Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. 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.
Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yes, it’s back, and Congress should keep bringing it back until it passes. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department’s ability to reject state voting law changes, and our Justice Department could do that in any state or locality that’s demonstrated a pattern of voting rights abuses. That would close the hole in the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court blew open in their notorious Shelby County v. Holder ruling. And it would help us restore the voting rights a lot of states have spent the last several years gutting.
Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would force our Supreme Court Justices to follow the same ethics rules every other federal judge follows. Is there a news hook? You bet there is! Paul Singer apparently paid for Sam Alito to go on a very expensive fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 when Mr. Singer had business before our Supreme Court. Long, long experience has taught us that we should not trust our leaders so much as make them do right by us; hence we do not “trust” Sam Alito that they weren’t really pals or that his First Class plane seat was just sitting there unused, we make sure he never does such a thing again. Why should this be hard?
Finally, the Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That resolution is almost old enough to get itself blind drunk at a bar without getting carded, and all it’s good for is encouraging Presidents to fling us off into more stupid wars, so getting it wiped from our laws shouldn’t be a big deal. And let me state, at least one more time, that our Constitution mandates that Congress declares wars and Presidents conduct wars. And it doesn’t say Congress declares “police actions” or “authorizes military force”; it says war. There are some old words we’ve got to get back to using, precisely because they’ll make us fly right again. “War” is one of them.
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