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Standing with the Strangers Among Us - support SB 54 and SB 6 now!

3/30/2017

Dear Friends:

Two bills we think are important for the rights of immigrants in our population will be voted on in the California Senate this coming Monday, April 3.

SB 6 offers every immigrant facing deportation the right to legal counsel.   SB 54 requires that all California state and local agencies refrain from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in identifying and apprehending immigrants for that reason alone.

SB 54 makes full cooperation with ICE a requirement when it comes to violent or serious felony offenders. But it stops police or any other agency from identifying or apprehending people who are guilty of nothing but a questionable immigration status.

Although ICE purportedly arrests only those with felony convictions, the actual record is considerably different. Many mistakes - or indifference to status - have been made in the last few months of increased action on deportations. Ripping families apart for no reason, deporting contributing taxpayers, threatening the stability of workplaces, are not the solution to our chaotic immigration system.

Please call your state Senator today or send email or FAX communication over the weekend. It is important that our witness for the 'stranger among us' be loud and clear.

Sample call:

Hello, my name is _______ and I am calling from _______ (indicate city as a constituent) to ask Senator ________ to support an inclusive SB 6, the Due Process for All Act, and a strong SB 54, the California Values Act, which will both be voted on in the Senate floor on Monday. I urge the Senator to be on the right side of history, not on the side of the California Sheriff's shameful collusion with Trump's anti-immigrant agenda. Will the Senator support SB 54 and SB 6?

To access your Senator's contact information, please go to: http://www.churchimpact.org/take-action.html

These two bills will go a long way to stopping the harassment and sheer terror that now are constant companions for too many of our neighbors. Yes we need paths to lawful presence, yes we need paths to full citizenship. What we cannot uphold is a chaotic, nightmarish apprehension and detention system that makes huge errors and destorys lives.

Raise your voice today for your fellow human beings. It is what we are called to do in our lives today.

Thank you!

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Affordable Care Act remains law of the land! You saved it!

3/25/2017

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Dear Friends:

Yesterday's defeat of the bill to scrap the Affordable Care Act was monumental. It is entirely due to your work.
Yes, hard-core anti-health care ideology was the final blow, but your voices in phone calls, emails, town halls, visits all held the line on behalf of the ACA and against gutting the plan. By standing firmly for good health care coverage, by rejecting plans to force 24 MILLION people to drop coverage they could not afford, you made a vote to kill the ACA utterly impossible.

This is the success that a moral voice for democracy can have. You did this work. You got this victory.

There will be more challenges to come. Those who see the ACA as tax revenue to be directed away from health care and into massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are not going away quietly. We will have to be on guard against stealth programs that cut support, especially for Medicaid, and start demanding the impossible such as the requirement that everyone receiving Medicaid has to work or lose it. Medicaid helps those who CANNOT work, so this tactic is particularly evil.

But for the moment, ACA is the law of the land, the health care option we saved. Your voices, your determination, your efforts made all the difference. This is democracy in action thanks to you.

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Protect our brothers and sisters - whoever they may be. Support SB 6, SB 31, and SB 54

3/15/2017

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Dear Friends:

I have just returned from a massive immigrant rights rally where I saw a number of you, our members, standing with immigrants and Muslims as we are called by our faith to do. This is the first step - bearing public witness however and wherever we can.

The next step is transforming our principles into law. If we do not secure democracy legally, we will eternally rally but no one will be truly safe because of it. These to things - activism and advocacy - go hand in hand.

This morning we rallied. This afternoon we begin changing our laws to assure the cries of "No Justice? No Peace! Know Justice, Know Peace!" are not just hollow slogans.

Please take a few minutes to support two bills that protect and defend our Muslim brothers and sisters and our immigrant families whoever they are.

SB 31 protects Muslims in California by forbidding any public agency from handing over information on a person's religion. Period. Full stop. This state will not be complicit with the ill-considered creation of religious profiling at airports or other points of entry nor with a religious registry that targets Muslims as potential terrorists. No hospital, college or university, no law enforcement agency, no social service office - no public employee of any kind may become an informer.

SB 6 will assure that people facing deportation have adequate legal representation. The brave attorneys who still sit day after day in the waiting lounge of international arrivals need this support as much as the people who need the attorneys. The lawyers must also be in place at detention centers to make sure those arrested are actually the right targets and that due process is maintained. We need a regular system of lawful representation for those unjustly targeted for who they are.

SB 54 prohibits our state and local police from abetting what too often has become hasty and erroneous seizure for deportation. Our law enforcement authorities already have the right to participate in deportation of convicted felons. When local law enforcement also becomes complicit in general round ups of people such as the awful story of a father ambushed by ICE, in the company of the local police, and seized while dropping his children at school. When this happens, the police drive a wedge into the trust of the community. Law enforcement officers around the state tells us this is extremely harmful to obtaining witnesses for crimes and especially for victims to come forward. This law prohibits the cooperation except under carefully planned multi-jurisdictional enforcement operations that must be pre-approved based on lawful criteria.

Please let your State Senators know that you support these three bills. They provide stable legal foundations as well as human rights and justice as part of how we exist as a state and society. All three are headed for the Senate floor. Please act NOW. While there is strong support, these three bills are "urgency" bills meaning they are meant to take effect immediately. This requires a 2/3 vote so every vote is precious. Allay doubts and worries among our elected officials; assure them these bills have our support from all of our members within our faith communities! Our faith voice is particularly powerful in these kinds of matters.

Please go to: http://www.churchimpact.org/take-action.html

Please tell your Senator that you stand with legal justice and lawful due process for all people and that these bills are essential to make sure our system of law gives the same rights to all people that we ourselves enjoy in California.

This is important witness for those who, caught in the hysteria too often present in our political lives, cannot always speak for themselves. Add your voice today!

Thank you!

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Health Care under assault - raise your voice NOW!

3/7/2017

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Dear Friends:

The new Anti-Affordable Health Care Act has now been unveiled in the House of Representatives. It is called the American Health Care Act, and it is not pretty.

Under the guise of “returning” authority over health care to consumers and states, many changes to the Affordable Care Act simply take us backward to the problems we had prior to ACA.

For young people in the peak of health not a lot will change other than they can now drop health care coverage totally since it would no longer be mandated.
Healthy people of any age will potentially leave the insurance pool, gambling that they won’t need insurance at all. That puts more people with existing health care needs to be covered, raising the overall outflow of insurance payments. In turn that outlay for your care – considered to be costs to insurance companies - will shove up the premium and other expenses on you, the insured.

To “relieve” insurance corporations from the burden of caring for a less healthy population, especially those with pre-existing conditions that still must be offered coverage, Congress will permit the return of significant “risk rates”. These set higher costs for covering not just illnesses but conditions such as age. The older you get (a good thing yes?) the more you may be charged. You may be charged more if you are in poor health or have a pre-existing condition.
Subsidies will continue for now. They will no longer be linked to income, however, but will be flat rates also based on age.
The monthly subsidies are now set at 1/12 of $2000 per year for those up to age 30, escalating to 1/12 of an annual $4000 allotment for those aged 60. What is masked in this flat rate assistance is the variable cost of premiums in different states and, more important, the fact that those aged 60 will now pay 5 times what those in their 20s pay but the assistance remains only double for older citizens. It is not uncommon for premiums for those aged 60 to be close to $1000 or more per month while the subsidy would be $333.

That is a huge gap between help and hardship. Younger people with pre-existing conditions receiving lower subsidies per month will also find their premiums much higher than those of their healthy peers since those with pre-existing conditions may be charged three times more.

One of the pre-Affordable Care Act problems for the very ill who had chronic or life-threatening problems was the existence of annual and lifetime caps on expenditures for health care coverage. Those are again permitted.

Employer tax credits for providing health insurance will be eliminated.

Health Savings Accounts will receive disproportionate tax credit help. Those with little to now discretionary income cannot save to create an HSA in the first place. For the working poor, enrolling in a ‘catastrophic’ plan with very high deductibles (50% or more would be the patient’s financial burden) would be highly encouraged. The lower income supports for deductibles would be eliminated.
Preventive care that has no extra charge will be eliminated.
Overall evaluation of the costs to individuals and families is staggering. Per David Cutler, Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University, health care under this proposed bill will cost families an additional $2243, those 55-64 will pay an additional $7604. For those below 250% of the federal poverty level, the bill will rise an additional $6228.

One Representative summed up the health care choices for the working poor as a difference between their choosing an expensive iPhone and health care. The problem is, health care is not a commodity, and most iPhones can be had for $100, not $6000-plus. This plan returns the working poor to a choice among rent, food, insurance.
Medicaid will be another problem for states. It will be transferred as a block grant meaning a flat sum not based on need or use or caseload. What has, in California, been transformative for homeless single adults, will now possibly be means tested, work related (a problem for those with disabilities), or capped so new enrollees would not be able to join. Those on Medicaid now will be eligible until 2020 in states that expanded the program in 2013. After 2020, the federal supports are not clear, the program at grave risk, with no alternative specified as part of the to-be-amended Social Security Act.
Those states not participating in Medicaid expansion will still not be part of that program. The very poor, disabled, elderly, blind, and otherwise uninsured poor will still have no access to care.
For those who opt out of private health coverage since it’s no longer mandated, there will be no tax penalty to cover the possible cost of emergency services. However, should insurance be needed in the future, there will be a new ‘penalty’ for non-coverage that will be equal to 30 percent of premiums for 12 months.

There will be tax cuts in the new plan, eliminating taxes on insurance companies, on pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, and the “Cadillac Tax” on high-cost health employer-provided health plans. In part to cover the tax breaks, there is a proposed diversion – some say raid – of $346 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund. (Source-socialsecurityworks.org)
Finally, the bill defunds Planned Parenthood, a major source of health access for men and women without local providers, insurance, or public clinics. PP provides an enormous array of services not just reproductive, and its defunding harms the poorest of the poor yet again.

TIME AGAIN TO RAISE YOUR VOICE!
It is no doubt clear California Church IMPACT is horrified. We, along with hundreds of thousands of you, fought for the Affordable Care Act through early 2010. The faith community across America was very important in securing the passage of ACA, and we need to be present in opposition to these setbacks.
The Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the bill – and passing it without a word of its public cost impacts is horrifying – but we already see that millions will lose their coverage through unaffordability and others will experience skyrocketing increases in their family outlays.

This is unacceptable!
The promises of those opposed to ACA were to ‘repeal and replace’. Repeal is clear. Replacement is not. This bill takes us back to the days of great harm to people whose only fault was not being rich. With employer mandates and tax credits removed, more people will be uninsured, not fewer.
RAISE YOUR VOICE!
Please contact the House immediately. Some votes on parts of this law are coming up in the next few days!
Please let them know you support continuation and improvement of the Affordable Care Act not this bill, not this way, not this tactic, not this time. We want real health care and real affordability, not promises that the “market” will somehow push prices down when it never has and never will.
Call Congress via the Switchboard at 202-224-3121 to connect with your Representative and tell your member of Congress that you will not accept this assault on Americans’ health care.

Time is of the essence. Please call tomorrow morning – your “Faithful Five Minute” call per day has never been more important!

Thank you!

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Protect everyone's religious freedom - Support SB 31 in the State Senate

3/2/2017

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Dear Friends:

In the changed climate of today's America, we have seen how too often the issue of a person's religion has become a target of and for discrimination and outright abuse.

We hold the truth of America, that a person's religion as with race, gender, and other characteristics, is never grounds for discrimination. Yet it happens these days with frightening regularity.

When the son of the late boxer Muhammad Ali, also named Muhammad Ali, flew into the Ft. Lauderdale airport in Florida, he and his mother were detained by immigration even though Ali is an American born citizen. He and his mother were separated and questioned for two hours after the ICE agent asked Ali, "What is your religion?" and Ali replied that he is Muslim.

It has become powerfully clear that religion is now a full-blown test for entry into this country, never mind citizenship and American passports, never mind declarations that the screening is not about religion. If this can happen to an American citizen, it will be only worse for those who are refugees, who hold green cards, visas, work permits, or are just tourists.

This religious profiling cannot be allowed to occur. We must not be complicit in such civil rights violations.

California will not engage in this kind of profiling. To that end, Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) has introduced an urgency bill, SB 31, that will prohibit "a state or local agency or a public employee acting under color of law" from providing or disclosing to the federal government personal information regarding a person's religious beliefs and practices.

The bill will require a 2/3 vote since it is intended to take effect immediately upon passage. At the moment, it is to be heard March 6 in Senate Appropriations where it strongly needs your support.

Please contact Senator Lara who is both the author and the chair of Appropriations. His status as chair does NOT guarantee smooth passage from Appropriations, so this is needed. His phone number at the Capitol is 916-651-4033.

The Appropriations staff person handling the bill is Mark McKenzie to whom you may send emails. His email address is Mark.McKenzie@sen.ca.gov. Appropriations does not have a FAX number, and a phone call to McKenzie is less likely to get answered while an email will be put into the file.

We strongly support this action. It is our moment to remember how targeting people by religion caused one history's most profound horrors in the Holocaust. Using people's religion to discriminate against them is outrageously un-American and a violation of our core faith principles of honoring all people.

Please let your voices be heard today - the bill will be heard March 6 and needs your strong support.

Thank you!

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Standing with the Strangers Among Us - support SB 54 and SB 6 now!

Affordable Care Act remains law of the land! You saved it!

Protect our brothers and sisters - whoever they may be. Support SB 6, SB 31, and SB 54

Health Care under assault - raise your voice NOW!

Protect everyone's religious freedom - Support SB 31 in the State Senate

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