What is happening right now in America is unprecedented and it is terrifying.

Last April, I had the opportunity to sit down with a Turkish-American family to celebrate the end of Ramadan. As we were waiting for the sun to set so we could break bread, they told me that they had fled Turkey after Erdogan had taken power, and that the first few months of Trump 2.0 were eerily reminiscent of what happened in Turkey after Erdogan took over. But they expressed hope that the democratic institutions and democratic resolve of the American people were strong enough to prevent an authoritarian takeover in the United States.

Indeed, Trump is following a well worn playbook in his second term followed by many other authoritarian dictators. He has illegally deployed troops in our streets. He has weaponized the federal government to go after his political enemies. He has released violent MAGA criminals into the streets. And he has repeatedly attacked our core democratic institutions, including the media, universities, and the independent judiciary. 

As the child of immigrants and as a lawyer who has spent his life standing up for the rule of law, these developments are deeply unsettling to me on a very personal level. When we talk about the American Dream, it is not some distant ideal to me, it is part of my lived experience. And I know that the values of welcoming immigrants, of valuing hard work, of upholding the rule of law, and respecting our fair and free elections are essential parts of what has made America such a special place and transformed it into the greatest country in the history of the world. And those same values are under an unprecedented, sustained, and ferocious attack right now from Donald Trump and his MAGA allies.

We must treat this crisis of democracy with the urgency it deserves. In Congress, I have been a leading voice in calling out the authoritarianism and lawlessness of the Trump administration. Just a month after I had been sworn in, I introduced the BAD DOGE Act, which would have eliminated DOGE and fired Elon Musk from his role as a special government employee. I sent the letter to the nine law firms that had settled with Donald Trump, calling into question whether those settlements might be crimes under federal and state anti-bribery statutes, and then sent similar letters to private firms that had bent the knee to Donald Trump in other contexts, such as the companies that had contributed to Trump’s White House ballroom. As a member of the House Oversight Committee, I’ve played a key role in forcing the release of the Epstein files. And as the Chair of the CPC’s Anti-Corruption Task Force, I’ve been at the center of efforts to rein in the outrageous corruption we’ve witnessed this past year, not just from Trump and his cronies, but from members of Congress and the Supreme Court. 

And I’ve done this all while being a freshman who represents a key swing seat, which I won by just over 2% in one of the closest elections in the country in 2024. I have been loud and vocal and aggressive in fighting for we, the people, and I will not let up because we deserve better than a rigged system where the Epstein elite have one set of rules and the rest of us play by a different set of rules.