Salaam Bhatti, a public-interest lawyer running in Virginia’s First Congressional District, joins Nick Paro on Powerful Voices to lay out the “ABCs” of his campaign: Medicare for All, taxing the billionaires, and campaign finance reform. Salaam grounds the platform in his record at the Virginia Poverty Law Center, where he expanded SNAP for 25,000 families with unanimous bipartisan support, raised TANF cash assistance twice, and helped build the Snapscreener.com tool that has unlocked over $100 million in benefits for 2.5 million families. The conversation gets sharpest on guaranteed income: Nick presses for a truly universal basic income funded by future AI productivity, while Salaam pushes back that means-tested support — paired with rent control and an updated federal poverty line — is the only fiscally responsible route. Both agree the patchwork of veteran healthcare (VA, TRICARE, CHAMP VA) and the broader Medicaid/Medicare maze should collapse into one Medicare for All system that includes dental, vision, and mental health. Listeners get a candid case for using impeachment as a delay tactic against Project 2025, a Virginia-specific moratorium pitch against data centers that ties to the JD Vance / Peter Thiel network, and a closing call to volunteer at salaamforva.com before the August 4th primary.

Key Takeaways

• Visit salaamforva.com to donate or sign up for door-knocking, phone-banking, or postcard writing — 78 days remain until the August 4th primary, and the campaign accepts no executive, lobbyist, corporate, or foreign-interest money.

• Read about Courage for Democracy to see the pre-drafted articles of impeachment Salaam and his fellow candidates have committed to advancing on day one — Salaam frames impeachment as a delay tactic against Project 2025 even without a Senate majority.

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Nick Paro sits down with Joel Lava, the Courage for Democracy candidate primarying incumbent Democrat Laura Friedman in California’s 30th Congressional District, and Lava spends the hour explaining why he stopped being a protester and started being a candidate. The on-ramp is Citizens Impeachment — now Courage for Democracy — which he met through the weekly Tuesday rallies he and his co-protest leader Addie ran outside Friedman’s office last December to ask her to file articles of impeachment. Friedman would not answer, the crowd grew from a handful to fifty, and after a recent candidates forum where she conceded the president is committing impeachable offenses but refused to commit to filing on day one if Democrats take the House, Lava decided to run. His pledge is concrete: file articles every day for at least the first week, then take stock; treat the constitutional remedy as bare-minimum job performance, not as political capital to be spent. He extends the same logic to the war in Iran, which he names plainly as an illegal war — a blockade alone is an act of war — argues the 60-day rule gives any president carte blanche and needs to be rewritten, and points to the JCPOA as a working inspection regime that Trump 1.0 scrapped, putting us where we are now. The remedy he wants Democrats to use, again, is impeachment.

On ICE and DHS, Lava is a “mend it, don’t end it” guy for almost every agency — and then names ICE as the exception that proves the rule. Abolish ICE, pull immigration enforcement out of DHS, reassess DHS itself twenty-five years after 9/11, and “document undocumented workers” through a seasonal-worker program, a DACA finalization, and a fast-and-fair citizenship path for long-resident law-abiding families. He grounds the economic argument in Lupe, the owner of a Mexican restaurant near his Tesla Takedown protests in Burbank whose construction-worker customers have either been deported or are too afraid to be seen in public, and he points to LAPD’s coordination with ICE — including credible reporting that LAPD officers are moonlighting as masked ICE agents for extra money — as a structural problem worth raising at the Police Commission directly with Chief McDonnell. The episode’s most personal turn comes when Nick, an Army combat vet, pushes on what Lava will actually do for veterans and the broader disability community given VA cuts, Doug Collins’s tenure, and the quiet rollout of AI auditing on disability-claim questionnaires; Lava concedes he isn’t a VA-policy expert, agrees aggregate care improved Obama-through-Biden and is degrading now, says budgets are moral documents, and floats Jason Kander — the Iraq-vet former rising Democratic star who left politics to treat his PTSD — as the kind of person who should be running the VA instead of Collins. With two weeks to a primary, Lava’s ask is volunteers and outreach before money: he wants people at polling stations at the legal distance, because most voters don’t decide until they’re in line.

Key Takeaways

• Track whether Lava actually files daily impeachment articles in his first week if seated — he’s pledged it on the record, named the Citizens Impeachment / Courage for Democracy draft articles (tyranny, corruption, illegal war) as the starting catalog, and explicitly contrasts his pledge with incumbent Laura Friedman’s refusal to commit even with a Democratic House; the first-week filings (or absence of them) are the cleanest test of whether the campaign promise survives contact with leadership.

• Audit the LAPD-as-ICE moonlighting claim — Lava says, based on what he’s heard at the LAPD Police Commission, that masked ICE agents in LA likely include LAPD officers working off-duty for extra money, and uses that to argue Chief McDonnell should be fired for non-enforcement of the masking law; verify the underlying reporting (LAPD policy on off-duty federal contracting, Commission testimony, any Inspector General review) before treating the claim as established, because the policy ask — separating local policing from federal immigration enforcement — depends on the factual claim landing.

Organizations / Programs:

• Courage for Democracy — The pro-democracy candidate coalition (formerly Citizens Impeachment) through which Lava reached the show; has drafted general articles of impeachment on tyranny and corruption.

• Joel Lava for Congress (CA-30) — Lava’s campaign site; primary is two weeks out from recording.

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Nick Paro sits down with Mary Noone — Indiana-based progressive strategist, Hoosier Victory Alliance co-founder, and former Lululemon/Ivivva leadership trainer — and the hour is essentially a clinic on why down-ballot Democratic campaigns keep losing winnable seats. Mary’s diagnosis is structural: candidates are recruited as policy experts but never trained as marketers, so they launch with a checklist of platform planks and no positioning. Her fix is a four-week candidate training built around community mapping (list 8–10 issues that matter locally, then the orgs and stakeholders already working them), social-media listening to surface the actual language voters use, and values-based messaging that lets candidates in neighboring districts talk about the same issue — data centers, redistricting, child care — in ways that resonate with their specific community without sounding scripted. She uses Zohran Mamdani’s NYC run as the canonical example: affordability was his frame, listening for months was his method, and rent control, child care, and grocery stores were the issues that hung off the frame.

The throughline beneath the marketing language is what Stephanie Wilson calls “better humaning” — the argument that durable political coalitions get built the way Lululemon built community before opening a brick-and-mortar: show up at the women’s hockey game, host a panel on data-center development, give without expectation, and trust that the metrics arrive three to four months later. Nick presses on the time crunch — midterms and 2028 are both bearing down — and Mary’s answer is twofold: lift up the “how-to” actionable creators (Run for Something, her own Hoosier Victory Alliance) above the news-explainer top layer, and educate the public that campaigns need accountants, graphic designers, and event planners more than they need another door-knocker. Her closing pitch is for candidates to start now if they’re thinking about 2028, and to get on the waiting list for the messaging-guide tool she and her partner Josh are automating so candidates without staff can still find their North Star.

Key Takeaways

• If you’re a working professional who wants to help — accountant, graphic designer, event planner, book-club organizer — Mary’s argument is that down-ballot campaigns will accept that help directly and don’t have the bandwidth to recruit you. Pick a local race, email the campaign manager with the specific skill you offer, and watch how fast the door opens.

• Track the Indiana redistricting fight as a case study in values-based pushback. Mary credits the win to (a) eight to ten weeks of sustained ecosystem messaging rather than a single rally, and (b) reframing redistricting as “DC deciding for Indiana” — a frame that landed because swatting incidents had already crossed the Hoosier value of not hurting each other’s families. Watch whether other gerrymandered states can replicate the frame.

Organizations and Terms

Organizations / Programs:

• Hoosier Victory Alliance — The progressive 501(c)(3) Mary co-founded with Stephanie Wilson to fill Indiana’s communications-hub gap.

• Indiana Women’s Action Movement — Where Mary previously chaired and surfaced the recruitment gap for women and women of color candidates.

• Run for Something — Amanda Litman’s national candidate-recruitment org; Mary positions her own work as complementary “how-to” infrastructure.

• Courage for Democracy — Network of progressive candidates who pledge on a shared set of articles and the citizens-impeachment movement.

• Indiana Rural Summit — Indiana-specific work Mary mentions on rural messaging consistency across neighboring districts.

• Veterans Fighting Fascism — Chris Goldsmith’s anti-fascist book club model that Nick’s Anti-Fascist Book Club is built on.

Terms / Concepts:

• Community mapping — Listing the 8–10 issues that matter in a community plus the orgs and stakeholders already working them; the prerequisite to messaging.

• Values-based messaging — Anchoring positioning to community-held values (family, independent decision-making, trust, fairness) rather than party labels or polling demographics.

• Better humaning — Stephanie Wilson’s frame for relationship-first political organizing where metrics lag months behind the work.

• Give without expectation — Lululemon-leadership ethos Mary imports into campaigns: build community presence without demanding immediate volunteer or vote conversion.

• Trifecta — Democratic control of the House, Senate, and presidency in 2020; cited as the unkept promise that drove Gen Z disengagement in 2024.

• MAHA — Make America Healthy Again; Mary cites Trump’s fruit-flavored-vapor executive order as a small-but-delivered campaign promise that explains MAHA loyalty.

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Nick Paro sits down with Erik Terwey, the Courage for Democracy candidate challenging Republican Josh Brecheen in Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District, and Terwey spends the hour translating progressive economics into language that works in a 22,000-square-mile rural district. He grounds his candidacy in his own biography — raised in OK-02, Teach for America French teacher in Tulsa, OU master’s, student debt and a 30-year mortgage he is not sure he can pay off — and argues nobody is fighting hard enough for people like him. His top issue is affordability: ending data-center sweetheart deals he blames for a 30% local electricity spike (against an 11% national figure), raising rural wages, restoring an education system he calls the worst in America, and pulling back from what he names as the “illegal war in Iran” because of how fossil-fuel and fertilizer prices flow through to grocery bills. On Native sovereignty, Terwey commits to introducing a day-one bill to seat the Cherokee Nation’s House delegate guaranteed by the Treaty of New Echota — a seat the nation has chosen and never been allowed to fill — and frames it as enforcing a treaty the U.S. signed, not granting a favor. He lays out his coalitions: Take Back Congress (term limits, overturning Citizens United, ending the Congress-to-lobbyist pipeline, banning congressional stock trading, an enforceable Supreme Court code of ethics), Citizens Impeachment, Mission for America, Men for Choice, and Progressive Victory. He is openly gay but deliberately keeps that off the website, arguing OK-02 voters respond to “fair” rather than “equity” or “inclusion,” and that the language the party uses in New York or California loses elections in the Ozarks.

What makes the conversation worth listeners’ time is the discipline of Terwey’s frame. He refuses to launder progressive policy as anything other than what it is, but he insists on translating it into the dialect of his district — fairness, work, faith, neighbor — and he is honest about why. He has very deep problems with the Oklahoma state party, real problems with the national party, and says plainly that the Democrats have not written him a check or sent him a volunteer. Nick presses him on how he would actually represent constituents from DC, on how he handles a suppressed-turnout electorate, and on whether his coalition pitch is more than branding; Terwey’s answer is transparency turned into a practice — weekly live streams, three-and-a-half-hour calls with single voters, and town halls during recess instead of vacations. The Cherokee delegate thread is the most editorially distinctive moment of the episode: Terwey credits fellow Courage candidate Brittany Jones for putting treaty law on his radar, and that cross-pollination is itself a useful signal about whether the Courage for Democracy network is functioning as a coalition or just a logo. The episode is a test of whether a gay, Democratic, treaty-enforcement, anti-data-center candidate can run an explicitly progressive economic platform inside the fourth-most-conservative district in the country and survive long enough to be heard.

Key Takeaways

• Watch Terwey’s day-one Cherokee delegate bill — the Treaty of New Echota guarantees the Cherokee Nation a non-voting House seat with committee votes and bill-submission rights, the nation has selected a representative, and no Oklahoma member of Congress has moved to seat them; treat the bill’s introduction (or absence) as the fastest measurable test of whether Terwey actually governs the way he campaigns.

• Audit the data-center deal claim — Terwey blames Oklahoma’s 30% electricity-cost increase (against an 11% national figure) on tax-incentive packages handed to data-center operators who employ a handful of permanent workers; track the underlying utility-rate filings and the specific tax-abatement agreements before treating the 30% number as settled, because the policy ask (ending the sweetheart deals) only lands if the cost causation does.

People, Organizations, and Terms

People:

• Erik Terwey — Courage for Democracy Democratic candidate for Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District; OU French-lit master’s, former Teach for America Union French teacher in Tulsa, openly gay; the guest. https://www.terweyforcongress.com

• Josh Brecheen — Incumbent OK-02 Republican congressman Terwey is challenging; cited for reading from cue cards at an August town hall and taking only a cursory question before leaving.

• Brittany Jones — Fellow Courage for Democracy candidate (running for Oregon governor) Terwey credits for surfacing tribal treaty law as a federal-policy lever.

Organizations / Programs:

• Courage for Democracy — The pro-democracy candidate coalition through which Terwey reached the show. https://www.couragefordemocracy.com

• Take Back Congress — 100+ candidate coalition committed to five day-one bills: term limits, overturning Citizens United, ending the Congress-to-lobbyist pipeline, banning congressional stock trading, and enforceable Supreme Court ethics.

• Citizens Impeachment — Accountability-focused candidate coalition Terwey says is ready to investigate constitutional-oath violations in any branch. https://www.citizensimpeachment.com

• Mission for America — Ten-year economic-transformation plan (newconsensus.org) Terwey has signed onto as a framework for clean, modern, broadly distributed prosperity.

• Men for Choice — Men’s coalition dedicated to restoring reproductive rights; does not endorse during primaries. https://men4choice.org

• Progressive Victory — Grassroots organization working to elect progressive candidates; Terwey is a member.

• Cherokee Nation — Sovereign nation whose Treaty of New Echota House-delegate seat Terwey commits to seating on day one.

Terms / Concepts:

• Treaty of New Echota — Pre-removal treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the United States that guarantees the nation a non-voting delegate in the U.S. House with committee votes, bill-submission rights, and full floor-speech rights — never seated.

• McGirt decision — The Supreme Court ruling Terwey cites as having reaffirmed tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma; “settled law in my heart.”

• Fairness framing — Terwey’s deliberate substitution of “fair” for “equity,” “equality,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” when speaking to OK-02 voters; same policy, different dialect.

• Data-center sweetheart deals — Tax incentives Terwey blames for OK-02’s 30% electricity cost increase versus an 11% national average, with few permanent jobs in return.

• Day-one bills — Pre-written legislation Terwey and his coalition partners say they will file the day they are seated, as a contrast to “going there to learn how to govern.”

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Nick Paro and Rachel Maron sit down with Brittany Jones, the Courage for Democracy candidate challenging Oregon Governor Tina Kotek in the Democratic primary, and Jones spends the hour translating progressive instinct into specific gubernatorial powers. She argues for a temporary state gas-tax suspension paired with a Secretary-of-State audit of ODOT, statewide expansion of CAHOOTS-style mental-health response, a housing-first approach she will fund from her own salary if the legislature refuses, and aggressive use of treaty law with Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes to block data-center expansion and Trump-administration logging approvals. She is explicit about confrontation with the federal government — referring ICE conduct to the Oregon DOJ, activating the state militia and National Guard to protect protesters, and coordinating with Washington and California to “fortify the West Coast” as a sanctuary for transgender, immigrant, and reproductive-care refugees.

What makes this interview worth listeners’ time is not the platform itself but Jones’s willingness to name the threat in plain language — fascism, white supremacy, government capture — and to accept the personal risk of doing so. She has raised under $2,000, lost her DoorDash vehicle, and tells her team to keep campaigning if she is arrested. The hosts press her on durability (income-tax flight, performance management, follow-through on past Oregon decriminalization) and on coalition-building with establishment Democrats; her answer is community-led oversight boards and constituent pressure rather than insider negotiation. The episode is a useful test case for whether a working-class, indigenous, grassroots-funded primary challenge can move the Democratic Party’s spine before the 2026 cycle.

Key Takeaways

• Track Oregon’s May ballot gas-tax measure and Jones’s proposed temporary suspension — her offset claim depends on an ODOT audit she has not yet seen the numbers on, so verify the audit’s existence and findings before treating the suspension as fully funded.

• Watch Jones’s use of treaty law as a template — if Oregon governors can credibly invoke the nine recognized tribes’ treaty rights to block data centers and federal logging approvals, that’s a tool other states could replicate, and the absence of its use today is itself evidence worth surfacing.

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Call your public servants on important issues:

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• deflock.me

Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

• Orders Project

• Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

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You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

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Nick Paro opens this Powerful Voices interview by welcoming Joseph Perez-Caputo — law student, former actor, former gardener, Sicilian-Boricua, and the Courage Candidate running to unseat Representative Jim Himes in Connecticut’s 4th District. CT-04 runs from Bridgeport down to Greenwich, through Ridgefield and Redding and all the idyllic New England towns in between, and Joseph moved back in with his mother in Stamford at 33 years old to run for the seat. That detail is not incidental. It frames everything else in this conversation: the man did the math, decided the district needed this, and went.

Before a single policy question, the episode gives real time to the mechanics of getting onto the ballot in Connecticut — and the picture is ugly. The state runs closed primaries, which means you either win 15% of delegates from Democratic Town Committees (people picked by the party infrastructure you’re challenging) or you petition. Joseph is pursuing the petition route. No one in Connecticut history has successfully petitioned their way onto the congressional ballot since the country was founded. The numbers explain why: he needs 2% of registered voters who voted in the last election — which translates to roughly 4,500 signatures, all from registered Democrats, all collected in 42 days, all meeting archaic literacy-law standards requiring cursive, specific ink colors, and a form the state doesn’t even release until April 28th. Modern campaign wisdom says double it. One previous candidate got close, had the state delay releasing his forms by three days, and then watched the court rule against him when he argued the delay was unconstitutional. Joseph knows all of this and is running the petition route anyway — because, he says, the petition is about the voice of the people. The delegates route would require him to walk back into a district he left during the pandemic and ask party insiders to hand him support. He didn’t want to do it that way. You sense he wouldn’t have respected himself if he had.

The policy section of this episode is dense and genuinely interesting. Joseph’s first legislative priority is a tax abatement program for residential and commercial property taxes, structured around converting lawns into native cultivar havens or community vegetable gardens — routed through local CSAs, farmer’s markets, and food pantries to eliminate food deserts. He built this idea out as a gardener a decade ago and has been waiting for the right moment to run on it. The ecological case he makes is real: existing research suggests that if most American lawns were converted to native habitat, the cumulative effect would approximate a 22 million hectare national park. The economic case is equally direct — prop up the gardening trade as legitimate skilled work, bring fresh local produce into grocery supply chains, and give communities a new category of economic participation. From there, the episode covers affordable housing (the luxury-apartment gentrification wave gutting CT-04), the AI revolution’s impact on labor (tech layoffs, energy usage, water consumption), and a genuinely open conversation about universal basic income as a mechanism for letting people change careers without a three-month gap in healthcare. Joseph is not a fan of AI. He wants regulation on what data it can access, what it can be connected to, and what it can be used to generate — including explicit deepfakes made without consent. His critique of AI mirrors his critique of social media: we failed to learn the right lessons the first time, and the greatest repository of social behavior data in history (Meta) exists entirely for advertisers, not for public benefit.

The sharpest section of the episode is on FISA 702. Joseph’s incumbent, Representative Jim Himes, has been the public face of pushing clean reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s subsection 702 — the mechanism under which, through the data broker loophole, the government can purchase commercially available data on American citizens without a judicial warrant. Himes fought hard for clean reauthorization, got pushed back by constituent pressure, wrote a 14-page amendment Joseph describes as a press release, and still didn’t close the loophole. Joseph’s critique is not rhetorical. He’s in law school. He explains the difference between legal terms of art and plain meaning rules, walks through how the phrase “commercially available data” has been interpreted to mean everything, and makes the point plainly: someone could be watching this conversation right now through a phone camera, and it would be legal. The fix he wants is twofold — class action restitution rights for citizens whose data has been breached or sold, and actual defined terms in the statute so that “commercially available data” and “acted with a foreign national” have precise legal meanings instead of acting as open-ended surveillance licenses. When Nick asks whether this warrants a constitutional amendment to enshrine data sovereignty and human protection into the Bill of Rights, Joseph says categorically yes — and notes that 12 years ago he organized an international protest whose central demand was exactly that: a constitutional convention and a constitutional restatement of rights for the digital age. The punk rock dude who wants to build a machine he doesn’t want to rebel against is already thinking at that level.

The episode closes on impeachment, and here Joseph is explicit that he holds the more aggressive position within Courage for Democracy. Impeachment is the floor, not the ceiling. What he wants is to pursue treason charges — under RICO, against the full network of business, NGO, and political machine actors — after the impeachments. He cites On Treason by Carlton F.W. Larson as the legal framework, draws a line from the Confederacy to the current president, and names Pete Hegseth’s alleged orders for extrajudicial killings as falling under the same category of accountability that would send a soldier to Leavenworth. He wants a full DHS review. He wants the new Nuremberg — and he says the first one wasn’t intense enough because of Operation Paperclip. He’s aware that saying this on camera is not safe. He says it anyway. Nick’s response is worth noting: he’s been saying the same thing on his own platform for some time, and he’s glad a candidate is willing to speak it out loud, because public opinion has to exist before Congress will act. Citizens’ Impeachment has been building exactly that — and Joseph is one of roughly 130 Courage for Democracy candidates already operating as a collaborative, pre-formed legislative block across 38 states. They have a policy matrix on the Courage for Democracy website showing nearly 99% agreement across issues. They’re not waiting to get elected to start working together. They’re already working.

Key Takeaways

• Connecticut’s ballot access system is designed to fail challengers. No one has ever successfully petitioned onto a Connecticut congressional ballot. Joseph needs 4,500+ signatures from registered Democrats, collected in 42 days, on a form the state won’t release until April 28th, following 150-year-old literacy laws. If you’re in CT-04, find him at JPC4CT04 and help collect signatures.

• The gardening tax abatement program is ready to become a bill. Joseph’s proposal — abating property taxes in exchange for converting lawns to native cultivar havens or community gardens — has ecological benefits at national scale (22M hectare equivalent national park effect) and economic benefits at the local level. It’s also the kind of policy that crosses partisan lines: lower property taxes, local food access, and skilled trade creation are not ideologically divisive asks.

• FISA 702’s data broker loophole means everything is commercially available. Your IP address, your phone camera, your communications with anyone in another country — all of it potentially falls under the current legal framework. Joseph’s incumbent is fighting to keep reauthorization “clean.” Joseph’s campaign is now primarily focused on defeating that effort and defining terms that actually protect citizens. Citizens’ Impeachment is tracking this fight and acting on it.

• Impeachment is the floor, treason charges are the ceiling. Joseph is explicit that he holds the more aggressive position within the Courage Candidate network — RICO charges, full network accountability, a new Nuremberg that goes further than the last one. Public opinion needs to exist before Congress will act. Say it out loud. Keep saying it.

• The Courage Candidate network is already functioning as a pre-formed congressional block. 130 candidates across 38 states, with a policy matrix showing ~99% agreement. The candidates who didn’t make the primary ballot are staying committed locally and will be offered staff positions if their peers win. Find the candidate in your district at couragefordemocracy.com and make noise before the advertising money arrives.

• The House of Representatives is the only branch that can create law. Joseph’s answer to the Supreme Court running renegade is legislative: go into the old cases, read the dissents and the dicta, find the reasoning, and write the bill that undoes the bad decision. Executive orders are suggestions. The Court can strike down bad law but can’t create new law. A functioning legislative body can undo everything the Court has enabled — if it does its job. That’s the argument for why the candidates in this network matter.

Terms and Concepts

• Closed Primary (Connecticut) — A system in which only registered party members can vote in that party’s primary. In CT, getting on the primary ballot requires either 15% of Democratic Town Committee delegates or a successful petition drive — both designed to be difficult for challengers.

• Petition Route — The path Joseph is pursuing for ballot access. Requires ~4,500 signatures from registered Democrats, collected in 42 days from April 28th to June 8th. Has never been successfully completed in Connecticut history for a congressional race.

• Tax Abatement Program (Agrarian Integration) — Joseph’s signature legislative proposal. Property tax abatements for property owners who convert their land to native cultivar gardens or community food gardens. Designed to eliminate food deserts, create a new skilled trade economy, and produce national ecological benefit.

• FISA 702 / Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 — The surveillance law that allows intelligence agencies to collect communications involving non-U.S. persons abroad. The data broker loophole allows the government to purchase “commercially available data” without a judicial warrant, potentially capturing U.S. citizens’ data.

• Data Broker Loophole — The mechanism by which private companies sell personal data to each other, and then to the government, without triggering warrant requirements. Joseph’s incumbent argues this is not addressed in the statute. Joseph argues that’s precisely what makes it a loophole.

• Citizens’ Impeachment — Nonpartisan grassroots organization working to force Congress to act on impeachment and accountability. Connected to the Courage for Democracy candidate slate.

• Courage for Democracy — Non-partisan candidate slate of 130+ candidates across 38 states running for federal office. Policy matrix shows ~99% agreement across candidates. Operating as a pre-formed legislative collaborative.

• RICO — The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Joseph proposes applying it to the current administration’s conduct, treating the full network of actors as a coordinated criminal enterprise.

• Ranked Choice Voting (Joseph’s Federal Proposal) — A federal bill Joseph would pursue allowing each party to place two candidates on the general election ballot, with ranked-choice voting determining the winner. Designed to expand democratic choice while respecting state control over elections.

• Constitutional Amendment for Data Sovereignty — Joseph’s long-standing position: data protection, biometric sovereignty, and human rights protections should be enshrined in the Bill of Rights, not left to statutory interpretation.

Sources & References

• Joseph Perez-Caputo Campaign — creatingcommunityeverywhere-jpcforcongress.org

• Courage for Democracy

• Citizens’ Impeachment

• On Treason — Carlton F.W. Larson (2019)

• FISA Section 702 reauthorization — ongoing legislative fight, CT-04

• Connecticut closed primary and petition ballot access requirements

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

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Nick Paro, Walter Rhein, and Will Fullwood open this Powerful Voices episode by welcoming Keira Havens — Air Force veteran, former scientist, co-founder of the Citizens Impeachment Coalition, and a driving force behind the Courage for Democracy candidate slate. The intro is warm and the military banter is real, but Keira gets down to business fast: she swore an oath to the Constitution, she’s taking it seriously, and she’s here because almost nobody in Congress is.

The backstory Keira lays out is both more organized and more infuriating than most people realize. In April 2025 — when polls were already showing 80-plus percent of Democrats, 40-50% of independents, and even 20% of Republicans wanting impeachment — the Citizens Impeachment Coalition launched with a single coordinated action: 600 people, one from every congressional district, sent an article of impeachment to Congress at the exact same moment. It worked. Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan’s 13th district incorporated their drafted article into a full impeachment resolution, filed it under Rule 9 (which forces a House floor vote within two legislative days), and brought it to a vote in under a month. Then Democratic leadership walked onto the floor and physically yelled at Thanedar until he pulled it. The first vote that did happen saw 79 members willing to take up the question of impeachment. By December, that number had jumped to 140. Only 47 Democrats followed leadership into the “present” column. The coalition reads this as a signal: leadership is isolated. The caucus is not with them. The movement needs to keep forcing votes until leadership can no longer pretend otherwise. Citizens Impeachment is still pushing for the next one.

The second pillar of this work is Courage for Democracy — the candidate replacement arm. If Congress won’t do its job, you replace the people in Congress. That logic produced a slate of 130-plus Courage Candidates across 38 states, running in 100-plus districts at the federal level, spanning both House and Senate races. Keira is clear on what “non-partisan” actually means in this context: it doesn’t mean bipartisan, it doesn’t mean splitting the difference, and it doesn’t mean she has any interest in what label a candidate puts on themselves. It means a shared standard — elected officials uphold the Constitution and are held to it equally — applied without exception and without carve-outs for team affiliation. The candidate interview playbook Walter and Courtney built (now live at broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook) is part of this infrastructure: giving independent media creators the baseline they need to run a serious candidate interview and get something useful on the record.

The primary calendar is where this episode becomes immediately actionable. Primary season kicks off May 5th, with Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana all in the first wave. Louisiana’s Courage Candidate has already cleared her primary — her opponent dropped out, so she’s on the general election ballot. Georgia has Brianna Woodson and Case Norton, who Keira describes as showing up ready and willing to fight. California is a major target on June 6th, along with a batch of others. The math Keira lays out matters: a typical congressional primary turns out roughly 40,000 voters in a district where the general may pull 200,000. That compression means 100, 200, or 500 organized people can swing a primary. The movement doesn’t need to win the whole country at once. It needs to win primaries, one district at a time, with people who show up before the general and vote when it actually counts. Full candidate search by state and office is at couragefordemocracy.com.

Nick closes by pulling the two threads together on-screen — showing the BroadBanner resources page with Citizens Impeachment and Courage for Democracy links already live — and framing what the platform is for: getting serious candidates in front of audiences before the money decides the conversation. Keira’s assessment of what podcasters and independent media can actually provide is worth sitting with. It isn’t money, and it isn’t infrastructure. It’s taking candidates seriously, giving them a platform where they look credible, and asking them the question that the institutional media consistently refuses to ask: are you willing to fight? That question, Keira says, is the one that actually separates the candidates who matter from the ones who are just running for résumé reasons. All resources — Citizens Impeachment, Courage Candidates, the community calendar, and the candidate interview playbook — are consolidated at broadbanner.com/resources.

Key Takeaways

• Vote in the primary. Congressional primaries turn out roughly 40,000 people per district — roughly 5% of the total electorate. That compression means a few hundred organized voters can determine the outcome. Find your Courage Candidate at couragefordemocracy.com, learn when your primary is, and show up before the general.

• Track the impeachment vote count. The December House vote had 140 members willing to take up the question of impeachment. Only 47 Democrats voted with leadership against it. Watch whether the next vote moves that number above 150 — that is the threshold at which Democratic leadership can no longer hold the line. Citizens Impeachment tracks every vote and sends constituent action items directly.

• Ask every candidate if they’re willing to fight. Keira’s framework for evaluating candidates is simple: not how much money they’ve raised, not what party label they’re wearing, but whether they will actually use power when they have it. That’s the interview question that matters. If you’re hosting candidates on your platform, use the framework at broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook.

• Primaries in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, West Virginia, and California start May 5th. The first wave of Courage Candidate primaries begins immediately. Louisiana’s candidate is already on the general election ballot. West Virginia’s Brit is running hard. California is the major June 6th target. Know who’s running in your district and make noise about it now, before the advertising money rolls in.

• Connect independent media to Courage Candidates. The most valuable thing podcasters and community platforms can do right now is give Courage Candidates a platform and treat them seriously. This doesn’t require money or infrastructure. It requires showing up, asking real questions, and getting candidates in front of new audiences. Reach out to Courage for Democracy to get connected with a candidate running in your district.

• The oath of office is non-negotiable. Keira’s framing is as simple as it is demanding: every member of Congress swore the same oath she swore in the Air Force — to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Courage for Democracy applies that standard uniformly, regardless of party, and will primary anyone who won’t keep it. That’s the entire theory of change.

Terms and Concepts

• Citizens Impeachment — Nonpartisan grassroots organization founded April 2025 with the goal of forcing Congress to act on impeachment. Strategy: coordinated constituent pressure, drafted articles of impeachment, Rule 9 filings. citizensimpeachment.com

• Courage for Democracy — The candidate slate arm of the citizens accountability movement. 130+ candidates in 38 states running for House and Senate seats. Non-partisan by design: applies a single constitutional standard to all candidates regardless of party. couragefordemocracy.com

• Courage Candidates — Individual candidates endorsed and supported by Courage for Democracy. Screened for willingness to uphold their oath of office and actually use power once elected.

• Rule 9 — A House procedural rule under which any member can raise a question of constitutional privilege at any time, forcing a floor vote within two legislative days. The mechanism the Citizens Impeachment Coalition used to get an impeachment vote to the floor in under a month.

• Non-partisan vs. Bipartisan — Keira’s explicit distinction: bipartisan means splitting the difference between parties; non-partisan means applying the same constitutional standard to everyone regardless of party. Courage for Democracy is the latter.

• Candidate Interview Playbook — A guide developed by Walter Rhein and volunteer Courtney for independent media creators who want to interview congressional candidates. Provides baseline discussion points and interview structure. broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook

• Primary Math — A Courage for Democracy organizing framework: congressional primaries average ~40,000 voters per district vs. ~200,000 in the general. 100-500 organized voters can swing a primary. Primary voting has disproportionate impact and is where the movement’s electoral leverage is concentrated.

Sources & References

• Citizens Impeachment Coalition — citizensimpeachment.com

• Courage for Democracy — couragefordemocracy.com

• Banner and Backbone Community Resources — broadbanner.com/resources

• Congressional Candidate Interview Playbook — broadbanner.com/candidate-interview-playbook

• House impeachment vote tallies (first vote: 79 for; December vote: 140 for, 47 with leadership)

• April 2025 polling: 80%+ of Democrats, 40-50% of independents, 20% of Republicans supporting impeachment

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with , , , and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Actions You Can Take

Check out our new shared community calendar:

• Broad Banner

Sign the Petitions:

• Demand Congress Subpoena Key Figures on the Epstein Case

• Mandate that ICE agents show their face and identification

Call your public servants on important issues:

• 5calls.org

Join the efforts to de-flock the States:

• deflock.me

Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders:

• Orders Project

• Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76

Banner & Backbone Authors’ Notes

Check out the new BroadBanner network and affiliate calendar!

Donate to Feeding America, today!

You being here shows that you have already begun the process of unfurling new Banners and forging new Backbones for a more progressive America. Please, take the time to become a paid, or free, subscriber to the Network — supporting us all and ensuring everyone in America can hear these messages.

The America we strive for — it is one where we willingly remember the teachings of our past, humbly learn from our failings, proudly celebrate our successes, and boldly lead the way into a future for all people.

Subscribe now

Reach out to the team if you are interested in volunteering time, supporting, and building these community driven platforms:

• Submit feedback directly: Feedback Form

• : info@bannerandbackbone.com

Support and subscribe to Banner & Backbone!

Banner & Backbone Team

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