Candidate Q&A
Why are you running?
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for the people what they can’t readily do for themselves. What I love about this job is that it allows me to do that - from small things like steering local investments in our communities to huge things like working to craft the COVID fiscal rescue package and accelerate the deployment of lower-cost energy infrastructure. What I fear about this job is how many of my colleagues choose to demonize public service - or worse, to use the awesome power of our government to impose harm on the weakest and most vulnerable.
I’ve been struck over the last 2 years by how many Americans wonder whether they can trust our government any more to live up to Lincoln’s vision. From a woman at a July 4th parade who asked me, “is our democracy going to survive?” to an 18-year-old volunteer at a food pantry who asked me “why should I be hopeful?” Too many Americans are wondering why a government that supposedly represents them is wasting time on wars that drive up the price of gasoline and imposing tariffs that drive up the price of everything else as they bulldoze our national monuments and post AI slop for no obvious purpose beyond trolling and self-aggrandizement.
And so here we find ourselves with a desperate need for oversight, and to commence the hard work of repairing, rebuilding, and fixing institutions that proved far too fragile at this moment. That is, undeniably, a project that “the people can’t readily do for themselves”. And it is the project I am committed to in the 120th Congress.
What do you think is the most pressing issue facing your constituents and how do you plan on addressing it?
We have to restore the guardrails of democracy that Trump has broken. Our founders created a government where only 6% of Americans could vote (white, Christian, property-holding men), and even they could not vote for Presidents or Senators. Every step we have made to expand democracy has made our country better - the 15th, 17th, and 19th amendments most obviously. The Trump Administration has attempted to take us back. To that end, I have introduced legislation to make our government more responsive and will continue to fight for reforms that close the gap between the fundamental decency of the American people and the bias against truly representational democracy that still exists in the structure of our government.
As long as I’m fortunate enough to have this job, I will use my public voice to remind us that we are all Americans first. It is too common and too easy to default to tribalism. Any of us who have ever thought differently of a neighbor because of the yard sign they put up in the last election knows that temptation. Everything the Trump Administration has done in the last year – from the invasion of ICE into our community to pardoning those who attacked our Capitol on January 6th – is in an attempt to further that polarization, completely disregarding the harm to Americans caused along the way. We must not let him win.
What is one unique challenge your district faces and how do you plan to address it?
I’m not sure this is unique, but the top issue that keeps coming up during my meetings and monthly town halls is a general angst about the state of our country - and specifically, the sense that the future our parents promised us no longer seems attainable. Sometimes it’s a nervousness about inflation chewing up all their spare income. Sometimes it’s the fear that an armed ICE officer can’t be trusted to protect their rights. Sometimes it’s the fatalism that comes when you believe that the laws you live by don’t seem to constrain the rich and the well-connected. But in all cases, the challenge is not one that can be solved by the creation of a law. It’s a challenge that demands the creation of hope.
Of course, there is legislation that we have worked on to address those issues - from my Energy Bills Relief Act to lower costs to my government reform bills to reduce the power of outside money in our political system. But I think it’s just as important to be hyper-present in the community, whether meeting with small businesses and human service organizations in informal settings or having more formal town halls where all questions are welcome. All are critical to show that we listen, to demystify the way government works, and to help us all see that American democracy was never perfect and never guaranteed. It has survived this long not because it started perfect but because every generation did their part to make it a little better. The hope comes from knowing that we are part of a process of improvement. Our parents gave us that hope; it is now our challenge to do the work so that we can honestly pass the same along to our children.
What do you think federal immigration reform should look like?
I have always been fond of Ronald Reagan’s description of America as a “tall proud city… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace - a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here.”
That is the vision of America that drew most of our ancestors here, and we remain American only so long as we hold onto that vision. Unfortunately, that’s also become a partisan idea, and while there have always been xenophobic voices in our society, it is rare to have federal policy being set by one from the White House.
The abuses by ICE in Illinois, Minnesota, and beyond are sickening. But for the federal supremacy clause, there would be legitimate grounds for prosecution of any number of ICE agents who have broken into people’s homes without probable cause, who have arrested and detained without due process, and who have committed unspeakable acts of violence, up to and including murder. The rule of law cannot survive if those tasked with enforcing the law refuse to hold themselves to account, which is a part of why I called for Kristi Noem’s impeachment.
We need to get back to an immigration policy based on facts. Of course we want secure borders. But we also have to acknowledge the objective truths that legal immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native born citizens, and that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates. That visa overstays, DREAMers, farm workers, and refugees/asylum seekers make up the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants in the United States. An immigration policy based on facts has no conflict with people’s Constitutional rights.
How should Congress address the rising costs of health care?
The Affordable Care Act took a big step toward universal health care in the U.S., providing more than 20 million additional Americans with access to affordable insurance for themselves and their families.
That is not to say that the ACA is perfect. I am of the view that while there has to be a federal backstop, maintaining a private sector with healthy competition is the best way to ensure the best, lowest-cost system - but only so long as the federal government retains an active oversight role to ensure that:
- No one can opt out of health insurance. Universal has to be universal.
- Robust anti-trust enforcement and consumer protections ensure that no one can take advantage of the obvious pricing power that exists when you have an urgent need for medical care.
- Everyone should have a choice in their care.
- Wherever possible, healthcare compensation should be tied to health outcomes delivered, not services provided.
- Finally, since an effective healthcare system will always have to include socialized benefits to ensure that the poor, the elderly, and the incapacitated are never denied care just because of their ability to pay, we need to be especially vigilant about those places in the healthcare system where well-intentioned cross-subsidies can create unethical - if legal - opportunities for excessive profits
What approach would you take on tax policy and what is your top priority?
At the most general level, (a) tax revenue needs to be sufficient to pay for all the services the public expects government to provide and (b) tax rates should be set to follow the old principle: “to he whom much is given, much is expected.”
A government that runs consistently in the red and where the wealthiest Americans often have the lowest marginal tax rates violates both principles. Donald Trump’s recent “One Big Beautiful Bill” violated both principles by adding $4 trillion to our debt in the course of further lowering taxes for our nation’s richest. Those cuts (which of course were in addition to the similarly skewed cuts in Trump’s first term from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003) have not only increased our national debt but also have contributed to the wealth inequality that is the fuel undergirding so much of our current populist outrage. Returning to Clinton-era tax rates will help our fiscal and political situation.
All that said: my top priority is simply to fully fund the IRS. For years, Congress has found it politically easy to demonize public service generally, and the IRS specifically. And that has left us with an agency that has woefully out-of-date IT systems and a woefully understaffed, underappreciated workforce. Anyone who has ever spent an afternoon in frustration trying to figure out why their refund check hasn’t arrived on time has seen the results firsthand. But the fiscal consequences are just as massive as they are underappreciated. In Donald Trump’s first term, the head of the IRS told us that the “tax gap” - that is, the gap between taxes due and taxes collected - is almost $1 trillion every year. Even worse, he noted that the IRS’ response to its own finite resources is to prioritize its audit team on the simplest cases. Since wealthier people and corporations also have more complicated tax returns, that means that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to get away with tax fraud.
The Inflation Reduction Act included provisions directly in response to that testimony that added another 80,000 IRS agents and included significant funding to implement a 10-year modernization of IRS IT infrastructure. And every one of those efforts to fully fund the (white-collar) police was reversed in the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. That’s not beautiful. It’s not fiscally responsible. It’s just theft. No fiscally responsible business would fire its collections department, and no company without a collections department will stay in business, no matter how they set their prices. We shouldn’t run the government that way either.
Is the House currently using its oversight powers in the way it should be? What areas of government need more or less oversight?
For all practical purposes, Congress has done no oversight of the Trump administration over the last two years. Congress was never intended to be a rubber stamp for the President. As James Madison said, Congress should be a rival to the executive where the ambition of one should “counteract” the ambition of the other.
How did Donald Trump generate billions of dollars of wealth from his crypto ventures since his re-election? What foreign governments bought his crypto and what did they get in exchange? Who in DHS is being held accountable for ICE’s extrajudicial killings? Is the jet provided by Qatar a national security risk? Who else did Pete Hegseth copy on unsecured networks that didn’t include Jeffrey Goldberg? What’s behind all the redactions in the Epstein files? Under what legal authority did the US seize Venezuelan oil, and where is the audit trail on the subsequent cash flows?
This is but a partial list of the oversight that should have been done over the past two years. Assuming a democratic majority, all these will come under scrutiny in the next term, and we are working now to prioritize these activities and triage. Given my role on the financial services committee, I am particularly focused on the crypto and Venezuelan oil issues and would expect to play an active role on both in the next Congress.
In addition to explicit oversight, Congressional appropriations is a powerful and underused tool to assert Congressional authority; while we certainly ought to seriously consider the President’s budget request as we appropriate funds, we should not simply act as a rubber stamp. I expect much closer scrutiny of military spending, especially as it relates to conflicts that the White House has entered without Congressional authorization in Iran and Venezuela. I have also sought to add conditions on Supreme Court appropriations so as to compel the Court to adopt a binding code of ethics.
What is the most pressing foreign policy issue facing the country and what role should the House play in dealing with it?
Our biggest foreign policy risk right now is unambiguously the weakening of foreign alliances that has been triggered by Trump’s foreign policy. Over the past 2 years, I have had conversations with officials in foreign governments who have always been US allies who have acknowledged that they are reconsidered how much intel they shared with us after seeing the shoddy protocols in “Signalgate”, others who noted that normal coordination of naval movements in the North Atlantic had to adjust to US saber rattling in Greenland and others who observed that commercial relationships with China that should be subject to national security checks are being looked at more leniently as relates to electric vehicle sales in light of US tariff policy and our misadventures in Iran.
This is in no way meant to dismiss the very real kinetic threats we face from our historic adversaries in Iran and Russia, nor the destabilization that would come from a Chinese attack on Taiwan, nor from the dozens of other ongoing conflicts that risk expanding into greater regional problems. But we have managed those risks for the last 80 years by maintaining a robust bloc of allies with common values and interests. When the President of the United States justifies the invasion of Venezuela by saying “to the victor belong the spoils,” he is not only rejecting that international consensus, but creating a much greater risk. The millions of soldiers who died in World War I were not inspired to fight just because a 19-year-old anarchist killed an Archduke, after all. But the fuel that turned that spark into a global fire was the isolationist, self-interested global (dis)order that Trump’s foreign policy is steering us back into.
The recent House votes to block further Iranian invasions under the War Powers Act were appropriate, necessary, and insufficient responses to that backsliding. We should be using all of our oversight powers to investigate, expose any violations of US and international law by Trump administration officials, and prepare for prosecutions as necessary once we have an Attorney General who prioritizes and venerates the rule of law over loyalty to a President. In the absence of an Executive branch that is meeting its constitutional requirement to “faithfully execute” the law, we should be using our appropriations authority to condition funding to federal agencies to help compel that compliance.
Over the past two years, we have not had the support of Speaker Johnson or the Republican majority to do any of those things, of course, but the public pressure (from other members, but also from civil society writ large) has been critical to persuade some of our Republican colleagues to join us in opposing the Iran war and Trump’s tariff policy. Personally, I have also spent much more time this term in communication with our European allies to maintain parallel-track diplomatic discussions and maintain some of the continuity that is being eroded from the Executive Branch, the better to rebuild those relationships once the Trump era comes to a close.
How do you view AI and the role the government should play in its regulation?
AI should be viewed (and regulated) in the same way as any other technological advance. We should embrace and encourage its beneficial uses, condemn and block its most dangerous uses, and in all cases ensure that its manufacturers and users are subject to the same civil and criminal liability as any other technology producer or consumer if they break existing laws.
The AI industry has - to put it mildly - not been a cooperative partner in that endeavor.
Imagine a world where a pharmaceutical company released a drug without doing any prior testing that was subsequently used by millions of people and then announced not only that their drug could kill you but also that their disclosure of that fact was proof of their moral candor. There would be mass public outrage. There would be demands to take the drug off the market and destroy all doses. There would be demands for government regulation and accountability.
Instead, the AI industry had the gall to ask Congress to pass legislation that would pre-empt them from any state-level civil liability.
None of this is to ignore the remarkable advances that AI is making possible in virtually every part of our economy. It is simply to note that Richard Feynman’s observation that all science is a moral endeavor is still true. The scientist or engineer working at the frontier of human knowledge always has to choose which use to pursue, and to anticipate how less moral agents will use their knowledge. To ignore that obligation is only to place a greater burden on government regulators to protect society from those risks.
In the near term, Congress should ensure that anyone who creates or uses AI systems is subject to the same legal obligations and protections as every other American. That means opposing all efforts to indemnify AI companies from future liability, providing additional funding and personnel to our regulators so that they can effectively monitor and prosecute any crimes committed with AI systems, and using our oversight powers to expose and amplify violations that may be subject to subsequent civil action.
How would you describe the current state of your party and what changes or new approaches would you like to see your party adopt?
As a policy matter, I reject the premise of the question. Not because I don’t have policy views that are perfectly aligned with the Democratic Party, but rather because the diversity of ideas we want in our government writ large is just as valuable in a political party. We must acknowledge that a governing entity broad enough to accommodate that breadth of opinion is also broad enough to accommodate the diversity of ideas among the people we represent.