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Dear Friends,

Last week the House Rayburn Office Building in Washington DC was overrun by low-income people trying to prevent Medicaid cuts. Taking health care from the poor, seizing the subsidies on the Affordable Care Act for those above poverty line but below 250% of the Federal Poverty Level are the work of sheer evil.

In Matthew 10, Jesus tells his disciples to go into towns and villages to bring the story, the news, but first heal the sick. Not with superhuman intervention, but with medicine. Basic health care was their first direction. Before all else, heal.

When Medicaid – Medi-Cal in California – was expanded to all adults as part of the Affordable Care Act, miracles really did happen. Our communities overall, grew healthier. I remember going to my pharmacy and having to stand in line for once. Why? People without health coverage finally had doctors and prescriptions to take care of what ailed them. 

Prior to Medi-Cal expansion, three homeless men died in my alley. They had treatable issues but no path to help. We knew all three fairly well. It was heartbreaking injustice, and it is not the mark of a strong community that these things occurred. I know some in Congress think the homeless are losers, but all three had worked, contributed to society, and simply fell on hard times. And we let them die. We tried to help, but the costs were prohibitive. Without Medi-Cal there was little we could do. I still miss them a lot.

When the poor got healthy, we got healthier. What does it benefit a society to have desperately sick people among us, unable to be treated or cured? Homeless folks lined up during COVID to get vaccinated. Low-income people the same. We were not affected by sick people providing us services and leaving us with diseases. It’s not selfish to wish for a healthy society as well as for healthy people in it. It’s good sense. 

Now the proposed House reconciliation act seeks to give MASSIVE tax cuts to the billionaires by cutting a few, low-cost programs. Medicaid is among them. So are the copay and deductible supports for those over poverty level but below 250% of the poverty line. What cruelty are we offering that takes affordable health care from struggling people to give the rich more tax breaks? We aren’t saving money. We are merely stealing health care. 

Please call your House member, regardless of party, to say you do not want sick people to go untended in America. Knowing, cynically, lots of House members have zero compassion, it is perfectly logical to affirm the need for a healthy society so we, the taxpayers won’t be sick either. If they have no compassion, speak to their self-interest. It does not bode well to have dead and dying people in our midst. It is dangerous to have those with contagious diseases going untreated. However you frame it is fine. Let your heart speak to your Representative.

“Keep Medicaid! Keep ACA lower income support payments!”

Another issue for especially rural folks is the likely closing of smaller hospitals. No Medicaid? The state’s subsidy for “charity care” is not remotely enough to cover costs. We have to protect our health providers as well as our health recipients.

We can’t flood the Rayburn Office Building with our bodies regularly, but we CAN flood their phone lines in both the Capitol and the district offices. We can send written messages from their web sites. We can send FAXes as well. Speak up for the health of America by speaking out on the need to keep Medicaid. It is a critical issue we all can address. 

To find your Representatives phone, Fax, and email please go here: Find Your Representative | house.gov Call often, get others to call. Do a visit if you can with others upholding these values. The very poor often have no voice. Let us be theirs.

Thank you.

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Dear Friends,

You may have heard that Congress, to provide a budget for the upcoming year, is looking to cut Medicaid to help make up the deficit that will be caused by tax cuts for the very wealthy. We now know there are GOP as well as Democrats who are objecting to this tactic. This is a good time then to raise our voices!

In addition to the profound harm such cuts will do to those who are poor, homeless, low income, there is a universal harm that will come to our smaller hospitals. Without Medicaid — MediCal in California — those smaller, rural hospitals may have to close.

California used to have a fund for “charity care” that helped hospitals cover costs of treating the uninsured. It was a pittance compared to the costs, and it did not help enough. You might recall that before the Affordable Care Act that passed 2010 expanding Medicaid, we learned that between Bakersfield and Sacramento, there were no trauma hospitals that could afford to stay open. It meant everyone traveling I-5 and US 99, the two main north-south routes between Los Angeles and cities in northern California, had no access to trauma centers in case of an accident or illness along the way.

Our rural and small-town hospitals could not survive. We speak of “food deserts” on hunger, but we had many “health deserts” from hospital closings, the absence of community clinics. That affects us all. MediCal expansion was a lifeline to everyone whether or not they were using it. 

Now it’s under threat from massive cuts that will do grave harm everywhere.

Photo courtesy of our friends at SEIU

Please call your House Representative and keep calling! Medicaid — MediCal — is essential to everyone. Please remind Representatives that providing health care was one of Jesus’ first directions to his apostles. In Matthew 10, he tells them first to heal the sick, and only then to spread the word. Health is a fundamental social good, and in this funding issue, cuts to coverage impact everyone.

We have stopped suggesting you call the Capitol switchboard for contact with your Representative since it’s massively overloaded! 

Instead, please find the Representative’s Capitol and district numbers here: Find Your Representative | house.gov  Please call to save Medicaid funding to keep our nation healthy, our hospitals and community clinics open to everyone. Call often and urge your friends to do the same.

Thank you!!

===================== We Need Your Help!  =====================

The California Council of Churches has been at the forefront of many, many social justice and civil rights movements for over 112 years. Like many justice-oriented nonprofits, we have lost most of our financial support since COVID and are working on ways to re-engage in the important work we have done so well for so long. We are currently seeking funding to create an online resource center to help congregations find the best resources to support the social justice ministries they feel their local communities need most from our member denominations, congregations, and partners. If you can help us, please contribute by using the donate button on our website, by PayPal here, or by sending your check to PO Box 980981, West Sacramento CA 95798-0981. If you can help us raise the funding we need from your congregation, judicatory, denomination, or other sources, please contact rick@calchurches.org.  Thank you!

Dear Friends,

Yesterday, the House Committee on Judiciary voted to permit the administration to deport United States Citizens! Under no existing law may that ever be done, and yet, the whole House is preparing to erode this central right under every existing law.

As we have mentioned, the courts today are very much focused on upholding the letter of the law, the actual texts of statutes and the Constitution. This vote yesterday was not a stand-alone bill but the veto of an amendment to the budget bill to prevent ICE from deporting American citizens. 

Technically, existing statutes and the Constitution still protect US citizens, natural born or naturalized, but these are very dangerous waters we are wading. The majority apparently did not wish to give textual support to the issues of due process and affirmation of US citizenship. That is both treacherous and cowardly.

Photo courtesy of the International Rescue Committee

The Supreme Court has affirmed the absolute right to due process, and yet US citizens have been deported within these last three months. That includes children. For this key committee to refuse to uphold and affirm the existing law is frightening in its import.

We urge you to call your Representative, regardless of party, to tell them clearly that we uphold the absolute rights of citizenship and due process. Three CA members of the committee voted against affirming these rights. Darrell Issa (CA -48), Tom McClintock (CA-05), and Kevin Kiley (CA -03). In addition to them, it’s important for ALL of California’s House delegation to know we will not support the erosion of these fundamental rights of citizenship for anyone, natural born or naturalized.

Please contact your House of Representative Member by going here: Find Your Representative | house.gov

Please start calling today before the budget bill reaches the floor. Ask your Representative to put this amendment back into the bill or at least, the very least, affirm to you that citizenship rights as now exist are sacred. We have honored citizenship for the entirety of our nation’s existence. Now is not the time to change that.

Thank you!

Dear Friends,

HR 22, the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” (SAVE) Act purports to end “illegal” voting. First, the evidence of fraud in registration and voting per the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, was double digits to 2016. That’s right, under 100 cases despite hundreds of millions of votes.

The claim now is “thousands” of non-citizens are registered, but not a single case has shown up. None. NO FRAUD has ever been proven. 2016-now. Despite this, the SAVE Act has new registration demands that are not only a great hardship to voters who are poor, rural, born at home, etc. but which will actively disenfranchise married women.

As written, all voters must be registered under the name on their birth certificate. Many women took their husband’s last name at marriage, and the bill makes no provision for bringing marriage licenses to show the change.  If your driver’s license or passport show a different name from your birth certificate, you may no longer vote. If you have no birth certificate, you have to get some kind of passport or other costly ID, and that has to have your name at birth.

Part of this is a religious agenda. The government has those within Congress who believe married women should not be allowed to vote, and this suits them perfectly.  (Never mind the unintended consequence of having registered married female voters who are feminists and kept their own birth names.)  The other group they wish to disenfranchise are transsexual people who have not gotten updated birth certificates which is most of them. 

There is nothing about this bill that makes a lick of sense since registration fraud does not exist, but there is much that will do grave harm to a huge part of the American population.  

Please write or call your House Representative and make clear how dangerous and useless this bill is.  They need to hear from us before Wednesday since we don’t know exactly when it will arrive for the vote.  These games are exhausting, but we need to stay on top of them.  Let your voice be heard!  

Please call your Representative.  You can find the numbers here: Find Your Representative | house.gov    If they won’t talk, please use the constituent form on their House.gov website to send a message. “Vote NO on HR 22 to truly SAVE OUR VOTE”!  Our vote is part of our voice over issues in America.  Please defend it now!

Thank you! 

Dear Friends:

It may not yet be apparent, but our 236-year system of government with division of powers, checks and balances, is actually working.  Judges at all three levels of our federal court — District, Appellate, Supreme Court — have been ruling without fear or favor to uphold the laws of the land.  

The Northern District of CA, the federal jurisdiction that runs north along the coast, issued a ruling that prohibited the deportation of suspected undocumented immigrants without due process. He was the judge who, you may have read, ordered the deportation planes returned but who was ignored. It led to his strengthening the ruling a couple of days later. 

That ruling was issued as a nationwide injunction as many such district rulings are.  The judge, James Boasberg, reminded the pro-deportation plaintiffs that appeals were the remedy for their disagreement.  (Note – despite the injunction, 17 more were deported to Venezuela this weekend.)  

Nationwide halts to law emanating from one district court are commonplace, but this administration proposed to impeach any judge who did that.  That was so egregious, Justice Roberts took the unusual step of reminding the White House that, as Judge Boasberg had noted, it is appeal not impeachment that is the way to address disagreements on outcomes.  

Rep. Darrell Issa from the San Diego area, instead created a new bill, also unprecedented, the “NORRA” bill: NoRogue Rulings Act” (H.R. 1526).  This would prohibit a district court’s rulings from having national impact.  Despite the wide use of nationally-applied injunctions by conservative as well as liberal justices, this bill would limit such district rulings to the district.  

Even when rulings have gone against principles that we in California Council of Churches IMPACT hold dear such as the bar to certain immigrant rights in earlier administrations, the fundamental issue is the universality of our law.  We agree with Judge Boasberg – the remedy is appeal, not selective enforcement of the law. What applies in principle in Northern California should apply everywhere equally unless overturned by higher courts.  To do otherwise would produce a patchwork quilt of rulings and enforcement. Uniformity, for good or ill, is critical to our unity as a nation.  The system of appeals has worked for 236 years.  It is not to be broken over whim and petulance.

Please call your Representatives immediately and opposed NORRA – HR 1526,  Speak up for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the uniformity of its application. 

Please call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 or, if it’s busy, find your Representative here: Find Your Representative | house.gov    We urge calling the Capitol number first, but again, if it’s busy, either use the online form to write or call a district office.  No matter what, please uphold our system of law and justice NOW! 

NO on HR 1526!

Dear Friends:

With all that’s going on, massive cuts proposed for both social supports and even our earned income for retirement, the House budget yesterday had infuriating projections for our nation.

Despite cutting TRILLIONS from all government programs, the addition of another massive tax cut for billionaires and corporations will actually ADD $2.2 TRILLION to our national debt.  The cuts to food, medical care, humanitarian aid, and everything else we’ve fought for over the years is just to ease that mischief, not solve a problem.

The loss of income to working families and the poor will have consequences.  Every human being serves two economic functions: they produce goods and services that generate wealth for companies and the nation.  The second function we all have is as consumers. We buy the things we and others make.  Without that function, the entire system collapses.  Silicon Valley sells information technology mostly to businesses. Businesses produce things that we buy.  The failure of us to buy ripples upward to not needing information technology or anything else.  Our role as consumers is critical to the whole mix.  

Using that power and leverage, we at California Council of Churches are working with thousands of groups to encourage a one-day economic boycott of everything except very local businesses.  No shopping means no income to the rich who are getting tax breaks on our backs and those of the poor.  

Yes, it’s a token. But as in “A Day without a Mexican”, sometimes the power of a demonstration has significance to other people’s understanding.   This is also consistent with our Lenten awareness of sacrifice.  It’s a small thing, but it may have huge impacts.

Please join with others and boycott everything – large food retailers, fast food, big box stores, Amazon, and the like. The is foreshadowing for them. If we lose income to finance their tax cuts? They will lose much more from our inability to be consumers. It won’t be just one day then. It will be all days.    

If you know homeless or very low income working people, they are exempt from this. They are living on the margins and, if they need a burger from McDs because they can access it, well, so be it.  We don’t need to ask them to sacrifice more. They already are.  Power matters. So does kindness.

We urge your participation. You can also Google corporate consumer lines to call to let them know you will not be shopping with them Friday and why.  “A Day without Our Dollars.”  We can do this!

Thank you!