Texas Congressional Election 2018 Political Courage Test

Abortion

1. Do you generally support pro-choice or pro-life legislation?
- Pro-choice

2. Other or expanded principles
- A Constitutional office must adhere to one belief-system before all others: Constitutional Law and Constitutional Rights. The Supreme Court has recognized a woman?s right to choose as Constitutionally protected. I will always be on the side of women?s liberty in that fight. Like most Americans, I am 100% in favor of reducing the number of abortions in this country, and that takes a three-tiered approach. First, we must make motherhood affordable. Second, we must reform our adoption system. Third, we must prevent unintended pregnancies via access to health care and education that allows Americans to make responsible decisions.

Budget

1. In order to balance the budget, do you support an income tax increase on any tax bracket?
- Yes

2. In order to balance the budget, do you support reducing defense spending?
- Yes

3. Other or expanded principles
- In any discussion on the budget, the future of Social Security and Medicare must arise. We must protect and stabilize these programs, beginning with combating efforts to privatize either program. Once privatized, I fear we would see Social Security and Medicare become less of a social safety net and more of a profit-making machine enriching anyone other than those who need the programs most. To ensure Social Security is around for the next generation, Congress should immediately raise the salary cap on contributions.

Campaign Finance

1. Do you support the regulation of indirect campaign contributions from corporations and unions?
- Yes

2. Other or expanded principles
- The Citizen?s United decision that paved the way for the current political mindset that grants individual rights to corporations is a travesty that we have seen play out in slow-motion over the last decade. I urge Americans to resist the mindset that Money Matters Most. Some politicians accept PAC money as long as it is affiliated with a cause they believe in. I disagree: if we decide some money is good and other money is bad, then we aren?t concerned about money in politics at all so long as the person with it has the right letter by their name.

Economy

1. Do you support federal spending as a means of promoting economic growth?
- Yes

2. Do you support lowering corporate taxes as a means of promoting economic growth?
- Yes

3. Other or expanded principles
- I support tying a reduction in the corporate tax rate to a hike in the federal minimum wage, offering partisans from both parties something they can accept. This minimum wage would not be a set dollar amount; instead, we would push for the usage of a formula that takes into account the community's cost of living, and offers a variable minimum wage that insures that all Americans have an equal opportunity for a living wage.

Education

1. Do you support requiring states to adopt federal education standards?
- No

2. Other or expanded principles
- Education in this country, has been held hostage by a movement known as ?school reform? but perhaps better labeled ?profiteering off student sorrow?. For too long we?ve been sold standardized testing and vouchers as ?solutions? for public education, but these solutions are really just band-aids for bullet-holes. Education isn?t about test scores or treating students as a defective cog in a testing machine, it?s about opportunity. Reduce the demand for standardized testing. Allow school districts nationwide to utilize the money once spent on the massive testing industry on other innovations in their classrooms, innovations unique to each campus, each district.

Energy & Environment

1. Do you support government funding for the development of renewable energy (e.g. solar, wind, thermal)?
- Yes

2. Do you support the federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions?
- Yes

3. Other or expanded principles
- There will come a time, sooner rather than later, when we will need to enact legislation reducing the output of greenhouse gases as a matter of species survival; it is far better to push for such legislation now rather than when we have no choice. There is an economic benefit to this: when Americans have pushed for innovation, we have often taken the lead in the world market. When we pushed for the moon, the materials, ideas, and innovations that resulted marked the dawning of the Information Age and the greatest economic upswing of the last century.

Guns

1. Do you generally support gun-control legislation?
- Yes

2. Other or expanded principles
- Like many Americans, I am sick of the cultural pattern we have set for ourselves in the wake of Mass Murder: a moment of shock and grief, a wave of partisan bickering that everyone knows is prelude to nothing, and then?silence. Rather than focusing our efforts and rhetoric on some overarching idea of ?gun control?, we need a laser focus. Take bump stocks off the market and prevent another Vegas. Reform the database system and prevent another Sutherland Springs. Improve the mental health system, especially when it comes to the young, and prevent a Columbine or a Newtown.

Health Care

1. Do you support repealing the 2010 Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare")?
- No

2. Other or expanded principles
- I would oppose any legislation that aims to dismantle protections necessary for the health of those Americans least able to weather the storm of debt that almost any medical procedure would incur. In my district, almost 60,000 people would lose health insurance if the Affordable Care Act is repealed. Moving forward, we need to not only strengthen and reform the Affordable Care Act to make it more efficient and more affordable, but we need to also look ahead to what is next. A single-payer system is the destiny of the American healthcare market.

Immigration

1. Do you support the construction of a wall along the Mexican border?
- No

2. Do you support requiring immigrants who are unlawfully present to return to their country of origin before they are eligible for citizenship?
- No

3. Other or expanded principles
- I teach in an urban school district. I look into the eyes of DREAMers everyday. I see what many people choose to ignore: that these students are as American as you or me. A clean DREAM Act is a priority for this campaign. I would urge the creation of a panel of experts to study immigration reform, made up of those who practice immigration law, those who enforce it, and those who have been through the current process and are now citizens. This is the only way to get informed, intelligent, and compassionate reform.

Marijuana

1. Do you support the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes?
- Yes

2. Other or expanded principles
- This is an issue that should have been dealt with decades ago, beginning with the immediate rescheduling of Marijuana. Scientific studies have been piling up over the years, all of which point to a conclusion that has been suspected all along: Marijuana poses significantly less dangers than the use of nicotine and alcohol. The federal government should reschedule marijuana, regulate marijuana?s sale and use, educate Americans on potential dangers (just as the Surgeon General does with the use of cigarettes and alcoholic beverages), tax each sale, and using the resulting revenue to fund programs direly in need of funds.

National Security

1. Should the United States use military force in order to prevent governments hostile to the U.S. from possessing a nuclear weapon?
- Unknown Position

2. Do you support increased American intervention in Middle Eastern conflicts beyond air support?
- Unknown Position

3. Other or expanded principles
- Neither of these questions can be answered with a binary choice of "yes" or "no". In 1914 a Serbian terrorist murdered an Austrian aristocrat and his wife in Bosnia. The death of two foreigners, in a foreign land, for a foreign cause, led directly to hundreds of thousands of American casualties and ended the era of practical isolationism forever. We ignored this to the world?s grief in 1939; we cannot afford to ignore it today. Our military is made up of precious American lives; we should deploy them only after diplomatic and economic tools failed.

Administrative Priorities

Please explain in a total of 100 words or less, your top two or three priorities if elected. If they require additional funding for implementation, please explain how you would obtain this funding.
- Once elected, my priorities would involve reforms to Immigration, Healthcare, and Education. A day-one priority would be to push for the passage of a clean DREAM Act, using the bully pulpit and social media voice available to any freshman congressman. Our healthcare system is a broken behemoth that will need not one solution or change, but dozens if not hundreds; I would push for utilizing the march-in provision of the Bayh-Dole Act to cap drug prices and reduce cost burden on Americans. Finally, I would push for an end to federally-mandated standardized testing in our schools.