’ll start gobbling up your PayPal and Venmo transactions, and then maybe you’ll get carted off to detention somewhere. If freedoms aren’t for everyone, they’re not freedoms.
Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which would, at long last, subject our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethics standards to which every other federal judge must submit. You need not find Justice Thomas’s actions in re the January 6 attempted coup suspicious to support this bill, nor need you find accusations of leaking against Justice Alito or accusations of influence-peddling at the Supreme Court Historical Society convincing. You need only remember that our duty, as Americans, isn’t to trust our leaders to be ethical, but to make them be ethical.
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