Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act, expand the Child Tax Credit, and pass the Protected Time Off 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.
RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote for the Right to Vote Act, which establishes a “fundamental right to vote in elections for federal office” in law, per Sec. 2(a), and would prohibit any “diminishment” of that right unless it were “the least restrictive means of significantly furthering an important, particularized government interest,” per Sec. 2(b). The Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act still deserve our support, but the Right to Vote Act at least would give us a fighting chance in court every time right-wingers want to suppress votes. And all we ever ask for is a fighting chance.
The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to expand the Child Tax Credit for working families now, without poison pill amendments. Even our Republican House approved a CTC expansion – one weighed down with corporate welfare, to be sure, but we’ll get no better out of this Congress – and yet some Senators want to pile on even more harmful and unpopular legislative initiatives they could never get passed on their own, so we need to stop that. Is this CTC expansion as good as the 2021 CTC expansion? No. But will it lift half a million children out of poverty? Yes, and that’s worth doing.
Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protected Time Off Act, which would guarantee two weeks of paid time off for all full-time workers, which they may use for any reason, including caring for themselves or sick family members. Would that be as good as the 13 weeks Sen. Gillibrand’s bill would have offered, or the four weeks off the 2021 Build Back Better Act offered at one point before the Sinemanchin Axis killed it? No, it would not – as Andy Reid might say, we can all count. But would it be better than the zero weeks some 20 million American workers currently have? Yes, it would. So we should take it, and then fight for more later.
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