Indivisibles,

We’re not going to mince words: on Saturday, a young, white man drove 9 hours to a Walmart in El Paso to murder brown people. It was spurred by the white nationalist ideology Trump promotes, his Republican enablers in Congress support, and Fox news mainstreams. Hours later, another white man murdered 9 people -- mostly Black people -- in less than a minute.

As the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia put it, the “US is in the midst of a white nationalist terrorism crisis.” The question now is what are we going to do about it?

Trump and Congressional Republicans have blood on their hands. They refuse to pass laws to reduce gun violence, no matter how many lives are lost in places like El Paso or Dayton or Chicago or Virginia Beach or Parkland or Pittsburgh or Thousand Oaks or Annapolis or Santa Fe. That is to say -- anywhere. The same Republicans also refuse to pass laws to create a more humane, common-sense, people-first immigration system that protects children and keeps families together.

The conversations we’re having right now, from gun control and white supremacist terror to immigration, are intrinsically linked. Just this morning, Trump doubled down on his harmful, racist rhetoric by suggesting we pass background check legislation as part of a deal on his harmful deportation agenda. (We’ll say it for you. What. The. F&*%?)

We have to do more to prevent gun violence. We need universal background checks. We must close the Charleston loophole. We should ban high capacity magazines, and the type of weapons used in these mass shootings -- weapons of war designed to carry out mass carnage in mere seconds. The Senate should come back to debate and vote on the pieces of legislation to expand background checks that the House passed months ago. But this crisis isn’t one that can be solved with gun reform alone.

President Trump’s signature issue has, and always will be, villainizing Black and Brown immigrants. You’ve read his Twitter, and you’ve seen his campaign ads. Since May 2018, his campaign has run more than 2,200 Facebook ads mentioning the word “invasion.” And rather than calling out their racist party leader, leading Republicans and their Fox News backers have fanned the flames, nodding along and sending him their donations while he suggests that some neo-Nazis are “very good people.”

Those “very good people” are the people who wake up, pick up a gun they bought legally through our far-too-loose laws, and then walk into a school or a mall or a church or a synagogue or a Walmart and murder people who the President has told them are less-than-human.

So what do we do?

In short, a lot. We have to fight on every front. That means:

• Demanding our members of Congress (MoCs) speak out against white nationalism and terror fueled by white supremacy in no uncertain terms.
• Organizing to tell our representatives to defund Trump’s hateful deportation agenda by cutting funding to ICE and CBP in this September’s budget fight.
• Showing up to ask the hard questions and get our MoCs on the record, publicly supporting a formal impeachment inquiry in the House. (If ten episodes of obstruction of justice weren't enough, inciting domestic terrorism and hate crimes should be. He's unfit for office and there is a mechanism in place to remove him).
• Asking our senators to publicly demand Mitch McConnell call an emergency session to vote on House-passed gun violence prevention legislation and cosponsor S. 42, Chris Murphy's Background Check Expansion Act.
• Insisting on meaningful plans from 2020ers on issues like immigration, fighting white nationalism, and addressing gun violence.
• Working hard to defeat Trump, take back the Senate, and maintain our House majority in 2020.
• And least click-bait-worthy but potentially most important? It means calling on senators and 2020 candidates to get real about how we get any of this done and commit to ending the filibuster in 2021 (more on this below).

We know -- that’s a lot to think about all at one time. So here are our top-3 action items for the week to move our entire agenda forward:

 Your 3 weekly to-dos 

1. Check out our new toolkit to fight back against Trump’s racist deportation machine and start planning your September Defund Hate Week of Action event now. This September’s work on the budget will be the biggest advocacy fight of this year -- and there’s so much at stake. As our MoCs return to DC next month, we are organizing a national week of action for our Defund Hate campaign. The week of action starts with a national call-in day on Monday, September 9, and will build up to a major, nationwide mobilization on Friday, September 13. Start planning now to tell your MoC to cut funding for ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the upcoming Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill.
2. This August, demand your representative publicly support a formal impeachment inquiry in the House. We’re proud to partner with MoveOn, Need to Impeach, Stand Up America, and others on the Impeachment August campaign. The ask is simple: find a town hall or register your own district office visit and demand that your representative in the House support a formal impeachment inquiry. As of today, a majority of House Democrats support an inquiry -- but we need many, many more to speak out to guarantee we learn the truth about Trump’s crime and corruption.
3. Use this script to call your senators now to say their thoughts and prayers are not enough. After the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton this weekend, every senator should publicly demand Mitch McConnell call an emergency session to debate and vote on gun violence prevention legislation AND cosponsor S. 42, which would close loopholes and require background checks for all gun purchases. Read more in our updated resource here.

 A word on the filibuster and gun violence prevention 

If you follow us on Twitter, you may have noticed that we (and others, like Jay Inslee) talked a lot about the filibuster this weekend. We want to talk to you about why.

For years, Democrats have offered legislative solutions to the routine mass shootings that take place in our country, but Republicans, many of whom are cozy with the National Rifle Association, have blocked any progress on common-sense gun safety laws.

This is because of a procedural loophole called the filibuster. It allows just one senator -- even a senator in the minority party -- to block a vote on legislation, unless a supermajority of 60 senators agree to let a vote proceed. Mitch McConnell has exploited the filibuster to great effect in the past, and if that weren’t bad enough, he has stated that he will use the filibuster to be “the Grim Reaper” of the progressive agenda if Democrats win back the White House in 2020.

In fact, after Sandy Hook, a bill to expand background checks got 54 Democratic and Republican votes in the Senate. It failed because of the filibuster.

That means McConnell and the rest of the GOP will stand in the way of all common-sense gun safety reforms, including widely popular proposals like universal background checks. How can we fight back? By eliminating the filibuster and passing gun safety laws with a simple majority.

In coming weeks, we’re going to be talking a lot more about the filibuster and why we must eliminate it -- but in the meantime, check out this explainer from Vox on what it is and why it has to go and read our explainer. Then, start talking to your senators and the 2020 candidates about why you’re demanding that they commit to eliminating it, and get them on the record about their positions.

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 All This Work Costs Money 

We outlined a lot of work in the message above here.

We talked about calling your senators about gun violence legislation, pressuring the administration to cut funding to ICE and CBP, pushing Democrats on impeachment, speaking out at Town Halls, demanding the Senate eliminate the filibuster and doing the work to take back the Senate and protect the Democratic House. And that’s just scratching the surface.

It takes a lot of things to get all of that done. And one of our jobs at Indivisible is to provide tools and resources so that we can make all of that calling, pressuring, pushing, speaking out, demanding and doing the work as easy and effective as possible for you. 

If you can, please chip in $5. Your donation supporting Indivisible Action will fund those tools and is an investment in taking back the Senate, ending gun violence and pushing forwards all of Indivisible’s priorities. 

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 IndivisWin of the Week 

Republicans created this crisis. Period. End of story. This is their strategy: a relentless assault on our values, our sanity. They’re hoping that we let cynicism take over. That we begin to opt-out. That we stop resisting. That we compromise on one crisis to address another. This has been their strategy long before Trump became president. 

It’s up to us not to let cynicism creep in and take over. We have to take the anger, the sorrow, the outrage and turn it into action. It is our opportunity to create a crisis for Republicans.

And we can only create it when we organize, when we show up, and when we collectively raise our voices to demand more from the people who represent us.

Your members of Congress are home right now for August recess until September 9, and they all need to hear from you. So, stay angry, get organized, and let’s get to work.

In solidarity,
Indivisible Team