WHAT DONAVAN IS FIGHTING FOR

As a proud former member of SEIU Healthcare Michigan, I know personally just how important unions are to our city’s history, our workers, and building the fair economy we all deserve. But for decades, we’ve watched corporations and their paid-for politicians gut our unions and their power, while billionaires only get richer and pay even less in taxes. Growing up, my mother often worked two and three jobs at once just to put food on our table. No one should have to do that. No one should have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet — let alone barely survive.

I’m fighting for all my union family and for every worker to have the right to form a union, earn a living wage, and be able to provide for their family. That starts with making the ultra-wealthy like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Congressman Shri Thanedar pay their fair share — like the rest of us working people already do. Raising taxes on billionaires and corporations could fund crucial investments our community needs for housing, education, clean air & water, fair paying jobs and healthcare. While billionaires have rigged the system to create massive income equality in Michigan and nationwide, everyone deserves money in their pocket through a universal basic income. Don’t let anyone tell you we can’t fund our people’s most basic needs while the Elon Musks of America have managed to pay $0 in income taxes.

Our district is the poster child for communities in need of the Green New Deal. It’s no secret to every person in this district that we have lead in our water and some of the most polluted air in the country. No one can be expected to raise a family without clean air & water. My grandmother, my mother, my brother, and I all have the same asthmatic cough that is all too common for anyone who grew up in the shadow of our city’s smokestacks and factories. I’m not willing to let another generation of my family or yours suffer the same fate that we have while the fossil fuel companies who are driving this crisis — like DTE and Consumers Energy — raise our utility prices, make record profits year after year, and buy our politicians’ inaction. 

It’s time to break the cycle and understand that we need a solution as large as the climate crisis itself. A Green New Deal transitioning to 100% clean and renewable energy, would  protect our planet’s future and create millions of good-paying green union jobs in Michigan. It’s also a more efficient and sustainable source of energy that will lower energy requirements and consumer costs, while improving our community’s health and cleaning our air & water. And one critical aspect of that for us in metro Detroit is investment to build and expand public transit, so people have the freedom and mobility to get to work, go to the supermarket, and pick up their kids without having to buy a car and pay some of the highest car insurance rates in the country. We deserve choices that corporations won’t let us have. We’re paying the price for this crisis built by greedy CEOs — but they’re the ones who should be paying to fix it.

If you’ve ever wondered why our politicians aren’t fighting for us, why they don’t seem to understand the urgency of our crises, or why they look the other way when we call for our basic needs to be met — it’s because of our broken campaign finance system. Because of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision 15 years ago, our current system gives corporations, millionaires, and billionaires the power to purchase  politicians and their inaction with unlimited dark money. None of us can compete with millions of dollars from CEOs — and we shouldn’t have to. Our democracy should be by and for the people, but as long as our elections are auctions for the highest bidder, the wealthy few’s wallets will be more powerful than the voices of the majority. 

In the State Legislature, I’ve fought to get big money out of politics, helping lead the introduction of a slate of bills in the State House that would ban monopoly utility corporations and government contractors from making political donations. I’m ready to take that same fight to Washington. Be it our multimillionaire Congressman who bought this seat with his own money or the corporate and right-wing Super PACs that will spend millions to support him, the future of our democracy demands we put an end to this corruption.

Our kids are struggling, plain and simple. No matter their race, gender, zip code, or religion, everyone is feeling the effects of decades of defunding and GOP attacks on our public schools. As a proud product of Detroit Public Schools, my mom had to send me to a school that took me an average of two hours to get to every day  on the bus, just to ensure I got a quality education. We cannot settle for that. Every family deserves a well-funded, fully-invested public school in their community that they are eager to send their kids to. We should not have seniors graduating high school without knowing how to read, and we should not have some of the lowest literacy rates in the country. This is not a reflection of our people, but a reflection of our politicians’ refusal to prioritize the federal investments we need to support our kids.

I’m going to Washington to put federal dollars back in our public schools; to invest in paying our teachers higher wages, nationwide universal free school lunches, expanding early child care resources, providing universal free pre-kindergarten, and broadening the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to fully fund equitable education for all children. We also need better federal funding for youth programming so every child can benefit from the community centers, mentorship, and programming opportunities that saved my life years ago.

But federal investments in quality, public education cannot stop at high school. All public colleges, universities, and trade schools should be tuition-free and all existing student loan debt should be canceled. Pursuing a higher education of any kind should not be a financial death sentence for anyone.

Every person deserves to be able to put a roof over their head and take their kids to the doctor without worrying if that comes at the expense of putting food on the table. Growing up, poverty wages led my family to experience evictions and move over 13 different times which also meant we definitely didn’t have the money to prevent my pre-asthma from turning into asthma I still have. 

As a former leader within SEIU Healthcare Michigan, I know our families cannot afford anything less than Medicare for All, which would ensure everyone in this country has healthcare — no matter their employment status, zip code, race, gender, sexuality, or disability. Medicare for All would include coverage for dental, vision, mental health, reproductive health and abortion care. It would also include community-based long term support services, ensuring hundreds of thousands of disabled people are able to finally get the home care they need.

I support a national homes guarantee that would give every Michigander safe, sustainable, and permanently affordable housing. With less than the money we spend on the Pentagon’s budget every year, we could change millions of lives. We could build 8.5 million new public housing units, fund local development of 3.5 million new private, permanent affordable housing projects, and fund billions for public housing repairs, climate resiliency, and critical infrastructure upgrades throughout the country. In order to do so, we must repeal the Faircloth Amendment that has put a federal limit on public housing spending for 25 years.

In Detroit, over 50% of households are renters. We need to protect all tenants with better federal protections including nationwide rent control to cap annual rent hikes from corporate real estate conglomerates, just-cause eviction protections to stop baseless evictions, federal right to counsel legislation so every renter facing eviction has a lawyer, and strengthening tenant unions so tenants have the power to defend themselves against greedy and predatory landlords. We must ensure that rent is affordable and accessible to everyone, and that renters aren’t price-gouged by greedy landlords who exploit our housing shortage and the economic insecurity of our community in order to increase their own profits. 

Letting corporations control our housing market is what led to the 2008 recession and our current crisis. We need a massive investment of federal resources driven by human need—not real estate profits.

The United States currently incarcerates more people per capita than any other independent democracy in the world, at a staggering rate of 580 residents incarcerated per 100,000 people. 

Our status as the highest-incarceration democracy in the world comes with a price. 

Economically, the United States annually spends more on prisons than it does on schools — an allocation of resources that only causes the school-to-prison pipeline to strengthen, as more students are left behind and less equipped to achieve economic security through traditional education or careers. But our communities also pay the price of our over-incarceration, as families are torn apart and communal systems of care are uprooted. And the vast majority — on average, 62% nationwide — of those held in our jails are being held pre-trial, and so are presumed innocent of any crime. 62% of those who are held in jails, away from their loved ones and community, are only there because they can’t afford the tens of thousands of dollars that our cash bail system requires in order for their freedom — even though they have not yet been found to have committed any crime.

I am committed to doing all that I can in Congress to transform the criminal justice system. That includes ending cash bail, because we should not be jailing people simply because they are poor. It includes reallocating funding to invest in social, health, and rehab services so that we are able to reach people who are at risk of incarceration before they end up stuck in the system. It also includes reforming sentencing guidelines, ending the school-to-prison pipeline by investing in quality public education and wrap-around services for all our youth, ending qualified immunity, and much more. 

Abortion rights have been gutted and continue to be under attack by the far-right across this country. Despite the disastrous Dobbs decision from the right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, Washington cannot stop fighting to protect our reproductive freedom and fight back against the continued GOP attacks on our abortion rights. We must codify abortion rights at the federal level and particularly protect access to medication abortion nationwide as Republicans focus their attacks on gutting access even in states that have protected abortion care like Michigan. 

We know that reproductive freedom is not just a healthcare issue — it’s an economic and racial justice issue, too. Republicans’ forced birth agenda forces families into situations they cannot afford, while the same politicians cut the critical funding to Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP benefits that lessen financial burdens on families. In Congress, I will push to pass bills like the EACH Act, which would repeal discriminatory laws such as  the Hyde amendment. By putting essential abortion care out of reach for marginalized and low-income communities, these kinds of laws only exist to punish people for being poor. 

The Pentagon has the largest budget of any federal government agency. As a result we spent nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars every year to line the pockets of corporate defense contractors, and to wage endless wars abroad. You know what doesn’t cost a trillion dollars? Leading with diplomacy, our nation’s greatest foreign policy asset — not bombs and weapons.

In Congress, I will oppose the bottomless and unconditional funding of weapons and bombs because we cannot keep funding human rights violations and war crimes with our taxpayer dollars. Instead, those dollars can be better spent here at home on urgent needs in our communities — from aging infrastructure to housing to ensuring our veterans get the job opportunities and healthcare they have earned.

Donald Trump ran a campaign of divide-and-conquer, attempting to turn our communities against each other, to distract us from the fact that the people actually stealing our jobs and making us unsafe are the corporations and billionaires he’s cutting taxes for. There’s a reason the first corporation to max out donations to Donald Trump’s campaign was GEO Group, one of the largest private prison corporations in the United States — the same corporation that ICE just awarded a $1 billion contract.

Now, Trump is waging an all-out war on all immigrants in this country, deporting anyone no matter their legal status, targeting those he disagrees with politically with an assault on free speech, and even defying the Supreme Court he handpicked. These are not normal times and the Democratic Party must be a party that includes all of us, fights for all of us, and opposes this agenda of mass deportations, internment camps, and the criminalization of immigrant communities.

We need a pathway to citizenship for all immigrants, tackle the bureaucracy that makes immigrating to this country so difficult, reform our asylum process, shut down for-profit detention centers, and not turn our back on refugees fleeing danger and disaster.