I’ve said elsewhere on this site that a state senator is not supposed to be a team captain for one side. The job is to be a referee: enforce the rules evenly, on everyone including the powerful, especially the powerful.

This page is what that means in practice.

You cannot trust a referee you are not allowed to watch. So every one of these commitments is about making the officiating visible: who is writing the rules, who those rules are written for, where your money is going, and what happens when someone breaks the rules.

I’ll lead the charge for:

• Stronger open records and ethics rules with real consequences for people who violate them

• Ending partisan gerrymandering with fair maps drawn by an independent panel, because politicians shouldn’t get to pick their own voters

• Making the state budget more transparent and easier to understand, because taxpayers deserve a scoreboard they can actually read

• A government that answers to the people who live with the consequences, not just the special interests trying to write the rules

Whether you're conservative, liberal, or somewhere in between—everyone deserves a government that earns their trust.

What This Means

Transparency is not about making government more complicated. It is about making it harder for powerful people to hide the ball.

It means you should be able to see who is asking for a law, who benefits from it, who pays for it, and why your senator voted the way he did. It means no surprise giveaways, no backroom deals, and no pretending a bill does one thing when the fine print does another.

If I vote for something, I’ll explain it. If I vote against something, I’ll explain that too. And if I get it wrong, you deserve to be able to tell me directly.