POLICY ISSUES
This campaign launched March 11, 2025. Since the beginning, we’ve talked about taking a different path to achieve a different result. I intend to look at past, current, and future legislation through a lens of restore, reform, and repeal. What legislation has passed that negatively impacts our country and that needs to be repealed? What has been taken away that should be restored? And lastly, what in our political system needs to be reformed?
This isn’t your typical campaign, and this isn’t your typical issues section. Our intent wasn’t to tell people what to think, but rather to listen to their concerns. In response to what we heard, this is our plan to improve the lives of the people we seek to serve.
Foreign Policy
Our country has a long history of getting involved in conflicts that we didn’t need to be in, often spurred by nothing more than economic gain. Our military industrial complex is out of control. Our Department of Defense … sorry, “Department of War” budget accounts for nearly half of all federal discretionary spending in the US and tops $1 trillion tax-payer dollars annually. There are times when as a nation, we need to stand up for what is right, to honor our obligations and commitments to our allies, but war should always be the absolute last resort.
I want to at least touch on the two major international conflicts that the US has been most involved in recently: Ukraine and Israel.
Prior to 1994, Ukraine had the world’s third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. In 1994, the Budapest Memorandum was signed, an agreement where the U.S., UK, and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and borders in exchange for Ukraine becoming a non-nuclear nation and giving up its vast Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. Since then Russia has repeatedly broken this agreement, first with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then with continued assaults into eastern Ukraine beginning in 2014 and continuing into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine beginning in 2022. Under the current administration, our support of Ukraine has dropped significantly and, not coincidentally, Russia’s territorial gains and attacks have increased. We should honor the commitments we have made to our allies in Ukraine and continue our support both financially and with increased political pressure and sanctions on Russia.
The horrific October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas were an act of terrorism and are absolutely unacceptable. Israel has every right to defend itself and has long been one of our strongest allies. But much of what we’ve seen in retaliation is also unacceptable. Genocide is never the correct answer, and too many innocent lives have been lost in this conflict on both sides for far too long. We subsidize Israel’s military to the tune of billions of tax-payer dollars every year and many believe this makes us complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Israel continues to expand into the West Bank and commit human rights violations. I would support proposals for future military aid to Israel to be conditional and aimed at “aligning support with international law and human rights, focus on protecting civilians in Gaza, facilitating humanitarian aid, limiting settlement expansion, and pursuing a two-state solution.”
