A Touch of Politics

photo credit: wikipedia

I talked last year (damn, it's been a year?) about wanting to delve into politics a little bit. I found the website popvox when the whole sopa/pipa thing was happening. You can look at bills, say you oppose/approve and send write a personalized reason why. It will automatically send a letter to your member of congress on your behalf, and when it's election time you can look back at their voting record and see how much they lined up with you. Pretty cool.

I had originally planned on looking at what was going to happen in congress each week and weigh in on whatever was coming, however, I had trouble finding a reliable list of what was coming up, and I got busy and distracted and so forth. But I think it is important to let our congressmen know that we are watching, so I want to try to get back to it in some capacity.

It also turns out they email you if there is an amendment (or an important amendment perhaps?) to a bill, that's what brought my attention back to this stuff. I got an email about a bill that I weighed in on a while ago, it's a bill that is trying to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks. I highly recommend that you go over there and say you oppose it. If possible write a personalized message, I imagine the representatives will be more likely to consider something that comes with an explanation.

I guess I'll just scan through the bills on the front page and see what catches my eye

H.R. 1892: Unlocking Technology Act of 2013
This one seems pretty cut and dry. It should be legal to unlock our damn phones

H.R. 2247: The Collectible Firearms Protection Act
This is interesting. A bill to exempt collectible guns from import without having to deal with normal gun laws. I guess it ultimately depends on what counts as a "collectible", but on the surface this seems fine. Your generally not going to be committing a crime with some antique collectible gun. Unless I'm missing something this seems okay. There's no organizations opposing or supporting. I wonder what that means.

S. 744: The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill
This one is much more difficult. It's long, and there seems to be a lot to it. I haven't had a chance to properly look into it yet, but I figured I'd bring it up anyway. Perhaps I'll have a chance to look into this one more in depth and bring it up again next week.
Immigration is a difficult topic, I like the idea of a path to citizenship, especially for people who were brought into the country illegally as children. But I don't like the idea of mass amnesty, it's just bad policy. I definitely need to look into this one a bit more.

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Well, that's all for today. I'm not sure exactly what I want this to be, I like the idea of doing something along these lines each week, we'll just have to see if this develops into something and what form it winds up taking.

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[edit] when I abandoned intense debate, all of the comments went away. I'm can see them but getting them back on the blog is proving to be a challenge. This is one idea, I'm not sure if it's worth it, but I will try. Unfortunately, they are also backward, read bottom to top