<p><strong>Intro to the testimonials</strong> can be written here.</p>

<h2>Pledges</h2>

Citizens' Impeachment Courage Candidate United for Democracy

<h6>Courage Candidate | Citizens' Impeachment</h6>

<h6>Money Out Of Politics</h6>

<h6>Patients Over Profits</h6>

<h6>California Billionaire Tax Act, Sponsored by SEIU-UHW West</h6>

<h6>No Fossil Fuel Money</h6>

<h6>The D.C. Statehood Movement</h6>

<h6>Abolish Forced Psychiatry</h6>

<h6>Mental Health Now - Statement of Support</h6>

<h6>Move to Amend</h6>

Testimonials

Events Post

<h1>Issues</h1>

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<h1>Reproductive Justice and Women's Rights</h1>

<h4>Public safety through justice, not punishment.</h4><p>The American criminal justice system locks up more people than any other country on Earth, costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and consistently fails at the one thing it claims to deliver: public safety. Decades of "tough on crime" politics have given us mass incarceration, militarized policing, and entire communities surveilled and punished into precarity, while the actual sources of harm in this country, from corporate fraud to wage theft to environmental devastation, go largely unaddressed. We can do dramatically better. The path forward starts with rethinking what public safety actually means and who gets to provide it.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Addressing the Roots of Crime</span></h5><p>Most low-level street crime is, fundamentally, crime caused by poverty. People steal because they are hungry. People sell drugs because legitimate work does not pay enough to live. People act out of desperation, addiction, untreated mental illness, or trauma that no amount of policing will resolve.</p><p>The single most effective public safety policy this country could adopt is meeting people's basic needs. Livable wages, guaranteed housing, accessible healthcare, mental health and substance use treatment, and well-funded community programs all reduce crime far more reliably than additional police officers or longer sentences. The evidence on this is overwhelming, and yet we keep pouring resources into the back end of the problem (prisons, surveillance, enforcement) while not even considering front end solutions that could center dignity, care, and compassion.&nbsp;</p><p>I will fight to invest in the conditions that actually produce safety, the same investments that show up across my platform: universal healthcare, housing as a human right, livable wages, public education, mental healthcare, and the social services that keep communities stable and connected.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Rethinking the Role of Police</span></h5><p>Police officers in this country have been asked to do far too many jobs they were never trained for. They respond to mental health crises, domestic conflicts, homelessness, school discipline, and substance use emergencies, often with predictably bad results. A profession built around the use of force is not the right tool for problems that are fundamentally about housing, healthcare, and human services.</p><p>I support shifting many of the functions currently assigned to police to civilian agencies, community-based organizations, and trained specialists who can actually address the underlying issues. That includes:</p><ul><li><p>Mental health crisis response handled by trained mental health professionals, not armed officers. Programs like CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, and similar models in dozens of other cities have demonstrated that this works, that it is safer for everyone involved, and that it costs less than the status quo.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Homelessness response handled by social workers and outreach teams connected to actual housing and services, not by officers tasked with moving people from one block to the next.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Traffic enforcement reformed to reduce armed encounters over minor violations, which have produced an enormous share of the police killings in this country and which fall heavily on Black and brown people.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>School safety handled by counselors, social workers, and trained de-escalation staff rather than school resource officers, whose record of disproportionately punishing students of color has been well documented.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Substance use treatment handled by healthcare professionals, with addiction treated as the public health issue it is rather than as a criminal one.</p></li></ul><p>This is what "defund the police" actually means in practical terms: not eliminating public safety, but making public safety focused, appropriate, and humane by routing problems to people who can solve them. Police should focus on the cases where their training and authority are genuinely necessary, with adequate resources to do that work well.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Redirecting Enforcement Toward the Biggest Sources of Harm</span></h5><p>Even within traditional law enforcement, our priorities are upside down. Federal and state agencies pour resources into low-level drug enforcement, immigration raids, and policing of poor neighborhoods, while the largest sources of harm in this country, by any honest measure, get a fraction of the attention.</p><p>Wage theft costs American workers more than all robberies, burglaries, and other property crimes combined while the agencies responsible for enforcing wage and labor laws are chronically understaffed. Consumer fraud, predatory lending, securities fraud, and corporate price-fixing extract enormous sums from working families every year, with criminal penalties that would be embarrassing if they were not so destructive. Climate destruction, toxic pollution, and corporate decisions that knowingly poison communities kill more Americans than street crime, but we devote shockingly little attention to them.&nbsp;</p><p>I will fight to redirect federal law enforcement priorities and funding toward the actual largest sources of crime in this country: corporate wage theft, consumer fraud, securities fraud, environmental crimes, and the corporate misconduct that does the most damage to ordinary people. The Department of Labor, the FTC, the SEC, the EPA, and similar agencies need real enforcement teeth, real funding, and real authority to bring criminal as well as civil actions against the executives and corporations responsible for these harms.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Creating Police Accountability</span></h5><p>Police officers in this country are protected by a doctrine called qualified immunity, which makes it nearly impossible to hold individual officers civilly liable for misconduct, even when they violate clearly established constitutional rights. Qualified immunity has produced a system in which serious abuses go unpunished, victims are denied recourse, and the worst actors face no real consequences.</p><p>We need to eliminate qualified immunity. Officers who follow the law and act in good faith have nothing to fear from accountability. Officers who do not should face the same consequences any other person in this country would face for the same conduct.</p><p>I also support requiring law enforcement officers to carry personal liability insurance, with premiums tied to their individual conduct records. Right now, when an officer engages in misconduct, the public pays the settlement out of taxpayer dollars, the officer faces no personal financial consequence, and the underlying behavior is structurally rewarded. Personal liability insurance shifts the cost to the officers themselves, creates real financial incentives for good conduct, and gives departments a self-correcting mechanism through their own peers. Officers will hold each other accountable when their own livelihoods depend on it.</p><p>Beyond these structural reforms, I will support:</p><ul><li><p>Independent civilian oversight of police departments with real investigative authority and the power to discipline officers for misconduct.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Federal standards for the use of force, with clear restrictions on chokeholds, no-knock warrants, and the use of military-grade equipment.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>A national database of officer misconduct that follows officers across departments, ending the practice of fired officers simply moving to the next jurisdiction.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Demilitarization of police forces, including ending the federal programs that transfer surplus military equipment to local police departments.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ending the Prison Exception for Slavery</span></h5><p>The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in this country, except as punishment for a crime. That single clause has been used for over 150 years to justify the forced, often unpaid labor of incarcerated people, who today produce billions of dollars worth of goods and services for both private corporations and public institutions while earning pennies an hour or nothing at all.</p><p>That exception has also become a structural feature of the immigration enforcement crisis we are living through. Immigrants detained without due process are being put to work in detention facilities, providing cheap labor to private prison companies and to the federal government itself, while the political class points to their presence as justification for further enforcement.&nbsp;</p><p>I support amending the Constitution to end the prison exception entirely. Forced labor is forced labor, regardless of who is being forced. A country that calls itself free cannot continue running a system of slavery hidden inside its prisons and detention centers.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Cultivating Decarceration&nbsp;</span></h5><p>The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world. We hold more than two million people behind bars on any given day, and we cycle millions more through the system each year. Most of those people are not violent threats to anyone. They are people convicted of drug offenses, technical parole violations, low-level property crimes, or simply the inability to pay bail, fines, and fees that the criminal justice system imposes as a condition of liberty.</p><p>I will push for Congress to pass laws that help states and localities with:</p><ul><li><p>Ending cash bail, so that pretrial liberty does not depend on a person's bank account.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Decriminalizing drug possession at the federal level and treating addiction as a public health issue.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Sentencing reform to end mandatory minimums, reduce sentences for nonviolent offenses, and allow meaningful judicial discretion.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Creating robust reentry support, including housing, employment, healthcare, and education, so that people leaving incarceration have a real chance to rebuild their lives rather than cycling back through a system designed to reabsorb them.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions, including those currently incarcerated, as part of the broader democratic reforms in my platform.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Ending federal contracts with private, for-profit prisons. Profit motives have no place in a system that decides who is deprived of liberty.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Making Safe Communities</span></h5><p>Public safety is one of the most basic things a government owes the people it serves. The current system is failing at that obligation while spending unprecedented sums and inflicting unprecedented harm. We can build a country where people are actually safer, where their basic needs are met, where their communities are stable and connected, and where the institutions of justice address the largest sources of harm rather than the smallest.</p><p>That country is not an impossible pipe dream. The pieces of it already exist in cities and states and countries that have done the work. What is missing is the political will to build it at the scale this country needs. I am running because I believe that work is possible and crucial.&nbsp;</p>

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<h4>My Checklist for Congress</h4>

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<h4>Quality education makes everyone's lives better.</h4><p>Classes are overcrowded, teachers are underpaid, kids are hungry, programs are being cut, and millions of Americans are carrying crushing student loan debt. Everyone benefits from a strong public education system, and we have to fight to protect it.</p><p>My goal as a member of Congress is to fight for an educational environment that promotes learning and growth for all students in urban, suburban, and rural areas. I will push to pass laws and secure funding to improve our academic infrastructure and outcomes so that every student has a genuine opportunity to find and pursue what they love.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Funding Schools Fairly</span></h5><p>Schools in poorer neighborhoods tend to fare worse than schools in wealthier ones, and property tax based funding is a major reason why. Even in California, where a smaller share of school funding comes from local property taxes than in most states, local taxes still make up roughly 20 to 25 percent of school budgets. That is enough to produce real inequality between neighborhoods, and it is especially punishing for rural and urban schools that often trail affluent suburban ones.</p><p>I support ending property tax based funding for schools and moving to a baseline and per-capita resource allocation model that ensures every school is fully staffed and funded, regardless of the wealth of the neighborhood around it. I also support additional resource grants for schools in traditionally underserved areas, to address systemic inequities that do not disappear the moment baseline funding equalizes. Revising how local property taxes are distributed, including pooling resources for redistribution by the state, is an essential part of promoting equal educational opportunity.</p><p>At the federal level, my role will primarily be in advocating for increased federal funding for education across the board and reversing the long federal trend of cutting funds. All of our schools should have robust funding to ensure that staff are paid livable wages, students have no-cost meals at school, and supplementary programs are supported.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Revitalizing the Department of Education</span></h5><p>Congress's primary lever for promoting equal access to quality education is shaping and funding the Department of Education. The Trump administration has spent the past year actively dismantling the department, firing staff, gutting the Office for Civil Rights, and working to hand over pieces of its operation to states and private actors. I will fight to undo the damage, restore the department, and ensure that our federal education efforts are driven by the needs of students and educators rather than by corporate interests or by extremist bigots and zealots. I will sign onto and ideally sponsor legislation that:</p><ul><li><p>Protects students with disabilities and fully funds IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which has been chronically underfunded since its passage, with the federal government contributing a fraction of what it originally promised and forcing local districts to pick up the shortfall. Full federal funding for IDEA is long overdue and would transform the experiences of millions of disabled students and their families.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Provides low-income students with financial and community support to help them succeed.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Enhances school infrastructure, including bus and vehicle fleets and facility upgrades.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Creates pathways for students from all backgrounds to attend college without going into crushing debt.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Undoes the harms of "No Child Left Behind" and the test-driven accountability culture it created.</p></li></ul><p>I will oppose every effort to divert resources away from public schools toward private and for-profit ones, including the voucher programs and "school choice" schemes the Trump administration is pushing at the federal level. Public money should fund public schools.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Helping Teachers, Staff, and Classrooms</span></h5><p>We cannot have a great public education system while we underpay and overwork the people who run it. I will fight for livable wages for all teachers and school staff, safe working conditions, smaller class sizes, and the right to organize without retaliation. Teachers should be able to focus on helping our kids, not on second jobs or on fighting for basic respect from their own employers.</p><p>Smaller class sizes let educators move back to a learning model that meets kids where they are, rather than training them to pass a standardized test. Investing in teachers is investing in students, and the country gets back far more than it spends.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Promoting Universal Pre-K, Childcare, and School Meals</span></h5><p>I will fight for universal Pre-K and childcare programs nationwide. Until that happens, I will work to secure grant funding for such programs in our district. Early childhood education is one of the highest return investments the public can make, especially because it lifts an enormous economic burden off of working families.</p><p>I’ll defend and expand the Head Start program. The Trump administration has moved to gut Head Start funding and shutter regional offices, threatening a program that has served low-income children and families for sixty years and that has extensive evidence supporting it. I will fight to protect Head Start, restore the cuts, and expand it as a cornerstone of any serious universal Pre-K plan.</p><p>I will also advocate for free school meals for every student. No child should try to pay attention in class while hungry. Universal meals remove the stigma that targeted programs produce, close loopholes where eligible kids miss out, and reflect a foundational commitment to ensuring that every student has access to nutritious food.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Making Free Public College and Trade Schools</span></h5><p>I support making public colleges and trade schools tuition-free as an investment in our future, alongside universal Pre-K and childcare. Our country has decided that we want an educated workforce, but we’ve made young people pay for that decision through debt that follows them for decades.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Canceling Student Debt</span></h5><p>I support canceling all federal student loan debt. Student debt has become one of the largest financial burdens on an entire generation. Debt is reducing quality of life, homeownership, small business creation, and retirement savings across the economy. Canceling the debt and funding public higher education publicly is both more just and more economically productive than the status quo.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Enhancing Charter Schools</span></h5><p>I am broadly against privately managed charter schools that funnel resources away from local communities and into the pockets of people who often do not live in those communities and do not care about the kids or families affected.</p><p>Charter schools can play an effective role in public education, but only with several important caveats. They must be nonprofit public charters, authorized and held accountable by local democratically elected school boards. They must provide a function that cannot be met in any other way by existing public schools. And they must comply with the same basic safeguards and laws as other public schools, including civil rights, public records, labor, health, safety, accreditation, and credentialing laws. While California's Constitution protects charter schools, I believe they should meet the same legal, regulatory, transparency, credentialing, and oversight requirements as traditional public schools, and they should be limited in scope and purpose to cases where public schools cannot meet a specific need.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Acknowledging DEI as a Strength</span></h5><p>Diversity, equity, and inclusion are vital parts of a healthy education system. The Trump administration's attacks on DEI, including executive orders demanding that schools and universities dismantle DEI offices under threat of losing federal funding, are a coordinated effort to roll back decades of progress and to punish schools for reflecting the country they serve. I will fight those attacks at every turn.</p><p>Students should have the opportunity to interact with teachers, administrators, and staff from a range of backgrounds. This is especially crucial in our region, as we live in an incredibly diverse area. With strong DEI programs, students can have teachers they connect with, teachers who look like them, who understand what they are going through, and who can help them navigate barriers and challenges. DEI also exposes students to different perspectives and experiences, cultivating empathy and connection instead of xenophobia and bigotry. Students should learn about varied identities, experiences, and perspectives as early as possible, preparing them to understand and collaborate with people from all walks of life.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Teaching Honest History and Protecting Student Rights</span></h5><p>Young people need to be able to learn about this country's history, unvarnished. That is how we give future generations the tools to mitigate injustice rather than repeat it. I will oppose the Trump administration's attacks on honest teaching of history, including executive orders targeting so-called "divisive concepts," the federal pressure campaign against teaching about race and gender, and the ongoing wave of book bans in schools and libraries. These are blatant attempts to produce a generation of Americans who cannot recognize injustice when they see it.</p><p>Students' rights need to be protected as well: the right to protest, the right to take an active role in their education, and the right to be who they are without fear or negative consequence. These&nbsp; are basic democratic rights and functions that a free society needs to practice in its schools.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Fixing School Discipline and the School-to-Prison Pipeline</span></h5><p>Attitudes about punishment in schools are shaped by our broader carceral logics and practices. There are absolutely cases where students need to be removed from a particular environment, but current systems tend to shuffle "problem" students from school to school, into "alternative" schools, and eventually into the school-to-prison pipeline. Administrators too often seek to make these students someone else's problem, when the focus should be on identifying and remedying the stresses and problems driving kids to behave in damaging ways.</p><p>I will fight for increased funding for school counselors, mental health support training for staff, and supplemental programs that give students healthy outlets to interact, learn, play, and grow. Meeting kids where they are, early and often, prevents the kinds of crises that end in expulsion or arrest.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Promoting School Safety Without Carceral Policing</span></h5><p>School Resource Officers have proven tremendously problematic in schools across the state and country. We need systems to ensure students stay safe at school, but replicating racist, punitive law enforcement systems in schools is not the solution. SROs have a documented record of excessively harming and punishing students of color, particularly Black students, and of reinforcing carceral thinking in institutions that should be oriented toward growth.</p><p>Identifying adequate solutions for hard problems, like preventing guns from entering school grounds, is not easy, which is why we need to invest in research and piloting of new safety protocols. I will push for major federal investments in school safety research so that we can build approaches rooted in evidence rather than in fear.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Funding Extracurriculars and Well-Rounded Learning</span></h5><p>After-school and extracurricular programs build retention, socialization, and well-roundedness, especially when they involve parents and the community. I will advocate for essential services as part of baseline education funding and for expanding extracurricular and advanced learning programs so that every student who can benefit has access to them.</p><p>I will also advocate for additional funding for extracurriculars in the arts and sciences, rather than pumping yet more money into already well-funded sports programs. Students should have a variety of opportunities to find and pursue their passions–a public education system worth its name gives every kid that chance.</p>

<h4>My Education Checklist</h4>

<h1>Events</h1>

Dozens of local organizations and leaders are standing together!

<h2>Endorsements</h2>

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<h2>Chris with the Community</h2>

3-3-25 Chris with supporters after Nevada County Candidate Forum

3-3-26 Chris with supporters in Grass Valley

3-1-26 Chris at the Folsom Sunrise Solidarity ICE Protest

2-28-26 Chris at the Arden & Howe anti-war with Iran and anti-ICE Protest

2-26-26 Chris with a college student at the CADEM Convention in SF

2-21-26 Chris at the CALCARE CADEM Convention Rally in SF

2-19-26 Chris at the Nurse Action against ICE at UC Davis Medical Center

2-19-26 Chris with a nurse leader at the Nurse Action against ICE at UC Davis Medical Center

2-17-26 Chris speaking at the UNITE HERE Local 49 picketline outside Sky River Casino

2-17-26 Chris marching with UNITE HERE Local 49 picketline outside Sky River Casino

2-12-26 Chris talking to HS students at the Folsom ICE Walkout

2-12-26 Chris at Folsom HS student ICE walkout

2-11-26 Chris on the Kaiser Roseville Picket Line with UNAC-UHCP

2-8-26 Chris at a Pint of Politics and Doing Something on 2nd Sundays

2-8-26 Chris at the Folsom Sunrise Solidarity ICE Protest

2-5-26 Chris with SEIU 2015 on the SNF picket line

2-5-26 Chris speaking to SEIU 2015 on the SNF picket line

2-3-26 Chris at the Fair Oaks-Carmicahel Indivisible Meeting

1-31-26 Chris at the Firewise cleanup on Judy Lane in Grass Valley

1-30-26 Chris at the John Moss ICE Field Office during the Sacramento area HS Student Walkout

1-30-26 Chris at the State Capitol during the Sacramento area HS Student Walkout

1-27-26 Chris registering students to vote at Sierra College

1-24-26 Chris at the John Moss ICE Field Office in downtown Sacramento

1-21-26 Chris with a nurse at the Hands Off Our Ratios rally

1-21-26 Chris holding a "Hands Off Our Ratios" sign with CNA nurses on Jan 21, 2026

1-20-26 Chris chatting with Constituents at the Grass Valley walkout

1-20-26 Chris with Grass Valley HS students at the ICE Walkout

1-19-26 Chris at the MLK Jr 365 Diversity Expo

1-11-26 Chris chatting with volunteers during our January 11th kickoff

12-18-25 Chris at the Third Act Holiday Party

12-8-25 Chris Bennett with Jessup U students at CPB recruiting event on Dec 8, 2025 in Rocklin

12-8-25 Chris Bennett with two others protesting ICE/CPB recruiting at Jessup U in Rocklin on Dec 8, 2025

11-22-25 Chris Bennett with an organizer of the 100 Years of Palestine event at Tarbiyah House in Roseville on Nov 22, 2025

11-17-25 Chris Bennett with Flo Cofer and union member on AFSCME 3299 picket line on November 17-18, 2025

10-25-25 Chris with Chinua Rhodes at the CAIR banquet

7-11-25 Chris chatting with constituents at a meet and greet in July 2025

6-14-25 Chris speaking with people at No Kings on June 14, 2025

6-14-25 Chris with Sac County Young Dems at No Kings Day on June 14, 2025

6-14-25 Chris with volunteers for No Kings Day on June 14, 2025

5-24-25 Chris doing Know Your Rights canvassing

5-17-25 Chris chatting at the teacher's rally in May 2025

5-1-25 Chris on the picket line with UPTE-CWA 9119 in May 2025

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<h4>Hands off our safety nets!</h4><p>Seniors and other vulnerable people are being put at risk through attacks on Social Security and Medicaid. These programs aren’t handouts; they’re insurance that working people have paid into for their entire lives. In Congress, I’ll defend Social Security and Medicaid, fighting for substantial additional investment in our safety nets.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Protecting Social Security</span></h5><p>Social Security is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs in American history. For tens of millions of retired workers, disabled Americans, and surviving family members, it is the difference between stability and bankruptcy. The administrative gutting carried out by DOGE has resulted in closed local offices, longer wait times, and reductions in the staff who process claims. Once elected, I will fight to undo DOGE damages to the Social Security Administration, restore staffing and field office access, and make the program easier for people to actually use.&nbsp;</p><p>Concerns about Social Security’s long-term solvency have driven budget cuts, raising of the retirement age, and reduction of services. The solvency problem is easily fixable if we get rid of the cap on Social Security payroll taxes so that high-income earners pay into the system on all of their income. Right now, a worker earning $60,000 a year pays Social Security tax on every dollar they earn, while a CEO earning $6 million pays on only a small fraction of their income. Lifting the cap makes the system more equitable and fixes the program’s solvency without cutting any benefits.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Protecting Medicaid</span></h5><p>Medicaid provides healthcare for more than 70 million Americans including low-income families, children, people with disabilities, and seniors in nursing facilities. When people talk about cutting Medicaid, what it means is cutting healthcare for kids, seniors, and disabled people, and forcing hospitals in working class and rural communities to close.</p><p>I will push for legislation to maintain and expand Medicaid until we pass Medicare-for-All and everyone is guaranteed comprehensive healthcare. Until then, Medicaid is crucial for tens of millions of people, so we need to protect it from cuts and attacks.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Creating Long-Term Reform</span></h5><p>I will work to reverse the damages of the "Big Beautiful Bill” that has ravaged our country through massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, paid for by cuts and restrictions on average people’s benefits.&nbsp;</p><p>Every attack on Social Security and Medicaid follows the same pattern: first, right-wingers claim a vital safety net is full of fraud, broken, or insolvent; then, cuts to services and staff make the program inefficient and frustrating; finally, they use the inefficiency and frustration to argue that the program should be privatized or eliminated. Their goal is to break public programs so the private sector can cannibalize the services and boost the profits of their billionaire buddies. The incredible part is how often establishment Democrats agree with them and lose the fight inch by inch.&nbsp;</p><p>Social Security and Medicaid are among the most successful and important policies our government has ever implemented. As a member of Congress, I will defend them, expand them, and make sure everyone is able to benefit from the systems they’ve paid into their whole lives.&nbsp;</p>

<h1>Walkable, Livable, Healthier Cities</h1>

<h1>Disability Justice</h1>

<p><strong>Get your volunteers excited</strong> with a little intro to the events section!</p>

<h2>Campaign Events</h2>

Events List

<p>Just <em>living</em> is increasingly unaffordable for most Americans. Many people can't meet their most basic needs: housing, food, and healthcare. That's not inevitable -- it's because of policy decisions from our government and our representatives. It's time to fix those decisions. </p>

<h2>Making Life Affordable</h2>

Issues

<h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Disability rights are human rights.</span></h5><p>More than 1 in 4 Americans have a disability. I am one of them. Our laws and regulations meant to protect people with disabilities are weakly enforced and chronically underfunded, and commercial and government systems are built without accounting for the needs of people with various disabilities. That has to change.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Strengthening Core Federal Programs</span></h5><p>Federal programs that support people with disabilities need real, sustained investment. I will fight to:</p><ul><li><p>Expand home and community-based services so that people who need care can receive it in their own homes and communities rather than being forced into institutional settings.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Fully fund and expand Money Follows the Person, which helps people transition out of institutions and into community living.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Increase funding for the Office of Special Education Programs so schools can meet the needs of every student.</p></li><li><p>Substantially increase federal ADA funding and enforcement.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Opposing Institutionalization and Coercive Practices</span></h5><p>I oppose any return to institutionalization. The push to cordon off people with disabilities, whether in large facilities or through carceral mental health systems, is a rollback of decades of progress won by disability rights advocates.</p><p>I will work to end seclusion and restraint programs in schools, which cause lasting harm to children and are disproportionately used against students with disabilities. I will also fight to end coercive mental health practices and replace them with voluntary, community-based care that treats people as partners in their treatment rather than as problems to be managed.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ending Subminimum Wage</span></h5><p>Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act allows employers to pay workers with disabilities below the federal minimum wage. The law dates to 1938 and is based on an assumption that disabled workers are worth less than everyone else. It is past time to end it. I will support federal legislation, such as the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act, to phase out 14(c) certificates, fund the transition to competitive integrated employment, and guarantee that workers with disabilities receive at least the full federal minimum wage for their work. Evidence from states that have already ended subminimum wage shows that disabled workers are not pushed out of the workforce when they are paid fairly. They are simply paid what they are owed.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Fulfilling International Commitments</span></h5><p>I support the United States signing on to the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. The CRPD has been ratified by most of the world and our continued absence from it weakens both the rights of Americans with disabilities and our credibility as a leader for human rights around the world.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Prioritizing Accessible Infrastructure and Transportation</span></h5><p>I will work to improve our transportation infrastructure to increase capacity, connectivity, and ADA compliance. Public transit is a lifeline for many people with disabilities, and it too often falls short on reliability, physical accessibility, and hours of operation.</p><p>Specifically, I will push for federal funding to states and cities to:</p><ul><li><p>Expand staffing and funding for transit systems, with funding for training on the needs of riders with disabilities.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Extend service hours to accommodate people with unconventional work schedules, including overnight and weekend shifts.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Hold transit agencies and contractors accountable for meeting ADA standards, creating and enforcing fines and penalties for non-compliance.&nbsp;</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Accessibility as Partnership</span></h5><p>Expanding federal funding for accessibility has to come with a requirement that the people most affected are partners in how that funding is used. Too often, accessibility decisions get made without the input of disabled people. Businesses and local governments that are required to meet accessibility standards should be supported in doing so, and the communities those standards exist to serve should have a meaningful seat at the table.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Staying Accountable</span></h5><p>I will maintain ongoing open forums, both virtual and in person, so that anyone can bring forward issues affecting people with disabilities and be heard directly. Accessibility in government means more than just providing ramps and captions. The people affected by these policy decisions must be able to actively participate in shaping them.</p>

<h1>Empower Public Education</h1>

<p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">I have devoted my life to serving my community and our country.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);"><u>I'm here to fight for a better future for all of us.</u></span></p><p>I'm a disabled army veteran, former tech worker, and community activist. I come from a working class military background, so I understand the needs of everyday people and how poverty fuels our system.</p><p>I believe that <u>together</u> we are stronger than the billionaires and oligarchs.</p><p>Like you, I haven't had a fairy tale life. I'm open and honest about the hardships I've faced. My experiences have fundamentally shaped my view that government can and must work on behalf of people like us.</p><p>If you'd like to know more about me, keep reading below!</p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text-accent-primary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-primary);"><strong><em>In solidarity,</em></strong></span><br><span style="color: var(--color-text-accent-primary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-primary);"><strong><em>Chris Bennett</em></strong></span></p>

Picture of Chris, a dark haired man with glasses and a sign reading "Veterans fought for freedom not for fascism"

Page Intro

<p><strong>So much is happening right now.</strong> Write a couple lines to get your readers excited for it.</p>

<h2>Latest Campaign Developments</h2>

News Preview

<h4><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Civil service jobs and power to the workers!</span></h4><p>Democracy thrives when inequality is low and working people have good jobs with strong labor protections. When wages stagnate while corporate profits soar, when workers are denied the right to organize, and when companies treat wage theft and union-busting as routine costs of doing business, both our economy and our democracy are weakened.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Creating a Federal Jobs Guarantee</span></h5><p>I will fight for a federal jobs guarantee through a Civil Service Corps, offering good union jobs to everyone who wants one. The Civil Service Corps would put people to work on the things this country genuinely needs:</p><ul><li><p>Building and repairing the infrastructure we rely on every day, from roads and bridges to water systems and public transit</p></li><li><p>Constructing affordable housing at the scale the housing crisis actually demands.</p></li><li><p>Expanding green energy and the infrastructure to support a fast, smooth transition away from fossil fuels&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Staffing the social services that communities depend on, from childcare to eldercare to public health</p></li></ul><p>A federal jobs guarantee would set a floor for the labor market. When every worker knows they have a good union job available to them, private employers have to compete by offering decent wages and conditions.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Creating a Livable Minimum Wage</span></h5><p>The federal minimum wage is far too low, and it has been allowed to fall behind the cost of living for so long that full-time work at minimum wage no longer covers the basics of life anywhere in the country. I will support legislation to increase the minimum wage to a livable level and index it to the cost of living, so that it keeps pace automatically rather than requiring a political fight every decade while wages fall further behind.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Providing Universal Basic Income</span></h5><p>The disruption of the labor market by AI will likely be faster and more damaging than previous technological shifts because it gives many new ways for companies to cut corners and devalue labor. Our existing safety net is not built for this shift, especially as it has been demolished by the Trump administration. I support a universal basic income that provides every person a stable floor to live on, regardless of employment status. Pilots of UBI programs have been unequivocally successful in increasing peoples’ living conditions. UBI works alongside good jobs and labor protections. It provides another layer of security that ensures no one falls through the cracks when industries change and companies shed jobs.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Passing the PRO Act and Enshrining the Right to Organize</span></h5><p>The right to organize is fundamental, and it has been systematically eroded for decades. I support the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would strengthen workers' ability to form unions, bargain collectively, and take action against employers who violate labor law. The PRO Act would:</p><ul><li><p>Protect workers from retaliation and impose substantive penalties on employers who violate labor law</p></li><li><p>Ban mandatory captive-audience meetings that employers use to pressure workers against unionizing</p></li><li><p>End the permanent replacement of striking workers</p></li><li><p>Override state "right-to-work" laws that weaken unions and depress wages</p></li><li><p>Crack down on the misclassification of employees as independent contractors, protecting temp workers and gig workers</p></li></ul><p>Giving workers real power at the bargaining table is how we build parity between the working class and the employers whose decisions shape their lives.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Enhancing Workplace Safety</span></h5><p>Too many workers are injured, made sick, or killed on the job each year. Enforcement of basic safety standards is chronically underfunded. I will fight to strengthen federal workplace safety standards across all industries, provide more resources for enforcement, and increase consequences for violations so that companies cannot treat them as routine costs.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Cracking Down on Wage Theft and Union-Busting</span></h5><p>Wage theft costs American workers enormously. Research from the <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/">Economic Policy Institute </a>has found that wage theft exceeds the combined value of all reported robberies, burglaries, larceny, and motor vehicle theft in the U.S. each year.</p><p>The penalties for employers caught stealing from their workers are often minimal. Union-busting is a well-funded industry, with consulting firms and organizations dedicated to preventing unionization. Employers routinely violate labor law to union bust because the fines are cheaper than negotiating with a union.</p><p>I will push for legislation and funding that gives federal and state enforcement agencies the authority and resources to pursue wage theft and union-busting aggressively. Penalties have to be meaningful enough that they cannot simply be absorbed as a cost of doing business.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Working with Labor</span></h5><p>I have picketed with and donated to striking workers, and many of my close personal friends are labor organizers and union members. As a member of Congress, I will work closely with federal, state, and local unions, including SEIU, NEA/CTA, NALC/NPMHU/NRLCA, AFL-CIO, the Sacramento Central Labor Council, NNU/ANU, AFSCME, AFGE, UFCW, IBEW, CSEA, TWUA, and UNITE HERE, among others. Labor unions know what workers need because workers built them. Any labor policy worth passing should be shaped in genuine partnership with the people it affects.</p>

<h4>My Jobs &amp; Labor Checklist</h4>

<h2></h2>

<h5>Want to contribute by check?</h5><p>To comply with Federal Campaign Finance law, <strong>please include the following information with your contribution</strong>:</p><ul><li><p>Full name</p></li><li><p>Home address</p></li><li><p>Employer</p></li><li><p>Occupation</p></li></ul><p><strong>Make checks payable to</strong> <strong>Friends of Chris Bennett</strong></p><p><strong>Mailing Address</strong>:</p><p>Friends of Chris Bennett<br>371 Lakeport Blvd., # 391<br>Lakeport, CA 95453</p>

Give by Check

<h4>LGBTQIA+ rights are human rights.</h4><p>Trans and queer people have always existed, and LGBTQIA+ people deserve equal rights and protections. Women's rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA+ rights are bound together. The same political movements attack all of them, so our framing and defense need to be comprehensive.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Standing on My Values</span></h5><p>I openly advocate for my positions and priorities without selling out particular demographics, including trans people and immigrants, because I stand on my values. I refuse to buy into right-wing, MAGA messaging. I believe we have to counter-message rather than concede ground, because conceding ground puts people like me, my friends, and my family in danger.</p><p>The Democratic Party could have codified our rights multiple times over the years and chose not to. They wanted to keep women and LGBTQIA+ people scared enough to vote Democrat without having to earn our support. I refuse to throw anyone under the bus for political compromise, the way Democrats have done to trans people and immigrants, which helped lead us to this authoritarian moment. I will continue to put my time and my body on the line to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Codifying Rights Into Law</span></h5><p>The Supreme Court has shown that rights we once considered settled can be stripped away in a single ruling. We cannot keep leaving the most fundamental protections of bodily autonomy and equal dignity to the shifting preferences of nine unelected, unaccountable judges.</p><p>I support passing laws and constitutional amendments that enshrine reproductive rights and LGBTQIA+ protections permanently. That means:</p><ul><li><p>Maintaining and strengthening federal protected-class status for LGBTQIA+ people across employment, housing, healthcare, education, and public services.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Codifying the rights to abortion, contraception, and the full range of reproductive healthcare into federal law.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Passing a constitutional amendment, such as the Equality Act, guaranteeing equal rights regardless of sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, so that these protections cannot be stripped away by a future Congress or Supreme Court.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Protecting access to gender-affirming care as medical care, free from political interference.</p></li></ul><p>Broadly, we need to refocus our efforts on the Equal Rights Amendment, which has been in limbo for decades. Our Constitution should reflect our firm commitment to equal rights for everyone.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Stopping Discrimination and Harassment</span></h5><p>I support mandatory anti-harassment training, including sexual harassment and implicit bias training, for all public employees. Our public employees should uphold the highest standards of conduct, and our elected representatives should be held to an even higher standard rather than the lowest one. Eric Swalwell is just the latest in a long line of men in politics who believe they are above consequence, who abuse their power to harass and assault staffers and employees. We need a serious reckoning for the public figures who harass, exploit, and discriminate.&nbsp;</p><p>As an intersectional feminist, I understand the impact that unconscious, implicit, and explicit bias has on people based on the intersections of their identities. In my past life as a healthcare worker, I served on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees to support culturally competent care and to end workplace and patient-care discrimination against women, veterans, people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ people. That work matters. I will bring that same commitment to Congress.</p><p>I will also fight to defend and strengthen Title IX, which has protected students from sex-based discrimination in federally funded education for more than fifty years. The current administration has worked to roll back Title IX protections, particularly for transgender and nonbinary students and for survivors of sexual harassment and assault. I will oppose every effort to weaken these protections and support legislation that makes clear Title IX covers discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, guarantees fair and trauma-informed processes for survivors, and ensures every student has access to an educational environment free from harassment.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Working Against the Politics of Division</span></h5><p>The billionaire class and the politicians who back the current authoritarian movement want us divided against each other. They want working people fighting over bathrooms and pronouns while they hurt our children, empty our bank accounts, and strip away our freedoms. I will not play that game. I will not let the people I represent be used as pawns in manufactured culture wars. LGBTQIA+ rights, women's rights, immigrant rights, and the economic rights of every working person in this country are part of the same fight to disempower the oppressive ruling class and empower everyday people.</p>

<h4>My Checklist in Congress</h4>

<h1>News</h1>

<h1>Environmental Justice</h1>

<h1>LGBTQIA+ Rights</h1>

<h4></h4><h4>A government that works for working people.</h4><p>Our government has been ravaged by decades of privatization, revolving doors, and the transfer of public functions into private hands. That has produced a state that works well for the wealthy and poorly for everyone else. To fix our government, we need to rebuild public capacity, protect the people who blow the whistle on wrongdoing, hold officials personally accountable for abuse, and enforce a tax system that requires the rich to pay their fair share.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Protecting Whistleblowers</span></h5><p>Whistleblowers should never face retaliation in any form for exposing malice and corruption in the government. Whistleblower protections have been too weak for a long time. Now, the Trump administration has launched a vicious assault on whistleblower protections by firing IGs, gutting oversight offices, and signaling to federal workers that speaking up about wrongdoing will cost them their careers or worse.</p><p>In Congress, I will fight for:</p><ul><li><p>The creation of an independent, nonpartisan commission with authority outside the control of the executive branch. This agency would have real investigative power, the ability to levy fines, penalties, and sanctions, and concrete planning to ensure the safety of whistleblowers.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>A national whistleblower fund that ensures anyone who risks their job and livelihood is able to live in peace with their basic needs met. People who expose wrongdoing should not have their lives destroyed for doing the right thing.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Personal liability for officials who engage in wrongdoing, backed by required insurance that is not funded by taxpayers. If you hold power and abuse it, the cost should land on you, not on the public.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Rebuilding Public Trust</span></h5><p>None of these reforms matter if the public does not trust the government to carry them out. Rebuilding that trust requires showing people that the government is on their side: that when you call a Social Security office, someone answers; that when you need healthcare, you get it; that when someone in power breaks the law, they face real consequences. A government that actually works for working people is the most powerful antidote to the cynicism and authoritarian politics we face today.&nbsp;</p><h4>Build a democracy that actually represents us.</h4><p>Neither party truly represents most Americans because our electoral system turns everything into a false binary: red versus blue, left versus right, us versus them. The world is more complex than that and the people of this country are more complex than that. We deserve a democracy capable of reflecting who we actually are, what we actually believe, and what we actually want from our government.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Pushing for Proportional Representation</span></h5><p>I support proportional representation, which is the gold standard for representative democracy and would almost certainly have been chosen by the framers of the Constitution had it been invented at the time. Under our current winner-take-all system, a candidate can win a seat with a narrow plurality and millions of votes for losing candidates do not translate into representation at all. The result is a Congress that systematically under-represents large portions of the country and that calcifies into two parties incapable of reflecting the actual range of American views.</p><p>Proportional representation works differently. Seats in a legislative body are awarded in proportion to the share of votes each party or coalition receives, so that a party winning 30% of the votes wins roughly 30% of the seats. Voters across the political spectrum get representation that actually matches their numbers. Coalitions form around real policy agreements rather than around the desperation of choosing the lesser evil. Most other established democracies use some form of proportional representation. Evidence consistently shows that it produces higher voter turnout, more diverse legislatures, more responsive policy, and lower levels of partisan polarization.</p><p>I will support federal legislation, including the Fair Representation Act, that would move our country toward proportional, multi-member House districts. This will be a painstaking long-term project, but it’s the most important structural reform available for actually fixing what is broken in our democracy.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Promoting Ranked-Choice Voting</span></h5><p>In the near future, ranked-choice voting is a practical, achievable reform that strengthens democratic representation right now. Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference rather than choosing only one. If no candidate wins a majority outright, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated and their voters' next choices are counted, and the process repeats until a candidate has majority support.</p><p>Ranked-choice voting eliminates the spoiler effect and frees voters to support the candidates they actually prefer without worrying about throwing the election to someone they oppose. It rewards candidates who help build broad coalitions rather than candidates who appeal to a narrow base and demonize everyone else. Cities and states that have adopted it, such as Maine and Alaska, have seen higher voter satisfaction. I support federal legislation enabling ranked-choice voting in federal elections and will work to make it standard across the country.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Defending Legitimate Elections from Bad-Faith Attacks</span></h5><p>The biggest immediate threat to American democracy is the coordinated, well-funded campaign to convince Americans that voter fraud is rampant, used to justify laws and administrative actions that strip eligible voters of the ballot. Voter fraud is not rampant. Most of the recently confirmed cases of voter fraud came from right-wingers trying to vote more than once. The Trump admin and the GOP are pushing draconian laws to make it more difficult to vote, seeking to disenfranchise people who don’t vote in their favor.&nbsp;</p><p>The SAVE Act is a textbook example of these efforts. Portrayed as bolstering election security, the bill would require documentary proof of citizenship–a passport or a birth certificate–to register to vote. This sounds reasonable until you realize that more than 21 million eligible American citizens do not have ready access to those documents. Married women whose names do not match their birth certificates, low-income Americans without passports, rural voters, and elderly people whose paperwork was lost decades ago would all face difficult barriers to voting. Meanwhile, state-level audits have repeatedly found that there is not substantial fraud, and particularly not fraud coming from noncitizens. There’s no good reason to pass it.</p><p>I will oppose any form of the SAVE Act and any other similar legislation. These voter ID laws are designed to disenfranchise the elderly, the poor, and people of color. They work through mass voter roll purges that remove eligible voters along with ineligible voters as well as restrictions on mail-in and early voting that target communities of color. In Congress, I will fight to:</p><ul><li><p>Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, restoring the federal preclearance requirements that the Supreme Court gutted in Shelby County v. Holder.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Pass the Freedom to Vote Act, establishing nationwide standards for voter registration, early voting, mail-in voting, and ballot access.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Establish nationwide same-day voter registration, so that no eligible American is turned away from the polls because of an arbitrary registration deadline.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Restore voting rights for Americans with felony convictions, including those currently incarcerated. Disenfranchisement strips millions of citizens of their voice in our democracy and falls disproportionately on Black and brown Americans. People convicted of crimes should still have a say in how their government works.</p></li><li><p>Defend election workers from harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence that have flooded local election offices since 2020.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Push back, in clear and public terms, against the lies about election integrity that have somehow become acceptable in the mainstream. Democracies do not survive when one of their major parties refuses to accept the results of elections it loses.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Abolishing the Electoral College</span></h5><p>A presidential candidate who loses the popular vote should not win the presidency. The Electoral College is a holdover from a constitutional compromise designed to protect the institution of slavery. Two of the last seven elections have produced presidents who lost the popular vote. I support abolishing the Electoral College through constitutional amendment and electing the president by a national popular vote, the way almost every other elected office in this country is decided.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ending Partisan Gerrymandering</span></h5><p>Gerrymandering, where politicians redraw districts in favor of their preferred party and candidates, has become far more aggressive in the past two decades, especially in the past few years. Gerrymandering effectively disenfranchises a substantial portion of voters and maintains the power and reach of incumbent politicians.&nbsp;</p><p>Efforts like Prop 50, which created this district, need to be viewed in a wider context of gerrymandering. We shouldn’t have to redraw districts to favor Democrats, but when the Republicans have taken extreme steps to centralize their power in states like Florida and Texas, the choice is either let the GOP entrench its authoritarian takeover or fight fire with fire. As a country, we need to establish clear standards for drawing districts, barring partisan gerrymandering across the board.&nbsp;</p><p>I will promote federal legislation requiring independent redistricting commissions in every state. Commissions should prioritize contiguous and compact districts that don’t unnecessarily split up communities. The current administration's push to reopen mid-decade redistricting in friendly states, in order to manufacture a partisan advantage, is a textbook example of the abuse this legislation would prevent. Voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Considering Statehood and Self-Determination</span></h5><p>Washington, DC has more residents than several states and pays full federal taxes, but it has no voting representation in Congress. Puerto Rico and other US territories are home to millions of American citizens who similarly lack full democratic representation. I support DC statehood. I also believe that US territories, including Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa, should have meaningful representation, including voting member rights in Congress. Further, if the people residing in those territories wish, we should pursue statehood to codify their representation in our government.</p><h4><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Reforming the Supreme Court</span></h4><p>The Supreme Court has become an unaccountable, partisan institution wielding extraordinary power over the lives of everyone in the US. A handful of unelected judges, appointed for life and serving for decades, routinely overturn settled precedent, strike down legislation passed by elected majorities, and alter constitutional interpretation to match the priorities of the political movement that put them on the bench. The Supreme Court does not foster equitable, representative government, eroding its legitimacy as part of our governing structure.&nbsp;</p><p>I support two major structural reforms to restore the legitimacy of the Supreme Court:</p><ul><li><p>An 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices with a regular schedule of appointments so that every president gets the same number of nominations and no single vacancy becomes a generational political crisis. Term limits would end the perverse incentives created by lifetime appointments, such as retirements timed to political advantage and the promotion of younger nominees to entrench ideological control of the court for decades to come.</p></li><li><p>Expanding the Supreme Court to thirteen justices. The size of the court has been changed multiple times in American history. The Constitution doesn’t require a specific number of justices. Expanding the Court would reduce the power of the current right-wing majority and restore balance after years of norm-breaking confirmation tactics. This would also align the court with the thirteen federal circuit courts. Combined with term limits, expanding the court could restore balance and reduce the partisanship of what is supposed to be an apolitical judicial body.&nbsp;</p></li></ul><p>I will also support binding ethics rules for Supreme Court justices: firm disclosure requirements, standards for recusal, limits on the gifts and travel, and enhanced restrictions on political activity for active judges. These standards already apply to lower courts and judges–there’s no reason the Supreme Court should be exempt from them.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

<h4>A government that works for working people.</h4><p>Our government has been ravaged by decades of privatization, revolving doors, and the transfer of public functions into private hands. That has produced a state that works well for the wealthy and poorly for everyone else. To fix our government, we need to rebuild public capacity, protect the people who blow the whistle on wrongdoing, hold officials personally accountable for abuse, and enforce a tax system that requires the rich to pay their fair share.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Protecting Whistleblowers</span></h5><p>Whistleblowers should never face retaliation in any form for exposing malice and corruption in the government. Whistleblower protections have been too weak for a long time. Now, the Trump administration has launched a vicious assault on whistleblower protections by firing IGs, gutting oversight offices, and signaling to federal workers that speaking up about wrongdoing will cost them their careers or worse.</p><p>In Congress, I will fight for:</p><ul><li><p>The creation of an independent, nonpartisan commission with authority outside the control of the executive branch. This agency would have real investigative power, the ability to levy fines, penalties, and sanctions, and concrete planning to ensure the safety of whistleblowers.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>A national whistleblower fund that ensures anyone who risks their job and livelihood is able to live in peace with their basic needs met. People who expose wrongdoing should not have their lives destroyed for doing the right thing.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Personal liability for officials who engage in wrongdoing, backed by required insurance that is not funded by taxpayers. If you hold power and abuse it, the cost should land on you, not on the public.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Banning Congressional Stock Trading</span></h5><p>Members of Congress should not be trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they directly influence through their votes. It’s a clear-cut conflict of interest that is wildly unpopular among all voters. The current administration has done nothing to stop it, and in fact seems to welcome it with open corruption among the cabinet. I’ll push for a ban on individual stock trading by members of Congress, their immediate family members, and senior staff, with real penalties for violations.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ending Means Testing and Making Government Programs Actually Work</span></h5><p>Means testing is portrayed as a way to target assistance more efficiently. In practice, means testing disproportionately excludes people who are qualified to receive necessary services. I will work to enact universal programs that do away with means testing wherever possible. Universal programs are cheaper to administer and far more effective at actually reaching the people they are supposed to serve.</p><p>All government services should be easily accessible for everyone. To make that possible, I’ll advocate for policies that:</p><ul><li><p>Increase staffing and work hours at government offices so working people with various disparate shifts and days off can actually get in the door.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Simplify technology systems and expand language support so that access does not depend on English fluency or a fast internet connection.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Provide cultural awareness and humility training for service providers so that the people delivering public services can actually serve the communities in which they work.</p></li></ul><p>The Trump administration's attacks on federal workers and public services have made all of this dramatically worse. Rebuilding public-sector capacity is not glamorous work that will generate a lot of buzz, but it’s necessary to make sure that every person who qualifies for a benefit, a service, or a protection can actually access it.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ensuring Public Resources Stay Public</span></h5><p>I oppose the privatization of public or natural resources in most circumstances. Privatization is almost always pitched as efficiency, but it’s almost always designed to pilfer resources and increase corporate wealth. Public goods created and sustained with public money are handed over to private owners who raise prices and cut services. Private operation should only be considered with overwhelming community support and clear evidence that it will actually improve outcomes for the people affected, not just for shareholders.</p><p>I am also generally opposed to public-private partnerships. Injecting a third-party profit motive into public services funnels wealth and resources out of local communities creates perverse incentives for public officials now beholden to private interests. I theoretically could support public-private arrangements were they to meet strict conditions: the private partner must be a locally owned business that primarily serves the local community, the arrangement must be limited in duration and scope, it must include penalties for misuse of public funds, and it should exist only in cases where the public sector genuinely lacks the resources, skills, or capacity to provide the service.</p><p>As a member of Congress, I will push to maintain public services and create even more of them. For example, I will support public banking at the state and federal level. Public banks can finance public infrastructure, support affordable housing, and provide people with basic financial services without exploiting them for profit.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Imposing Strict Limits on Corporate Subsidies</span></h5><p>Public money and tax incentives should only be used to subsidize private businesses when those businesses are:</p><ul><li><p>Locally owned and primarily serving the local community</p></li><li><p>Providing an important cultural service or basic need</p></li><li><p>Generating more funding for local services through taxes</p></li><li><p>Strategically necessary as part of a larger economic development plan</p></li></ul><p>Subsidies should never be offered to companies requiring funding because of their own mismanagement. Nor should they be offered to companies whose goods or services are unethical or in tension with the public good. The current system often rewards bad behaviors: large corporations shake down local governments for tax breaks and then relocate or lay off workers the moment a better deal appears somewhere else. When public money does flow to a private company and that company engages in mismanagement, fraud, or mass layoffs, executive compensation at those companies should be subject to clawback. Executives who walk away with millions after their firm takes a public bailout have been stealing from taxpayers; they should face real, serious penalties for the damages they cause.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Requiring Community-Oriented Land Use</span></h5><p>I will push for federal frameworks that use a combination of incentives and disincentives to promote community-oriented land utilization. These frameworks should impose vacancy taxes on empty commercial and residential properties, provide development credits that reward genuinely beneficial projects, and include clawback provisions for companies that don’t fulfill their commitments to things like affordable housing requirements. Land use guidelines should be created in collaboration with tribal groups, advocacy organizations, and consistent public input. Congress must stipulate these guidelines in any legislation that includes funding for land usage.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Making a Tax System That Works for Working People</span></h5><p>The tax system should be set up to make life easier for average Americans. We need a simplified and streamlined system so everyday people are not paying private companies to file their taxes and not guessing what they owe in the first place. Most developed countries have return-free filing for most taxpayers. We only don’t have that because the tax-preparation industry has spent decades and millions of dollars lobbying against it.</p><p>As we provide tax relief for average Americans, we also need to substantially increase taxes on the wealthy. Billionaires should not exist, let alone pay lower effective tax rates than working people. I’ll advocate for a number of concrete changes in Congress:</p><ul><li><p>Fully fund and staff the IRS to go after the billionaire class of ultra-wealthy tax cheats and ensure they pay what they owe. The Trump administration's gutting of IRS enforcement has been a massive favor for the rich. Equal taxation is impossible without a robust IRS.</p></li><li><p>End offshoring tax havens and shelters and tax US-based companies on their actual profits regardless of what incorporation games they play.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Close tax loopholes that allow the ultra-wealthy to live tax-free on paper, including the use of collateral loans taken out against unrealized capital gains, a structure that lets billionaires fund lavish lifestyles without being taxed.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Restore and expand taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, and large estates, so that the people who have looted our country have to contribute proportionally to the public systems that made their plundering possible.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Enact a wealth tax on the ultra-rich. Income taxes alone cannot address a system where the wealthiest Americans accumulate billions in assets that are never meaningfully taxed. A serious wealth tax on fortunes above a high threshold is one of the most direct tools for reversing decades of increasing inequality.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Rebuilding Public Trust</span></h5><p>None of these reforms matter if the public does not trust the government to carry them out. Rebuilding that trust requires showing people that the government is on their side: that when you call a Social Security office, someone answers; that when you need healthcare, you get it; that when someone in power breaks the law, they face real consequences. A government that actually works for working people is the most powerful antidote to the cynicism and authoritarian politics we face today.&nbsp;</p>

<h1>Government Reform</h1>

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<p><strong>Put an introductory paragraph to your issues page here.</strong> It could be about specific key issues your campaign is focusing on or your campaign’s more general mission and approach.</p>

<h2><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Our Campaign’s People-First Priorities</span></h2>

<h1>Good Jobs, Livable Wages, and Labor Power</h1>

<h4>Protect and defend those who cannot speak for themselves.</h4><p>Animals endure enormous, systematic abuse across the institutions of modern American life, and they have no voice of their own in the political system that decides their fate. In Congress, I will be a voice for animals and I will work to make clear that their suffering is part of the broader fight for justice that drives the rest of my platform.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Require Community-Oriented Land Use</span></h5><p>I will push for federal frameworks that use a combination of incentives and disincentives to promote community-oriented land utilization. These frameworks should impose vacancy taxes on empty commercial and residential properties, provide development credits that reward genuinely beneficial projects, and include clawback provisions for companies that don’t fulfill their commitments to things like affordable housing requirements. Land use guidelines should be created in collaboration with tribal groups, advocacy organizations, and consistent public input. Congress must stipulate these guidelines in any legislation that includes funding for land usage.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Understanding the Cost of Factory Farming</span></h5><p>Our current system of industrial animal agriculture is unsustainable and harmful at every level. Workers in slaughterhouses and processing plants face brutal conditions, debilitating injuries, and systematic exploitation. Surrounding communities, often low-income and disproportionately Black and brown, live with the air, water, and soil pollution that factory farms produce. As I have written in my healthcare platform, industrial animal agriculture is the single largest source of novel diseases and pandemics. The animals endure conditions that, by any honest moral standard, would be recognized as torture if they happened to any other living creature.</p><p>There is not enough land for ethical farming everywhere, and the answer to that fact cannot be the further expansion of industrial cruelty. We need a different approach.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Creating a Federal Path Forward</span></h5><p>I will fight for:</p><ul><li><p>Increased federal funding, subsidies, and research investment in crops grown for direct human consumption rather than for animal feed. The vast majority of American agricultural land is currently devoted to feeding livestock rather than people, an arrangement that wastes water, land, and energy on a massive scale.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Public investment in plant-based alternatives for food and medicine, so that the transition off animal exploitation comes with real, accessible options for ordinary people. The science on plant-based protein, cellular agriculture, and animal-free pharmaceuticals has progressed rapidly over the past decade, and federal research dollars and procurement should accelerate it.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Land use alternatives, including stewardship arrangements, re-wilding programs, and ecological restoration on land currently devoted to industrial animal agriculture. Returning that land to its ecosystems would lock in carbon, restore biodiversity, and give us back natural systems we have spent generations destroying.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>An end to the federal subsidies that prop up factory farming, which currently flow to the largest and most polluting operations while smaller, more humane farms receive little or no public support.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Stronger enforcement of the limited animal welfare protections we already have on the books and meaningful expansion of those protections to cover the animals currently exempt from them, including the farm animals who make up the overwhelming majority of animals affected by federal policy.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Thinking Beyond the Factory Farm</span></h5><p>Industrial agriculture causes the most animal suffering in this country, but other major sources demand attention as well. Animals are abused in research laboratories, displaced and killed by habitat destruction, exploited in entertainment industries, and produced in vast numbers through irresponsible breeding even as shelters fill up with companion animals in need of homes. I support:</p><ul><li><p>Federal investment in alternatives to animal testing in research, building on the validated non-animal methods that have already replaced animal use in many contexts and that produce more reliable results for human medicine in many cases.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Stronger habitat protection across federal lands, in line with the ecosystem and biodiversity priorities in my environmental platform.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Phasing out the use of animals in entertainment industries that cause documented harm, with priority on circuses, marine mammal facilities, and similar contexts where the suffering is most acute.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Federal support for spay/neuter, adoption, and animal welfare programs that responsible communities rely on, paired with meaningful regulation of commercial breeders and puppy mills.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Promoting Compassion as Justice</span></h5><p>Animals deserve our compassion and our advocacy. The moral logic of this position is the same one that runs through the rest of my platform: where there is suffering produced by structural exploitation, it is the obligation of people in positions of power to fight for change on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves. That obligation does not stop at the species line.</p>

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<span class="image image-framed image-left image-tilt-left" style="width: 30%;"><span class="image-inner-wrapper"><img src="https://run.imgix.net/3262cf40-ce81-4e3c-b1cc-34fdcd002acb/2620f87e-7cf0-4886-9a2d-43d43a1bd25f/2620f87e-7cf0-4886-9a2d-43d43a1bd25f.jpeg?ixlib=js-3.8.0&amp;bri=0&amp;con=0&amp;sat=0&amp;high=0&amp;shad=0&amp;usm=0&amp;rect=0%2C0%2C480%2C604&amp;w=1500" alt="" caption="With family in the early 1990s" align="left" alignwidth="30" tiltdirection="left" variant="framed"></span><span class="caption" style="">With family in the early 1990s</span></span><h5>A Childhood of Transitions</h5><p>I grew up an Army brat and the oldest of eleven siblings. My mom is Puerto Rican, my dad from Eastern Washington, and they met as cadets at West Point. After they graduated, got married, and had me and my three brothers, their marriage ended when I was nine. My childhood was shaped by constant moves, tight finances, and watching my parents work hard through difficult times, including on the global scale. I was in 6th grade when I watched as the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. At that moment, I gave up on being an architect and decided I wanted to serve my country.&nbsp;</p><p>My high school years were full of transition. Alternating between living with my dad, step mom, an aunt and even a family friend, I saw first hand the hardships of working class people working full time jobs and often still needing to rely on food stamps to feed the children in their care. By high school graduation in 2008, I had moved a dozen times and gone to three high schools in three different states.</p><h5>A West Point Education</h5><p>I applied to only one college, the United States Military Academy at West Point, where I studied Computer Science and trained in military ethics, leadership, and the laws of just warfare. The program was rigorous and tested me in every way, both academically and personally. Like many cadets, I faced challenges that forced me to dig deep, ask for help and support when I needed it, and build the resilience to lead under pressure. Fighting through exhaustion, mental health struggles, family and relationship complications to finish the academy strong shaped my commitment to service. It strengthened my belief that <u>access to support systems, whether in education, health, or community, can change the course of someone’s life.</u> I'll be forever grateful for the mental health care support that I had in the Army, and I graduated in 2013, ready to put those lessons into action as an Army officer.</p><h5>Serving Our Country</h5><span class="image image-framed image-right image-tilt-left" style="width: 30%;"><span class="image-inner-wrapper"><img src="https://run.imgix.net/3262cf40-ce81-4e3c-b1cc-34fdcd002acb/1dba5d6d-9cb6-4e50-80bf-b7f55cffe2bd/1dba5d6d-9cb6-4e50-80bf-b7f55cffe2bd.jpeg?ixlib=js-3.8.0&amp;bri=0&amp;con=0&amp;sat=0&amp;high=0&amp;shad=0&amp;usm=0&amp;rect=0%2C0%2C960%2C960&amp;w=1500" alt="" caption="At a Ball in Seoul, South Korea in 2014" align="right" alignwidth="30" tiltdirection="left" variant="framed"></span><span class="caption" style="">At a Ball in Seoul, South Korea in 2014</span></span><p>I commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Field Artillery branch and swore an oath to <u>support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic</u>, before reporting to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for Artillery School. While I was there, I got to take Precision Fires where I learned how to use guided munitions and minimize collateral damage. I also learned about the military responsibility to prevent war crimes prohibited by international law and the Geneva conventions–crimes such as indiscriminate or deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure and collective punishment, among others.</p><p>My first duty station was in South Korea, where I met my wife, a California native and the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, who was teaching English after graduating from Cal Poly Pomona. Around that time, the Army created the Cyber Warfare branch, and I was one of just a handful of artillery officers accepted into the new Cyber Corps. In early 2016, we left Korea for Augusta, Georgia, where I joined the U.S. Army Cyber Protection Brigade on 152 Cyber Protection Team (CPT). I led a mission element specializing in discovery and counter-infiltration, providing cyber support to corps and below units. The work took me to training centers across the country, including Fort Irwin, California, and Fort Polk, Louisiana.</p><h5>Life Transitions</h5><p>After finishing my active duty service in 2018, I left the Army so my wife and I could start a family. I always wanted children of my own, but I wanted them to have more stability than the constant moves of my Army childhood. We settled in Northern California, where I worked in nonprofit healthcare at Kaiser Permanente in Walnut Creek and Oakland, later joining Sutter Health.&nbsp;</p><p>When the pandemic began, we moved to Sacramento County, looking to set down roots where we could raise a family and afford to live. After moving, I earned an MBA from UC Berkeley while working full-time, graduating in 2022 before taking a role in technology consulting with PwC Strategy&amp;.</p><p>Like many families, we faced challenges starting a family of our own and pursued IVF. That endeavor was ultimately unsuccessful, and opened my eyes to how corrupt and profit-driven decisions in healthcare can deeply affect people’s lives. This painful experience fuels my commitment to <u>fight for a system that puts people before profits.</u></p><p>I loved my job and the people I worked with at Strategy&amp;, but the state of our country made me so angry that I had to act. I saw peaceful students and ordinary people getting snatched off the street by masked secret police and sent to foreign prisons without due process in violation of our laws, court orders, and the Constitution. I decided I couldn't continue with business as usual. So I quit my job to run for Congress. I believe that our elected representatives have abdicated their responsibility to check the power of the executive branch. <span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);"><strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">I <em>know</em> I can do a better job.</strong></span></p><h5>Fighting for Our Future</h5><p><strong>Let's be frank</strong> <strong>- our country has been sold out. </strong>Our elected officials are in the pockets of billionaires and corporate lobbyists while regular people are struggling to get by. The rich and powerful use their media machines to pit us against each other, blaming immigrants, trans people, and other vulnerable groups so we don’t look up and see the real problem: a ruling class getting rich while the rest of us struggle.</p><p>I’ve seen how health insurance companies profit from misery, denying care and jacking up prices just to boost their bottom line. For decades, our government has funneled wealth from working people to Wall Street and the billionaire class. As a disabled veteran who gets care through the VA, I know how dangerous it would be to privatize it. I’m fighting for Medicare for All because healthcare is a human right, and no one should have to go bankrupt just because they got sick. I’m fighting for a government run by the people, not by the billionaires.&nbsp;</p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);"><strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Enough is enough.</strong></span> It’s time our government worked for us, not them. It’s time to fight back.</p>

<p><strong>A rising tide lifts all boats.</strong> It's time we fight for everyone's basic needs and stop prioritizing the profits of unaccountable billionaires, corrupt politicians, and the military-industrial complex.</p>

<h2>Our Campaign’s Top Issues</h2>

<h2><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Meet Captain Chris Bennett</span></h2><span class="image image-framed image-left image-tilt-left" style="width: 32%;"><span class="image-inner-wrapper"><img src="https://run.imgix.net/3262cf40-ce81-4e3c-b1cc-34fdcd002acb/9f1d9094-9ded-46d5-a5c9-fbd3e63e831e/9f1d9094-9ded-46d5-a5c9-fbd3e63e831e.jpeg?ixlib=js-3.8.0&amp;bri=-4&amp;con=0&amp;sat=8&amp;high=0&amp;shad=1&amp;usm=0&amp;rect=0%2C0%2C2608%2C3206&amp;w=1500" alt="Chris Bennett, candidate for U.S. Congress" caption="" align="left" alignwidth="32" tiltdirection="left" variant="framed"></span><span class="caption" style="display: none;"></span></span><p><span style="color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary);"><strong style="color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary);">I'm a disabled Army veteran running for U.S. Congress in California's 3rd district to fight for everyday people, not billionaires, lobbyists, or genocidal foreign countries.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary);"><strong style="color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary);"><u>I put people first.</u></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">I'm the oldest brother of eleven siblings, and I know firsthand what it's like to worry about putting food on the table and making rent.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">After 9/11, I chose to serve my country in the Army like so many of my family before me. When I graduated from West Point, I swore to <strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">defend the Constitution</strong> and the rights it guarantees, like <u>due process</u>, <u>freedom of speech</u>, and <u>the rule of law</u>.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">In the Army, I served overseas in artillery and in the states defending our nation’s computer networks as a cyber officer. After the Army, I worked in nonprofit health care and tech strategy, earning my MBA from the Haas School of Business.</span></p><span class="image image-framed image-right image-tilt-left" style="width: 32%;"><span class="image-inner-wrapper"><img src="https://run.imgix.net/3262cf40-ce81-4e3c-b1cc-34fdcd002acb/1f30d1c4-f519-47b3-a357-4bacb2b9d28a/1f30d1c4-f519-47b3-a357-4bacb2b9d28a.jpeg?ixlib=js-3.8.0&amp;bri=0&amp;con=0&amp;sat=0&amp;high=0&amp;shad=0&amp;usm=0&amp;rect=104%2C59%2C918%2C1321&amp;w=1500" alt="Captain Chris Bennett in army dress blue uniform for Department of the Army photograph" caption="" align="right" alignwidth="32" tiltdirection="left" variant="framed"></span><span class="caption" style="display: none;"></span></span><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">I’ve been shaped by many teachers in my 35 years - my parents, my wife, West Point, the Army, and Berkeley to name a few.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Each one instilling values I still carry: to help those in need, stand up to bullies, choose the harder right over the easier wrong, lead by example, and question the status quo.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">But today, we’re watching billionaires harvest our data, steal from the poor, and destroy our safety net, while Congress takes a handout to look the other way. Both parties have been corrupted by wealthy interests, and too many politicians have abandoned us to appease their donors.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">When I saw ordinary people being disappeared off the street by masked thugs without due process, I couldn’t stay on the sidelines. So I left my job to run for Congress, to stand up to unchecked power and fight for the future we all deserve.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary);"><strong style="color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text-accent-secondary);"><em>I refuse any money from corporate PACs or lobbyists.</em></strong></span><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);"> I’m fighting for our basic needs - affordable housing &amp; groceries, Medicare For All, Social Security, the VA, and our basic human rights.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">This campaign isn’t backed by big donors, it’s <em>powered by the people</em>. We need <strong><em>your</em></strong> help to take back our democracy.</span></p><h5 style="text-align: center;">Join our movement today by donating or signing up to volunteer.<br><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">A better future is possible, but only if we fight for it together.</span></h5>

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<p>Ami Bera accepts money from Big Tech, Wall Street, election deniers, and other companies that profit by harming Americans.</p>

<h2>Wall Street, Big Tech &amp; Election Deniers</h2>

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<p><span style="color: var(--color-bg0-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-bg0-text);">Thank you to everyone who supported our campaign and made it what it was. We will continue fighting for a better world alongside you.</span><br></p>

<h1><span style="color: var(--color-bg0-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-bg0-headline-secondary);">Ask me how to fight back!</span></h1>

<p><span style="color: var(--color-bg0-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-bg0-text);"><strong style="color: var(--color-bg0-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-bg0-text);"><em>A better world is possible if we work for it together.</em></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-bg0-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-bg0-text);">The Primary is <strong>June 2, 2026</strong>. </span><br>Counties will mail ballots on <strong>May 4, 2026</strong>.<br>The last day to register is <strong>May 18, 2026</strong>.<br><span style="color: var(--color-bg0-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-bg0-text);">Early-in-person voting starts <strong>May 23, 2026</strong>.</span><br></p>

<h1>Issues: Making Life Affordable</h1>

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<h1>Criminal Justice Reform</h1>

<h1>End Genocide and Wars</h1>

<h4>AI must serve people, not the other way around.</h4><p>Artificial intelligence is being deployed across the economy at a pace and scale we have never seen before, with little regulation, almost no public input, and most of the benefits flowing to the same handful of corporations and ultra-wealthy investors who have captured so much of the rest of our economy. The harms, meanwhile, are spreading rapidly: workers losing jobs, creators having their work stolen, communities seeing their water and electricity diverted to data centers, kids and vulnerable adults harmed by chatbots designed to maximize engagement, and a federal government rushing to integrate AI into everything from warfare to immigration enforcement before anyone has figured out how to keep it accountable.</p><p>This is the wild west of AI, with the people most likely to be harmed having the least say in what gets built and how it gets used. We need strong, immediate regulation to prevent harm, to mitigate the damage already being done, and to ensure the benefits of AI flow to working people rather than only to the billionaire class building these systems on the rest of our backs.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">The Trump Administration's AI Free-for-All</span></h5><p>On day one of his second term, Donald Trump revoked the modest AI safeguards established under the previous administration and signaled to the entire industry that the United States would impose no meaningful guardrails on AI development. Since then, his administration has done everything in its power to accelerate AI deployment while gutting the agencies that might have regulated it. Federal contracts have been steered to politically connected AI companies. Massive new data center construction has been incentivized regardless of local environmental and infrastructure costs. The administration has pushed efforts to preempt state-level AI regulation, leaving the country with no enforceable rules at any level.</p><p>What we have is a captured market dressed up as a free market, with ordinary people paying the price for it.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Data Centers, Energy, and Environmental Costs</span></h5><p>AI data centers consume enormous quantities of electricity and water. The boom in AI development is driving construction of massive new facilities across the country. Some of these data centers are causing brownouts and elevated electricity costs for residential customers in their service areas. Others are draining aquifers and stressing municipal water supplies in regions already facing climate-driven water scarcity. Many are being built on sweetheart deals with utilities and local governments, with the public footing the bill for transmission upgrades, water infrastructure, and the increased emissions that come with surging power demand.</p><p>I am opposed to the construction of any new AI data centers until sweeping regulations are in place to prioritize residential water, electricity, and public safety first. That includes:</p><ul><li><p>A requirement that data center operators prove their facilities will not harm surrounding communities before construction begins, including binding limits on water and energy use during drought, peak demand, and emergency conditions.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Full polluter-pays accountability for environmental damage, infrastructure costs, and elevated utility rates caused by data center construction. The companies profiting from these facilities should bear the costs, not residents and small businesses in the surrounding area.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Mandatory disclosure of energy and water consumption, emissions, and supply chain impacts, so that communities can make informed decisions about whether to host these facilities at all.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Strict limits on the use of public subsidies, tax breaks, and infrastructure investments to attract data centers, which currently extract enormous public concessions for facilities that produce few local jobs and substantial local harm.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Protecting Workers and Compensating Creators</span></h5><p>The promise of generative AI has been packaged as productivity and innovation. The reality, for many workers, is wage compression, mass layoffs, and the elimination of jobs that supported families. AI is replacing customer service workers, writers, artists, designers, paralegals, translators, coders, and increasingly white-collar professionals across the economy. The workers bearing the cost of this transition were not consulted, are not being meaningfully retrained, and have no share in the productivity gains AI is generating for the corporations deploying it.</p><p>I am opposed to the use of generative AI to replace American workers. AI should be used to enhance existing workflows and to take on the tasks that genuinely benefit from automation, with displaced workers retrained, supported, and given a real share in any productivity gains. As long as the alternative remains poverty for displaced workers, AI-driven labor automation cannot be allowed to proceed unchecked.</p><p>I support a federal universal basic income, part of my broader economic platform, to provide every person a stable floor in an economy where the labor market is being transformed faster than any safety net was designed to handle. UBI works alongside good jobs and labor protections, ensuring no one is left destitute by changes they did not choose.</p><p>I also support holding AI companies accountable for the creative and intellectual work they have used without permission to train their models. Writers, artists, musicians, journalists, photographers, and countless other creators have had their work scraped, ingested, and repurposed by AI systems whose business models depend on that uncompensated labor. AI companies must compensate every creator whose work was used without permission, and they must obtain meaningful consent for any future use. Existing copyright and intellectual property law has to apply, with real enforcement, to companies that have spent years operating as if it did not.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Consumer Choice and the Right to Opt Out</span></h5><p>AI features are being pushed into every piece of consumer software, every website, and every mobile application, often without consent and frequently without any way to disable them. People who do not want their email summarized by AI, their search results filtered through AI, their photos processed by AI, or their personal data fed into AI systems are increasingly unable to find products and services that simply work without it.</p><p>I support requiring every company to allow consumers to opt out of any and all AI features in software, websites, and mobile applications. The opt-out should be easy to find and fully functional. Users should be able to keep using the products and services they have paid for, exactly as they are, without being forced to participate in AI experiments they did not consent to.</p><p>This is part of a broader principle. Consumers and workers should have meaningful agency over how AI is used in the contexts that affect their lives. Consent has to mean something more than a buried checkbox in a terms-of-service update.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Promoting Safety and Protecting Vulnerable Users</span></h5><p>AI companies must be held fully responsible for the outputs of their models and for the safety of the users who interact with them. This is especially urgent for children, teenagers, and other vulnerable populations who are increasingly using AI chatbots, companions, and tools that have already been linked to serious harm.</p><p>Cases have already emerged of AI systems contributing to suicides, fueling eating disorders, encouraging self-harm, and reinforcing dangerous delusions in users experiencing mental health crises. These are predictable outcomes of products designed to maximize engagement, deployed without meaningful safety testing, and aimed at populations that include children. The companies responsible have escaped accountability so far because the legal framework for AI liability is decades behind the technology.</p><p>In Congress, I will fight to:</p><ul><li><p>Establish clear federal liability for harm caused by AI systems, with consequences that scale to the size and reach of the companies deploying them.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Require meaningful safety testing and external auditing of AI systems before deployment, particularly for systems aimed at or accessible to minors.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Mandate clear verification and additional protections for AI products marketed to or used by children and teens, with strict limits on data collection and engagement-maximizing design.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Require AI systems to clearly disclose their nature to users, so that no one mistakes a chatbot for a human therapist, friend, or medical professional.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Empower the FTC, state attorneys general, and private parties to bring meaningful enforcement actions against companies whose products cause harm.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Keeping Humans in Charge</span></h5><p>I am opposed to any effort to remove human beings from targeting decisions in warfare or law enforcement, and I am against the use of AI to wage wars without strong human oversight and full accountability for the results. A person must always be responsible for the use of lethal force. That principle is not negotiable, regardless of how cheap, fast, or efficient the alternative looks to military planners and defense contractors.</p><p>Beyond warfare, federal agencies are increasingly using AI to make consequential decisions about housing, healthcare, immigration enforcement, criminal justice, and benefits eligibility. Too often these systems have been deployed with no transparency, no appeal process, and documented patterns of bias against the same communities our institutions have always failed. I will fight to:</p><ul><li><p>Ban autonomous weapons systems and require meaningful human control over any use of force, in line with the principles long advocated by the international disarmament community.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Require human review and clear appeal rights for any federal agency decision affecting individual rights, benefits, or liberty in which AI plays a meaningful role.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Mandate algorithmic accountability and transparency for AI systems used by the federal government, with binding standards for bias testing, performance auditing, and public disclosure.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Take concrete and definitive action to prevent the loss of control over AI systems whose behavior is not yet well understood, including the largest and most general-purpose models being developed today.</p></li></ul><p>The technology is advancing faster than our ability to govern it and the gap is widening. Closing that gap is one of the central regulatory challenges we face.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Spreading AI Literacy and Public Understanding</span></h5><p>A democratic society cannot make good decisions about a technology its citizens do not understand. AI is currently being marketed to the public through a veil of hype, mystification, and corporate PR, with the result that many Americans either dramatically overestimate AI's capabilities or accept claims about its inevitability that the evidence does not actually support.</p><p>I support major federal investment in AI literacy and public education, so that workers, students, parents, voters, and communities can understand what AI actually is, what it can and cannot do, where its real risks lie, and how to evaluate the claims being made by the companies selling it. Informed people make better choices, both individually and through the political system. The companies that benefit from public confusion will not provide that education, which means the public sector has to.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Making a Better Future</span></h5><p>Technology is shaped by the political choices we make about it. The version of AI we currently have, dominated by a small number of corporations, deployed without consent or accountability, and producing concentrated wealth alongside diffuse harm, is not the only version possible. A different path, one that puts ordinary people first, requires sustained federal action, real corporate accountability, and the willingness to say no to the people who profit from the status quo.</p>

<h4>My Checklist for AI</h4>

<h4>Whoever has the most money should not get the biggest say.</h4><p>Wealthy interests spend effectively unlimited money buying our politicians and the results are exactly what you would expect. A well-known Princeton study found that what ordinary people want has almost no measurable impact on what policy outcomes actually get passed in this country. On issue after issue, strong majority support from the public translates into nothing, while the preferences of wealthy donors and organized business interests become law. That is not a functioning democracy. We need comprehensive reforms to reclaim the democratic power of regular people.&nbsp;</p><p>In 2024, federal election spending reached a record $16 billion, with outside spending alone hitting $4.5 billion and dark money spending reaching $1.9 billion, also records. Elon Musk personally spent more than $290 million to elect Donald Trump, the largest disclosed political donation by an individual in American history, and he was rewarded with a senior White House role and effective veto power over federal agencies that regulate his companies. Six other billionaires each gave over $100 million in the same cycle. Elections are essentially auctions for the ultra-rich. We need to end the auction and declare the people the winners.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Running a Corporate-Free, People-Powered Campaign</span></h5><p>My campaign is entirely grassroots, powered by ordinary people rather than corporate PACs or federal lobbyists. I refuse corporate PAC money and federal lobbyist money. I am loyal only to the Constitution and my constituents. This is not just a symbolic commitment. Every dollar a politician takes from a corporate interest is a dollar that buys their attention, their time, and eventually their vote. The only way to be genuinely accountable to working people is to refuse the money that makes politicians accountable to someone else.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ban Congressional Stock Trading</span></h5><p>Members of Congress should not be trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they directly influence through their votes. It’s a clear-cut conflict of interest that is wildly unpopular among all voters. The current administration has done nothing to stop it, and in fact seems to welcome it with open corruption among the cabinet. I’ll push for a ban on individual stock trading by members of Congress, their immediate family members, and senior staff, with real penalties for violations.</p><p>Ending Means Testing and Making Government Programs Actually Work</p><p>Means testing is portrayed as a way to target assistance more efficiently. In practice, means testing disproportionately excludes people who are qualified to receive necessary services. I will work to enact universal programs that do away with means testing wherever possible. Universal programs are cheaper to administer and far more effective at actually reaching the people they are supposed to serve.</p><p>All government services should be easily accessible for everyone. To make that possible, I’ll advocate for policies that:</p><ul><li><p>Increase staffing and work hours at government offices so working people with various disparate shifts and days off can actually get in the door.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Simplify technology systems and expand language support so that access does not depend on English fluency or a fast internet connection.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Provide cultural awareness and humility training for service providers so that the people delivering public services can actually serve the communities in which they work.</p></li></ul><p>The Trump administration's attacks on federal workers and public services have made all of this dramatically worse. Rebuilding public-sector capacity is not glamorous work that will generate a lot of buzz, but it’s necessary to make sure that every person who qualifies for a benefit, a service, or a protection can actually access it.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Overturn Citizens United</span></h5><p>Citizens United v. FEC unleashed unlimited corporate spending on our elections by ruling that political spending is a form of protected speech and that corporations have the same free speech rights as everyday people. The result has been exactly what critics predicted: a torrent of dark money, super PACs, and corporate-funded interest groups drowning out ordinary voters.</p><p>One of my top priorities will be to build support for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. We must firmly establish that corporations are not people and that money is not speech. Restoring these basic principles is foundational to every other reform on this list. As long as unlimited corporate money can flood our elections, no other democratic reform will be enough.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Enable Public Financing of Elections</span></h5><p>I support public financing of federal elections. When campaigns are funded by small-dollar donations matched with public funds, candidates can run competitive races without being dependent on wealthy donors or corporate interests. Public financing programs at the state and municipal level have been shown to produce more diverse candidate pools, more responsive representatives, more time spent talking to constituents, and more faith in the strength of democracy.</p><p>Public financing should be paired with robust small-donor matching programs, so that a candidate's ability to run for office depends on the support of their community rather than the pockets of wealthy donors.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ban Dark Money Loopholes</span></h5><p>Even without overturning Citizens United, there is a lot Congress can do to stop dark money, such as:</p><ul><li><p>Passing the DISCLOSE Act, which would require organizations spending money in federal elections to disclose their major donors. This would close many of the loopholes that allow shell organizations and politics-oriented nonprofits to launder anonymous corporate and billionaire contributions. The bill has been introduced repeatedly and blocked repeatedly by the same people who benefit from dark money secrecy.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Requiring full, timely disclosure of the true sources of political spending, including the donors behind super PACs and shell organizations.</p></li><li><p>Strengthening rules against coordination between candidates and supposedly-independent SuperPACs designed only to support a particular candidate.</p></li><li><p>Real enforcement authority and funding for the Federal Election Commission, which has been deliberately weakened and circumvented by the political establishment.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Close the Revolving Door</span></h5><p>The movement of people and money among Congress, federal agencies, and the private sector is the source of many of our problems. Staffers write legislation and then leave to lobby on it. Regulators write rules and then leave to fight them on behalf of the industries they used to oversee. Members of Congress retire into multi-million-dollar lobbying careers built on the relationships and knowledge they accumulated on the public dime.</p><p>I will advocate for meaningful cooling-off periods before former members of Congress, senior staff, and federal officials can lobby, along with real restrictions on the kinds of corporate payments and board seats they can accept after leaving office.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Reform Lobbying</span></h5><p>Lobbying is protected by the First Amendment, covered under the right to petition the government. Today’s lobbying industry bears almost no resemblance to that constitutional principle. Corporate lobbyists far outnumber members of Congress; they write large portions of the legislation that eventually becomes law and they operate with minimal disclosure and weak enforcement.</p><p>I support legislation stipulating stronger registration and disclosure requirements for lobbyists, a ban on lobbyist contributions to the members they lobby, and clear, codified rules against bribery and corruption. Ordinary constituents should not have to compete with paid professional advocates just to be heard by their own representatives.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Keep Public Resources Public</span></h5><p>I oppose the privatization of public or natural resources in most circumstances. Privatization is almost always pitched as efficiency, but it’s almost always designed to pilfer resources and increase corporate wealth. Public goods created and sustained with public money are handed over to private owners who raise prices and cut services. Private operation should only be considered with overwhelming community support and clear evidence that it will actually improve outcomes for the people affected, not just for shareholders.</p><p>I am also generally opposed to public-private partnerships. Injecting a third-party profit motive into public services funnels wealth and resources out of local communities creates perverse incentives for public officials now beholden to private interests. I theoretically could support public-private arrangements were they to meet strict conditions: the private partner must be a locally owned business that primarily serves the local community, the arrangement must be limited in duration and scope, it must include penalties for misuse of public funds, and it should exist only in cases where the public sector genuinely lacks the resources, skills, or capacity to provide the service.</p><p>As a member of Congress, I will push to maintain public services and create even more of them. For example, I will support public banking at the state and federal level. Public banks can finance public infrastructure, support affordable housing, and provide people with basic financial services without exploiting them for profit.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Restrict Corporate Subsidies</span></h5><p>Public money and tax incentives should only be used to subsidize private businesses when those businesses are:</p><ul><li><p>Locally owned and primarily serving the local community</p></li><li><p>Providing an important cultural service or basic need</p></li><li><p>Generating more funding for local services through taxes</p></li><li><p>Strategically necessary as part of a larger economic development plan</p></li></ul><p>Subsidies should never be offered to companies requiring funding because of their own mismanagement. Nor should they be offered to companies whose goods or services are unethical or in tension with the public good. The current system often rewards bad behaviors: large corporations shake down local governments for tax breaks and then relocate or lay off workers the moment a better deal appears somewhere else. When public money does flow to a private company and that company engages in mismanagement, fraud, or mass layoffs, executive compensation at those companies should be subject to clawback. Executives who walk away with millions after their firm takes a public bailout have been stealing from taxpayers; they should face real, serious penalties for the damages they cause.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Connecting the Dots</span></h5><p>Every issue on my platform, from healthcare to housing to war and peace, faces the challenge of operating in a system in which the people who benefit from the status quo can pay to protect it. Democracy means that the people who live under the law get to shape it. When money decides instead, we do not have a democracy. I am running to change that because everything else depends on it.</p>

<h1>Volunteer</h1>

<h1>Break Up Monopolies &amp; Tax Billionaire Wealth</h1>

<p>Unlike what you will read below about Ami Bera, Chris Bennett puts Americans and Californians first. That's why Chris supports policies that will improve our lives and why he refuses to ever accept <strong><em><u>any</u></em></strong> money from corporate PAC's, federal lobbyists, or foreign interests like AIPAC.</p>

<h1>Ami Bera vs. Chris Bennett</h1>

<h1>Democratic Reforms</h1>

<h6>SEIU California</h6>

<h6>California Faculty Association</h6>

Logo for Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption

<h6>Track AIPAC</h6>

<h6>National Union of Healthcare Workers</h6>

<h6>Unite Here Local 49</h6>

<h6>CWA Local 9421</h6>

<h6>Central Sierra Foothills DSA</h6>

<h6>American Small Business League</h6>

Wellstone Progressive Democrats / Our Revolution of Sacramento

<h6>Wellstone Progressive Democrats / Our Revolution Sacramento</h6>

<h6>JFK Democratic Club of Sacramento County</h6>

<h6>Courage For Democracy</h6>

<h6>Organize for Peace</h6>

<h6>Sac State College Dems</h6>

Headshot of Nevada City Councilmember Daniela Fernández

<h6>Daniela Fernández, Nevada City Councilmember</h6>

Portrait of Grass Valley mayor Hilary Hodge

<h6>Hilary Hodge, Grass Valley Mayor</h6>

Portrait of Rancho Cordova City Council member Joe Little Smiling

<h6>Joe little, Rancho Cordova City Council District 3</h6>

Picture of man with a green had and a blue bag picking oranges from a green tree

<h6>Steve Wilensky, Union Organizer, environmentalist, and tribal community organizer</h6>

<h6>Sean Frame, State Senate Candidate, Union progressive, Organizer, and Founder of The Six Pack</h6>

<h6>Ken Cross, West Point graduate Class of 1974</h6>

<p>This block can be used a FAQ, a list of issues and more. The key element of this block is the accordion dropdown.</p>

<h2>Ami Bera's record speaks for itself</h2>

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<p>Ami Bera’s Tenure in Congress from 2013-2026</p>

<p>Ami Bera was the only incumbent in the state who failed to secure the California Democratic Party endorsement</p>

<p>Pediatrician Ami Bera puts Israel and weapons manufacturer profits first</p>

<p>Ami Bera Voted for Charlie Kirk Day</p>

<p>Ami Bera was against Impeaching After Trump Bombed Iran in 2025</p>

<p>Ami Bera dodges in-person Town Halls just like Kevin Kiley</p>

<p>Ami Bera censured Al Green for defending Medicaid</p>

<p>Ami Bera got into office off corruption</p>

<p>Ami Bera says little about ICE terror</p>

<p>Ami Bera has praised Hindu supremacist leader Narendra Modi and denied the Sikh genocide</p>

<p>Ami Bera backed the Trans Pacific Partnership and Presidential Fast-Track Trade Authority</p>

Accordion

Embed

<p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Spans from <strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Southeast Sacramento</strong> in <strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Sacramento County</strong>, north through <strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Placer County</strong>, includes all of <strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">Nevada County</strong> and much of <strong style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">El Dorado County</strong> east to Nevada's western border.</span></p><p><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);">View the new 3rd, 5th, and 7th district lines with this helpful </span><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/1/viewer?mid=1X_iMphCrm5qM9-B8c0yERWpQHRYCUmQ&amp;ll=38.705304358143984%2C-120.98043278011664&amp;z=10" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><strong>Google Maps Overlay(➚)</strong></a><span style="color: var(--color-text); text-decoration-color: var(--color-text);"> created by <a href="https://www.indivisibleeldorado.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">El Dorado Indivisible(➚)</a> and <a href="https://eldoradoprogressives.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">El Dorado Progressives(➚)</a></span><br></p>

News

<h4>Stable, dignified housing should be guaranteed for everyone.</h4><p>Housing in this country has been treated as a speculative investment vehicle for the wealthy rather than as a basic human need. The result is exactly what we see around us: skyrocketing rents, families pushed out of neighborhoods their grandparents helped build, working people priced out of every city they might want to live in, and millions of Americans without homes.&nbsp;</p><p>The main causes of homelessness are stagnant wages, an artificially restricted housing supply, rent collusion among corporate landlords, and insufficient medical and mental health care driven by our for-profit healthcare system. None of these problems are accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of a market that has been designed to extract wealth from working people through one of the most basic necessities of life.</p><p>I will fight to build a federal housing policy that treats housing as a human right. That means investing in public housing at scale, protecting tenants from predatory landlords, building new homes priced for working people, and pushing back against the speculation and corporate consolidation that has made this crisis what it is.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">The Trump Administration's Attack on Housing</span></h5><p>The current administration has used the past year to gut federal housing programs at the worst possible moment. The department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been targeted for massive budget cuts and staff layoffs. Section 8 voucher funding has been threatened when the need for it is greater than ever. Fair Housing Act enforcement has been de-prioritized, leaving discrimination claims to languish. Programs supporting unhoused veterans, families, and people with disabilities have been gutted. All of this makes the crisis more severe and it falls the hardest on the most marginalized groups in the country.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Housing-First Approaches</span></h5><p>A housing-first approach is the most effective response to homelessness. The evidence has been clear for years. Without a stable place to live, it is next to impossible to hold down a job, receive medical or mental health treatment, or rebuild community connections. Conditional models that require people to address other issues before being given a home have a long track record of failure. Direct, unconditional access to housing produces better outcomes for less money.</p><p>I will fight for substantial federal funding allocated to states for the creation, maintenance, and expansion of public housing for low- and middle-income individuals and families. Specifically, I support:</p><ul><li><p>Restoring and expanding HUD funding so that public housing can actually be built and maintained at the scale this crisis demands.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Direct federal investment in social housing that operates outside the speculative private market entirely, with permanent affordability guarantees.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Strengthening services connected to housing, including healthcare, mental health treatment, addiction services, and employment support, building on the proven housing-first model.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, which has artificially capped public housing construction since 1998 and is one of the single biggest legal obstacles to actually solving the affordability crisis.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Financial Aid for Hardship</span></h5><p>When someone loses a job, an unexpected medical bill arrives, or an emergency strikes, it can threaten an entire family's housing in a matter of weeks. Unemployment assistance is vital and&nbsp; we also need short-to-medium-term financial aid available specifically for rent, mortgage payments, security deposits, and utility bills. These programs should help people keep the homes they already have rather than forcing them into a far more expensive and traumatic crisis.</p><p>I will fight for federal grants to state-administered programs that provide this kind of support, including zero- and low-interest loans with appropriate repayment periods. California already operates down payment assistance programs for first-time home buyers, and we can use those programs as a model for temporary hardship aid. The cost of preventing a family from losing their home is far lower than the cost of dealing with the consequences once they have been evicted.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Legal Help for Renters</span></h5><p>Renters are almost always in financially precarious situations. When a landlord decides to raise the rent, refuse to renew a lease, or convert a property to a short-term rental, most tenants have no real recourse. Lawyers cost money tenants do not have. Housing courts move slowly. Eviction can happen faster than legal protection can be activated.</p><p>I will fight for federal funding for state-level programs that provide legal aid, mediation, and case management services for renters. Studies have repeatedly shown that tenants represented by lawyers are dramatically less likely to be evicted and far more likely to retain their housing through difficult periods. Right-to-counsel for tenants in eviction proceedings should be a federal baseline, not a privilege available only in a handful of cities that have managed to fund it locally.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Building New Homes</span></h5><p>There is plenty of housing in this country. The problem is that most of it is priced for buyers who do not exist, while corporations and tax loopholes encourage owners to leave properties vacant until someone is willing to pay an inflated price. Imagine a city full of vacant million-dollar homes. There may be sufficient housing on paper, but if it is out of reach for the people who actually need somewhere to live or it's too far from the places where people can find jobs, then it might as well not exist.</p><p>We need publicly funded home development at scale, designed to match the actual income needs of local communities. Most of that development should be multi-family, dense housing supported by public transit and walkable neighborhood infrastructure. New units can be tailored to the buying power of local residents through adjustments to size, design, and location. State and local governments should then sell or rent these units directly to residents, undercutting the inflated pricing of private developers.</p><p>Done at scale, public housing development would put downward pressure on private markets, create good jobs in the regions where it is built, and deliver some of the green and energy-efficient infrastructure the country urgently needs. I will fight to allocate federal funding for new home development, paired with the zoning and tax reforms that would actually allow it to happen.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Imposing Vacancy Taxes</span></h5><p>Across the country, residential properties sit empty as speculative assets while families struggle to find a place to live. Corporations and wealthy investors hold homes off the market, betting on appreciation. Short-term rental conversions take housing stock that was once available for long-term residents and turn it into hotel rooms. Foreign speculative investors, often seeking to launder wealth, and Wall Street firms accumulate properties they have no intention of using as housing at all. Meanwhile, the supply available for actual residents shrinks, prices rise, and the people who work in our cities are forced further and further away from their jobs and communities.</p><p>I support a federal vacancy tax framework that disincentivizes holding residential property empty for speculative purposes, with revenue directed to public housing investment in the same communities. Vancouver, Oakland, and a number of other localities have already implemented vacancy taxes and seen meaningful results. A federal floor would prevent corporate landlords from shifting strategies between jurisdictions to avoid local taxes, and the revenue would directly support the housing solutions communities need.</p><p>I also support strict limits on the conversion of long-term housing into short-term rentals like Airbnb, with federal tools that empower local governments to control the impact of these platforms on their housing markets. In the most affected cities, short-term rental conversion has stripped tens of thousands of units from the long-term rental market, and existing local regulations have struggled to keep up.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Creating Public Home Insurance</span></h5><p>I will fight to develop a public home insurance program covering all climate impacts, including flood and fire damage, funded through taxes on the biggest polluters. Public insurance would be designed around providing real security for people whose lives can be upended by a disaster they did not cause, rather than around maximizing profit. A program like this is especially critical in regions where private insurers have refused to write new policies or where premium rates have become inflated well beyond actual local risks.</p><p>For the private insurers who continue to operate in the market, we need to disincentivize them from ripping off policyholders, denying valid claims, and refusing to insure entire categories of properties. For the biggest polluters, we need to implement escalating penalties including fines that can't just be absorbed as the cost of doing business, criminal sanctions for executives directing illegal conduct, and the corporate death penalty for the worst and repeat offenders.</p><p>In some cases, homes have been built in areas that are increasingly prone to wildfires, floods, and other climate-driven disasters. Public home insurance should cover existing builds in those areas, but it should not be available for new construction in the highest-risk zones, as designated by state and federal scientific guidelines. The availability of insurance is a powerful tool for shaping where and how new homes get built. We should be using it to encourage development in environmentally sustainable areas with sustainable practices, rather than continuing to subsidize building in places we know will burn or flood.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ending Speculation and Corporate Concentration</span></h5><p>I oppose foreign, Wall Street, and private equity speculation on single-family homes. Over the past decade, institutional investors have moved aggressively into the residential housing market, buying up entire neighborhoods of single-family homes and converting them into rentals at extractive prices. This practice has pushed first-time home buyers out of markets, driven up rents, and concentrated ownership of the most basic American asset in the hands of a small number of corporate landlords answerable only to their shareholders.</p><p>I will fight for federal legislation that:</p><ul><li><p>Prohibits the bulk acquisition of single-family homes by hedge funds, private equity firms, and other institutional investors.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Establishes outright bans on foreign speculative purchases of US residential housing that are not used directly by the owner or their immediate family members.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Requires public disclosure of the corporate ownership behind residential property, ending the LLC and shell-company structures that obscure who actually owns the homes in our communities.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Empowers cities and states to enact stronger local rules against corporate consolidation of residential real estate, including rights of first refusal for tenants and community land trusts when properties are sold.</p></li></ul><p>These reforms tie directly into the corporate concentration and antitrust frameworks in my platform. The same logic that says we should not let a handful of corporations control our food, healthcare, or tech infrastructure says we should not let them control our homes either.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Fixing Zoning Laws</span></h5><p>You cannot build the housing this country needs on top of zoning laws that were designed to prevent it. Most American cities have zoning codes that mandate single-family-only housing across enormous areas, ban mixed uses, and impose excessive parking requirements that make new housing more expensive and walkable communities harder to build.</p><p>Many of the zoning reforms I support align with my walkable cities platform: mixed-use zoning, eliminating parking minimums, and planning density around transit corridors. For housing supply specifically, I support federal incentives and funding tied to local zoning reform that:</p><ul><li><p>Allows varied density housing, including duplexes, triplexes, courtyard apartments, and small multi-family buildings, in neighborhoods currently restricted to single-family homes only.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Eliminates exclusionary single-family-only zoning, which has historic roots in racist housing agreements and continues to lock in segregated, unaffordable patterns of development today.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Streamlines permitting and review processes for affordable and publicly funded housing development, while maintaining environmental and community oversight.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Creates faster pathways for the conversion of underused commercial space, including vacant offices and retail, into housing.</p></li></ul><p>Zoning reform alone, without the public investment and corporate accountability described above, mostly opens land for the same private developers and speculators who have driven the crisis to begin with. The reforms have to come together to actually deliver homes for working people.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Eliminating Predatory Fees and Junk Charges</span></h5><p>Renters in this country are increasingly subject to a maze of predatory fees that landlords have figured out how to charge on top of rent. Pet rent is one of the most egregious examples. Tenants who already pay deposits and additional security for animals are then charged ongoing monthly fees, often substantial, simply because they live with a pet. Application fees can run hundreds of dollars per unit, with no guarantee of approval. "Amenity fees" charge tenants for the privilege of living in their own buildings. "Convenience fees" charge people for paying their rent. New junk fees appear faster than tenants can keep track of them.</p><p>I will fight to ban predatory rental fees at the federal level, including:</p><ul><li><p>Banning monthly pet rent. Reasonable, refundable pet deposits to cover potential damage are legitimate. Ongoing pet rent is a tax on tenants for having non-human members of their family.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Capping or banning rental application fees, with limits on how many fees a single landlord can charge across multiple applications.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Requiring full upfront disclosure of every fee and charge associated with a rental, so that the advertised rent is the actual rent.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Eliminating fees for paying rent, including online payment fees, "convenience fees," and similar predatory charges.</p></li></ul><p>These reforms are small individually and significant together. They are also a useful test of which side a politician is on: the side of the tenants paying the rent, or the side of the landlords figuring out new ways to extract more money.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Making Sure Everyone Has a Home</span></h5><p>Housing is the foundation of every other thing a person does in life. Stable housing is what allows a child to focus in school, an adult to hold a job, a sick person to recover, an elder to age with dignity, and a community to form the kinds of relationships that hold neighborhoods and democracies together. A country that fails at housing fails at everything.</p><p>We can do far better. The reforms in my platform are the kinds of policies that other wealthy countries have already implemented to varying degrees, and that the United States used to consider mainstream public investments until the ruling class decided to outsource the basic necessities of life to corporations whose only obligation is to increasing profits for their shareholders year over year.</p><p>I am running because I believe housing is a human right and because the people of this country deserve a representative who is willing to fight for it.</p>

<h4>My Housing Checklist</h4>

<h1>Helping Veterans and Troops</h1>

<h4>Protect children and reproductive freedoms.</h4><p><a href="https://www.sistersong.net/">SisterSong</a>, the Black women-led collective that founded the reproductive justice movement, defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Their framework is tremendously helpful in reshaping our conversations around bodily autonomy. Reproductive justice is broader than the legal right to an abortion, though that right is essential. It includes everything that makes it possible for people to make free, informed, decisions about their bodies, their families, and their futures.</p><p><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-c-sections">Horrifying cases like Cherise Doyley's</a>, a Black woman in Florida who was forced into a court hearing on Zoom while in labor and told by a judge that she must undergo a C-section birth, are a window into the nightmares women face in today’s United States. The right wing has sustained an assault on bodily rights, and now they’ve set their eyes on banning mifepristone, medication abortions, and even contraceptives in general. We can’t just defend against these attacks – we have to boldly fight for broader, more comprehensive reproductive justice.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Recognizing The Right to Decide Not to Have a Child</span></h5><p>Women's rights must begin with the right to control their own bodies. The overturning of Roe and the implementation of state-level abortion bans have produced precisely the harms that advocates predicted: women denied miscarriage care, women forced to carry non-viable pregnancies, women criminalized for their own medical decisions, and a growing surveillance apparatus aimed at people seeking reproductive healthcare.&nbsp;</p><p>I will fight for federal legislation, such as the Women's Health Protection Act, guaranteeing the right to abortion nationwide, full coverage of contraception and reproductive care under any federal healthcare program, protection of the right to travel for care, and legal shields for providers who serve patients from states with bans. Reproductive freedom is not negotiable.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Safeguarding the Right to Have a Child</span></h5><p>For many people, reproductive justice means the ability to have children when they want them, with the medical care, support, and dignity that requires. I support expanded access to fertility treatments, including IVF, and I oppose every effort to restrict them, whether through state legislation, personhood arguments applied to embryos, or insurance exclusions that put these treatments out of reach for working people.</p><p>I also support dramatically expanded federal funding for research into conditions that disproportionately affect women, including polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis. These conditions affect millions of people, cause significant pain and infertility, and remain chronically under-studied because women's pain has historically been dismissed by the medical establishment. Increased research funding is long overdue.</p><p>Maternal health belongs here as well. The United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world. Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at several times the rate of white women. This is a public health emergency that is the direct product of bias in medicine, under-resourced hospitals in Black and rural communities, and a healthcare system that treats birth as a commodity rather than a right. The Cherise Doyley case is one data point in that larger crisis.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Respecting the Right to Parent in Safe and Sustainable Communities</span></h5><p>The third pillar of reproductive justice is the right to raise children in safety and security. That right has been undermined by decades of policy choices that have made it harder for working families to afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and the basic conditions of a decent life.</p><p>As a member of Congress, I’ll fight for an influx of federal funds to support universal childcare. No family should have to choose between a parent working and a child being cared for. I will fight for paid family leave for every worker, so that people can actually be present for the early months of their children's lives without losing their jobs or going broke. The broader themes of my campaign also directly promote the wellbeing of children: good jobs, livable wages, healthcare, and strong communities are crucial to promoting reproductive justice.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Stopping Domestic Violence and Promoting Healthier Masculinity</span></h5><p>Domestic violence comes, in large part, from the harmful ways we socialize children and treat people of different genders and identities. Women and girls are expected to be caregivers and are raised from birth to be that way. Men and boys are expected to be independent, violent, and emotionally stunted, which leaves many of us without the ability to empathize with others or express ourselves in healthy ways. That socialization is a choice, and it can be unlearned.</p><p>I want to be a good role model for men and boys as someone who has worked through bad socialization and come out the other side. My broader platform is designed to strengthen communities, which significantly reduces all forms of violent crime by prioritizing people's basic needs and supporting local economies. A country where people can meet their basic needs, feel connected to their neighbors, and see healthier models of masculinity is a country with less domestic violence, less community violence, and less of the isolation that fuels both.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Enshrining These Rights</span></h5><p>I support a constitutional right to reproductive care so that these protections cannot be stripped away by a single court ruling or a single election. Rights that depend on the composition of the Supreme Court are not rights. They are no more than temporary privileges. The people of this country deserve permanent protections and robust reproductive justice.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Ami Bera accepts Israel lobby and weapons manufacturer money. That may explain why he keeps sending our American tax dollars to support Israel and Netanyahu's genocide, apartheid, and war crimes.</p>

<h2>Foreign Lobbyists &amp; War Profiteers</h2>

Foreign & War Profiteers

<h1>Social Security and Medicaid</h1>

<h4>Support those who served.</h4><p>As veterans, we are used by war-hungry politicians and then forced to fight for care after the harms we suffered in service. As a disabled veteran, I know this firsthand. I oppose handouts to defense contractors while troops are on food stamps or living in barracks with black mold. I oppose sending troops to die in pointless wars. It is time we prioritize care for our veterans and troops and reform the military institutions that profit from their sacrifice.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ending Private Defense Contracting</span></h5><p>I believe private defense contractors should not exist. My goal is to bring all military functions back in-house, within the federal government. The profit motive that drives the military-industrial complex is the reason the Pentagon has never passed an audit, having failed every single one it has undergone, and it is the reason the military budget is so out of control.</p><p>Eliminating private defense contracting would accomplish several things at once:</p><ul><li><p>Cut the military budget substantially. I believe we could cut hundreds of billions of dollars in spending while actually improving our ability to achieve national security, because troops would no longer have to wait on private contractors to service their own equipment at exorbitant cost.</p></li><li><p>Remove the profit incentive for war. When companies and individuals can no longer profit from conflict, there are far fewer incentives for corrupt politicians to cause or support unjust forever wars, regime changes, or military adventures abroad.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Restore accountability. Functions performed by federal employees are subject to federal oversight, inspector general review, and congressional accountability. Functions outsourced to private contractors too often disappear into a black box.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Protecting the VA</span></h5><p>As a disabled veteran, I oppose every effort to privatize the Department of Veterans Affairs. Privatization is sold as choice and modernization, but in reality it redirects public funds to private healthcare companies, hollows out the VA's internal capacity, and leaves veterans with worse care and longer wait times. The VA, properly funded and staffed, can be one of the most effective healthcare systems in the country. In Congress, I will fight to protect and expand it.</p><p>An average of <a href="https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2024/2024-Annual-Report-Part-1-of-2_508.pdf">17 veterans die by suicide every single day</a> in this country, a rate nearly double that of non-veterans. On any given night, <a href="https://archives.hud.gov/news/2024/pr24-327.cfm">more than 32,000 veterans are homeless.</a> These numbers reflect the true cost of service, and they reflect a country that has not kept its promises to the people who served. Gutting the VA does not solve either crisis. Investing in it, alongside real investment in housing, mental healthcare, and economic security for veterans and their families, is the only path that will.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Taking Care of Troops and Veterans</span></h5><p>No service member should be on food stamps. No service member should be living in barracks with black mold. We can and should pay troops more, and we should guarantee living conditions that reflect the obligation this country has to the people who serve.</p><p>The money is there. It is currently being handed to defense contractors. Redirecting a fraction of that funding toward pay, housing, healthcare, and basic quality of life for service members would transform the lives of the people in uniform without costing taxpayers a cent more than they are already paying.</p><p>Our nation’s heroes living with limb loss often face new daily challenges, but it doesn’t mean giving up independence. Thanks to modern prosthetics and adaptive tools, many veterans thrive in everyday tasks like driving. Helpful guide on driving after amputation <a href="https://www.richmondvona.com/tips-driving-amputee/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><strong>Driving As An Amputee(➚)</strong></a>.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Ending Discrimination in the Ranks</span></h5><p>I served with transgender people in the military. They were excellent soldiers who could do the job. I oppose arbitrary discrimination against anyone based on immutable characteristics, and I support trans rights because they are human rights. Any service member who meets the standards and is willing to serve should be able to serve, period.</p>

<h4><strong><u>Healthcare is a human right.</u></strong></h4><p>Everyone should have access to healthcare, regardless of their employment status, their identity, or their background.&nbsp;</p><p>As a former healthcare worker, I saw firsthand how our pain generates profits for Wall Street, private health insurers, and big pharma. People have to ration medication, skip treatment, or avoid calling an ambulance because they can’t afford what should never have had a price tag in the first place.&nbsp;The United States has the most expensive healthcare system in the world with the worst health outcome of any developed country. In the richest state in the richest country in the history of the world, we need to do better. We should not be letting countries with a fraction of our resources and power run laps around us with healthcare.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Passing Medicare-for-All</span></h5><p>I will fight to pass Medicare-for-All: a single-payer system that covers every person in this country from birth, with no premiums, no deductibles, no copays, and no network restrictions. Healthcare decisions should be between patients and providers, not insurance adjusters looking for reasons to deny care to minimize cost and maximize profit. Medicare for All is far less expensive than the fragmented, for profit, fee-for-service system we have now.</p><p>Coverage under Medicare-for-All must be comprehensive. That means mental health, vision, hearing, dental, gender-affirming, and reproductive care are included. It also means lifting any caps or restrictions on the ability of Medicare to negotiate prices with drug or medical device manufacturers. The artificial distinction between "medical" care and care for our eyes, ears, teeth, and mind exists because it is profitable rather than for any health related outcome.</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Taking on Big Pharma and the Insurance Industry</span></h5><p>Pharmaceutical companies extract massive profits from drugs developed with public research dollars and then charge Americans more than any other country in the world for those same medications. I will work to fix this injustice through legislation that:</p><ul><li><p>Removes the statutory limits on Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices across the board.</p></li><li><p>Caps profits on any drug that relies on publicly funded research.</p></li><li><p>Bans direct-to-patient pharmaceutical advertising, as almost every other developed democracy already does. These ads just help drive up prices and pressure healthcare providers to prescribe overpriced drugs that may not be optimal for the best health outcomes.</p></li><li><p>Invests in drug intervention and addiction treatment. We need to treat substance use as a public health crisis rather than as a criminal issue.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Holds pharmaceutical companies accountable for things like creating the opioid epidemic.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Building the Healthcare Workforce</span></h5><p>We have a healthcare worker shortage because it’s exorbitantly expensive to earn medical degrees, the pay is not nearly as lucrative as most people assume until several years in, the job is immensely stressful which leads to high rates of burnout, and that's without accounting for the politicization of our health system by bad faith actors looking to punish their ideological enemies over differences of opinion by undermining trust in empirical data, science, and medical consensus. We need to help healthcare workers feel secure and comfortable in their career path. I will push for legislation that:</p><ul><li><p>Provides federal tuition funding for all public trade schools, colleges, and universities, including medical and nursing schools.</p></li><li><p>Creates and enhances loan repayment programs for healthcare workers, providing widespread debt relief as well as targeted relief for people working in under-served communities.&nbsp;</p></li><li><p>Allocates funding to support the opening of more medical schools and expands residency slots so we train enough clinicians to meet demand.</p></li><li><p>Protects the VA healthcare system from privatization and maintains it since it is currently the biggest training ground for the medical workforce. </p></li><li><p>Assists in recruiting and training healthcare workers from marginalized backgrounds. Patient outcomes improve measurably when patients can find providers who look like them, speak their language, and understand their lived experience.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Protecting Healthcare Workers</span></h5><p>We can't have a functioning healthcare system without protecting the people who deliver care. I will fight to:</p><ul><li><p>End subcontracting, independent contractor employment models, and the misclassification of employees as contractors. These practices strip workers of benefits, bargaining power, and basic protections in favor of employer profit. This aligns with the worker protections of the PRO Act and stronger labor standards.</p></li><li><p>Guarantee the right to organize without retaliation across every healthcare employer, public or private.</p></li><li><p>Establish safe, fact-based staffing ratios enforceable by federal law. Doctors, nurses, and techs should maintain patient ratios that allow them to spend ample time and care with each patient without causing burnout.</p></li><li><p>Strengthen workplace safety standards and OSHA enforcement for all workers, especially in healthcare settings where workplace violence and injury rates have increased substantially.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Advocating for Rural and Under-served Communities</span></h5><p>Rural hospitals are closing at alarming rates, and when they close, people die. Market forces are not going to fix this problem.</p><p>I will advocate for permanent federal funding and federal operation of rural and under-served medical facilities across the country. I will also promote the construction of new hospitals where none exist. Models like the VA and the Indian Health Service show that the federal government can run care facilities directly. We need to double down on funding for the VA and IHS and use that as a baseline for new facilities.&nbsp;</p><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Dealing with Mental Health and Substance Use</span></h5><p>I've helped people in the military and as civilians when they were in mental health crises, and I've been through those struggles myself. Mental healthcare has to be a core component of basic medical care. I will fight in Congress for:</p><ul><li><p>Full parity and integration of mental health into primary care, with walk-in access at federally operated facilities.</p></li><li><p>Increased funding and infrastructure for life preservation and suicide prevention programs, also supporting continued expansion and adequate staffing of the 988 crisis line and community-based crisis response systems.</p></li><li><p>Dramatic expansion of the behavioral health workforce through tuition assistance and specialized training programs.</p></li><li><p>Addressing the addiction, overdose, and suicide rates tied directly to financial stress, isolation, and lack of access. Programs that help people feel financially secure and connected to their communities are vital for preventing these harmful behaviors.&nbsp;</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Preparing for Pandemics and Public Health Crises</span></h5><p>COVID-19 showed us what happens when public health infrastructure is designed for profit instead of preserving public health. I will push for federal legislation that supports:</p><ul><li><p>Substantially increased federal funding for personal protective equipment (PPE) stockpiles and infectious disease preparedness, updated regularly so we are prepared for the next pandemic or public health crisis.</p></li><li><p>Ventilation and filtration upgrades in medical facilities, protecting both workers and patients from airborne transmission of pathogens.</p></li><li><p>Public health campaigns against health misinformation and disinformation, which has cost American lives and continues to endanger healthcare workers.</p></li><li><p>Stronger enforcement of safe animal agriculture practices since industrial factory farming is the number one source of novel diseases and pandemics in the modern era.</p></li></ul><h5><span style="color: var(--color-headline-secondary); text-decoration-color: var(--color-headline-secondary);">Promoting Equity and Inclusive Care</span></h5><p>Gender-affirming care is healthcare. I will oppose every attempt to strip transgender people of the medical care their doctors agree they need, and I will work to guarantee access through federal programs.</p><p>Culturally competent care has to be built into how we train and evaluate healthcare workers. Cultural competence can help reduce discrimination in delivering care, recruit providers from the communities they serve, require meaningful cultural competency training, and ensure language accessibility in every facility.</p>

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