Our Platform

We deserve guaranteed healthcare. Right now, health insurance companies force us to fork over thousands for barely anything in return. They reject our claims, slap us with six thousand dollar deductibles, and then expect us to beg them to cover our child’s medicine even though we paid them to cover us in the first place. The health insurance industry is functionally a scam.
The bare minimum Texans deserve is to have their health taken care of. Anything that prevents this is unacceptable, which is why we are fighting to create a healthcare system that every Texan is entitled to. One that, for most in this district, will be thousands of dollars cheaper.
This looks like a public option, an alternative to private or employer insurance. You could keep your current plan, but unlike them it will guarantee coverage of all medications and treatments deemed necessary by your doctor. Or, in the case of things which are necessary for treatment but “contested,” they’ll be partially covered and at a lower price.
Rather than thousands in deductibles a year plus several thousand more in co-pays and surprise out of pocket expenses many pay, you would only be paying two to four thousand dollars a year based on income per adult, plus out of pocket costs equivalent to, at most, your morning coffee run for prescriptions and days at the hospital.
As well, anyone 26 or under would be considered a dependent of their parents or guardians, with disabled adults having indefinite coverage as dependents. No massive increases just because your children need healthcare.
This public option is funded the same way Social Security and unemployment already are: a small, automatic contribution taken from your paycheck and matched by your employer. There would be no surprise $800 bills waiting in the mail.
We deserve housing we can afford. Let’s be honest, the Texas housing market and living costs are awful. High property taxes, absurd housing insurance rates, skyrocketing rent, and insane mortgage rates create a situation where many Texans are one disaster away from losing it all despite doing everything right. And as for our children, most are flat out unable to afford a home because of how expensive they are.
This is completely unacceptable. Housing is not an optional luxury, it is a necessity to live with dignity and raise a family if we so choose.
For homeowners, we are fighting for regulations such as homestead exemptions and targeted relief to prevent you from being taxed out of your home. We’ll also force insurers to justify price hikes with actual data, and limit how far and fast they can jack up costs.
For tenants, we are fighting to end unjust rent increases. Landlords with five or more properties will only be able to increase rent by 3% from the previous year. We will also fight for tenant protections, requiring legitimate justification for evictions rather than the current criteria: “because I said so.”
As for mortgages, corporations buying up homes are what pushed home prices into the stratosphere. Through regulations, caps, and requirements for cities and residents to have first pick on any property for sale, we can make it extremely painful for corporations like BlackRock to buy what is rightfully ours.
Finally, we will invest in real public and social housing to build high-quality homes that people can afford. Mixed-income housing that’s built for struggling families, seniors, and veterans as a guarantee that they, too, can live without fear.
We deserve the greatest education system possible. Our school district budgets were already being squeezed, yet instead of fixing things they peddled private school vouchers with money that should have been used for our classrooms.
If you can afford private school, then great. But the responsibility Austin has is to public schools, and they chose a scam that benefits no one but billionaires. If that wasn't enough, teachers aren't being paid enough to live off of despite their critical role in our children's development.
The dysfunction doesn't stop at K-12. College tuition is so cripplingly expensive that many Texans have had to watch as their children either go into insane debt to earn their degree, or forgo it entirely because they literally cannot afford it. The state of Texas’s education is unacceptable.
We are fighting so that every school, no matter what their zip code is, will be fully funded. That means they receive enough to pay teachers a living wage, purchase supplies, fund learning resources like computers, and pay for expansions or remodeling as needed. We are also fighting for setting in-state tuition costs for community college and public 4-year colleges at zero.

Key Issues

In order to fund all of the policies we’re proposing, more revenue has to be generated.
Unfortunately, the GOP shot our state in the foot on this front. Through multiple constitutional ballot measures, Texas billionaires are now shielded from the types of taxes that actually touch their vast wealth. Austin literally cannot wield any of the usual tools used to tax billionaires in meaningful ways. We cannot use personal income, capital gains, or wealth taxes to make billionaires contribute a tiny fraction of their wealth. No, this is not a joke. Which means we have to use alternate methods so they pay what they owe until those constitutional amendments are repealed.
The usual avenues might be closed for now but there is an alternative: taxing the corporations themselves. We do that by raising the top rate on very large firms and implementing a new higher bracket for corporations making mega-revenue. We can also reshape property tax and school finance so that big commercial players pay more, alongside a tax on luxury items that only the ultra wealthy buy, like private luxury jets.
Inevitably, you will hear bad actors screaming that these will “scare billionaires out of Texas” and they’ll “take their business elsewhere.” The reality is, the tiny fraction of additional wealth they will now have to contribute is far less than the billions it would cost to pack up and move everything into another state. That includes the infrastructure of their companies which require thousands of workers to operate.
The minimum wage should actually be a minimum you can live on. With today’s prices, no one can survive on $15 an hour, or even $20. We should stop pretending otherwise and set the minimum wage equal to a real living wage for an individual, automatically adjusted for local cost of living and inflation. That way, when prices go up, wages rise too, instead of corporations gouging people’s paychecks by jacking up costs while wages stay frozen.
The Texas Legislature needs to fully legalize marijuana alongside other THC products and both pardon and expunge the records of low-level users. There is no good reason, medically, legally, or financially, to continue criminalizing it. Texas is light-years behind the curve on this, with scientists and other states long since proving it is safer than both tobacco and alcohol. It’s also unacceptable that Texas is literally abandoning $500 to $600 million of state revenue per year over culture war nonsense. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars that could go towards state-level universal healthcare. We need to build a sane, regulated system where THC is treated like any other controlled substance: taxed, checked for safety, and used without fear of prosecution.
I support legalization of gambling because not only does prohibition not work, the new revenue generated from it can be used to help fund our public schools and lower property taxes for Texans. Depending on how it’s implemented, legalization could bring a revenue stream in the ballpark of $500 million to $1 billion per year. It’s obvious that Texas should take advantage of it. Having said that, with legalization comes regulation, since gambling can easily lead to addiction. Any sort of legalization bill has to come with strong consumer protections and dedicated funding for addiction treatment. The state government has a responsibility to take care of all Texans, no matter how tempting the earnings are.
When talking about border security, we need to look at the facts. Operation Lone Star is a $2 to $3 billion-a-year money pit for useless security theater. The numbers put out by the Texas Military Department itself show border crossings rising and falling with federal policy, with little influence from OLS. Border security is a federal responsibility. Texas can only decide whether to abuse immigrants or treat them like humans.
The Legislature can repeal SB 4 and SB 8, which allow ICE practically free rein to kidnap immigrant parents without judicial warrants, and require local sheriffs to help enforce immigration law despite that being DHS’s and ICE’s responsibility. We can help immigrants gain citizenship by creating an Immigrant Defense Fund to guarantee lawyers and fund legal clinics that will help people apply for asylum.
As someone who’s had years of direct experience meeting and working with undocumented immigrants, I can confidently say that the GOP’s constant fearmongering over so-called “illegals” is a total fabrication. And as shown by ICE murdering Renee Good and Alex Pretti, along with the kidnapping of immigrants on work visas and green cards, it was never about them “taking jobs” or coming in “the right way.” It was always about naked cruelty, and we, as humans, have to be better than that.
As a state representative, I have to consider what will benefit Texans the most. In this case, it’s slamming the brakes on what’s driving the absurdly large demand for power and water: AI data centers. The environmental and labor costs required to build these massive boondoggles, for a tool that has proven itself to often be more unreliable than humans, owned by an industry working at a net loss and propped up on government subsidies is unacceptable.
Instead, Texas can build a profitable data center industry by hosting non-AI server farms dedicated to services such as cloud services, streaming, or banking/health records. This will drastically reduce energy and water demands. We can push those demands even lower by denying permits to build them in drought-prone areas or using fresh drinking water, prioritizing air cooling and recycled/greywater systems, and tying permits and tax incentives to using renewable energy.
Most importantly, to ensure communities are actually benefiting, the state can enforce strong local hiring, apprenticeships, and union-level wage standards. Because corporate profits should never come at the expense of working families.