VOTE411 Voter Guide

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The Constitution clearly gives the states the job of administering elections, and it allows Congress to pass rules for federal elections. It gives the president no role whatsoever. Congress needs to use its power to stop Donald Trump's unconstitutional attempt to take over the administration of elections.

I will sponsor a national anti-gerrymandering law, which would also prevent states from imposing the kind of racial gerrymandering unleashed when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Voters should choose their political leaders, instead of politicians choosing their voters.

ICE and CBP are out-of-control agencies with a persistent culture of abusing rights and empowering cruelty. They should be disbanded and replaced with new immigration agencies rebuilt from the ground up.

Congress should dissolve the entire Department of Homeland Security, which was created in a post-9/11 panic. It brought things that have little or nothing to do with terrorism, like immigration, and brought them under an agency formed to fight terrorism, and that is the basic source of the abuses we're seeing from ICE and CBP. The legitimate functions of DHS should be sent back to other agencies.

Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies are waking a lot of people up to the reality of immigration, because they show how his mass deportations are based on lies. He said he was going to target criminals and people who were violating the rules, but the majority of the people he has rounded up have no criminal records, and many were detained when they showed up for regular check-ins, precisely because they were trying to follow the rules. And many of them were loved and valued as members of their communities.

We've had previous anti-immigration hysterias in which demagogues vilified people with names like McGuire and names like Tracinski, and instead those people helped build this country and became as American as anybody else.

We should have more of an Ellis Island-style approach to immigration and oppose any policy that would have rejected our own grandparents or great-grandparents.

People blame the Citizens United ruling for the influence of wealthy donors and "dark money," but the real problem was with the underlying laws, which imposed strict money-raising limits on political parties and campaigns--but the limits they placed on outside organizations couldn't withstand constitutional scrutiny.

That produced an unbalanced politics in which accountable actors like parties and candidates were put at a disadvantage against unaccountable outside organizations.

I support reforms that allow candidates and parties to raise more money directly, with full transparency, giving them more power to counter PACs funded by oligarchs.

But the biggest thing I've learned in running for office is that money is largely a problem in politics to the extent we have disengaged citizens who are not paying attention and can be easily swayed by disinformation and propaganda. I will champion active public engagement with politics and especially efforts to revive local news coverage, so people are not just relying on fishy ads paid for by unknown people to learn about their candidates and the issues.

The rule for this administration--and for the Republican Congress that serves as a giant rubber stamp for Donald Trump--is that there is always plenty of money for hurting people and never any money for helping people.

Republicans in Congress have voted for hundreds of billions of dollars to fund ICE through 2029, in an attempt to lock in the cruelty and lawlessness of Trump's mass deportation agenda and prevent the next Congress from rolling it back.

The new Congress should reject this, claw back those hundreds of billions, and use them restore funding for health care, scientific and medical research, and other programs that actually improve the lives of the American people.

This is a test of our moral priorities. It's about whether we think government should play a constructive role in our society, or whether it is there to be overbearing and oppressive to people we don't like.

I have one top priority: reining in out-of-control presidential power and making Congress function again as our representatives.

The US faces many problems right now--war, rising cost of living, violations of civil rights, and so on. But they all have one cause: Donald Trump is asserting unlimited presidential power, going far beyond constitutional limits, and that's what is driving all the other problems.

Take the war in Iran, which he started without permission from Congress. If he had gone to Congress, they might have asked about his strategy and whether he had one, and the costs of the war, and what could go wrong. It's clear by now he had no answers to those questions. We've all been paying the price at the gas pump and on the farms in the Fifth District--and all for what? A costly loss that left Iran stronger than when the war began.

But the problem isn't just Trump, it's that congressmen like John McGuire are just rubber stamps for the president, with no courage and no independence.

That's why I'm running. Congress has enormous power, and we need a member of Congress who will act like it and really represent the interests of people in this district instead of the interests of one guy at Mar-a-Lago.

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