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“San Francisco should be represented by someone in Washington for whom resistance is more than a hashtag.” - Shahid Buttar Our current member of Congress, Nancy Pelosi, joined Congress 31 years ago by winning a San Francisco Democratic Party machine seat. Reagan was President and the Internet wasn’t even born. San Francisco looks a lot different now. And whether you’re a longtime San Francisco resident or instead new to SF, our congressional representative unfortunately has repeatedly failed to represent our city. |
Pelosi has:
A vote for Shahid is a vote for San Francisco’s shared values, a vote against entrenched corporate power dominating Washington, and a vote for a long overdue generational change.
Shahid has spent two decades advocating for your rights, while building organizations and coalitions to challenge entrenched power. He stands for:
Fighting bipartisan corporate corruption in Washington
Shahid will challenge the bipartisan corruption increasingly visible across our government. Both in legislation and in oversight, Shahid will promote political process reform, civil liberties, workers & immigrant rights, and cuts to military spending to preserve social programs threatened by the recent GOP tax scam.
Protecting privacy & promoting government accountability
Shahid will champion your right to be free from arbitrary government surveillance by agencies including the NSA, FBI, and DEA. As an advocate in Washington and San Francisco, and also as an organizer working across the country, he has long promoted transparency and accountability on national security issues from NSA spying to CIA torture and drone strikes.
Cutting spending on expensive corporate weapons contracts to save social services
Shahid will enhance U.S. national security by curtailing wasteful and fraudulent military spending. Today, our biggest threats to U.S. national security are climate change, election hacking, and our criminally kleptocratic President. We don’t need to spend trillions of dollars that we don’t have to enrich corporate weapons contractors at the expense of veterans, taxpayers and your children.
In particular, he supports diverting spending on failed and fraudulent programs—such as the F35 Joint Strike Fighter—and closing U.S. military bases in foreign countries. Doing so could offset substantial funding to secure crucial veterans’ services, student debt relief, and early childhood education programs, alongside HUD grants for affordable housing tax credits to better address the urban housing crisis afflicting cities across the country, including San Francisco.
Ending the federal prohibition of cannabis
Unlike our opponent, Shahid will aggressively champion measures to end the federal prohibition of cannabis and support its removal from the Controlled Substances Act. To further dismantle the prison-industrial-slavery complex, he will also support measures to support the re-integration of returning citizens into their communities and end prison gerrymandering.
Safeguarding democracy from political corruption
Partisan gerrymandering, the Wild West of campaign finance, voter suppression, and our archaic voting methods each help entrench a partisan political duopoly that undermines the Constitution’s central purpose: guarding democracy from concentrations of power.
Shahid successfully defended campaign finance regulations as a young lawyer in Washington, years before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision threw open the floodgates of corporate corruption. As our representative in Washington, Shahid will pioneer visionary political process reform.
Shahid walks the talk by committing to decline contributions from Political Action Committees (PACs)
Policies to address the discrete components of America’s political process crisis—gerrymandering, campaign finance, voter suppression, and unrepresentative voting methods—will always lag behind problems on the ground. As an alternative to legislatively micromanaging process regulations, Shahid will champion visionary legislation to extend the protections of antitrust statutes beyond economic markets to also ensure competition, fairness, and legitimacy in elections.
Shahid stands for:
- voted for wars that Shahid—like thousands of other San Franciscans—risked arrest trying to stop.
- supported government surveillance that Shahid—like thousands of other San Franciscans—has taken action to challenge.
- claimed to support LGBT communities, but failed to embrace marriage equality until nearly a decade after Shahid had defended the right of same-sex couples to wed in New York.
A vote for Shahid is a vote for San Francisco’s shared values, a vote against entrenched corporate power dominating Washington, and a vote for a long overdue generational change.
Shahid has spent two decades advocating for your rights, while building organizations and coalitions to challenge entrenched power. He stands for:
Fighting bipartisan corporate corruption in Washington
Shahid will challenge the bipartisan corruption increasingly visible across our government. Both in legislation and in oversight, Shahid will promote political process reform, civil liberties, workers & immigrant rights, and cuts to military spending to preserve social programs threatened by the recent GOP tax scam.
Protecting privacy & promoting government accountability
Shahid will champion your right to be free from arbitrary government surveillance by agencies including the NSA, FBI, and DEA. As an advocate in Washington and San Francisco, and also as an organizer working across the country, he has long promoted transparency and accountability on national security issues from NSA spying to CIA torture and drone strikes.
Cutting spending on expensive corporate weapons contracts to save social services
Shahid will enhance U.S. national security by curtailing wasteful and fraudulent military spending. Today, our biggest threats to U.S. national security are climate change, election hacking, and our criminally kleptocratic President. We don’t need to spend trillions of dollars that we don’t have to enrich corporate weapons contractors at the expense of veterans, taxpayers and your children.
In particular, he supports diverting spending on failed and fraudulent programs—such as the F35 Joint Strike Fighter—and closing U.S. military bases in foreign countries. Doing so could offset substantial funding to secure crucial veterans’ services, student debt relief, and early childhood education programs, alongside HUD grants for affordable housing tax credits to better address the urban housing crisis afflicting cities across the country, including San Francisco.
Ending the federal prohibition of cannabis
Unlike our opponent, Shahid will aggressively champion measures to end the federal prohibition of cannabis and support its removal from the Controlled Substances Act. To further dismantle the prison-industrial-slavery complex, he will also support measures to support the re-integration of returning citizens into their communities and end prison gerrymandering.
Safeguarding democracy from political corruption
Partisan gerrymandering, the Wild West of campaign finance, voter suppression, and our archaic voting methods each help entrench a partisan political duopoly that undermines the Constitution’s central purpose: guarding democracy from concentrations of power.
Shahid successfully defended campaign finance regulations as a young lawyer in Washington, years before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision threw open the floodgates of corporate corruption. As our representative in Washington, Shahid will pioneer visionary political process reform.
Shahid walks the talk by committing to decline contributions from Political Action Committees (PACs)
Policies to address the discrete components of America’s political process crisis—gerrymandering, campaign finance, voter suppression, and unrepresentative voting methods—will always lag behind problems on the ground. As an alternative to legislatively micromanaging process regulations, Shahid will champion visionary legislation to extend the protections of antitrust statutes beyond economic markets to also ensure competition, fairness, and legitimacy in elections.
Shahid stands for:
- Defending the rights of all Americans.
- An immigrant himself who came to the U.S. at the age of two after being born in England, Shahid is deeply committed to the rights of immigrants—including not only students, but also their families, and workers who enable our economy.
- He’s also committed to the right to have a private conversation, enshrined by the First and Fourth Amendments yet violated en masse by agencies (including the NSA, FBI, and DEA).
- As a committed intersectional feminist, Shahid is a staunch defender of both reproductive freedom and reproductive justice.
- Shahid is also a strong supporter of the rights of workers to organize.
- Shrinking the military budget, to avoid otherwise predictable cuts to social services while driving massive reductions in carbon emissions and enabling programs to help the 99% not only survive, but thrive.
- Cutting a single failed, fraudulent, and futile weapons program—the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—will allow substantial student debt relief.
- Closing U.S. military bases in (some among the 150) foreign countries where the Pentagon burns scarce taxpayer dollars.
- Requiring a long overdue Pentagon audit and ending fraudulent weapons programs could help liberate funding for a variety of social services, including veterans’ services, early childhood education and development, and federal programs addressing the urban housing crisis around the country.
- Ending the federal prohibition of marijuana and shrinking the prison-industrial-slavery complex.
- Promoting robust democracy by extending the protections of antitrust law beyond economic markets to also guard competition and fairness in political markets.
- Bold legislation creating a statutory mandate for judicial intervention could address issues such as campaign finance abuses, denials of ballot access or access to debates, prison gerrymandering, or collusion among the parties to divide territory—all at once, in a single measure.