Issues

The United States spends 16% of its gross domestic product on health care - far more than any other industrialized country - but fails to cover all of our citizens. That’s a scandal. Forty-seven million Americans, and 600,000 Oregonians, are uninsured. That’s a bigger scandal. I will be an outspoken fighter in the Senate for comprehensive national health reform. I want to make sure everyone has affordable health care, and that means doing the hard work of addressing the complex web of factors that drives up costs.

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Our men and women serving in Iraq are doing an exceptional job under incredibly challenging conditions. But no amount of military professionalism can forge a political resolution to this poorly conceived and disastrously planned war. It is time to bring our troops home from Iraq and work with the world and the region to take a new direction in the reconstruction. Here at home, it is time to honor our veterans’ service with access to benefits and an end to bureaucratic barriers to care. And we must rebuild our international credibility on human rights, arms control and the rule of law if we are to defeat extremism and hatred.

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Global Warming, A New Energy Agenda, Sustainable Forestry, Toxic Waste and a Stop to the Politicization of Science

I spent nearly a decade at the U.S. Justice Department, suing big polluters for violations of the Clean Air and Clean Water Act. I saw firsthand what a difference good environmental legislation and enforcement can make in protecting our natural heritage. For the last ten years, I’ve served on the board of the Oregon Environmental Council, fighting threats to our environment and forging new solutions for a sustainable future. I will keep up that fight in the U.S. Senate, demanding that we enact a comprehensive approach to reduce global warming, establish a new energy economy and help make Oregon an economic leader in renewable energy. In addition, I’ll work hard to preserve our environment – cleaning up toxic waste, protecting endangered species, and keeping politics out of scientific decision making. I firmly believe we can do this while also building a sustainable economy for the future with smart forestry, agriculture and fishing practices.

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Gordon Smith is as responsible as any member of Congress for helping George Bush add $3 trillion to the national debt. He supported every one of George Bush's tax cuts for the rich and powerful and added a few of his own. In the U.S. Senate, I’ll fight to restore fairness to our tax code and fiscal sanity to our federal government. With the growing budget deficits and impending retirement of the baby boomers, now is the time to address this crisis – not when are faced with massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

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With a shaky housing market, rising medical and gas bills and stagnant real incomes, more and more middle-class families are struggling just to get by. We need to get back to a federal government that helps lift working people up, not keep them down at the behest of the special interests. It is my pledge that in the U.S. Senate I’ll always stick up for the little guy, making sure they get a fairer break in our labor, economic and trade policies.

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Today Today nearly 39 million Americans, including 480,000 Oregonians live below the federal poverty line. That is a staggering disgrace. We are the richest nation in the world, yet the number of people in poverty has been actually been rising in recent years. It is a central commitment of mine in this campaign to help rebuild this nation’s middle class and that means providing opportunities for every American to make a better life for themselves. And I mean everyone. Too often those living in real poverty are overlooked in our discussions of the economy. I simply cannot accept a society where people are left out the effort to create shared prosperity. Therefore, I have outlined a “Poverty Agenda” to help those living in poverty join the middle class.

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Immigration is a challenging issue – just look at the Congress’s failure to enact reforms last year. There are no easy answers, and there is right on many sides of the issue. As a former federal law enforcement officer, I sympathize with those who argue that “the law is the law.” But as a practical person, I do not think it is feasible to round up 12 million people living here without documentation and deport them. So on this issue, there are no easy answers, but we must try our best. We need comprehensive immigration reform to secure our borders, strengthen our economy and ensure every person within our country is treated with respect and dignity.

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If Social Security had been left alone, it would be on sound financial footing for decades to come. The working Americans who have paid extra taxes since 1983 in order to secure the future of Social Security are entitled to their benefits. But every President since then - except for Bill Clinton in his second term - has borrowed from that trust fund to pay for other programs. The real threat to Social Security is not that the system itself is ‘broken’; it is the prospect that the rest of the Federal government will not repay what it has borrowed from Social Security. Tough fiscal choices will have to be made to ensure that promised benefits will be delivered.

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Educators, administrators and parents across Oregon and across the nation know the hard work and determination it will take to help our children succeed. It is time for the federal government to be a full partner in that project, rather than looking for an opportunity to pull the rug out from under our public schools or failing to live up to its education promises.

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I was taught at an early age that we cannot accept a society, nation or economy that works only for the rich, only for white people, only for men, only for straight folks. We can only accept a society, nation or economy that works for every blessed one of us – and on that principle there can be no compromise.

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One of the most dangerous legacies of this Bush administration will be the rollback of our constitutional rights and civil liberties by an executive branch that appears to consider itself above the law. Time and again, serious allegations of wrongdoing have been stymied, stonewalled, swiftboated or swept under the rug. It is not a surprise that people have little trust in their government and little faith that their rights will actually be respected. The record of warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, covert CIA “black site” prisons, use of torture in interrogations and other tactics in tension or direct violation with the law have sparked outrage here at home and sullied our name abroad. We as Americans must demand better from our leaders and be willing to fight to get it.

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I would join many other U.S. senators, and the rest of what we might call Google Nation, in supporting "net neutrality." We need to prevent broadband providers from creating a two-tiered system of access to information, in which content providers with money would have an advantage over those without it, and Internet users would often find it harder to Google their way to the information they really need.

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