As our community prepares for another fire season and the drought continues, I am continuing to fight for disaster relief for our district. At the forefront of my efforts is the reauthorization of the Wildfire and Hurricane Indemnity Program Plus (WHIP+), a vital program that provides direct payments to farmers and ranchers for crop losses from qualifying disasters, including wildfires, smoke-taint and drought. My bill, H.R. 267, the 2020 WHIP+ Reauthorization Act was signed into law by President Biden and will provide $10 billion to those agriculture producers impacted by disasters. Important for our communities, my legislation increased the support available to agriculture producers with losses of high-value crops. 

Our current immigration system is broken and we need comprehensive immigration reform.  I believe we need immigration policies that are fair, practical and respect the rule of law while also recognizing our heritage as a nation of immigrants. Among other priorities, I am fighting to protect the DREAMers, young undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children.  I believe they deserve a pathway to citizenship. I am a cosponsor of legislation that has passed the House of Representative that would do just that.

Additionally, I cosponsored and voted to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. This bill establishes a program for agricultural workers and their families to earn legal status through continued agricultural employment. This bill reforms also the H-2A program to make the program more responsive and user-friendly for employers.

I’ve also introduced legislation to remove barriers to naturalization for non-citizen military service members, veterans, and their families. My legislation would extend naturalization eligibility to more veterans and give veterans more time to apply for naturalization after their service. My bill will also help reunite the families of certain non-citizen service members by expediting the lawful permanent residence petitions for their spouses and children and allowing immediate family members of certain citizen soldiers to apply for lawful permanent residence.

Immigrants are an irreplaceable part of our country’s economic future, and we need to ensure that our businesses have the workforce they need to grow and prosper in our communities. A sensible immigration policy that meets the needs of our workers, immigrants and businesses will provide a stronger economic opportunity for our district.

I am an original cosponsor of H.R. 4, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.  I voted for this legislation that passed out of the House which restores critical protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and keeps the promise of our democracy for all Americans. Amid state-level efforts across the country to restrict the right to vote, H.R. 4 would prevent states and localities with a history of voter discrimination from restricting the right to vote by requiring these jurisdictions to preclear election changes with the Department of Justice. 

I also voted for H.R. 1, the For the People Act, legislation thats expands voting rights, changes campaign finance laws, bans partisan gerrymandering, and creates new ethics rules for federal officeholders.

As Chair of the Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee, I wrote legislation, the Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now (GREEN) Act.  This legislation which passed the House of Representative as part of Build Back Better, is the largest investment to ever pass out of the House of Representatives to combat climate change.  This legislation builds on existing tax incentives that promote renewable energy and increase efficiency and creates new models for technology to reduce our carbon footprint. If we don’t address climate change, nothing else matters as we won’t have a planet to pass on to our next generation. The GREEN Act is a critical step forward in our fight to tackle climate change head on and create jobs. 

I would seriously get southern California to build Desalinization plants so they coud create their own potable water and Northern CA can keep their water.

The laws we have are fine since they are not really being followed in the first place. We need to adhere to the current laws for 5 years to find out where we might need to fix an issue.

FIrst off We are a republic if we can keep it. Fight any and all social /marxist designs of life and stop the new world order direction that the left is pushing.

Regulating in a generic format may not be the best idea as each state has their own design coal is mined in Wyoming, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Kentucky but not California. Why create a regulation for Wyoming when it won't work in California. After looking at the production we may be able to say through out the states you can only have 30 PPM of manufacturing particles being produced.

The drought--and the devastating wildfires it has created the conditions for--are the greatest direct threats to our lives, homes, businesses, and communities at large here in California’s 4th District. If I am successful in my bid for Congress, I would aim to use every tool available at my disposal as a Federal leader and steward to our environment to ensure that water conservation and management efforts are supported and well-funded so that we are collectively prepared for the worst in the event of future disasters. This would include collaboration with my Congressional colleagues who share jurisdiction over the watersheds in our respective districts to work in tandem with local, state, and federal agencies (such as the State Water Resources Control Board, National Marine Fisheries Service, the Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Solano, and Yolo County Farm Bureaus, and the California Department of Water Resources) to ensure that our communities are well-equipped to preserve water. I believe that the State of California's decision to reduce State Water Project allocations from 15% to 5% is wise given the present drought conditions, and I will use my platform to encourage my constituents to conserve water as much as possible in our communities until drought conditions have run their course.

I believe that the US should provide greater opportunity for immigrants to come here legally to meet employer needs and that Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the U.S. permanently with a clear path to citizenship. We are a nation of immigrants from every land, culture, and society. I believe that we are the Citadel of Liberty for all who are or would be free, and it is my belief that those who would be our brothers and sisters in freedom should be encouraged to join us with greater support for assimilation than what we currently provide. Those who would pay our taxes, follow our laws, and participate in our grand experiment should be welcomed rather than shunned and it should be easier to come here through proper legal channels than we’ve made it. The American Dream applies to “all men,” and I hold to this notion with conviction and love for all. E Pluribus Unum.

I plan to continue the work of the civil rights leaders who came before me to ensure that we establish a more perfect Union, first and foremost by defending the right to vote through efforts like passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and making Election Day a National Holiday. We must ensure that we have equality of opportunity for all of our citizens under the law, and that our rights are not infringed by tyrannical governments or increasingly powerful private corporations and their lobbyists. As such, I would also like to add my voice to the cause of overturning Citizens United to get corporate money out of politics as well as support ranked-choice voting initiatives to break the duopoly of the two-party system.

Climate change is a global issue, but affects our local communities directly in the form of droughts and wildfires, and I plan to use this platform to take on climate change head on through legislation that influences the largest greenhouse gas emitters in energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and single-use packaging to encourage greater development of green, renewable, and sustainable alternatives to preserve our environment for future generations. Instead of providing billions in subsidies to the failing coal industry, we should be investing in the next generation of green energy. We can build thousands of charging stations across rural areas to make the idea of an electric car more realistic. An investment in green energy like this would create millions of good-paying, blue-collar, union jobs (Jobs that only require a high school degree in many instances).

What’s more, Congress has failed to do anything meaningful to curb the production single-use “disposable” plastics. World-wide less than 10% of plastic items are recycled, meaning that of the 300 million tons of plastic produced each year, most of it ends up in landfills or the environment, particularly in our water supply. There is only so much voting that consumers can do with their wallets to put a dent in the manufacturing of this plastic packaging, and I would seek to put Federal regulations on the production and sale of non-recyclable, single use plastic materials to facilitate investment in and the production of sustainable alternatives. This would greatly facilitate the reduction of microplastics in our food chain and water supply, as well as crack down on one of the leading sources of carbon emissions produced in manufacturing. If we want to tackle pollution and climate change in tandem, attacking non-sustainable waste is a great place to start.

Yes, immigration policy really begins as foreign policy. The fact is that the US has been propping up some very oppressive governments in South America for a very long time, not just financially but militarily. We do this so that US corporations can continue to underpay those workers and provide worse working conditions. The possibility of "moving overseas" has in turn hurt workers here by keeping wages down and by blocking unionization. If we helped South American countries develop their economies, or just left them alone to develop, there would not be an immigration problem. An immigrant who has been living here for years is an American. If they don't have documents, then give them documents.

As we are seeing right now, when there is not enough fuel, everything is affected. We need a massive, fast-paced investment into the construction of renewable energy