Your body, your decision.

Four years after the Supreme Court tore up the federal right to abortion, the country is a patchwork — protected in some states, criminalized in others. In states with bans, women have been turned away from emergency rooms mid-miscarriage because doctors fear prosecution more than they fear a patient bleeding out. The harm falls hardest on Black women, who already die in pregnancy and childbirth at far higher rates than white women.

Maryland is a safe harbor: voters wrote reproductive freedom into the state constitution in 2024, and this year the legislature codified emergency abortion care into state law. But safe is relative. Anti-abortion officials are now targeting mifepristone, the most common and safest method, in a case that could choke off mailed prescriptions even in states like ours. Protect access here, guarantee emergency care, defend medication abortion, and restore the federal right Dobbs destroyed.

I'm a bisexual man. This one's personal.

The country is living through the harshest rollback of LGBTQ+ rights in a generation, and it's coming from every direction at once. The Supreme Court let states ban gender-affirming care for trans kids, and 26 states now do. The administration declared in policy that transgender people effectively don't exist, stripped their care from federal health plans, forced trans service members out of a military they volunteered to defend, and erased the "X" marker from passports so people can't carry an ID that matches who they are.

I know what it's like to grow up hiding a part of yourself. No kid should have to, and no adult should lose their doctor, their job, or their standing as a citizen over who they are. Pass the Equality Act, protect gender-affirming care and marriage equality, and write anti-discrimination protections into law where no executive order can erase them.

They gutted the Voting Rights Act. Maryland answered.

In April 2026, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision that for sixty years stopped states from drawing maps that erase the voting power of Black and brown communities. Justice Kagan called it the "now-completed demolition" of the law. The fallout is already in motion: analysts project Republicans could pick up more than 190 seats across Southern statehouses, most of them currently held by Black legislators.

Maryland didn't wait. The day before the ruling, the governor signed a state Voting Rights Act and put it plainly: "Even if Washington won't protect your vote, I will." That's the model. Pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore federal protection, and back state voting rights acts everywhere they can be won. A democracy that lets the powerful pick their voters isn't one.

Disability is not an afterthought.

Tens of millions of Americans live with a disability, and the systems meant to serve them are still built as an afterthought. Start here: in 2026, it is still legal to pay a disabled worker less than the minimum wage. Under a 1938 loophole the Labor Department just declined to close, some workers with disabilities earn pennies an hour. At the same time, the Medicaid cuts moving through Washington are gutting the home- and community-based care that lets disabled people live in their own homes instead of institutions.

I live with a chronic condition myself, so none of this is abstract to me. The Americans with Disabilities Act was a promise. Thirty-six years later, it's still only half-kept. End the subminimum wage, protect home-based care, and enforce the ADA like it means something.

Nobody consented to this.

Artificial intelligence has made it trivially easy to fabricate explicit images of real people who never agreed to any of it. The targets are overwhelmingly women and girls — one study found tens of thousands of fake intimate images of members of Congress, nearly all of them women. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, now in effect, finally makes this a federal crime and forces platforms to pull the images within 48 hours. That's a start, not a finish. Victims still often can't sue the people who made the images. The DEFIANCE Act would fix that, and it's stuck in the House. Pass it. And don't let a giveaway buried in some tech bill — a moratorium banning states from regulating AI — quietly wipe out the protections survivors just won.