At the ACLU of Washington, we show up to work every day choosing to believe in the power of our work, communities, and collective imagination. When we dwell in possibility, we’re able to create a brighter future for all – one that is rooted in equity, justice, and fairness.We invite you to read our 2023 Annual Report to learn about our commitment to protecting and advancing equity and justice for all, including our efforts to:
support policies to make Washington a leader in protecting and expanding access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care,
advance first-of-its-kind legislation to protect consumer health care data from abuse – a particularly important safeguard in a post-Roe world,
fight alongside people impacted by police violence on a groundbreaking effort to eliminate racially biased traffic stops,
The work doesn’t stop when the calendar changes. 2023 may be behind us, but our commitment to a just and humane Washington persists in the coming year and beyond.
Did you argue with your family over politics this holiday season? We sure as hell did. Many families won’t talk about politics at gatherings anymore– it’s gotten too hard.
Women’s March is formally launching an initiative called WTF is Even Happening? As you may have picked up from the name, this campaign is set to help us understand what the actual fuck is going on around our kitchen tables, in our communities, and across the country. WTF is Even Happening is an intervention to help us make heads or tails of the current political moments as they unfold, and give us the tools to help move those we care about from where they are to where we all need to be.
We won’t ever win by disengaging from people that we don’t agree with. Over the next months and years, we need to deepen our commitment to organizing and educating if we are going to grow to the scale necessary to win for our communities in 2024 and defend those wins in the future.
WTF is Even Happening will
Organize the feminist movement to align vision, strategy, and messaging
Build in-person and digital spaces for feminists (both experienced and new activists) to convene, build community, and build power
Welcome, onboard, and catapult new activists into the feminist movement
Sharpen and clarify our priorities, people, and plans
Build a feminist movement that is sharp and sustainable
Women’s March is a 501c(4) organization. Your generous support helps us prepare for fights we see coming and those we don’t. Donations are not tax-deductible. If you prefer to make a tax-deductible gift, we encourage you to support the Women’s March Network. Gifts to the Network support our organizing, communications, advocacy, and public education efforts.
As this year comes to a close, the League of Women Voters of Washington reflects on all that has happened and all that is before us in 2024.
This coming year, an important presidential election year, will have much impact on our democracy.
The League cannot do this vital work without your support. Your contribution, no matter the size, helps the League empower voters and defend democracy.
The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan political organization that encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy.
The League of Women Voters of Washington 1511 Third Ave, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98101 United States
For the ninth year in a row, the Alliance for Gun Responsibility has graded Washington State Legislators on their support for gun violence prevention. The scorecard measures each legislator’s commitment to reducing the number of gun deaths and injuries in Washington state as demonstrated by their votes, sponsorships, and advocacy.
We’ve made tremendous progress in Olympia recently, and it shows! This year, a record number of legislators received A++ and A+ ratings. These elected officials demonstrated true commitment to reducing gun violence not only by sponsoring and supporting life-saving gun safety bills but also by supporting community advocacy efforts.
Unfortunately, many legislators did not score high and earned an F or F- rating this year. These legislators actively worked against measures that would help keep guns out of dangerous hands and keep our communities safer.
Join us in Olympia for a day of advocacy to transform the criminal legal system.
On Wednesday, January 24, 2024, the ACLU of Washington, partners from across the state, and community members who have been impacted by the criminal legal system will gather for our annual day of advocacy, and we hope you can join us.
We will bring our power and resources to Olympia to urge lawmakers to pass meaningful criminal legal system reform. This is an opportunity to learn about the legislative process and bills that impact communities, and most importantly, to have your voice heard!
Please note: This link will take you to a third-party website, everyaction.com.
Together, we will demonstrate our collective power and advocate for important legislation related to police accountability, sentencing reform, and youth justice.
From the election next November to the fight for abortion rights and trans justice, the ACLU is ready to keep showing up for all of our rights in the new year.
With another election year just around the corner, our year-round work to protect voters is more crucial than ever.
Our lawyers are continuing to fight for fair maps in court – and in states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia, where we’ve already overturned unconstitutional and discriminatory maps, we’ll be paying attention to make sure the new maps accurately represent us all.
Meanwhile, we’ll continue pushing to expand voting access – countering voter suppression efforts in state legislatures across the country while advocating for federal voting rights legislation.
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Just last week, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear a case that could have devastating effects on our ability to access medication abortion.
Anti-abortion groups are trying to use this case to take mifepristone off the shelves in all 50 states – even though over 5 million people have already safely used this medication in the over 20 years since the FDA first approved it.
We’re keeping a close eye on this case while we continue our work challenging bans on abortion in states like Ohio and Georgia. And, in states where abortion could be on the ballot, we’ll organize communities at the grassroots level to ensure every single person has the ability to make their own decisions about their body.
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As state legislative sessions start up around the country, we’re keeping a close eye on any attempts to restrict the rights of transgender people to access necessary health care and live their lives free of discrimination.
And while our policy team watchdogs state legislatures, our legal team is busy at work filing lawsuits to protect transgender students and ensure access to gender-affirming care for minors. We’re waiting to hear from the Supreme Court on a case we filed in Tennessee and will continue to fight for trans rights at every level.
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In November, we sued to stop the State University System of Florida from banning a Palestinian rights student group just for exercising its First Amendment rights.
Free speech is a foundational value in America that protects us from viewpoint-based censorship or discrimination. That includes advocacy for Palestine, Israel, or any population, movement, or cause. The work to protect this core right will always be a top priority at ACLU, and we will continue to push back against all forms of unconstitutional censorship.
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We’re countering harmful anti-immigration policies, like the recently passed Texas bill that allows state and local law enforcement to arrest and detain people over suspicions on immigration status. The bill would authorize judges to order people deported without due process, and opens the door to racial profiling, harassment, and unlawful discrimination.
We’ll keep up the pressure to end these harmful, unconstitutional policies, and shut down any further attempts to threaten immigrants’ rights.
ACLU Supporter, again, these are only some of the many plans we have in store for 2024. We’re so grateful to the lawyers, activists, organizers, and supporters like you who fuel this work in all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico – and as we look to the new year, we continue our pledge to always show up to protect all our rights.
The change we’re fighting for is major but necessary. In this fight for our civil liberties, we’re glad to have you with us.
According to history, polls, & pundits, Dems should have lost the 2022 midterms. Instead, women turned out and stopped the red wave in its tracks.
We are building & strengthening the base with every mobilization, and our priority states are those that have abortion-related ballot initiatives.
In 2024, we have to hit the ground as hard as possible. We need everybody on every strategy to be laser focused for the #MaximumEffort that 2024 will require. We can’t afford to stop now!
On January 22, 1973, the Roe v. Wade ruling decriminalized abortion.
On June 24, 2022, a compromised Supreme Court gutted Roe.
On January 20, 2024, we take the streets! Reproductive freedom is bigger than Roe. Our lives are bigger than Roe, and the fight is bigger than abortion. This year, democracy itself is on the line.
Get in where you fit in on this #BiggerThanRoe weekend of action. March, rally, host a house party or canvass your neighborhood. Be there. Take action with us in your city or state.
Women’s March is a 501c(4) organization. Your generous support helps us prepare for fights we see coming and those we don’t. Donations are not tax-deductible. If you prefer to make a tax-deductible gift, we encourage you to support the Women’s March Network. Gifts to the Network support our organizing, communications, advocacy, and public education efforts.
Last week, the notorious economist Larry Summers was interviewed by a Financial Times reporter about the state of the American economy. They spent quite a bit of time discussing the remarkable resilience of consumer spending and the ongoing strength of the job market, at the same time as price increases have finally slowed. Larry expressed some anxiety about the future but indicated that it was never really all that reasonable for anybody to have expected that unemployment had to increase in order for inflation to slow, commenting that: “No one should have thoughtthat most of the route from 7 percent to 2 percent needed to be achieved in ways that were correlated with increases in unemployment.”
If that doesn’t sound like Larry to you, it’s because that remark about what “no one should have thought” is a sharp rebuke to what one Larry Summers was saying in June 2022. At that point in time, he in fact seemed to think the exact opposite, insisting (from a tropical vacation!) that “we need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to contain inflation–in other words, we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment.” But now, no one should have thought this, says Larry… commenting about Larry.
Make it make sense.
working class Americans are severely rent-burdenedthan was the case 20 years ago. Almost one in five working-class renters pay more half their incomes to their landlords in rent.
approve of the government usingprice controls to address inflation. Seventy percent of women and more than half of Republicans express support for price controls.
is the change in US egg prices since last year, according to official government stats. The price of gas, airline fares, and other items have also seen recent declines.
Official economic data doesn’t always correspond to people’s sense of what they’re seeing in their own experience. Sometimes, that’s because our own individual experiences aren’t nearly as vast as we may like to imagine. Sometimes, that’s because economic data is full of generalizations and averages and weightings and adjustments that — while statistically useful — don’t map directly to real-world experience. Sometimes it’s both of those things.
But sometimes it all lines up, like in this graph of Federal Reserve data showing how people’s wages change from year to year, depending on whether they switched jobs or not. And just as you might imagine, there’s a consistent and very long-running pay premium that goes to people who switch jobs. In other words: yes, getting a better job is a thing, and it pays off. Which is perhaps why big employers are so intent on stifling the job market with non-compete and no-poach agreements that make it harder for workers to change jobs and make more money — and why the Biden administration’s middle-out approach to economic growth includes making sure we have strong, competitive labor markets that help workers get more money.
Many of the most valuable pharmaceuticals on the market are the product of medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health and other public agencies. But despite the fact that the financial support of the American public is critical to the development of so many drugs, giant pharmaceutical companies bank all the profit that results from all this publicly-funded innovation. Even worse: Americans often pay more for these lifesaving drugs than people in any other country.
In a recent underpublicized development, the Biden administration announced a groundbreaking plan to get at this problem. In short: if drugmakers don’t offer reasonable prices on drugs funded with government support, the government will step in and empower other companies to make the same drugs at a lower price. This transformational power was granted by an act of Congress back in 1980, but despite an extraordinary increase in pharmaceutical costs, it has not yet been exercised in the 43 years since.
This year, the ACLU continued our mission – scoring big wins to defend our civil rights and liberties. This work takes months and sometimes years of effort in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities – and with your support, we were able to achieve some heartening wins in 2023.
These wins across the country will strengthen protections for our communities and our democracy. From the state level to the Supreme Court, we attained wins for us all.
Like in states such as Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, where the ACLU helped secure critical wins for abortion rights at the ballot box.
Or in Arkansas, where we prevailed in a critical case for trans youth, overturning a gender-affirming care ban.
Or our legal challenge in Nebraska to defend an Indigenous student’s right to wear tribal regalia at her graduation – and so much more.
A MAGA multi-millionaire and failed gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna are trying to stop us from spreading the truth about their slate of backwards initiatives.
On Friday afternoon, Fuse received a cease and desist letter from McKenna demanding we end our decline-to-sign campaign against the six destructive “Backwards Washington” ballot measures.1 Together, these initiatives would cut nearly $900 million a year from public schools and child care, block seniors from accessing long-term care, and increase Big Oil profits while rolling back our investments in clean energy. They want to silence our work exposing these giant tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.
The people behind this campaign have deep pockets and will stop at nothing to impose their far-right agenda on Washington, but we will not be intimidated! We need your help to fight back against these legal threats and redouble our efforts to educate the public about these destructive initiatives. Will you chip in $5 now to our rapid response campaign?
These “Backwards Washington” initiatives are part of a far-right agenda aimed directly at our kids and their schools, working families trying to afford childcare, seniors who benefit from long-term care, and clean energy solutions that tackle the growing climate crisis. Here’s the initiatives and what they do:
I-2109: Repeals Washington’s capital gains tax on top 0.2%, defunding early learning and education
I-2117: Ends Washington’s program to fund clean energy and fight climate change by making polluters pay
I-2124: Repeals long-term care coverage for working Washingtonians
I-2113: Repeals best practice safety standards for dangerous high speed chases
I-2081: Doing nothing for kids and schools while undermining safe harbor protections for reproductive and gender affirming care
I-2111: Protecting Washington’s wealthiest 1% while slashing funds for child care, education, paid family and medical leave, and long term care
MAGA multi-millionaire Brian Heywood is bankrolling these initiatives in a cynical effort to dodge the taxes he owes to our communities, and now he’s enlisted the help of Rob McKenna. We can’t back down and let them roll back so much of the progress we’ve made. Will you chip in $5 now to our rapid response legal and communications campaign?
