Issues

I strongly believe that Congress needs to make fiscal responsibility a priority. I support rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending in order to bring down the deficit, but we also need to raise adequate revenues in order to pay for the priorities we have as a nation. Those priorities include safe food and water, defense and homeland security, education and health care, and infrastructure investments that help build economic growth and opportunity for all.

We are still recovering from the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Home values crashed, savings accounts shrank, millions of jobs were lost or eliminated, and access to credit became nonexistent. Many Americans were left with loans they were unable to afford based on misleading promises of low payments that ballooned at the worst possible time. This was the result of Wall Street greed, deregulation, and the failure of federal regulators to act in the interests of consumers.

I have consistently worked to make safe food a guarantee for all families. I am continuing to monitor implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act, which I supported in the 111th Congress and which brought the most significant reforms to our food safety laws since FDR was president. The law will help the FDA more effectively track tainted foods, better-screen imported foods, improve recall information for consumers, and speed up response time to food safety threats.

Resources

We live in a dangerous world, and our foreign policy and national security strategies must protect the American people by addressing modern threats. As a former member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (members are term limited to 8 years), I take national security very seriously.

Every two minutes, a woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications. Women in developing countries have fifteen times the risk of dying than women in the developed world. These deaths are further complicated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in some countries. I am committed to ensuring that all women have access to family planning methods.

It has been estimated that nearly a billion women globally will be beaten, raped, mutilated or otherwise abused during their lifetimes—that is 1 in 3 women. In some countries up to 70% of women and girls are affected by violence. In countries with armed conflict, rape has been used as a weapon of war to intimidate and destabilize entire communities.

According to the Brookings Institution, 2.7 million Americans are employed by the clean energy economy, which is more than are employed in the fossil fuels sector. Over the next few decades, the green energy sector is projected to be worth trillions of dollars and to create millions of new jobs, and we must ensure that American companies are able to compete in the worldwide race to create the technology of the future.