Features Overview
It's 3AM now. I'm ready to lead.
As a captain in the Marines, I led in times of hardship. As a manager in business, I guided teams through uncertainty to success. As a city councilor in Newton, I have worked together with both friends and opponents to deliver results on transportation, housing, and the environment.
In the Marines, we had a saying: “3AM leadership.” It meant that when things get hard, when times are dark, great leaders stay calm, focus in, and get the job done. In the midst of this 3AM crisis, I am more focused than ever — and in Congress, I will get the job done.
In Washington, I’ll work to ensure that healthcare is available and accessible to all — as a pandemic is exactly the time to finally ensure that healthcare is a human right, not a job perk, that no senior citizen struggles to pay for the drugs they need, and that every woman controls her own reproductive decisions. I’ll protect education funding from Republican cuts to make sure our schools don’t lose a dime and our kids don’t lose a year. I’ll champion increased job opportunity and a green economic recovery, especially in those parts of the Massachusetts Fourth that have been historically underserved.
I’m running for Congress to bring strong leadership, collaboration, and service to Washington. It’s 3AM now, but together, we will get to a new day.
- Jake
An economic recovery is not truly a recovery unless everyone recovers. In the aftermath of COVID-19, we must ensure that our recovery hinges on those communities who rely on a thriving Main Street economy, and who were in desperate need of infrastructure support even pre-pandemic.
Jake is committed to providing comprehensive aid to businesses, families, and individuals struggling with the economic ramifications of the COVID-19 crisis. Jake’s plan for an equitable economic recovery focuses on helping working families, supporting local governments, providing aid to underserved children, and propping up small businesses. In the long-term, Jake understands Massachusetts’ life sciences sector as a means for both crucial COVID-19 treatment and the creation of good jobs. Additionally, he will focus on leveraging future infrastructure-based stimulus packages to strengthen infrastructure needs for communities throughout the Massachusetts Fourth.
As a young person — the youngest city councilor in Newton, and the youngest candidate for Congress in the Massachusetts Fourth — Jake feels the urgency of our climate change crisis. He has dedicated his career to developing forward-thinking, progressive solutions to our greatest environmental challenges.
In Congress, Jake will work toward a future that focuses on clean, green public transportation instead of cars. He will prioritize carbon taxation, as he understands it as the single most substantive way to reduce carbon emissions and fossil fuel usage, moving us toward a clean-energy future. Jake will be a champion for offshore wind, ensuring that Massachusetts reaps both the environmental and economic benefit of this major clean-energy solution.
Jake will lead on progressive environmental policy, ensuring that each community in the Massachusetts Fourth benefits from progress made.
COVID-19 has forced kids, parents, and teachers to sacrifice so much. In Congress, Jake will fight to ensure our schools don’t lose a dime and our kids don’t lose another year.
The first position Jake took in Newton was as an advocate for early education, helping to bring about full-day Kindergarten and calling for expanded pre-K offerings. Jake has continued to advocate for education — when the Newton City Council debated a pay raise for elected officials, Jake voted No (one of only two out of 24) because Newton teachers were not guaranteed a pay raise, too. Excellent public education is the best way to ensure equal opportunity. In Congress, Jake will fight against Republican cuts to federal education aid, and will advocate for our kids, parents, and teachers.
Health care is a human right, not a job perk, and a pandemic is precisely the time to finally ensure that healthcare is affordable and accessible to every American. Having grown up in a family of physicians, scientists, and public-health officials, Jake appreciates the pivotal role of health care in quality of life and the Massachusetts economy. In Congress, he will be a champion for a public option, for increased federal funding toward basic medical research, and for a woman's right to choose.
With a lawless and corrupt president — whose mismanagement of COVID-19 has allowed the pandemic to reach crisis level — Congress must actively support and defend the Constitution to protect the American people and its institutions. Jake publicly called for an impeachment inquiry in 2017, and maintains that President Trump is wholly unfit for office. As a member of Congress, Jake is committed to restoring the rule of law and balance of powers.
Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Jake’s great-grandfather, a Russian Jew, fled the pogroms and built a small business in Massachusetts. From those refugee roots, his granddaughter, Jake’s mother, became the first female CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
America’s promise is that the condition of your birth should not determine the outcome of your life. We fail that promise when we deprive immigrants of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a Newton city councilor, Jake co-docked Newton’s Welcoming City ordinance, protecting immigrants by limiting cooperation between city and federal authorities and preventing investigation or detainment of immigrants solely based on legal status. In Congress, Jake will serve as a strong ally for all immigrants.
Jake commanded an infantry platoon in Afghanistan and special operations in Panama. He slept, ate, trained, and patrolled with an assault weapon for four years. Those are not the ‘arms’ that our Founders had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment 229 years ago. The American gun violence epidemic is one that plagues our schools, grocery stores, and our places of worship — and disproportionately affects minority communities.
In Congress, Jake will take on the NRA and will fight to make common-sense gun legislation a reality, including: mandatory assault-weapon buybacks, mandatory liability insurance for all weapons, Red Flag laws, and universal background checks.
Jake commanded special-operations-capable units, and knows what the United States military is capable of—and what it is not. Massive troop deployments in nation-building exercises waste our resources and recklessly endanger American lives.
As a member of Congress, Jake will work to reduce the conventional ground-force footprint, to scale naval, air, and cyber commands that protect the global commons, and to invest in surgical special operations that can identify, target, and neutralize terrorists across the globe without overextending the United States. Jake believes that international aid and robust diplomacy can strengthen our standing in the world while helping those most in need around the globe. Read more here.
Your time is valuable, but getting around keeps getting harder. Greater Boston has the worst traffic in the country, and transit is inconvenient and unreliable. Moreover, transportation accounts for more than 40% of Massachusetts’ carbon emissions. Jake has been the Newton City Council’s leader on transportation and an advocate for progressive transportation policies statewide. As a manager at Liberty Mutual’s innovation lab, he helped re-orient a Fortune 100 company to a future where people have the option to drive less and walk, bike, and take transit more.
In Congress, he will ensure that federal investments in a carbon-neutral future, including any form of a Green New Deal, bring funding for Massachusetts to re-invent its transportation system. The status quo of traffic and pollution is not acceptable. Jake will help deliver smarter transportation policy to Massachusetts, while strengthening the vibrancy of downtowns and neighborhoods from Fall River to Franklin, Needham to Brookline.
Jake believes systemic change is the most durable and impactful. In Congress, Jake will look beyond the surface to address root causes of the issues we face in our systems and institutions. Jake has been a major supporter of Ranked Choice Voting, a simple and fair way to better represent the will of the majority in elections. Jake has also presented at conferences on more equitable and transparent financing mechanisms for political campaigns and journalism.
After corporations spent money on a ballot initiative in Newton, Jake detailed the problem to his constituents in his newsletter, later submitting and passing a resolution with the Democratic City Committee calling for an end to corporate spending in local elections. Jake has not and will not accept any corporate PAC donations.