Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact sane gun control legislation, reject the RESTRICT Act, reject any effort to cut food stamps, and pass the Secure Viable Banking 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.
The mass murder at a Nashville school has inspired a lot of stupid thought from right-wingers, so let’s instead call our Reps and Senators and offer a sane plan, one first proposed by Thom Hartmann in 2018, which would a) amend the National Firearms Act of 1934 so that it includes semi-automatic guns as well as automatic ones and b) require gun owners to register their guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance. (You can read Mr. Hartmann’s full plan here.) Don’t brook any registration-equals-nanny-state-equals-slavery hysteria; we’ve all registered so many things in our lives we hardly think of it.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the RESTRICT Act, which purports to be a data privacy bill (as well as an anti-TikTok bill, since that diddles right-wing rage glands these days), but which contains such vague enforcement language that law enforcement could easily use it to stifle fairly common and necessary internet processes, like Virtual Private Networks (or VPNs). Recall that Republicans couldn’t wait to repeal the actually pretty good data privacy protections our FCC enacted back in the late Obama years, and thus realize that none of them have any standing to foment drama and hysteria about data privacy now.
The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP), a.k.a. “food stamps.” Don’t believe the hype that “we have to cut food stamps to get out fiscal house in order,” because a) food stamps comprise rather less than 2 percent of our government’s spending and b) how about cutting defense spending, since we already spend more on defense contractor executive pay defense than the next nine countries on that list combined? Right-wingers don’t care about fiscal responsibility – they care about keeping our government from doing anything for anyone other than their big campaign donors.
Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would restore rules and restrictions on mid-sized banks that originally passed in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial services reform bill, but which Congress repealed in 2018. That 2018 bill was a bad bill then – no matter how “bipartisan” it was – and with the recent failures of the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank of New York, we now know how bad it was. At least, we hope we know, as in we hope no more banks fail! Pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, and maybe we won’t ever have to know.
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