This week, as Connecticut residents remain priced out of basic necessities and watch their own government brutalize civilians in the streets, Congress is finally ready to take action — by asking you for $5,000.
That’s the cost of admission to get in the room with Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is coming to Connecticut to headline a fundraiser this week. Not to listen. Not to learn. Not to respond to what people here are enduring. He’s coming to pull money out of the state to protect a Congress that has repeatedly failed to protect us.
It’s an opportunity to have your voice heard and influence the policies that shape American life, provided you pay an entry fee.
If this feels gross, that’s because it is.
Families are being crushed by housing, grocery, healthcare, and energy costs. At the same time, Americans are watching open corruption, the erosion of constitutional rights, and lawless violence carried out by the federal government in plain sight. People are not confused about what’s happening. They are begging Congress to act with urgency that matches the gravity of the moment.
Instead, they’re being handed a donation form.
For nearly a decade, Democrats have met every escalating crisis with the same response: give us more money so we can fight back next time. Rather than lead, party leadership has focused on protecting its own positions. Policies that would actually help people get watered down. Negotiations drift toward the safest political ground. Billionaires are handed the keys to Congress in exchange for financing campaigns.
This isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice our leaders have made.
The only way this changes is by electing different kinds of people to Congress. That’s why I’m running.
As a social worker, a working mom, and a state legislator, I’ve spent my career in rooms listening to regular people. Those conversations shape the laws I write and the issues I take on.
Running for Congress, I’m hearing something new and unmistakable. Alongside their personal struggles, people are naming Democratic leadership itself as a problem to be solved. They see a government that responds to money, access, and seniority, and treats public critique as an inconvenience.
And elected leaders keep proving them right.
Democrats talk a lot about standing up to corruption and extremism. But that will never happen as long as they refuse to confront money in politics, especially as it’s flowing into their own campaigns.
That’s why I’ve proposed The People’s Election Program for Congress that puts power back in the hands of voters by taking big money out of the election process and forcing Congressional candidates to earn support from those who would elect them. It’s modeled on Connecticut’s public financing system, the same system that helped me defeat an 18-year incumbent in the State House.
For long-time incumbents and well-financed contenders, donor-driven politics is familiar terrain. They have the networks. They know the rules. They benefit from leadership positions and institutional inertia. To them, the system doesn’t feel broken, which is exactly why they have no incentive to change it.
For people who are comfortable with how power works in Washington, this is just how politics is done.
For everyone else, it’s a dead end.
You should not need wealth, insider status, or rich friends to matter in a democracy. Yet that is exactly what our political system now demands, while asking working people to trust that it still represents them.
It doesn’t.
That’s why frustration with Democratic leadership is so intense right now. Not because people expect miracles, but because they expect courage. They expect Congress to respond when power is abused and when people are hurting, not to disappear behind closed doors unless someone writes a large enough check.
If we want Congress to function again, to actually help people, restrain abuse of power, and meet moments of crisis, we have to change what it’s built around.
As long as money is the organizing principle of politics, Congress will keep failing the people it’s supposed to serve.
I’m not running to join this system or to make myself comfortable inside it. I’m running to change how Congress works, who it listens to, who it answers to, and whose lives shape its priorities.
Congress doesn’t need your $5,000. It needs your two cents — and the courage to listen to it.
State Rep. Jillian Gilchrest is a candidate for Congress in Connecticut’s First District