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Billy's Bakers Dozen....
And then some.
Below are the essential and vital Issues that I am fighting for. These are the issues that I represent, will champion, and are too long overdue. We must restore the republic and establish
the nation we deserve.
The Existential Threat of Climate Change
Full National Mobilization for Climate: Carbon Neutrality by 2030, the Green New Deal & the Socio-political-economic Revolution we cannot afford to delay.
There are moments in history when the ordinary pace of political life — the compromises, the half-measures, the endless deferral of the difficult — is simply no longer adequate to the scale of the crisis before us. This is one of those moments. The science is unambiguous: to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold beyond which the consequences become not merely severe but irreversible, we must reach carbon neutrality by 2030. That is not a policy preference. It is a deadline set by physics. And meeting it will require nothing less than what this nation achieved in the Second World War — a full mobilization of our industrial capacity, our public investment, our collective will, and the boundless energy of our young people — organized now not around the machinery of destruction, but around the transformation of our economy, our cities, and our relationship to the living world.
Universal Healthcare Medicare for All
There is something deeply wrong with a nation that sends its young men and women to fight and die on foreign soil, yet cannot guarantee them a doctor's visit when they come home wounded in body and spirit. We are the wealthiest country in the history of civilization, and still mothers ration insulin, fathers skip treatments, and children go without care — not because the medicine does not exist, but because a profit has been placed between the sick and the healer. This is not a failure of resources; it is a failure of will and a failure of conscience. Medicare for All is not a radical idea — it is the fulfillment of a promise this country has made to its people and never kept. Every other wealthy democracy on earth has found a way. It is time we found ours.
A Living Wage
My father used to say that a man who works hard should be able to look his children in the eye and know that his labor was enough. That covenant has been broken. Today, millions of Americans work two and three jobs — they rise before dawn and come home after dark — and they still cannot pay the rent, still cannot fill the refrigerator, still cannot give their children what every child deserves. A federal minimum wage that keeps pace with the dignity of labor is not a handout; it is the recognition that when a man or woman gives their time and their back and their years to this economy, the economy owes them a life worth living in return. We do not ask for charity. We can no longer labor and sacrifice and watch the quiet violence of capital institutions destroy our families and our children's futures. Now is the time to make our own justice.
Housing as a Human Right
To sleep without shelter is to have been abandoned by your country. In the richest nation in the history of the world, there are tent cities beneath the overpasses of our great cities, children who do not know what it means to have a permanent address, families who must choose between medicine and rent — and we look away because it is easier than reckoning with what it means. Housing is not a luxury. It is the floor beneath every other hope: you cannot hold a job without an address, cannot raise a child without a room, cannot participate in the life of your community if you are consumed by the fear of where you will sleep tonight. We must build, and invest, and yes, regulate the speculation that turns homes into assets and people into afterthoughts.
A Federal Job Guarantee
Unemployment is not an abstraction. It is a woman or man sitting at a kitchen table at two in the morning, staring at bills he cannot pay, wondering what he has done wrong — when the truth is that the economy has failed him, not the other way around. We have always had more work that needs doing than we have had workers to do it: bridges to repair, schools to staff, parks to tend, communities to care for. A federal job guarantee says to every American willing to work: there will be a place for you, at a living wage, with dignity, contributing to something that lasts. It is not charity. It is a recognition that in a society as productive as ours, there is no excuse for anyone who wants to work to be left without the opportunity to do so.
Universal Basic Services
There are things a decent society does not leave to the mercy of the market. There are services so essential to the flourishing of human beings — food for hungry children, care for aging parents, a place for toddlers to learn while their mothers and fathers work — that to commodify them is to say that only those with money deserve to fully participate in the life of the nation. We have always known this, in our better moments. We built public libraries because we believed knowledge should not be for sale. We built public parks because we believed beauty should not be for sale. Now we must extend that same conviction to childcare, to eldercare, to the broadband lines that carry modern opportunity into every home, rural or urban, rich or poor.
UNION RIGHTS
The great labor leaders of the last century understood something that the comfortable and the powerful preferred to forget: that democracy does not end at the factory gate. A man who has no voice in the conditions of his labor, no seat at the table where his wages are decided, no protection against the arbitrary power of those who own his hours — that man is not truly free, whatever the Constitution may say. The right to organize, to bargain collectively, to build cooperatives where workers share in the fruits of what they create together — these are not threats to the American economy. They are its foundation. They are how we ensure that the prosperity of this nation is not merely a private reward for the few, but a shared inheritance for all who build it.
Progressive tax restructuring: Making the tax code an instrument of justice
I have seen, in the in the faces of those who work in the fields and on the loading docks, in the faces of teachers and baristas what it looks like when the economy turns its back on people — not through accident, not through the impersonal workings of some neutral market, but through choices, deliberate and repeated, embedded in the law of the land. The tax code is not an abstraction. It is a moral document. It tells us, with a precision that no political speech can match, exactly who this society values, who it protects, and who it has decided can be made to bear the cost of everything it chooses not to pay for. Read it carefully, and you will find that we, both democrats and republicans, have written a code that taxes a warehouse worker in Worcester at a higher effective rate than the hedge fund manager whose carried interest — a legal fiction of breathtaking audacity — is treated as capital gain rather than income. We have written a code that allows the wealthiest corporations in the history of commerce to pay nothing, legally, because they can afford the accountants and the lawyers and the lobbyists that the rest of us cannot. We have written a code that is, at its root, a transfer of wealth upward — and we have done it in the open, year after year, while insisting with straight faces that the system is fair.
A Free & Fair Public Media: The Fairness Doctrine, PBS, and the airwaves that belong to us all
Democracy does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in kitchens and living rooms and school cafeterias, in the spaces where people encounter information about the world they share and form their judgments about how it ought to be governed. When those spaces are controlled by six corporations whose primary obligation is to their shareholders — when the evening news is shaped by what sells advertising, when local stations have been strip-mined by private equity and left with skeleton staffs reading wire copy in empty studios, when the algorithm decides that outrage travels farther than truth and optimizes accordingly — we are not just losing journalism. We are losing the informational commons on which self-governance depends. This is not a media problem. It is a democracy problem. And it requires a democratic solution.
We will restore the Fairness Doctrine. For decades, broadcasters who used the public airwaves — airwaves that belong to the American people, not to the companies that are licensed to use them — were required, as a condition of that license, to present issues of public importance in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC abandoned that requirement in 1987, and in the years since, we have watched what happens when the obligation to serve the public interest is replaced by the obligation to serve the bottom line. The result is an information ecosystem so fractured, so weaponized, so saturated with partisan performance and deliberate misinformation, that millions of our fellow citizens now inhabit entirely different factual universes and can find no common ground on which to meet. The Fairness Doctrine will not fix all of that. But it will restore the principle that the public airwaves carry a public responsibility — that a license to broadcast is not a license to radicalize.
A United States Treason Tribunal
Accountability for Constitutional Violations, War Crimes & the Abuse of Power
We propose the establishment of a U.S. Treason Tribunal: an independent body, insulated from executive interference, with the full power of subpoena, prosecution, and adjudication — empowered to investigate and hold accountable every individual, regardless of rank or office, who has violated the Constitution, committed acts of war that contravene the laws of nations, or used the instruments of government power against the rights and liberties of the people. No president. No general. No intelligence official. No member of Congress. No contractor who carried out an unlawful order and told himself he was only following instructions. None of them are above the law — and a nation that permits them to act as though they are has already surrendered the first and most essential premise of self-governance. Accountability is not vengeance. It is the precondition for trust. And trust is the only foundation on which a democracy can stand.
Money out of Politics
Democracy is a simple idea: that each of us has an equal voice in the decisions that govern our lives. But that idea has been slowly hollowed out, replaced by a system in which the size of your contribution determines the size of your influence, in which the men and women we send to Washington arrive already indebted to the powerful interests that financed their campaigns. This is not governance. This is a transaction. And until we have the courage to end it — to publicly finance our elections, to overturn Citizens United, to say plainly that a corporation is not a citizen and money is not speech — we will keep sending reformers to a system designed to defeat them. The people must reclaim their government. That work begins with campaign finance.
Voting Rights & the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
We will pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We will enact automatic voter registration for every eligible American at the age of eighteen, full stop, no exceptions, no opt-in required. We will establish a national standard for early voting, vote by mail, and same-day registration that no state legislature can override. We will end partisan gerrymandering through independent redistricting commissions accountable to the courts, not to the party in power. We will restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated citizens upon release, because a democracy that strips people of the right to vote as a permanent punishment has confused disenfranchisement with justice. We will pass ranked-choice voting for federal elections, ending the tyranny of the spoiler effect and the lesser-of-two-evils calculus that has narrowed the range of political choice for generations. We will grant statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico — whose residents pay taxes, serve in the military, and live under laws they have no meaningful voice in passing. And yes, we will abolish the Electoral College, because a system in which the winner of the popular vote can lose the presidency is not a democracy — it is a distortion of one, and it is time we had the honesty to say so.
Abolish the Filibuster
The filibuster, as it exists today, is not a protection of deliberation or minority rights. It is a veto held by inertia, a mechanism by which a determined minority can indefinitely block the will of the people on voting rights, on healthcare, on climate — on every urgent question of our time. It has been used to protect segregation and defeat civil rights legislation. It has been invoked to stop popular reforms that enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of Americans. A tool so easily weaponized against progress has no rightful place in a republic that aspires to govern itself. We must restore majority rule to the Senate — not so that any one party may govern without check, but so that the people's representatives may actually govern at all.
Racial & Gender Equity
The greatest failure of American democracy is the full inclusion of those who were excluded from its founding promises — Black Americans who built much of this country's wealth in chains and have never been made whole for it, women who have been paid less and heard less and protected less for generations, LGBTQ+ Americans who have had to fight for the simple right to live openly and safely. Equity is not a gift. It is a debt. And until we take it seriously — not merely in our rhetoric but in our law, in our budgets, in the structures of opportunity we build or fail to build — we remain a country that has never fully lived up to the declaration that all are created equal. The work of justice does not pause for our comfort.
Free Public College & Students Debt Cancelation
We tell our young people from the time they are small that education is the key, that if they study hard and work hard and believe, the door of opportunity will open for them. Then we hand them a bill for fifty or a hundred thousand dollars and tell them that the key costs more than most families earn in a year. This is a betrayal — not merely of individuals, but of the promise America has always made to the next generation. The GI Bill sent an entire generation to college and created the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. We did it once because we believed it was worth it. We can do it again. And for those already crushed beneath the weight of debt they took on in good faith, we must find the courage to say: we asked too much of you, and we will make it right.
Reduced Military Spending
My great uncle gave his life in service to this country, and many members of my extended family have joined out military, and I have never doubted the courage or the sacrifice of the men and women who wear its uniform. But courage in service of a wise policy and courage in service of a foolish one are not the same thing, and for decades we have asked our bravest citizens to die for objectives that were never clearly defined and never fully achieved and at times were deceptions and betrayals. We spend more on our military than the next ten nations combined, and still we cannot find the money for healthcare, for schools, for the infrastructure of a modern society. This is not strength. It is a choice — a choice to prioritize the projection of power abroad over the investment in people at home. A strong nation is one whose people are healthy and educated and housed, and we have neglected that strength for too long. For how long will a people fight for a government that has deserted and betrayed them?
Eliminating the Federal Deficit: Taxing Wealth to Fund the Nation We Deserve
We are told, with great solemnity and the full apparatus of economic authority, that the federal deficit is a crisis — that we cannot afford healthcare, cannot afford schools, cannot afford to house our homeless or feed our hungry or repair our infrastructure, because the numbers simply do not permit it. And then, in the same breath, we are told that we cannot raise taxes on those who have accumulated more personal wealth than entire nations produce in a year, because that would be unfair, because it would harm the economy, because the wealthy are the engines of growth and must not be burdened. These two positions cannot both be true. We have chosen to believe them both because it is convenient for those who benefit from the deficit to keep it exactly as it is — a permanent justification for austerity imposed on the many, funded by the labor of the many, and never, under any circumstances, resolved by asking anything more of the few.
America's High-Speed Rail Revolution: Building the World's Premier Rail Network
We built the interstate highway system because we understood that a nation's infrastructure is its spine — that how people and goods move through a country determines how that country grows, who participates in its economy, and what kind of communities its citizens are able to build and sustain. Dwight Eisenhower looked at the Autobahn and came home and built something greater. It is time we looked at the high-speed rail networks of Japan, of France, of Spain, of China — systems that move passengers between cities at two hundred miles an hour, on time, in comfort, with a fraction of the carbon footprint of a domestic flight — and decided that the United States of America, the country that built the transcontinental railroad, that put a man on the moon, that has never failed when it chose to be great, will build something greater still.
The Reestablishment of USAID & America's Commitment to Global Human Dignity
There is a particular kind of cowardice that disguises itself as fiscal responsibility — the cowardice of turning away from the suffering of others, of the indifference to the suffering of our fellows because it is inconvenient to look at, because the suffering is happening far away, because the people enduring it cannot vote in our elections. The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development was an act of that cowardice. For decades, USAID represented something genuinely noble in American foreign policy: the recognition that our national interest and our national conscience were not in conflict, that a world with less hunger and less disease and less poverty was a safer and more stable world for all of us, and that the wealthiest nation in history had both the capacity and the obligation to help build it. We did not do this work perfectly. But we did it, and its absence is already being measured in lives.
Restoring a Woman's Right to Abortion: Bodily Autonomy is
Non-Negotiable
There are moments when a government reveals, unmistakably and without apology, whose lives it values and whose it does not. The Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was one of those moments. With a single ruling, five justices — three of them appointed through the manipulated confirmation process we have already described in this platform — stripped from every woman in America a constitutional right she had held for fifty years. They did not do this because the Constitution required it. They did so because they had the votes, and because the people who worked to put them on that Court had been working toward exactly this outcome for decades. The women who lost that right did not lose it because the law changed. They lost it because power changed. And we intend to change it back.
A Free and Independent Palestinian State: Justice, Dignity, and the Right of Return
The Palestinian people have a right to a state. This is not a controversial position in the international community — it is affirmed by the United Nations, by the vast majority of the world's nations, by international law, and by the most basic principles of human self-determination that the United States has invoked on behalf of other peoples in every corner of the globe. A viable, contiguous, fully sovereign Palestinian state — with East Jerusalem as its capital, with borders based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, with genuine control over its own economy, its own security, its own airspace and coastline and future — is not a concession. It is a requirement of justice. It is also, as every serious student of the region has concluded for decades, the only path to a durable peace that provides genuine security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. There is no military solution to this conflict. There has never been. The only solution is political, and it begins with the recognition that two peoples have claims to this land that must both be honored.
Education Reform: Ending the Tyranny of Standardized Testing and Building a World-Class System of Learning
We will end No Child Left Behind's poisonous legacy of test-and-punish school accountability and replace it with a system that measures school quality the way the best education researchers and the best teachers know it must be measured — through multiple indicators, evaluated over time, including student growth, school climate, teacher quality, access to arts and music and physical education, and the development of the habits of mind that prepare young people for citizenship and life. We will establish a national teacher residency program modeled on medical residencies, raising teacher preparation to the level of rigor the profession deserves, and we will make teaching one of the best-compensated and most respected professions in the country — because no educational reform survives contact with an underpaid, overworked, and demoralized teaching force. We will fully and equitably fund every public school in America, ending the obscenity of a system in which the quality of a child's education is determined by the property tax base of the neighborhood they happen to be born in. We will end federally funded school vouchers for private education. We will restore arts education, physical education, vocational and technical training, and civics as core components of every child's schooling — not electives, not extras, but essentials. And we will say clearly, as a matter of Massachusetts values and national policy, that a child is not a data point. A child is a human being in the process of becoming, and the job of a school is to help that process unfold with all the richness, complexity, and joy it deserves.
Making Social Security Permanently Solvent: Lifting the Cap and Making the Wealthy Pay Their Fair Share
There is a quiet scandal embedded in every American paycheck, and most people who experience it have been told it is simply the way things work. A nurse in Worcester pays Social Security taxes on every dollar she earns. A teacher in Springfield pays on every dollar he earns. A warehouse worker, a firefighter, a home health aide, a carpenter — every working person in America contributes 6.2 percent of their wages to Social Security from the first dollar to the last. But a hedge fund manager who earns ten million dollars a year? He pays that same 6.2 percent only on his first one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars — and then he stops. On the remaining nine million eight hundred thousand dollars, he pays nothing. Not a reduced rate. Nothing. We have written into the tax code a provision that says, in effect, that the more you earn, the smaller your proportional contribution to the retirement security of the American people. And then we hold hearings about Social Security's solvency and shake our heads and say the math just doesn't work.
Expanding the Supreme Court: Restoring the Balance of Justice
The Supreme Court of the United States was stolen. Let us be precise about what happened, because precision matters when we are talking about the highest court in the land and the integrity of the constitutional order it is supposed to protect. In 2016, the Senate majority refused, for the first time in American history, to hold hearings or a vote on a sitting president's Supreme Court nominee — holding the seat open for nearly a year in open violation of every precedent and every norm of constitutional governance, on the explicit gamble that a different president would fill it with a different kind of justice. They won that gamble. And then, four years later, the same majority that had declared it improper to confirm a justice in an election year reversed itself entirely, confirming a justice eight days before a presidential election. The result is a Court whose current composition was achieved not through the ordinary operation of democratic governance but through the deliberate, calculated manipulation of the confirmation process by one political party for the explicit purpose of entrenching a supermajority that the country, by any measure of popular will, did not choose.
Immigration Justice
We are, most of us, the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of people who came to this country with nothing but their willingness to work and their belief in the promise that America represented. That is not a romantic myth — it is the literal story of this nation. To treat today's immigrants, who come for the same reasons and with the same hopes, as a threat to be repelled rather than a resource to be welcomed, is to deny our own history and diminish our own character. A pathway to citizenship for those already woven into the fabric of this country, humane treatment at the border, and an end to enforcement practices that tear families apart — these are not concessions to lawlessness. They are the demands of a nation that still believes in what it says it believes.
Reestablishing America's Alliances: Returning to the World as a Partner, Not a Bully
There is a difference between strength and belligerence, between leadership and coercion, between the respect that is earned over generations of shared sacrifice and partnership and the fear that is purchased through threats and abandonment. We have spent years confusing these things — treating our oldest allies as adversaries to be squeezed for tribute, withdrawing from the international institutions and agreements that our own statesmen built after the Second World War, and conducting ourselves on the world stage with a contempt for diplomatic tradition that has left our friends uncertain and our adversaries emboldened. The damage is real. The repair will not be easy. But it is essential, and it must begin now.
Restore the Republic: Immediately Reestablishing Every Agency, Office & Organization Dismantled by the Trump Administration
​There is a word for what has happened to the institutions of the federal government over the past year, and that word is vandalism. Not reform — reform requires a theory of improvement, a vision of something better, a plan for what replaces what is removed. What has occurred instead is the systematic dismantling of agencies, offices, programs, and organizations that were built over decades by Americans of both parties who understood that a government capable of serving its people requires infrastructure — human, institutional, and technical — that cannot simply be rebuilt overnight once it has been destroyed. The people who carried out this dismantling knew that. The destruction was the point.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created after the 2008 financial crisis to stand between ordinary Americans and the predatory lending practices that had destroyed their savings and their homes — gutted. The Department of Education, which existed to ensure that every child in this country, regardless of the zip code they were born into, had access to the federal resources that make education possible — targeted for elimination. USAID, which carried American values and American investment to the most vulnerable corners of the world — disbanded. The inspectors general who served as the independent watchdogs of executive branch agencies — fired en masse in the dark of night. The advisory boards, the scientific committees, the career civil servants with decades of irreplaceable expertise — purged, pressured out, or simply let go, their institutional knowledge walking out the door with them and not coming back. The offices dedicated to pandemic preparedness, to election security, to protecting the rights of workers and consumers and the environment — hollowed out, defunded, or quietly abolished.
Full Release of the Epstein Files & the Prosecution of Every Abuser, Regardless of Power or Privilege
There are crimes against children that no civilized society can treat as a matter of political inconvenience. The trafficking and sexual abuse of minors by Jeffrey Epstein — and by the network of powerful men who participated in, facilitated, or knew of and ignored what he was doing — is not a tabloid story. It is a moral catastrophe. It is evidence of what happens when wealth and status become a sufficient substitute for law, when the connections of the powerful are enough to make investigators look away, when prosecutors settle rather than pursue, when files are sealed and names are protected not because justice requires it but because justice, in those rooms, was simply not the point.
A Department of Peace & the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
We propose the establishment of a United States Department of Peace — a cabinet-level agency with the budget, the staff, the authority, and the mandate to make the prevention of conflict as central to American foreign policy as the prosecution of it. We spend more than a trillion dollars a year on the Department of Defense. We spend a fraction of that on diplomacy, on conflict prevention, on the international institutions and agreements that keep wars from starting in the first place. This is not a strategy. It is a habit — the habit of preparing for the wars we hope will not come while systematically defunding the tools that might prevent them. A Department of Peace would house our diplomats and our mediators, our international development experts and our conflict resolution specialists, our public health and climate negotiators — all the instruments of the durable peace that no army has ever been able to build alone. It would have a seat at every table where decisions about the use of American power are made, and a mandate to ask, always and first, whether there is another way.
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