3 upsides to the DNC email leak: (1) Sanders was tight, (2) Discipline was swift, and (3) Tim Canova [View all]

[Attorney in Texas]

gets a moment in the spotlight.

Sanders has reacted with incredible message control on the question of leaked DNC emails. He has refused every media outlet's efforts to bait him into blaming the Democratic Party or the Clinton campaign, and -- every time -- he has been emphatic in his unwavering support for Clinton. This is discipline. This is putting our progressive goals ahead of personal regrets. This is how a movement which is bigger than any single individual candidate pushes forward.

Instead of letting this wound fester and serve as a distraction throughout the convention, our party's self-policing was swift and just. This is how a healthy party deals with an error. Contrast how the Democratic Party addressed this problem in comparison to how the Republican Party mismanaged Milania's plagiarism scandal.

Finally, if this results in Tim Canova getting a second look by some, that is a real silver lining. Tim excites like few other candidates in America today, and having him on the ballot in November will boost Democratic turnout in battleground Florida!

Tim on Reversing Income and Wealth Inequality:

"For the past three decades, I have been speaking out against the growing inequality in income and wealth in the United States – while serving as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill in the 1980s, while practicing law in the 1990s, and as a legal scholar ever since. In fact, the distribution of wealth and income is now more top-heavy than anytime since the Gilded Age of the 1890s and the Roaring 1920s. Incredibly, the top one-tenth of one percent now owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And almost 60 percent of all new income since the 2008 financial crash has gone to the top 1 percent. We are now in a New Gilded Age."

Tim on Universal Health Care and Medicare for All:

"The passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a monumental achievement. With the stroke of a pen, President Obama signed into law the most important health care reform since Johnson’s Great Society. Through the ACA, millions of Americans have gained access to health insurance that was previously too expensive or otherwise unattainable. It is because of the ACA that insurers can no longer deny coverage because of preexisting conditions, drop policy holders when they get sick, or issue policies with lifetime dollar limits on essential benefits. Simply put, the ACA was a transformational piece of legislation, but I know we can do better. The United States remains the only major developed country that does not provide universal health care to all its citizens. Generations of American leaders – Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, among others - have tried to guarantee health care to all Americans, without success. Despite the reforms of the ACA, tens of millions of Americans still do not have health insurance. Millions more are underinsured, cannot afford high priced deductibles and co-payments, or are forced to declare bankruptcy because they simply cannot afford to pay their medical bills. This should not happen in a fair and just America. I firmly believe that health care is a universal human right and it is because of this that I want to improve upon the Affordable Care Act, by moving to a “Medicare for all” single-payer health care system that would guarantee every citizen health care as a basic right. ... Currently, many seniors struggle to afford the prescriptions medicines they need. That is why when I am elected to Congress I plan on working to create legislation that will allow the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to bring down the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare recipients. ... Expanding universal health coverage to all Americans would give us all the peace of mind to know that getting sick will not lead to bankruptcy. We will no longer have to choose between a better job or better health care coverage."

Tim on Tax Policy:

"tax cuts for the wealthy {are} nothing more than “voodoo economics” – as even George H.W. Bush candidly recognized while running in the presidential primary against Ronald Reagan over 30 years ago. Rather than mysteriously “trickle-down” to ordinary working folks, tax cut savings for the very wealthy are more likely to flow out of the U.S. to off-shore tax havens. Unfortunately, proponents of ever-more tax cuts for the wealthy never learned the lesson of history. The trickle-down tax cuts of the 1920s culminated in the Great Depression. Likewise, the Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s culminate in our own Great Recession, the adverse consequences of which are still with us today. Presently, the top bracket has a marginal income tax rate of 39.6 percent, far below the marginal tax rates that prevailed from the 1940s to 1980s, a period when the U.S. enjoyed not just a much more equitable distribution of income and wealth, but also far higher economic growth rates, rising real wages, and stronger labor markets. ... For more than the past 100 years, since the start of the modern tax code in 1913, our country has implemented what is known as a progressive federal income tax, meaning that tax rates get progressively higher as taxable income increases, with a larger percentage of income being paid by high-income groups, a lower percentage of income paid by middle-income groups, and an even lower percentage of income being paid by low-income groups. Cutting top tax rates for the wealthiest families reduces the progressive nature of our federal tax code, and undermines the concept of “ability to pay” and the goal of inherent fairness upon which our system of taxation is supposed to be based. ... I believe there should be more tax brackets at the high end of the income distribution scale, with higher marginal tax rates imposed on those making millions and billions of dollars a year. Otherwise, the tax burden falls too harshly on working families, the middle class, and small- and medium-sized business owners, even those trying to make their first million. We should also put an end to “corporate inversions” and other loopholes that allow corporations and wealthy individuals move their money into offshore tax havens, while taking advantage of federal subsidies and access to the largest consumer market in the world."

Tim on Ending the War on Drugs:

"As an activist and a law professor, I have been involved in the grassroots movement to decriminalize drugs. The goal should be to let adults make their own decisions as long as they are not harming themselves and others, let the States and their voters decide their own drug policies, and treat drug abuse as a public health issue, rather than burdening our criminal justice system. ... In Florida, I supported the 2014 medical marijuana referendum that garnered about 58 percent of the vote state-wide, falling just short of the required 60 percent mark. My opponent, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is a drug warrior who opposed the medical marijuana referendum. ... Certain industries have a special interest in keeping marijuana illegal - for example, the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries, both of which view recreational and medicinal use of marijuana as a competitive threat; and the private prison industry, which profits from warehousing people in jails, including for marijuana possession. Not surprisingly, having taken in lots of campaign donations from the alcohol, pharmaceutical, and private prison industries and their political action committees (PACs), Debbie Wasserman Schultz opposes medical marijuana and supports privatized prisons and mass incarceration. Unlike my opponent, I do not take any contributions from these special interests, or from any corporate interests at all. ... An entire private prison industry has arisen that lobbies for harsh drug wars with severe sentencing. The drug war institutionalizes racial, generational, and economic injustice, by disproportionately punishing people of color, young people, and people with lower incomes at far greater rates than the population as a whole. For instance, although surveys show that illicit drug use is no higher among people of color, African-American men are arrested at many times the rate of white men on drug charges in the U.S., and at even higher rates in Florida. ... More than half a million people are languishing behind bars on drug charges in the U.S., breaking up and often irreparably destroying families. ... In Florida and some other states, those convicted of non-violent drug felonies are barred for life from voting, even after they have served their sentences, regardless of whether they are responsibly employed, paying taxes, and raising families. In 2001, I helped spearhead the grassroots lobbying campaign that overturned New Mexico’s felon disenfranchisement law, and worked successfully with a Republican governor to do so. Unfortunately, Florida leads the country in felon disenfranchisement. ... Public opinion surveys show that people across the country, and particularly in South Florida, want to end this misguided drug war. Unfortunately, powerful industries continue to lobby for the drug war – including the same pharmaceutical, alcohol, and private prison companies from which my opponent readily takes large amounts of money. It is time to take corporate money out of politics, end the drug war, and provide legal and healthy alternatives for everyone. ... We don’t need more prisons. We need more jobs and more educational opportunities as alternatives to drug dealing and chronic drug use. And for those who are caught in the grip of the disease of drug addiction, rather than warehouse them in prisons as punishment, we need more treatment programs to provide a better means to help them recover."

Tim on Financial Regulation:

"Financial deregulation has resulted in more income inequality. Big Wall Street banks have been allowed to impose all sorts of fees on low-income customers. They charge high interest rates on predatory and subprime loans. They pay near zero interest to bank customers on their deposits. My opponent, after taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks, has co-sponsored a bill to prevent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFTP) from regulating payday loans and addressing racial discrimination in car loans. This reverses the progress made by President Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren in significant parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 - the Obama administration’s main legislative response to the 2008 financial collapse. ... I have spent my entire career opposing financial deregulation for the big banks, and calling for regulation of lending standards. I warned against watering down and then abolishing the Glass-Steagall Act firewalls that had separated commercial banking from investment banking and risky securities markets for decades. And I support breaking up these huge financial institutions that have become too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to manage."

Tim on Trade Agreements:

"As a law professor, scholar and activist, I opposed ... trade policies, including NAFTA, permanent normal trade relations with China, and China’s membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) ... that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in Florida. ... I do not take corporate money, period. And I opposed fast-tracking the TPP and I oppose the TPP."