Accountability
Washington works. Just not for you. It works for the donors who fund the campaigns, the lobbyists who draft the bills, and the members who quietly get rich on the side. That's not corruption hiding in the shadows. That's the business model. Breaking it was the whole point.
The real money is the money you can't see.
Refusing corporate checks is the easy part. The harder problem is the spending nobody discloses at all. In 2024, secret donors poured a record $1.9 billion into federal elections — nearly double four years earlier, and that's only what anyone could trace. It moves through shell companies and nonprofits that never name a single funder, washed through super PACs until the original source vanishes. The Supreme Court promised in Citizens United that this money would at least be transparent. It wasn't.
You have a right to know who's trying to buy your government. Overturn Citizens United, pass the DISCLOSE Act, and drag every dollar into the light. And yes — my own side does this too. That's the whole reason I won't.
Ban congressional stock trading. All of it.
Members of Congress vote on laws that move markets, then trade the stocks those laws affect. It's legal. It shouldn't be. Congress had its chance in 2026: a bipartisan bill to ban the practice outright and make members sell their holdings. It fell apart into loophole-riddled half-measures and partisan blame, and the real ban died. Of course it did — they were being asked to police themselves.
Do it for real: no grandfathered portfolios, no exemption for crypto or a spouse's account, no carve-out for the president or vice president. If you write the rules, you don't get to bet on the game.
Kill the filibuster.
A Senate rule nobody ever voted into the Constitution lets a minority block what a majority of the country actually wants — paid leave, voting rights, a real stock-trading ban, all of it. The last serious bill to force dark money into the open came two votes short of breaking a filibuster in 2022. It didn't lose on the merits. It lost to a rule.
The filibuster is a tool for stopping change, and it has worked beautifully. End it, and let the people you elect actually govern. A democracy where the side that lost gets to set the rules isn't much of a democracy.
Show up.
Accountability isn't only what's written into law. It's whether you'll stand in a room and answer for your record when the room is angry. Between 2015 and 2022, members of Congress held more than 25,000 town halls. Then, in early 2025, as constituents packed those rooms furious over cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, House Republican leaders told their members to stop — to switch to call-in events where staff screen the questions and a tough one gets cut off with a click. The instinct to manage voters instead of facing them runs through both parties, not one.
I held town halls in counties candidates write off, and I took the questions I didn't see coming. That shouldn't be remarkable. The bar is on the floor. You don't get to represent people you refuse to face.