Name: Sean Casten

What office are you seeking: US Congress - Illinois’ 6th District

What is your political party? Democratic

What is your current age? 54

Occupation and employer: US Representative for Illinois 6th Congressional District

What offices, if any, have you previously held? US Representative for Illinois 6th Congressional District (2019-Present)

City: Downers Grove

Campaign website: https://www.castenforcongress.com/

Education: Middlebury College (BA)

Dartmouth College (MS, MEng)

Community involvement: I have proudly served Illinois’ 6th Congressional District since 2019.

Marital status/Immediate family: I am married to Kara and have two daughters, Gwen and Audrey.

What are your top three legislative priorities for your first year in the U.S. House?

1. Making sure we have an economy that works for everyone. At the end of Biden’s administration, GDP was growing, job creation was surging, unemployment was low, and prices were coming down. All of those trends have slowed or reversed under Donald Trump, largely thanks to unpredictable tariffs and a weakening of the rule of law. We know how to fix it; we just need to stand up to the President, and I hope in the next term we have a majority in the House that’s willing to do what has not happened under the leadership of Speaker Johnson.

2. Protecting our democracy from the harm caused by the Trump administration. Congress needs to not only assert its oversight powers to act as a check, but also reclaim powers that were taken by the Executive Branch. Oversight will come if Democrats take the majority, but we also need to pass structural good government reforms, including but not limited to my governmental reform proposals, and use our power of the purse to withhold funding for agencies that refuse to comply with ethics and the rule of law - from ICE to the Supreme Court.

3. Addressing climate change and removing the barriers to cheap, clean energy deployment. I have crafted legislation to achieve this goal that is a compilation of ideas from all across Congress. I hope to make that the roadmap for climate policy.

What specific local issues in this district will guide your work in Congress?

I pride myself on the constituent services we provide to help people in the district make sure that they have access to all the federal services for which they are entitled. Since first being elected in 2019, we’ve resolved thousands of constituent cases and returned millions of dollars to constituents. Those numbers, though, don’t tell the full story, and whether it’s someone who got an expedited passport so they could travel to a family wedding, or a senior who finally got the Social Security Administration to acknowledge that they are still alive (this happens too often!) and collect back social security benefits, the personal impacts are enormous.

I’ve also brought tens of millions of dollars in federal funding directly back to the 6th district in specific Congressional authorizations, ranging from storm sewer repairs in Downers Grove to EV chargers in Bedford Park to recapitalizing teen centers in Orland Park. I’ve secured federal funding for Morton Arboretum to fund their programs to breed, plant, and maintain urban trees throughout the Chicagoland region, and one of the first major bills I passed - the Battery Energy Storage Act has provided $500M per year for the development and deployment of grid energy storage technologies that have a significant nexus at Argonne National Lab.

One of my larger and still incomplete projects is to push to ensure that IL-06 - and Illinois more broadly - gets our fair share of federal funding by virtue of appropriations formulas that are crafted to gain majority support in the Senate, where small population states are over-represented. Bill Foster and I have been - often lonely - voices in trying to reform programs like EPSCOR that steer research funding to low-population states regardless of the quality of research or community need. (It is very hard to argue that downstate, rural Illinois is less deserving of federal investment than rural Iowa, but an identical institution/community in Iowa has more access to funding dollars because of that bias.) Those biases are not limited to research programs - from highway funding to Medicaid, they are rife throughout the allocation of federal dollars. We had one major success when we were crafting the COVID relief funding, when we were able to persuade our colleagues that the health and economic effects of COVID scaled per person, not per state, which massively increased federal funding to Illinois - but only in that bill. We have much more work to do on that front.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly: while money is important, it’s not everything. One of the things I learned early on in my Congressional career is how much the tone we set as Federal officials shapes the tone of the community.

Particularly in these divisive times, that matters. Whoever we are, however we worship, whoever we love, we are all Americans first. Hatred and tribalism are easy to spread, but love and respect are the only way we remain theUnitedStates of America. My commitment to townhalls, hard conversations, standing up for our values, and treating all with respect is driven by my belief that we are better than we think we are, and that there is no conflict between standing on hard moral principles and showing respect to those who disagree.

What federal funding priorities would you advocate for this district, including infrastructure needs like roads, bridges, broadband, and transit?

As noted in the prior answer, current House rules allow me to advocate for up to 15 specific projects in the district every year. My selection process is driven from the bottom up so as to be responsive to the specific needs identified in our communities. This always provides a real-time pulse check on community needs. A few years ago, it seemed every community needed rail grade separations. More recently, requests have been dominated by water and storm sewer upgrades.

At a larger level, the biggest constraint to growth in IL-06 is transportation infrastructure. Metra would run more often and provide more connections to downtown if the tracks weren’t congested with freight traffic - and this is especially true on the south side, where the Belt railway dominates the economy - and traffic congestion. I was proud that we were able to secure the $43 million in federal funding for the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency’s (CREATE) 65th & Harlem Avenue rail project out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, but that is a fraction of the need.

Finally, I’m consistently struck by an enormous opportunity that we haven’t yet fully tapped, created by our schools and our national labs. FermiLab is just to the west of IL-06, and Argonne is nestled near the district’s southwestern corner. In between are all the science and engineering talent along the Warrenville road corridor, the employees of those labs who live in our communities, the two biggest community colleges in the state (College of DuPage and Moraine Valley), and the amazing public high schools that consistently rank at the top of the state. And of course, exceptional public and private universities throughout the Chicagoland area. From advances in quantum technology at FermiLab to developments in battery technology and supercomputing at Argonne, we’ve got an enormous resource to drive future growth. We’ve helped steer lots of dollars to the national labs, and set up our STEM Scholar program in part to help connect young high school students to careers and opportunities in those programs. But we have much more work to do.

How will you prioritize the concerns of your district versus the priorities of your party?

I have never felt any particular conflict between my political party and the people I represent. Everyone benefits when everyone has equal opportunity to succeed and equal protection under the law. America was not born perfect, but we have become better every time we expanded our democracy and expanded our vision of what it means to be an American. The progress of the civil rights era for minorities and women is not complete, but it is progress nonetheless. The fact that we stood up to fascism in the 1940s and to the Soviets in the 1980s made us - and the world - safer. Those may seem like partisan ideas now, but they all still benefit the people it is my privilege to represent.

Has Congress given up its Article I powers during the Trump administration? How would you restore congressional authority?

Congress, unfortunately, has a long history of ceding power to the executive branch that should be corrected. However, I would argue that Congress has not given up its Article I powers during the Trump administration as much as the Republican majority has simply chosen not to use the powers that they have.

Congress does have subpoena power, the ability to call oversight hearings, the ability to terminate Presidentially-declared national emergencies, the ability to hold uncooperative executive branch officials in contempt, and, of course, the power of impeachment. The Congress has the power of the purse and therefore the ability to compel the Executive Branch to faithfully execute the laws we pass, including but not limited to fully funding Congressionally-directed programs, from USAID to the Department of Education. The Senate has the ability to prevent incompetent people from serving in senior positions - and yet they confirmed vaccine deniers to run health care policy and alcoholic retired Majors to oversee our defense. Those tools all still exist; they simply haven’t been used in the last 2 years. With the notable exception of the vote to compel the release of the Epstein files, I cannot think of an instance this term when the Republican leadership was willing to act as a check on the Executive - and even in that case, they are not yet forcing compliance with that law.

But there is also a broader historic trend. There is always a political temptation for Congress to address problems in the nation by passing a law that directs (and, hopefully, funds) the relevant executive branch agency to solve it. But in the absence of clear guidelines and guardrails, those bills inevitably serve only to shift power from the legislative to the Executive branch. At our nation’s founding, most of the federal government was in the legislative branch.

In the post-Trump era, we will hopefully have an opportunity to reverse some of the Trump administration’s destruction. How will we rebuild agencies - from the CFPB to the Department of Education to USAID - that have been gutted by the Trump White House? Do we put them back as they existed before, or do we reimagine them in ways that assert more legislative control? That’s a complicated conversation, but I have, and will continue to argue for expansions - or, if you prefer, restorations - of Congressional power relative to the Article II and Article III branches.

Do you believe any conduct of the current administration needs to be investigated?

Where to begin? Who was granted access to the Treasury payment system? Did they exfiltrate any data, and did they have read/write access that has permanently compromised the code? What foreign governments have directly transferred money to Donald Trump and his family through their various cryptocurrency businesses, and what was granted in exchange for those payments? (I would specifically like to know whether the pardon of Chanpeng Zhao - who confessed to money laundering - was in exchange to payments made to his firm, Binance through Trump’s World Liberty Financial platform, and whether the lifting of travel bans on Justin Sun - who was accused of manipulating markets by ‘wash trading’ certain crypto currencies - was in exchange for purchases he made in a Trump crypto enterprise that allowed Donald Trump personally to extract cash from that business.)

How many people globally have died because of the illegal cuts to USAID and domestic nutrition and medical programs by OMB director Russ Vought? What is in the Epstein files, and why have they failed to comply with legally mandated deadlines for disclosure? What are they afraid of? I have submitted and/or joined other members in submitting formal requests to the relevant agencies on all of these questions, but it is by no means a complete list.

Has the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gone too far in its recommendations?

Unambiguously yes. Although I am more concerned with what they actually did than what they merely recommended.

It must be noted that DOGE was not Congressionally approved, operated outside of existing Congressional oversight, and consistently misrepresented the so-called savings they generated. They acted without authority, and it is a stain on the Republican leadership in the House and Senate that they refused to do the basic oversight necessary. One can disagree on policy, but it should not be partisan for members of Congress to defend Congressional power.

To the extent they generated any savings at all, they almost certainly imposed greater costs on the US Treasury; as Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Trump’s first administration, often noted, every $1 cut from diplomatic programs adds $10 to long-term defense expense. Slashing programs like USAID, Voice of America, and Fulbright Programs makes the world more volatile, exposing us to greater long term risks and expenses. That also applies domestically. Gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exposes more consumers to fraud and abuse, ultimately reducing trust and economic growth.

I still have significant concerns that those DOGE employees illegally accessed the Treasury Payment System that directs over $5 trillion per year in federal payments. I introduced a bill with Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan to prevent future access, which Speaker Johnson has not allowed to come to the floor.

How will you work across the aisle to pass legislation?

Having spent 20 years in the private sector before coming to Congress, I still find it odd that we evaluate members of Congress by who they work with rather than what they do. No one in the private sector gets praised for mediocre work just because they got along with someone who disagreed with their opinions on the Second Amendment, after all.

In the course of my time in Congress, I’ve always operated on the philosophy that members of Congress should do what’s right. They should act consistently with their values and the promises they made to their voters, and they should work with any other member who shares those goals without consideration for their political party. Judge us by our works, not by who we work with.

To that end, I have worked with Tim Burchett (R-TN) on legislation to allow teachers to write off expenses they incur for school supplies, with Ann Wagner (R-MO) on legislation to increase entrepreneurs access to venture capital, and with Pete Stauber (R-MN) on legislation to make sure our pilots and air traffic controllers have access to the mental health care they need. We worked together because we had common values, not because we came from opposite parties.

I have never compromised my values, nor have I ever chosen to work with someone just because of the letter after their name. And I don’t intend to.

Do you support term limits for House members, and if so, what limits?

I do not support term limits for House members, for the same reason I don’t support term limits for my doctor. Experience does not always lead to expertise, but there is no way to get expertise without it - and given the scope of Congressional responsibility, we should never force people to retire simply because they have taken the time to gain that expertise.

At a larger level, the basic bet of democracy is that the voters will collectively have the wisdom to choose the best representative. To force members to retire is to assume that the voters are no longer to be trusted with that responsibility. That is a slippery slope. However, it does mean that we need to be alert to any assaults on our democratic systems. I’ve consistently supported legislation to overhaul our campaign finance system and nationally eliminate gerrymandering - both of which provide undue power to incumbent members of Congress over their challengers.

I’ve also consistently supported the extension and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act to ensure that states and municipalities cannot selectively make it harder for certain communities to cast their ballot. Trust democracy - but never take it for granted.

Do you believe the President should have the constitutional authority to order military strikes and detain a foreign head of state without prior Congressional authorization? Why or why not, and where should Congress draw the line between executive action and its own constitutional war powers?

In virtually all cases - most definitely including Venezuela - no. In general, the only argument that I find convincing on matters relating to US military action without prior Congressional authorization is in cases where there is an imminent threat to the United States. But in those cases, such actions require immediate Congressional notification thereafter and authorization for continued engagement. Neither of those conditions have been met in Venezuela.

What is your position on U.S. intervention, specifically Ukraine, Israel and Venezuela?

Given the countries listed, let’s carefully define intervention. Should the U.S. provide diplomatic support and intelligence to allies, or to select members of a government that we fear could tip in an anti-US position? Should the U.S. share intelligence and sell both offensive and defensive military hardware to allies prior to that ally being engaged in a conflict? Should the U.S. provide such hardware if a declared enemy of the United States has invaded an ally? Should the U.S. invade a foreign country and seize their head of state? Should the U.S. put American soldiers in a foreign country to conduct kinetic military operations? And at which point in this chain of escalation does the Executive first have to secure Congressional authorization?

All of those scenarios constitute some degree of intervention, and each apply in various ways to U.S. actions in Ukraine before the election of President Zelenskyy, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to Israel for most of the last 75 years, to Venezuela today, to Vietnam, and to World War II.

At the most general level, I support intervention when it unambiguously advances U.S. interests and defends the post-WWII international order, provided that such intervention has secured the necessary approvals from Congress pursuant to the War Powers Act and from the U.N. Security Council. The United States is the only country that can effectively advocate for the rule of law and democracy, and - as we have seen in the Trump era - when we step back from those responsibilities, other countries step in. As it was put to me when I was in Madrid for COP-25 by a European parliamentarian: “bad things happen when the United States doesn’t lead.”As a practical matter, what constitutes the US interest and the rule of law is rarely black and white, and from Vietnam forward, there is ample precedent for engaging in extensive military action without Congressional or U.N. consent. I am not condoning that behavior, but simply noting that legal precedent is a slippery slope.

With respect to Ukraine, I have supported our engagement there since the start of the war. At the start of the war, I was reluctant to provide any military equipment that could reach into Russia out of fear that it could provoke a larger counter response into Europe. As the war progressed, I - and many of my colleagues - became more comfortable with providing longer-range weapons, especially as Russia began moving its missile batteries into Russian terrain, just beyond the reach of Ukrainian weapons systems. Whether or not one thinks my initial caution was justified, it is appropriate for Congress to be involved in those decisions so as to appropriately balance the US interest and global impacts beyond the zone of conflict.I have always been a supporter of a two-state solution that ensures security for Israelis & freedom & self-determination for the Palestinian people. Neither the current Israeli government nor the current political leadership representing Palestinians can be trusted, on its own, to guarantee equal protection, property rights & democratic governance for all in the region. That reality has made me a consistent supporter of providing defensive articles to Israel, while also insisting on accountability for Israeli citizens and elected officials who violate Israeli and international law in the West Bank and Gaza. It also requires elevating & partnering with more moderate voices in Israeli civil society.

Regarding a future Palestinian state, I consistently support humanitarian aid to address the needs of the Palestinian people, ensuring that assistance and basic necessities are not dependent on the policies of the Netanyahu government. I support strengthening institutions that enable Palestinians to exercise self-determination. There must also be accountability for Palestinians who violate international law, along with ongoing efforts to promote more moderate voices in Palestinian civil society.

Both of those examples are in dramatic opposition to the current situation in Venezuela, where Trump first asserted his authority to attack drug smuggling boats from Venezuela in international waters on the argument that drug traffickers are terrorists, then asserted his authority to capture President Maduro on the argument that he was indicted in the Southern District of New York and needed to be brought to justice to face trial and is now asserting that he has the authority to control and sell Venezuelan oil. None of those actions secured prior Congressional approval; all of their legal arguments would be outlandish if we applied them to our adversaries. Taken globally, I have great fear about what happens if China or Russia follows the logic Trump has applied in Venezuela, in Taiwan, or Eastern Europe.

What is your stance on border security and immigration reform?

I have always been fond of Ronald Reagan’s description of America as a “tall proud city… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace - a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here.”

That is the vision of America that drew most of our ancestors here, and we remain American only so long as we hold onto that vision. There is nothing about that vision that is inconsistent with border security, but we lose something essential to our character when we focus so much on keeping bad people out that we fail to let the good people in.

Recent decades have seen a surge of immigration to the United States. Some are driven by foreign factors beyond our control (political destabilization in Venezuela and Central America), some by natural disasters (hurricanes in Honduras, earthquakes in Haiti), and much is driven by the fact that the United States remains the place where the best and brightest want to come. The challenge I have observed in Congress over the last several terms is that while there is bipartisan support for increased border security, it is increasingly partisan to provide support to let good folks in. From the Dreamers and DACA recipients we’ve left in limbo to underfunded asylum courts/refugee processing facilities to the farmworkers we have welcomed when they give us cheap food but demonized as “illegal”... we can do better. I’ve been proud to cosponsor and help pass on the floor of the House bills to address all these issues, from the Dream and Promise Act to the Farm Workforce Modernization Act - and to provide increased resources for Border Security and immigration processing. I’ve watched in sadness and anger as my colleagues across the aisle remained silent when Donald Trump separated families at the border and sought to prevent Muslims from entering our country. And I’ve been frustrated when those in my own party overstated the cost of immigration and understated the benefits.

But so long as it remains partisan to uphold Ronald Reagan’s vision, it will remain a challenge to get proper, comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate by virtue of the Senate’s structure and rules, which allow a small, xenophobic minority to control what comes to the floor. That is one of the many reasons why I have so consistently called for the Senate to abolish the filibuster so as to at least allow themselves to vote on bills that are supported by the majority of their members.

Do you support changes to Social Security or Medicare to ensure long-term solvency?

Ensuring that Social Security and Medicare continue to provide economic security for American families requires working on both the cost and revenue sides of the ledger, but absolutely cannot include any cuts in services provided.

On the revenue side, both programs suffer from the fact that they are progressive policies funded by regressive taxes. FICA contributions are currently capped at $184,500 of W-2 income, which means that the wealthier you are, the less you contribute as a percent of income. Taking off that cap would substantially solve near-term challenges, and I was proud to co-sponsor legislation that would start that process.

On the cost side, we have huge opportunities to lower the price of health care in this country which would in turn drastically cut the cost of Medicare. We spend more per person per year on health care than countries like Switzerland and Germany, but have vastly worse health outcomes. Getting to those levels would free up ~$1 trillion/year in healthcare expenses, a significant portion of which would accrue to Medicare. That means defending and expanding the ACA and lowering the cost of prescription drugs, building on the work we did to impose insulin price caps and limited Medicare price negotiation for pharmaceutical purchases in the Inflation Reduction Act.

What should Congress do to address healthcare affordability?

The Affordable Care Act took a big step toward universal health care in the U.S., providing more than 20 million additional Americans with access to affordable insurance for themselves and their families. We expanded coverage by a similar amount when we expanded the ACA tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, and the failure of the current leadership to extend those subsidies before they expired at the end of last year is going to send approximately 17 million people into less affordable, worse care.

That is not to say that the ACA is perfect, but it does point out that the single best, proven way to lower the cost of healthcare is to provide universal health insurance. If you have health insurance, you are more likely to secure low-cost preventative care. If you don’t have health insurance, you are more likely to defer that care until you require much more expensive acute care.

The keyword here is universal. One does not need a single payer to have universal health care, and I am of the view that while there has to be a federal back stop, maintaining a private sector with healthy competition is the best way to ensure the best, lowest cost system - but only so long as the federal government retains an active oversight role to ensure that:

1. No one can opt out of health insurance. Universal has to be universal.

2. Robust anti-trust enforcement and consumer protections ensure that no one can take advantage of the obvious pricing power that exists when you have an urgent need for medical care.

3. Everyone should have a choice in their care - and ideally, everyone should have the same menu of choices - to ensure the benefits of competition.

4. Wherever possible, healthcare compensation should be tied to health outcomes delivered, not services provided. (For example, it makes no sense that Medicaid provides a lower reimbursement rate to doctors who provide primary care than to those providing specialty care. Setting prices that discourage low-cost interventions serves only to discourage low-cost interventions.)

5. Finally, since an effective healthcare system will always have to include socialized benefits to ensure that the poor, the elderly, and the incapacitated are never denied care just because of their ability to pay, we need to be especially vigilant about those places in the healthcare system where well-intentioned cross subsidies can create unethical - if legal - opportunities for excessive profits.

Over the course of my time in Congress, I’ve championed multiple bills to improve the ACA in that direction. Examples include expanding ACA tax subsidies, giving Medicare the right - and the obligation - to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies, and making sure that Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates don’t provide incentives to shift the most lucrative services out of hospitals and into private clinics.

Is the CDC a trustworthy, qualified source of information under RFK Jr.? How should public health policy be managed?

The CDC (and, it should be noted, the NIH) has exceptionally talented, scientifically-minded career staff. At the senior levels, though, are political people who aren’t so much hostile to science as they are unwilling to openly evaluate research results that disagree with their preconceived opinions. In a scientific environment, that’s sometimes even worse since good science depends on consistently failing to prove your hypotheses wrong - not simply stopping the first time you see a result that confirms what you wanted to be true. Furthermore, the push from Russ Vought at OMB (as spelled out in the Project 2025 Handbook he prepared prior to the election) has been to replace those career-level staff in all agencies with politically appointed toadies.

That is creating a real problem in all federal agencies, as good people, dedicated to public service, are being told either to do what the political leadership tells them or get fired. Some have been fired for refusing to back down. Some have tried to keep a low profile and do good work as quietly as possible. Some have quit rather than bow before a despot. And some have caved into that pressure.

As we sit here today, my sense is that CDC still has a core group of scientifically minded, trustworthy people, even if they are being forced to stay quiet. But every day under RFK Jr’s leadership is another day where a good person leaves. It’s important for all of us to let those employees know that we have their backs, and that there will be accountability when this horrible era finally comes to a close. Until then, we are going to have to depend more than we should on the good work done by states like Illinois to issue the best possible public health guidance, even if it contradicts that from the CDC. And once this era comes to a close, we have to insist on accountability for people like RFK Jr,. who, I fear, are going to be responsible for massive, unnecessary deaths.

How should Congress regulate artificial intelligence, if at all?

In the near term, the most important thing for Congress to do is to ensure that anyone who creates or uses AI systems is subject to the same legal obligations and protections as every other American. That means opposing all efforts to indemnify AI companies from future liability (including recent proposals to ban states from litigating against the same), and providing additional funding and personnel to our regulators so that they can effectively monitor and prosecute any crimes committed with AI systems.

As even those most casual users know, AI is a powerful tool that, at its best, is democratizing huge swathes of expertise. Whether you use AI to write computer code more quickly, to draft legal documents, to hunt for unexpected correlations in large data sets, or any of a thousand other uses, you’ve undoubtedly found it possible to do something for free that used to require access to professional expertise. To be clear, AI is decidedly not capable of creating new expertise. As I put it in a recent hearing, I can ask AI to write the story of my life in the style of a Robert Johnson song, but I can’t ask AI to invent the blues.

All of that should be welcomed, with one exception noted below. The risk that demands immediate legislation is that none of the AI developers have yet figured out how to write an AI module that will never break the law, much less one that will hew to a coherent code of ethics. The inability of the models to erect those guardrails is why we have AI models that are suddenly creating child porn, or encouraging people to commit suicide, or boosting ads for banks in ways that violate fair lending laws, or encouraging people to join hate groups. Not because those models were designed to do evil, but because their programmers haven’t figured out how to force them to be good.

That is, in a very general way, no different than any other technology. Fertilizer can be used to grow a garden or to build a truck bomb. Cough syrup can be used to calm your throat or as a raw ingredient for methamphetamines. Which is why we require the manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and, in some cases, the users of those technologies to minimize the opportunity for illegal activity and hold them criminally accountable if they do not.

AI should be no different. In the last administration, we worked closely with the CFPB to ensure that if credit card companies advertised on Facebook and the AI algorithms that boosted their ad were found to preferentially target racial groups that violated the Fair Lending Act, both the credit card company and Facebook would be prosecuted for such a violation. That is the right approach - but as noted, also requires that our regulators have the budget and necessary technical resources to monitor those crimes

If Democrats win the House in 2026, how do you feel about calls for impeaching President Trump?

I have voted to impeach Trump twice. In both instances, the Senate failed to remove him, although the second did gain more support from Senators of the President’s party than any of the 4 presidential impeachments that have happened in our history. I am on record as believing Trump is unfit to serve, but also more familiar than I ever thought I would be with the process of impeachment.

To that end, I think we need to think about impeachment more broadly than Trump. Numerous officials in the Trump White House, including Trump himself, have committed what I judge to be impeachable offenses. A partial list would have to include Hegseth’s use of non-secure communication channels, Noem’s withholding of FEMA funds and oversight of an agency that is murdering American citizens, RFK Jr’s actions to directly increase child mortality and Trump’s extensive violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution through his crypto ventures, refusal to comply with legal obligations to release the Epstein files, and more.

The challenge is not whether to impeach but rather how to triage this excess of impeachable offenses, given finite Congressional resources and public attention, because the measure of a successful impeachment is whether one succeeds in securing a removal in the Senate. I am in conversations with my colleagues about how to organize that triage process. For now, I would simply point out that the most important thing is to restore and reassert Congressional oversight and our power as a coequal branch. Every standing Congressional committee has the power to hold hearings, compel testimony, issue subpoenas where necessary, and every one of those committees has been delinquent under Speaker Johnson’s leadership. Let’s restore that oversight and follow those facts where they lead, including but not limited to impeachment and criminal referrals as warranted.

If Democrats win the House, what issues should oversight committees investigate first?

Every committee has oversight authority, and every committee should initiate oversight hearings within its jurisdiction. At the highest level, that oversight should be informed not by political retribution but rather by protecting the rule of law, Congress’s power as a coequal branch, and accountability against any federal employee who failed to uphold their oath to the Constitution and protect the Constitutional rights enjoyed by every American citizen.

I am on the record as calling for Kristi Noem’s impeachment in the wake of the murder of Renee Good and have noted that the failure of every Cabinet official on the “Signalgate” chat to fail to enforce classified protocols, Trump’s crypto-driven emolument violations and the failures to secure necessary Congressional approvals before commencing kinetic strikes on foreign countries and foreign citizens all constitute potentially impeachable offenses. On the Financial Services Committee, where I serve, we will have an important role in the crypto/emoluments oversight.

I have also introduced legislation and pressed Treasury Secretary Bessent on multiple occasions to provide more details on the illegal hack of our Treasury Payment System by DOGE, and specifically what role Secretary Bessent played to pressure individuals who were blocking DOGE’s access into retirement immediately prior to that hack. If we have the majority, I will push to compel the release of all information on that hack that he has, to date, successfully stonewalled.

What issues, if any, do you agree with Republicans on?

Republicans are not monolithic! I agree with Richard Nixon for creating the EPA. I agree with Ronald Reagan when he said that the day America stops welcoming immigrants to our shores is the day we give up our position of leadership in the world. I agree with George H.W. Bush for creating an international consensus to force Iraq not to invade its neighbors and then withdrawing US troops once that narrow mission was complete. I agree with George W. Bush for creating the PEPFAR program that has saved millions of Africans who otherwise would have died of AIDS. I agree with Liz Cheney when she said that people died on January 6 because of Donald Trump’s lies. I agree with Thomas Massie for pushing to release the Epstein files.

Should private equity and hedge funds be allowed to purchase so many homes?

While I share the concern that purely financial buyers may be pushing up home prices, I don’t think a legislative ban or limitation on purchases by financial buyers is prudent. That’s partly for definitional reasons: is a Real Estate Investment Trust a Private Equity? How about an individual who buys a 3-flat in Chicago, lives in one, and flips the other two? What if that individual gets some friends to co-invest with them in a private equity arrangement? But it also doesn’t affect the root cause. Financial investors like real estate because real estate investments tend to appreciate.

And real estate investments tend to appreciate because the majority of American household wealth is in their homes, and homeowners vote. We could make homes more affordable if we eliminated the mortgage interest tax deduction, or if we got rid of the federal backstop of 30-year mortgages - but any politician who did that would surely lose their next election.

All of which is why I believe that durable solutions need to focus on the supply side (which is often driven by local & state zoning and permitting rules rather than federal regulation) and by lowering the cost of capital for first-time buyers by defending and expanding policies like the Community Reinvestment Act.

Do you support or oppose the expansion of work requirements for SNAP recipients? Why?

No. SNAP already has income eligibility requirements, as it should, since it is designed to help the neediest among us. The work requirements serve only to send a message that says, “I want you to work, but I want you to work at a job that pays so poorly that you are eligible for food assistance.” That’s just cruel.

Who are your top donors? How often do you speak with them?

This information can be found in my FEC reports at FEC.gov.

How would you reform U.S. trade policy so that farms don’t need repeated bailouts from tariff impacts?

Get rid of the tariffs. They are bad economic policy and violate the Congressional power of the purse. I have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court to that effect.