It’s time to end the corporate takeover of our democracy. 

In the past few Congressional cycles, we’ve had front-row seats to see the impact that unchecked, unregulated, and unlimited money can have on our democracy. In a post-Citizens United world, we see billionaires buy elections, halt legislation that conflicts with their business interests, influence critical political decisions like cabinet appointments, and gut voting rights for communities that undermine their for-profit interests. Now more than ever, we must run full-tilt towards the work needed to have a functioning democracy that represents the will of the people — and that means getting first and foremost getting big money out of politics and ensuring every person’s right to vote is protected. 

We need to repeal Citizens United, ban corporate Super PACs, and publicly finance our elections. 

Year by year, the Supreme Court has chipped away at the Voting Rights Act and continued to disenfranchise Black voters nationwide. We need to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to protect and strengthen the VRA and reverse these assaults on suffrage. We need an end to racial and partisan gerrymandering and institute federal standards for independent redistricting commissions to create districts that actually represent communities on the ground. We also must end felony disenfranchisement that was intentionally used to strip Black Americans of their voting rights. Felony disenfranchisement has stolen voting rights from over 4 million Americans and a conviction should not take away your freedom to vote.

A majority of congressional districts in America are deemed “safely Republican or safely Democrat” and do not have competitive general elections. We support bold reforms to provide voters an equal say in our democracy. This includes efforts to expand the House of Representatives and the Fair Representation Act to create multi-member districts, ranked-choice voting, and independent redistricting.

We strongly support the movement to provide statehood for Washington D.C. and a referendum for Puerto Ricans to decide on independence or statehood.

Our federal immigration system is broken and we need comprehensive immigration reform to resolve its systemic problems. The right-wing response from both parties has been to fund billions in militarized police, militarized borders, and an endless deportation machine — which has done nothing to resolve underlying issues or end any bottlenecks in ou immigration system.

We must protect the 11 million undocumented immigrants in our country from deportation and provide them a pathway to citizenship. We can and must end the bureaucracy that makes immigrating to this country an impossible task for millions by reforming our asylum process, expanding our refugee programs, ending mass deportations, and banning private immigration detention centers that lock immigrants up for profit.

Even before Donald Trump unleashed ICE on our communities to terrorize, kidnap, and murder our neighbors, it was time to abolish ICE. Now, that demand is even more urgent. ICE was created in our lifetimes in 2003 as a product of George W. Bush’s War on Terror. For over 200 years, our country survived without ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. We don’t need a special enforcement agency charged with targeting, kidnapping, and killing undocumented immigrants.

American foreign policy has always functioned as an agent of American imperialism. But millions of Americans are not interested in seeing our government use billions of our tax dollars to fund genocide or wage endless wars abroad. Our foreign policy should lead with diplomacy and prioritize peace.

We must end all US military funding for violence abroad — from Israel’s ongoing genocide, apartheid, and annexation to the UAE’s funding of genocide and war crimes in Sudan to Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses and funding for war in Yemen. That funding, demanded and enabled by the establishment, Israel lobbies like AIPAC, and corporate defense contractors, has led us down the continued path of death and destruction globally. Donald Trump, alongside Israel, has plunged us into a forever war with Iran that has already spilled out into a broader regional war. His bipartisan-backed warmongering has led to global wars, unlawful coups in Venezuela and Iran, and crippling embargoes against Cuba — making none of us safer, killing scores of civilians, creating more refugees and asylum-seekers, and spending billions to line the pockets of corporate defense contractors while he defunds our healthcare.

We can start a new path forward by cutting the Pentagon’s bloated budget that is approaching $1 trillion dollars — despite never having passed an audit — and using that money to invest in our actual national defense by funding people’s healthcare, housing, jobs, and education.