Campaign

At a time when our country faces great uncertainty, one thing has remained constant – the men and women who stand on the frontline to defend the freedoms and values upon which this great country was built.

The service of our nation’s veterans spans every day of every year of every decade of our country’s existence. Over the past two centuries, our world has changed and the duties of the Armed Forces have changed with it. However, the bravery, dignity and honor of our men and women in uniform remain firm.

If there’s one thing it’s time for us Republicans to learn, it’s that maybe we should start paying attention to those within our ranks who have actually dealt with the issue of illegal immigration, rather than simply being satisfied with the talking points we've come to accept as the most conservative.
 
While Governor Rick Perry’s ill-fated presidential bid was immortalized by the word “oops,” this armchair quarterback still believes the moment that sealed his fate was the Florida CPAC debate.

The results of Tuesday’s election did not change the structural environment in Washington – voters chose to reelect President Obama and return a Democratic majority to the Senate and a Republican majority to the House of Representatives. Most of the same players will return to most of the same positions when the President and Congress are sworn into office in January.

But one change the election might presage is improved prospects for Congressional efforts to address America’s looming immigration crisis through comprehensive immigration reform. Long a hot topic in Washington, the last meaningful attempt at comprehensive reform of the immigration system was in 2007 – and it ended badly. A bipartisan effort led by President George Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy to address the millions of undocumented residents of the United States, deal with border security requirements, and meet the demands of the high skilled workforce fell victim to bitter ideological battles over “pathways to citizenship” and “chain migration” to name a few. Since then, every attempt to reform the system in a meaningful way has been stymied.

It would be easy for Republicans to blame party losses on Mitt Romney. Easy, perhaps, but not accurate. Data shows that Romney can make a stronger case blaming his loss on the party than the party can
make blaming its loss on him.

Romney faced an electorate not particularly enamored with the GOP. The CNN poll conducted right before the election pegged Republican favorability at 47 percent--five points lower than Democratic favorability at 52 percent. Republicans were under water, with their negatives two points higher than their positives. On the other hand, Democrats were seven points more positive than negative.

This year, election night brought results that would have been unthinkable four years ago: stunning wins for proponents of marriage equality for gay couples across the nation. This historic moment indicates how far the LGBT movement and the country have come in the past four years on marriage equality and other lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues.
 
Four years ago, President Obama’s win was tempered by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which undid the state Supreme Court’s ruling that allowed same-sex couples to marry. And given that Obama at that time did not support marriage equality, his victory left many LGBT Americans wondering when a sitting United States president would finally support this right.

Sequestration was never intended to be good fiscal policy. It was never intended to be policy, period. When Congress passed the Budget Control Act in 2011, they formed the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, more commonly known as the Super Committee, to cut nearly a trillion dollars from the federal budget. Sequestration – a fancy word for painful cuts to every area of the 2013 budget – was a failsafe in case Super Committee negotiations broke down.

The plan was simple: By passing sequestration into law, Congress was creating a deterrent against its own gridlock. The law was so unpalatable to both sides – Democrats wanting to avoid cuts to social programs, and Republicans wanting to safeguard defense spending – that theoretically, everyone would negotiate in good faith to avoid it. 

Today, we break all the records. Today, we have the first Asian American and Pacific Islander majority district in the continental United States, which I’ve been elected to serve in Congress as the representative of California’s 17th District. As of voting day, my campaign utilized over 20 languages* to get out the vote -- an inspiring reflection of America’s growing diversity and a testament to how other campaigns in the future will communicate. Read more...

This election, more than ever before, is comprised of many voices: Many communities, many ethnicities, and many languages, all coming together to form a more-perfect union. As a democracy, America’s electoral system depends on myriad voices being heard; it must be a priority to connect with those different voices in as many ways as possible.

In the 113th Congress, California’s newly-redistricted 17th Congressional District will be the first majority-minority district in the continental United States, with 51.55 percent of the total population made up of Asian-Americans, Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, and  17.46 percent made up of Latinos.

There's an evangelical pastor in Washington, DC, Jim Wallis, who said something that has always stuck with me: we don't need to go further to the left, we don't need to go further to the right, we all just need to go deeper.

With less than two weeks remaining until Election Day, I'd like to ask you to do something radical: STOP. That's right - just stop. A pretty uncommon ask from a politician, eh? Politicians are usually asking us to DO something. I'm asking you to take a few minutes and just stop.

In a potential replay of the 2006 campaign of North Carolina Congressman Larry Kissell, Democrat Gloria Tinubu, who won a smashing victory in a Democratic primary runoff, has gotten no financial support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in South Carolina’s new Seventh District.