Restoring Our Democracy

The Iowans Over Insiders Agenda: Part Five

Let me be plain about what is happening in this country.

Donald Trump is the most serious threat to American democracy in our lifetimes. He has tried to overturn an election he lost. He has pardoned the people who attacked the United States Capitol on his behalf. He has deployed federal troops into American cities over the objection of governors and mayors. He has used the Department of Justice to investigate his political opponents and protect his political allies. He has defied court orders. He has openly mused about a third term the Constitution does not allow. He has called the free press the enemy of the people, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for unfavorable coverage, and floated jailing American citizens for their political speech. And he has spent every single day of his second term making it clearer that he believes the President of the United States is above the law.

This is not normal. This is not partisan politics as usual. The only thing standing between this president and the end of American self-government is whether the rest of us are willing to fight for it. Our constitution only lives if we’re ready to defend it.

Too many Democrats in Washington still don’t get it. They are still treating this like a normal political moment, where you give a tough floor speech, send a strongly worded letter, and wait for the next election to fix things. That is not going to be enough. The people who are dismantling our democracy do not play by the old rules, and we are not going to save it by pretending they do.

It is time for Democrats to fight back like we actually mean it.

That means more than condemning this corrupt administration. It means rebuilding the democratic foundation he is tearing apart: the right to vote, the freedom of speech, fair maps, fair elections, a court system that is not for sale, and a campaign finance system that does not let billionaires buy our government out from under us. It means doing the structural work that previous generations of Democrats put off because it was hard. It means using power, when we have it, to actually fix the system instead of leaving the next generation to clean up the mess.

Ashley Hinson is part of the problem. She votes with Trump nearly every time. She has cheered while he deploys troops on American streets, defies court orders, and threatens his political opponents with prosecution. She voted to gut Social Security, voted for the largest Medicaid cut in American history, and has done nothing to defend the constitutional system she swore an oath to protect. She is not a check on this president; she is a rubber stamp. And every day she remains in office is another day Iowa is represented by someone whose loyalty is to Donald Trump, not to the people of this state.

Part One of our Iowans Over Insiders agenda took on Washington corruption directly: banning corporate PAC money, overturning Citizens United, ending congressional stock trading, and shutting down the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street. (Read it here.) Parts Two, Three, and Four laid out plans to build an economy that works for Iowans, revitalize rural Iowa, and deliver universal, affordable healthcare.

Part Five is the foundation that makes all of it possible. You cannot fix the economy if an authoritarian president is using federal power to crush dissent. You cannot save rural hospitals if gerrymandered districts insulate corrupt incumbents from accountability. You cannot deliver universal healthcare if voters are being purged from the rolls or intimidated at the polls. And you cannot keep any of it if Donald Trump or any future president succeeds in turning the United States into a country where elections are theater and the rule of law is a suggestion. Every problem we set out to solve in this campaign starts with one question: who actually gets to decide? Right now, Donald Trump and the billionaires who bought him are deciding. We are going to change that.

My Plan: Defend Our Democracy

A democracy that can survive an authoritarian moment doesn’t just happen. It takes deliberate choices, and it takes leaders who are willing to use the power of the federal government to defend the constitutional system instead of waiting politely for the next election to bail us out. That’s how we beat back the Trump assault on our democracy and put power back in the hands of the people it belongs to. Every proposal in this plan starts from the same place: Iowa deserves a Senator who will fight to defend and expand democracy, not one who will collaborate with the people trying to dismantle it.

This democracy agenda has eight pillars, each takes on a specific way Donald Trump and his allies are working to rig the system against the people, and offers a concrete plan to fight back.

1. Pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act

2. Guarantee Automatic Voter Registration and Make Voting Easier for Every Iowan

3. End Partisan Gerrymandering with Independent Redistricting Commissions

4. Get Big Money Out of Politics

5. Secure Our Elections from Foreign and Domestic Threats

6. Protect Voters and the People Who Run Our Elections

7. Modernize Our Democracy: Ranked Choice Voting and a National Popular Vote

8. Restore Trust by Reforming the Supreme Court and the Federal Bench

1. Pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act

The right to vote is the foundation of our democracy. It is the one tool ordinary Americans have to fire a politician who has stopped working for them. That is exactly why Donald Trump and his allies have spent the last decade trying to undermine our elections and make it harder to vote.

When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it set off a wave of voter suppression we are still living with today. States rushed to close polling places, purge voter rolls, and slash early voting in an effort to keep certain people — working people, students, seniors, people of color, people with disabilities — away from the ballot box. Iowa wasn’t spared. Kim Reynolds and the Republican legislature passed one of the most aggressive voter suppression laws in the country in 2021, cutting early voting, shortening poll hours, and making it a crime for county auditors to send absentee ballot request forms to voters who hadn’t asked for them. Trump and his allies are now pushing the same playbook at the federal level.

That is not a free and fair election system. That is a system designed to pick the winners before the voters get to the polls. And we are going to end it.

I will fight to:

• Pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the federal preclearance requirement that the Supreme Court gutted in Shelby County v. Holder. States and counties with a recent history of voting discrimination should not be allowed to change their election rules without federal review. Period.

• Pass the Freedom to Vote Act to set strong national standards for federal elections, including no-excuse mail voting, at least two weeks of early voting, same-day registration, restoration of voting rights for Americans with past felony convictions, and an end to partisan voter roll purges. Voting in the greatest democracy on earth should not depend on which state you live in or which party controls your statehouse.

• End the Senate filibuster. The most basic protections of American democracy are being held hostage to a Senate procedural rule that does not appear in the Constitution. If a majority of the Senate votes to protect the right to vote, the right to vote should be protected.

• Make Election Day a federal holiday so working Iowans don’t have to choose between cashing a paycheck and casting a ballot.

2. Guarantee Automatic Voter Registration and Make Voting Easier for Every Iowan

America has one of the most cumbersome voter registration systems in the developed world. We are virtually alone in placing the burden of registration on the individual voter rather than on the government. The result is predictable: roughly 1 in 5 eligible Americans isn’t registered, and the people who fall through the cracks are disproportionately young, working-class, and mobile — exactly the voters whose voices we need most in this moment.

That is not an accident. The harder it is to register, the easier it is for entrenched politicians to stay in power. Trump and his allies understand that perfectly well. That is why they have spent years attacking automatic registration, mail voting, and same-day registration.

I will fight to:

• Pass nationwide automatic voter registration, so that every eligible American is registered to vote whenever they interact with a government agency — the DMV, the Social Security Administration, a public university, a public health program — unless they affirmatively opt out. This single reform would add tens of millions of eligible voters to the rolls and eliminate one of the biggest barriers to participation in our democracy.

• Guarantee same-day voter registration in every state, so that no eligible Iowan is turned away from the polls because of a clerical error or a deadline they didn’t know about. If you are eligible to vote and you show up to vote, you get to vote.

• Require pre-registration at age 16 so that young Iowans are automatically registered to vote the moment they become eligible. This is a basic civic step that costs the government nothing and pays dividends in lifelong participation.

• Expand vote-by-mail and early voting with at least two weeks of in-person early voting, no-excuse absentee ballots, and prepaid postage on every mail ballot. Working Iowans, parents juggling kids, farmers in the middle of harvest, shift workers, and people with disabilities, all deserve real options for casting their ballot.

• Modernize voter rolls and end partisan purges. Voter list maintenance should be done with care, not as a partisan weapon to disenfranchise eligible voters weeks before an election. I will fight to set strong federal standards that prevent the kind of mass purges we’ve seen and that the Trump administration is now pushing nationwide.

• Guarantee accessible voting for Iowans with disabilities, including accessible ballot machines at every polling location, curbside voting, and accessible vote-by-mail materials. Roughly one in four Iowa adults has a disability. Their access to the ballot is not optional.

• Protect voting rights for military members, Native Iowans, and Iowans living overseas by passing the Native American Voting Rights Act and strengthening federal protections for absentee voting by service members and overseas voters.

3. End Partisan Gerrymandering with Independent Redistricting Commissions

Iowa is one of the few states in America with a redistricting process that actually works. For more than fifty years, our nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency has drawn our congressional and legislative maps using objective criteria — population equality, contiguity, compactness, and respect for political subdivisions — without regard to where incumbents live or how the lines would benefit one party over the other.

Most states are not so lucky, and we all pay the price. In states across the country, partisan politicians of both parties draw maps designed to lock in their own power for a decade at a time. Trump and his allies are now openly pushing red states to redraw congressional maps mid-decade to manufacture a Republican House majority through gerrymandering rather than through votes. This is not democracy. This is politicians choosing their voters before voters get to choose them. And we are going to end it.

I will fight to:

• Ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide by passing federal legislation that prohibits the drawing of congressional districts to favor or disfavor any political party or any incumbent.

• Require every state to use an independent redistricting commission, modeled on Iowa’s nonpartisan process or on the citizen commissions that voters in California, Michigan, Colorado, and Arizona have already approved. Politicians should never get to draw the lines that determine their own job security.

• Establish strong federal standards for fair maps, including population equality, contiguity, compactness, respect for communities of interest, and protection of minority voting rights under the Voting Rights Act.

• Stop mid-decade partisan re-redistricting. A state should not be allowed to tear up a decade-old map and draw a new one just because one party decides it can squeeze out a few more seats. Congressional maps should be drawn once a decade, after the census, by an independent commission — not whenever a party in power decides it wants more power.

• End prison gerrymandering, which counts incarcerated people in the rural districts where they are imprisoned rather than the urban communities they came from. This practice artificially inflates the political power of districts with prisons and dilutes the political power of the communities — disproportionately Black and brown — where most incarcerated Americans actually live.

• Require full transparency in the map-drawing process, with public hearings, publicly available data, and a real opportunity for citizens to weigh in before maps are finalized. The maps should belong to the people, not to the consultants who draw them in back rooms.

4. Get Big Money Out of Politics

In Part One of the Iowans Over Insiders agenda, I laid out my plan to end Washington corruption: banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks, ending corporate PAC money, closing the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street, and overturning Citizens United. (Read it here.) That plan was about the corrupt politicians who take the money. This pillar is about the broken system that allows the money to be spent in the first place.

Citizens United was one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of my lifetime. In a single 5-4 ruling, five unelected justices overturned a century of campaign finance law and declared that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. The result was exactly what every reasonable person predicted: an explosion of dark money, a tidal wave of corporate political spending, and a political system in which the voices of working Iowans get drowned out by the voices of billionaires and their corporate lobbyists.

Elon Musk spent $291 million in 2024, and his net worth has increased by more than half a trillion dollars since. That is not a coincidence. That is the deal. The billionaires bankroll the politicians, and the politicians deliver the policy. Working Iowans pay the bill. This is what oligarchy looks like. And we are going to end it.

This year, I worked across the aisle with Republican State Senator Dave Sires to introduce a bipartisan constitutional amendment in the Iowa State Senate to ban corporate campaign money in our state — a direct, Iowa-grown response to Citizens United. We don’t agree on a lot. We agree on this: the people of Iowa should not have to compete with multinational corporations for the attention of their own elected officials.

I will fight to:

• Pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo, which together created the legal fiction that corporations are people and that money is speech. The American people overwhelmingly support this — across party lines, in poll after poll. It is past time for Washington to listen.

• Establish a system of public financing for federal elections with a small-donor matching program — six federal dollars for every dollar from an in-state small donor up to $200. Public financing is the surest way to break the grip of big donors and let candidates run for office without first auditioning for billionaires.

• Ban corporate PAC money in federal elections. I do not take corporate PAC money in this campaign, and I will not take it in the United States Senate. I will fight to make that the law for every member of Congress.

• Abolish super PACs and shut down dark money, which were the inevitable consequence of Citizens United and which now spend more on federal elections than the candidates themselves. Pass the DISCLOSE Act so that every dollar spent influencing an election is publicly disclosed, in real time, before voters go to the polls.

• Ban foreign money in American elections, including the laundering of foreign cash through American subsidiaries, shell companies, and trade associations. Our elections are not for sale to foreign governments, foreign oligarchs, or anyone else.

5. Secure Our Elections from Foreign and Domestic Threats

In 2016, a hostile foreign power launched a coordinated attack on the American election system. They probed voter registration databases in all fifty states. They breached systems in at least two. They ran a sophisticated disinformation campaign on American social media platforms. And they did it while a future Republican president cheered them on from the campaign trail.

Today the threat is bigger and the response is smaller. Many states still rely on voter registration databases that are decades old. Some are still using software older than most college graduates. Some still use paperless voting machines with no auditable paper trail. Most don’t have the resources to train election officials on basic cybersecurity. And the Trump administration has actively gutted the federal agencies — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI’s election integrity efforts, the State Department’s counter-disinformation office — that were built to defend us. The President of the United States is dismantling our election defenses while foreign adversaries and domestic extremists test them every day.

Our elections are the foundation of our democracy. They deserve to be defended like it. And the people supposedly in charge of defending them right now are the ones tearing down the walls.

I will fight to:

• Make a serious federal investment in election security and administration by passing the Sustaining Our Democracy Act and providing $20 billion in federal funding to states and localities over the next decade to upgrade voting equipment, modernize voter registration systems, train election officials, expand polling places, and protect the people who run our elections.

• Require hand-marked, voter-verified paper ballots in every federal election with rigorous post-election audits. No paperless machines. No untraceable digital votes. If we’re going to ask Iowans to trust the result, we have to give them a result they can verify.

• Restore and strengthen federal election cybersecurity capacity that the Trump administration has gutted. Rebuild CISA’s election security mission. Restart the federal-state intelligence sharing that protects voter registration systems and election night reporting. Fund state and local election officials at a level that lets them meet the threat.

• Combat election disinformation, including AI-generated deepfakes, with strong legal penalties for the deliberate creation and distribution of false content designed to deceive voters about when, where, or how to vote, or to fabricate the words or actions of candidates.

• Protect critical election infrastructure from foreign attack by designating it a top national security priority, sharing real-time threat intelligence with state and local election officials, and aggressively pursuing foreign actors who attempt to interfere in our elections — regardless of which candidate they are trying to help.

6. Protect Voters and the People Who Run Our Elections

Since 2020, too many people who run America’s elections, most of them volunteers, most of them our neighbors, have been subjected to a wave of harassment, threats, and physical intimidation unlike anything our country has seen in modern times. County auditors have been doxxed. Poll workers have been threatened with violence. Secretaries of state have needed personal security details. The man currently in the White House has personally attacked election workers by name, falsely accused them of fraud, and incited his supporters to harass them. He pardoned the people who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, and he has signaled to every would-be vigilante in the country that political violence in his name will be rewarded, not punished.

This is by design. The people who want to undermine American democracy understand that if they can drive enough good people out of these jobs, they can replace them with partisans who will do their bidding. Voter intimidation is the same playbook with a different audience: scare working Iowans away from the polls, and you don’t have to win their votes — you just have to suppress them.

Iowans deserve better. Our democracy depends on it.

I will fight to:

• Make threatening, harassing, or assaulting an election worker a federal crime, with strong criminal penalties for anyone who tries to intimidate the people who run our elections. The same protections that apply to federal judges and federal employees should apply to the volunteer poll workers and county auditors who keep our democracy running.

• Pass strong federal protections against voter intimidation, including criminal penalties for anyone who threatens, harasses, or coerces a voter at the polls or in the lead-up to an election. Pass the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act to ban the deliberate spread of false information about elections.

• Ban paramilitary groups, armed militias, and unauthorized armed observers from polling places. Iowans should not have to walk past a man in tactical gear with an AR-15 to cast a ballot. Period.

• Prevent ICE and other federal officials from committing voter intimidation at polling locations.

• Provide federal funding for election worker security, including physical security at polling places and ballot processing centers, training in de-escalation and active-threat response, and personal security for election officials who have been targeted.

• Crack down on insider threats to election integrity, including partisan election officials who refuse to certify legitimate election results. Certifying a lawful election is a ministerial duty, not a political opportunity, and a partisan official who refuses to do their job should face real consequences. Trump and his allies have made overturning lawful election results a political project. We are going to make it a federal crime.

• Protect the rights of voters to assist others — including family members, caregivers, and trusted community members — to vote, especially for voters with disabilities, voters who don’t speak English as a first language, and elderly voters who depend on someone they trust to help them participate.

7. Modernize Our Democracy: Ranked Choice Voting and a National Popular Vote

Some of the rules our democracy operates under were written before women could vote, before Black Americans could vote, before there were cars or telephones or televisions. Those rules made sense in a different time. They don’t make sense in this one.

Donald Trump has lost the popular vote in two of the three presidential elections he has been on the ballot in. The first time he lost it, the Electoral College made him president anyway. That is not a system that has the consent of the governed. It is a system that hands the most powerful office in the world to the person fewer Americans voted for. If we want a democracy that survives the next century, we have to be willing to update the operating system.

I will fight to:

• Elect the President of the United States by national popular vote. The Electoral College has produced two presidents in this century who lost the popular vote. The candidate who gets the most votes should win. That is the fundamental promise of democracy.

• Pass a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, and in the meantime, support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which already has commitments from states representing more than 200 of the 270 electoral votes needed to make the popular vote the law of the land.

• Allow ranked choice voting in federal elections, as Maine and Alaska already do, and as growing numbers of cities across America are adopting. Ranked choice voting eliminates the spoiler effect, gives voters more meaningful choices, and produces winners who actually have majority support — not just the most votes in a fragmented field. It rewards candidates who build broad coalitions instead of candidates who appeal only to a narrow base, and it is one of the strongest structural defenses we have against extremist factions capturing major-party nominations.

8. Restore Trust by Reforming the Supreme Court and the Federal Bench

Public trust in the Supreme Court has hit historic lows, and the justices have only themselves to blame. We have learned that members of the Court accepted lavish gifts and undisclosed travel from billionaires with business before the bench. We have watched the Court overturn fifty years of precedent on reproductive freedom and watched them gut the Voting Rights Act. And in 2024, we watched the Court hand Donald Trump a blanket grant of presidential immunity that has no basis in the Constitution and that has emboldened him to act, openly, as if he is above the law.

That is not a court the American people trust. And it is not a court that can credibly serve as the final arbiter of our democracy at exactly the moment our democracy needs an honest one. If we are going to restore confidence in our democracy, we have to restore confidence in the institutions that enforce it.

I will fight to:

• Pass a binding code of ethics for the Supreme Court, with real disclosure requirements, real recusal standards, and real enforcement. Every other federal judge in America is bound by an enforceable code of ethics. The nine most powerful judges in the country should be too.

• Establish 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, with regular appointments every two years. Lifetime tenure made sense when life expectancy was shorter and confirmations were less politicized. Today, it has turned every Supreme Court vacancy into an existential political war. Term limits would lower the temperature, restore predictability, and ensure that the Court reflects the America of today, not the America of forty years ago.

• Require full financial disclosure for Supreme Court justices and their spouses, with the same rigor we require of every member of Congress and every senior executive branch official. If a justice or their spouse is making money from someone with business before the Court, the American people have a right to know.

• Reverse the Court’s presidential immunity ruling by statute and, if necessary, by constitutional amendment. No president — Republican or Democrat — should be above the law. The Supreme Court invented a new doctrine of immunity in 2024 that has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in two and a half centuries of American practice. Congress has the authority to write that doctrine out of our law, and we should.

Expand and protect lower federal courts by passing legislation to increase the number of federal judges to keep up with caseload growth, and by making the confirmation process work — not as a partisan blockade, but as a real check on qualifications and integrity.

What’s at Stake

Democracies do not usually die in a single dramatic moment. They die when judges accept gifts and nobody acts. They die when presidents defy court orders and nobody stops them. They die when election workers are threatened and nobody protects them. They die when the press is attacked and nobody defends it. They die when one party makes a deliberate, decade-long project out of dismantling the institutions that hold it accountable, and the other party responds with strongly worded letters.

That is the road we are on right now. And it is not too late to get off of it. But it is going to require Democrats, including Democrats in the United States Senate, to meet the moment we are in.

Every condition that is making American democracy weaker, more captured, and more vulnerable to authoritarianism is the result of a political choice. And every one of those choices can be made differently.

Our democracy isn’t broken by accident. It’s being broken on purpose. And we can fix it.

My Promise to Iowa

The next six years will decide whether the constitutional system will stand for the next generation. That is not hyperbole. That is the actual stake of this election.

I am running for the United States Senate because I am not willing to leave that fight to anyone else, and because Iowa cannot afford a senator who treats this moment as politics as usual. Ashley Hinson is a rubber stamp for an authoritarian president. Iowa needs a senator who will be a check on him.

I refuse corporate PAC money. I will abide by my own term-limit pledge: twelve years and out, no exceptions. I will not own, buy, or sell individual stocks while I serve in office. I will vote to end the filibuster to actually get things done. I will vote to expand voting access. I will vote to ban gerrymandering. I will vote to overturn Citizens United. I will vote to hold this president, and every future president, regardless of party, accountable to the law. And I will not be quiet, and I will not be patient, and I will not wait for someone else to lead this fight.

Democrats have spent too long bringing strongly worded letters to a constitutional crisis. The people dismantling our democracy are not going to be persuaded by op-eds, and they are not going to be shamed by floor speeches. They are going to be beaten — at the ballot box, in the Congress, and in the courts — or they are going to win.

On my honor, I will be that senator.