User:Humanengr/Governance §

Campaign finance reform and election integrity
The Financial Times identifies campaign finance reform as one of Gabbard's signature issues. In 2016, Gabbard co-sponsored the We the People Amendment to abolish corporate personhood and declare that campaign contributions are not free speech protected by the First Amendment. As of October 2018, Gabbard was one of only four members of Congress who pledged not to accept corporate campaign donations.

Gabbard introduced the Securing America's Elections Act of 2018 to require voter-verified paper ballots for federal election audits or recounts.

Civil liberties
Gabbard is an original member of the bi-partisan 4th Amendment Caucus. In 2014 remarks on an NSA phone data mining bill, she said: "We still have yet to hear of a single example of how national security has been strengthened by allowing bulk data collection." In 2019, Gabbard was awarded an 'A+' rating "as a champion for protecting a free and open internet and civil liberties" from Restore The Fourth and Fight for the Future.

Gabbard has called for breaking up "big tech companies" who she says, together with "overreaching intel agencies who take away our civil liberties and freedoms in the name of national security and corporate greed". She supports net neutrality, and has criticized Facebook for banning users. In Gabbard's lawsuit against Google for temporarily suspending her campaign's advertisement account, her lawyers that contended Google should be considered a "state actor" and that Google's program to verify election ads amounted to regulation of political speech, thereby violating the First Amendment.

Media and party
In a 2019 campaign email, Gabbard wrote that "our freedoms and democracy are being threatened by media giants ruled by corporate interests who are in the pocket of the ‘establishment war machine'" and has blamed the political establishment and mainstream media for ignoring or smearing her. She introduced legislation to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, a policy that required media outlets to present contrasting views on any political or social issue.

In March 2022, she said media freedom in Russia is "not so different" to that of the United States. A number of academic sources described her claim as false, saying that in Russia the government represses independent media and free speech, which includes imprisoning critics of the invasion of Ukraine.

Assange, Snowden, and Manning
Gabbard says the U.S. government should drop charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: "[H]is arrest and all … that just went down … poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech" She has also expressed concerns that "our government … can basically create this climate of fear against … those … publishing things that they don't like …. This … threatens every American — the message … we are getting is 'Be quiet, toe the line, otherwise there will be consequences.'"

She would also pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and take action to "close the loopholes" in the law Snowden exposed. Regarding both Snowden and Chelsea Manning, she said, "there is not an actual channel for whistle-blowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties, period. There was not a channel for that to happen in a real way, and that's why they ended up taking the path that they did, and suffering the consequences."

In October 2020, Gabbard introduced two bipartisan resolutions in the House of Representatives to pardon and drop all charges against Snowden and Assange respectively. She also introduced a bill to reform the Espionage Act -- HR8452 ("Protect Brave Whistleblowers Act") -- which was supported by Daniel Ellsberg (best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers).

In November 2020, Gabbard called for President Donald Trump to pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.