My Agenda

I’ve been asked to post an overview of where I stand on various policy issues and what my agenda would be in office.

The first, longest, and most detailed section is the one policy that makes all the others possible: reining in executive power and restoring the authority given to Congress in the US Constitution.

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Restore the American System

Our top priority is to restore the power of Congress and rein in an out-of-control president. There are a lot of good things we would like to do, but Congress has to have real power first, and our first priority is to assert that power and keep the president from undermining it.

There are real things Congress can do, based on established precedents.

Use the power of the purse. Congress controls spending, and this is the big stick the Constitution gave us to keep the president in line. We don’t need to settle for symbolic victories. We should make it clear that this administration won’t get our permission to spend a single dime until they make real concessions. This is the leverage we can use to get everything else on this list.

Use earmarks to put Congress in control. A specific way Congress can use the power of the purse against the president is to mandate money for specific purposes and recipients, removing the president’s discretion about when to spend money and who gets it. This would keep the president from extorting states, universities, and our allies by arbitrarily holding up their funding.

End bogus “emergency” powers. Congress has created too many “emergency powers” that assume good faith from the president but are just a blank check to do whatever he wants. Repeal the Insurrection Act. End all emergency powers granted to the president by Congress. If there are any powers the president legitimately needs, he can beg us to restore them in legislation that imposes real limits. Even if it doesn’t succeed, just passing this bill in the House would undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s power grabs.

Push out Trump’s lackeys. Use the power of the purse to force the resignation of Trump’s most malicious toadies. Why should Congress approve money for officials who are working to undermine the missions given to them by Congress? Target Kristi Noem for lying to the public. Target Pam Bondi for persecuting Trump’s enemies, including members of Congress. Target Brendan Carr for using the FCC to threaten Jimmy Kimmel. Not a dime should be approved for their agencies until they are replaced by trustworthy, independent professionals.

Bury them in hearings. Congress recently cut off part of the defense budget until Pete Hegseth releases video of his war crimes in the Caribbean. Let’s do more of that—and play hardball this time. Force the administration to release damning information. Force government officials to spend endless hours testifying. We can get vital information to public about the rotten things their government is doing—and we can tie up Trump’s minions in hearings and paperwork.

Use legislation to overrule the president. Remember the law requiring the release of the Epstein files? Let’s do more of that—and with harsher punishments for refusing to comply. Before we abolish ICE, we can at least ban them from wearing masks. Change the law to prevent Border Patrol from being deployed in cities far from the border. Congress has to power to tell the president what he can and can’t do. We should try that again.

Impeach the rascals. Trump’s abuses of executive power are so vast they give us grounds for impeachment against the president and vice-president, but also against the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the Chair of the FCC, and so on. The Senate might be reluctant to convict the president—but they already seem eager to throw Kristi Noem under the bus. Even if we don’t have enough Senate votes to convict all these official, the hearings and trials would gather evidence of their abuses and mobilize public opinion against them.

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Freedom of Speech

Rein in the FCC. Remove the vague “public interest” requirement that lets the FCC threaten broadcasters.

Protect the independence of universities. Remove the arbitrary discretion on funding for research and education that the president has abused to impose his ideological agenda on higher education.

No ideological test for visas and immigration. Limit the State Department’s arbitrary discretion over international travel. Ban using politically disapproved speech as a basis for denying visas.

Keep the media independent. Pass legislation making media companies less dependent on the arbitrary favor of the president, particularly with regard to technology platforms and media industry mergers. Pass new legislation enforcing the TikTok ban to eliminate a platform that is now completely dependent on the president.

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I am a radical for incrementalism. We need to take radical measures in the fight to restore our constitutional system. But once it is restored and we have rebuilt the agencies gutted by Trump, our goal should be to pursue incremental reforms based on a reasonable consensus.

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Affordability

End the trade wars. Revoke Donald Trump’s bogus “emergency” power over tariffs and end a destructive trade war that pushes up prices for consumers and small businesses while killing the overseas market for our farmers. The economy needs predictability and lawfulness, not the constant uncertainty of tariffs that go up and down at the president’s whim.

Protect the Fed. Pass legislation reaffirming the independence of the Federal Reserve, to prevent Trump from pushing for policies that might artificially stimulate the economy in the short term at the cost of inflation that eats away at the average family’s budget.

Build more housing. Pass legislation encouraging zoning reform nationwide and reducing some of the costs and barriers to building new housing. Cities like Minneapolis have shown these reforms can reduce rent and making buying a house more affordable.

Make white collar crime illegal again. Donald Trump has created a market for white-collar criminals and cryptocurrency scammers to buy pardons, and he’s building a gilded ballroom where rich guys in tuxedos can meet to trade favors. Launch investigations to uncover these corrupt deals and pass legislation to limit Trump’s ability to shake down corporations for bribes.

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Health Care

Rebuild what Trump has broken. There are no magic solutions to making health care more affordable, but we can start by restoring health care funding blocked by Trump and the Republican Congress—then focus on incremental reforms to lower underlying costs.

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Education

Restore the independence of the universities. Federal money for research and education can’t be allowed to become a tool for the president to impose ideological conformity. Congress should restrict the administration’s discretion to cut off funds for higher education and scientific research, allocating them by congressional earmarks if necessary.

Improve the public schools. Decades of federal attempts to improve public schools have produced few results. An emphasis on standardized testing has pushed schools to “teach to the test” and in many cases reduce art and music education that isn’t covered in the tests. The federal government should at least stop doing harm.

Reduce the cost of higher education. Decades of education policy was aimed at making it easier to get student loans for college, producing a generation who graduated with crushing debt. We should focus instead on reducing the cost of education by scaling back administrative costs and encouraging states to invest more in public universities.

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Energy

All of the above. We should build our way to the future of energy, not ban our way to it. We need an all-of-the-above energy policy that welcomes all forms of power. But Trump has been trying to ban solar and wind energy to preserve the past. Congress should step in to keep him from stacking the deck against new forms of energy.

Use the AI bubble to build energy. Tech companies are shoveling trillions of dollars into data centers to feed AI, driving up demand for a limited supply of electricity. Maybe this is a long-term boom—or maybe it’s a bubble—but either way, we should use it to fund new electricity generation, especially nuclear power plants that require massive up-front investment.

Pass permitting reform. There has been growing bipartisan support for permitting reform to reduce the delays and the mountains of unnecessary paperwork that currently add huge costs to the kind of large infrastructure projects—from wind farms to high-speed rail—that we need to build the future. Congress should finally get this done.

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Immigration

Abolish ICE. Our current immigration enforcement mechanism is an out-of-control goon squad that targets US citizens, kidnaps children, runs inhumane prison camps, and murders observers. An organization this rotten can’t be reformed and has to be defunded and dismantled.

Break up the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS was created two decades ago in a post-9/11 panic, so it’s no wonder it treats everything like terrorism. It’s time to reverse that mistake, sending the agency’s legitimate functions back to the agencies that used to do them.

Create real immigration courts. Current immigration “courts” are not real courts but part of the executive branch, with no independence. Congress can create independent “Article III” courts that fall under the judicial branch and won’t just be a rubber stamp for whatever Trump wants to do.

Make immigration legal again. The reason we have so many illegal immigrants is because legal immigration is a nonsensical maze. Immigration is good for America. It brings in new workers, including highly skilled workers, who start new businesses, volunteer for the US military, and contribute to our culture—just as our own parents and grandparents did. Instead of enforcing xenophobia, let’s make immigration legal again.

Use immigration to solve problems. Contrary to right-wing propaganda, immigrants do not steal our jobs, nor do they sponge off of the welfare state. Studies have repeatedly shown that immigration helps drive economic growth and create more jobs, while immigrants pay far more into the American system in taxes than they take out. More legal immigration is necessary to ease America’s fiscal crisis, keep Social Security solvent, and keep our factories and farms healthy and growing.

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Foreign Policy

Cut off funding for Trump’s adventures. The power of the purse gives the House a lot of control over foreign policy. We can pass legislation banning Trump from using money to buy or invade Greenland, ending a threat against our NATO allies—and do the same for his other pointless imperial adventures.

End the “Board of Peace.” Donald Trump is using our money to appoint himself leader-for-life of a dictator’s club called the “Board of Peace.” Congress can cut off funding for this vanity project and ban American participation.

Support our friends and allies. Congress should increase aid for Ukraine, reinforce our alliance with NATO, and block the president from making personal economic deals with dictatorships like Russia and Venezuela. It’s time for America to be the good guys again and support liberal democracies instead of dictatorships.

Cheap aid, not expensive wars. We should demand the restoration of USAID for the simple reason that Congress mandated it, and the president can’t close it without our permission. But also, this was a tiny fraction of the budget that delivered a lot of value, supporting our foreign policy goals and helping to prevent expensive wars.

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Is there a policy issue that’s important to you that you didn’t see addressed here? Drop me a line and let me know, and I’ll give you an answer.—Rob Tracinski