To the 120th United States Senate and Congress Your Mandate from the American People, November 3, 2026
We are the people of the United States of America. We are the farmers and the nurses and the teachers and the veterans and the dock workers and the small business owners and the mothers and the fathers and the grandparents and the young people who stood in lines in November and cast the votes that sent you where you are. We are the ones who watched. We are the ones who lost. We are the ones who buried people who did not have to die, who lost businesses that did not have to close, who watched rights stripped from women and dignity stripped from immigrants and truth stripped from the institutions we built over two and a half centuries to protect us from exactly what happened. We are the ones who fought back the only way a free people can — at the ballot box — and we fought in numbers that left no room for misreading and no room for the kind of equivocation that has cost this country too much already.
We know what we sent you to do.
We did not send you to Washington to negotiate with the people who broke it. We did not send you to find the reasonable middle ground between constitutional government and the apparatus that spent two years dismantling it. We did not send you to be gracious in victory or measured in your response to what was done to this country in our name and without our consent. We sent you to fix it. Every last piece of it. And we are going to tell you exactly what that means, because we have watched long enough to know that if we do not say it plainly, it will not get said at all.
And we need you to understand something before we go any further. We are not waiting in comfort. We are waiting in crisis. We are standing in grocery stores doing the math on what we can and cannot put back on the shelf. We are sitting at kitchen tables with bills we cannot pay and choices no family in the richest nation on earth should ever have to make. We are watching the price of everything we need to survive continue to climb while the men responsible for that climb point fingers in every direction but the mirror. We went to work on November 3rd and came home to the same broken economy we left that morning. We are still there. And we need to see something change — not in two years, not after the structural work is done, not when the architecture is restored and the embedded loyalists are removed and the constitutional order is reestablished. Now. In the first days and weeks after you take that gavel.
That means bringing immediate relief on prices. It means ending the tariffs that function as a hidden tax on every American family every time we buy groceries, clothing, medicine, or anything that moves through a supply chain. It means using every legislative instrument available to pressure the price gouging that has used inflation as cover and corporate profit as the actual objective. It means moving on prescription drug pricing with the full authority the law gives you and the full urgency the moment demands. It means demanding an end to the war — the Iran war that has cost twenty-three American lives, destabilized the global oil market, driven energy prices into our households like a spike, and produced no strategic outcome that any honest accounting can justify. We did not vote for that war. We were never asked. And we are paying for it in ways that show up at the pump and in our heating bills and in the price of everything that moves by ship or plane or truck through a world that this administration set on fire. End it. The diplomatic track exists. Use it. We want our sons and daughters home and our economy back and our government focused on the country it was elected to serve.
Our immediate needs are not separate from the structural work. They are the reason the structural work matters. A government that cannot respond to the daily material reality of the people it serves is not a government that has earned the trust we extended on November 3rd. Show us in the first days that you heard us. Not with a press release. With a vote.
The first thing you must understand — before affordability, before healthcare, before the border, before the national debt, before a single piece of the legislative agenda you arrived in Washington carrying — is that the government you are about to run was not left to you intact. It was not left to you damaged in the ordinary way that governments are damaged by policy disagreements and political negligence. It was left to you deliberately corrupted, agency by agency, office by office, position by position, by people who used the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 not as a policy proposal but as a staffing manual. Stephen Miller. Russell Vought. Their predecessors. Their collaborators. Elon Musk, who was handed access to federal systems and federal personnel decisions that no private citizen in the history of this republic has ever been granted, accountable to no statute, confirmed by no Senate, answerable to no law that was enforced against him. These men did not merely advocate for a different vision of government. They planted their people inside it. Those people are still there. They did not leave on November 3rd. They are sitting in offices in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education and the Veterans Administration and every other department and agency that belongs to the American people, and they are waiting to see whether you have the seriousness to find them, the spine to remove them, and the discipline to replace them with qualified nonpartisan professionals whose obligation runs to the law and to the public and not to the political survival of one man.
Find them. Every one of them, in every agency, at every level. This is not a purge. The word purge belongs to the authoritarian tradition you were elected to end. This is restoration. The civil service was built over more than a century, beginning with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, on the foundational democratic principle that the government of the people must be staffed by people whose obligation runs to the law and to the public, not to whoever currently holds the executive office. What was done to that system between January 20, 2025 and November 3, 2026 was not reform. It was sabotage. Executive Order 13957, signed in the final months of Trump’s first term and reinstated on the first day of his second term, January 20, 2025, reclassified tens of thousands of career civil servants into a category called Schedule F, stripping them of civil service protections and making them fireable at will for any reason or no reason at all. That order must be repealed legislatively, permanently, with statutory protections that no future executive order can reach. The Civil Service Restoration Act is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is the foundation without which nothing else you build will stand.
You must also address what the Supreme Court of the United States did to this republic on July 1, 2024. Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, was not a narrow ruling about one man’s criminal liability. It was a rewriting of the constitutional architecture that the founders built specifically to prevent the concentration of unchecked power in a single executive. The Court held in a 6-3 decision that a president has absolute immunity for acts within his core constitutional authority and presumptive immunity for all other official acts, a ruling so broad in its implications and so contrary to the founders’ explicit intentions that it requires a legislative response commensurate with the damage it caused. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51 that the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The Supreme Court’s ruling did not merely fail that standard. It inverted it. You have the constitutional power to respond. The Presidential Accountability Act, which would establish by statute that no sitting or former president is immune from criminal prosecution for acts that violate federal law, must be passed in this Congress. It will face a veto. Pass it anyway. Make him veto it. Put that veto in the record. The American people and the historians who come after us will know exactly what it meant.
The same unconstitutional overreach that produced Schedule F and the immunity ruling produced the most systematic assault on the separation of powers this country has seen since Richard Nixon, and Nixon at least had the decency to resign when the walls closed in. The Department of Justice was converted from an independent law enforcement institution into a personal legal protection service for the president and a political weapon against his perceived enemies. Federal prosecutors were directed, removed, and replaced based on their willingness to serve executive political interests rather than the law. The FBI was targeted, its leadership decapitated, its institutional independence treated as an obstacle rather than a constitutional feature. The emoluments clauses of the Constitution, both domestic and foreign, were violated so openly and so continuously that the violations ceased to be news. These are not partisan grievances. They are documented facts in the public record, and they require a legislative response that makes their repetition structurally impossible.
Restore the independence of the Department of Justice by statute. The Justice Department Independence Act must establish in law what every attorney general since the founding has claimed in principle — that the department’s prosecutorial decisions are made on the basis of evidence and law and not on the basis of the president’s political needs. No president should be able to direct, halt, or redirect a federal investigation for personal benefit. No attorney general should be confirmable who cannot demonstrate before the Senate Judiciary Committee a commitment to that independence that goes beyond the verbal and extends to the structural. The Senate’s confirmation power, which you now hold with a ten-seat majority, is not a ceremonial function. It is a constitutional instrument. Use it as one.
The military is not exempt from this accounting, and you must say so plainly. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is not suspended by a presidential order, constitutional or otherwise. Officers who followed orders they knew to be unlawful — orders that directed military assets against American citizens on American soil, orders that deployed military force for political theater, orders that placed the interests of the commander in chief above the constitutional oath every officer swears to the Constitution and not to any man — those officers must be held to the standard the UCMJ establishes. This is not retribution. This is the law. The military’s credibility as an institution that serves the republic and not the executive depends on the accountability of its officer corps to the legal framework that governs them. A military that follows unconstitutional orders without consequence is not a democratic military. It is a praetorian guard. You were not sent to Washington to preside over a praetorian guard.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in its current form must be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. What it became under this administration — a deportation force operating outside due process, conducting warrantless home invasions, separating families without legal authority, rendering American citizens and legal residents to foreign countries without judicial review, and in documented cases delivering human beings into the custody of governments that tortured them — is not a law enforcement agency. It is a machine for the organized violation of constitutional rights at industrial scale. Every person this administration illegally rendered to a third country must be identified, located, and brought back. That is not a political position. It is a legal obligation. Due process is not a privilege extended to some categories of human beings on American soil. It is a constitutional guarantee that attaches to personhood, not citizenship, and the Supreme Court established that principle in Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, in 2001, and it has not been repealed. Enforce it. Build a border policy that is humane, lawful, legally functional, and consistent with the constitutional and statutory rights of every human being who crosses onto American soil. Stop building the wall. It has never worked. It will never work. It is a monument to a political fantasy funded with money that belongs to the American people and it must stop.
The women of this country sent you to Washington with a specific and unambiguous instruction. Restore their rights over their own bodies. The Dobbs decision of 2022 did not merely overturn Roe v. Wade. It handed the most intimate medical decisions a human being makes to state legislatures composed largely of men who will never face the consequences of those decisions personally. Women have died because of Dobbs. That is not a projection or a political argument. It is a documented medical fact recorded in emergency rooms and maternal mortality statistics in every state that enacted an abortion ban after June 24, 2022. Maternal mortality rates are 62 percent higher in states with abortion bans. Texas saw a 56 percent rise in the first full year of its ban. Black women in ban states are 3.3 times more likely to die than white women in those same states. The Women’s Health Protection Act must pass this Congress. It will face a veto. Pass it anyway. Make him veto it. Put every vote in the record. The women of this country are watching every single one of you, and they will remember.
Restore the Affordable Care Act to its full original architecture and begin the work of expanding it toward universal coverage. The richest nation in the history of the world is the only wealthy democracy on earth that does not guarantee healthcare to every one of its citizens, and Americans die every year from conditions that are entirely treatable because they cannot afford the treatment. That is not an economic statistic. It is a moral catastrophe that this country has chosen to sustain because the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry have invested billions of dollars in making sure it continues. Close the tax loopholes that allow billionaires and millionaires to pay effective tax rates lower than the nurses and teachers and factory workers who keep this country running. Use those revenues to build the healthcare system this country has needed since November 19, 1945, when Harry Truman first proposed it to Congress and was stopped by the same combination of corporate money and political cowardice that has stopped it every time since.
Put every environmental regulation back in place. Every one of them. The regulations stripped from the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act did not disappear because they were unnecessary. They disappeared because the industries they regulated paid to have them removed. The Amazon is burning. The coral reefs are dying. The glaciers are gone. The planet is not waiting for the next election cycle, and neither are the children who will inherit what we leave them. The oil companies must be pulled out of protected waters. The cattle and soy and coffee industries stripping the remaining rainforests of the world must face the regulatory consequences that every other industry that destroys a commons faces when a government is functioning as it should. The national parks and monuments that belong to every American equally must be returned to the public trust and closed permanently to private extraction. Theodore Roosevelt understood this in 1906. It should not require rediscovery in 2027.
Pull back the tariffs that functioned as a tax on the American consumer while producing none of the domestic manufacturing revival they promised and all of the retaliatory damage to American agricultural exports they were always going to produce. Evaluate every trade relationship on the actual documented evidence of what it does to American workers, American farmers, and the American economy — not on the basis of what sounds strong in a campaign rally. Support American ranchers. Stop the importation of beef from countries whose environmental and labor standards we would never accept at home. Regulate the importation of any product whose production causes the kind of environmental damage we have spent fifty years making illegal here, because outsourcing the destruction does not make us innocent of it.
Restore what this administration stripped from the world. Reinstate humanitarian aid. Return our clinics and services worldwide to what they were before January 20, 2025. Show the world and show our own people that America is back — not as a slogan but as a documented and verifiable fact. Due process for every immigrant and refugee who crosses onto American soil. An attorney. A fair hearing. The rights that belong to every human being on American soil under the law that this republic wrote and swore to uphold.
Get every dollar of dark money out of American politics. The Citizens United decision of 2010 opened the door to the systematic corruption of American democracy by unlimited anonymous corporate money, and the evidence of what that corruption produces is now visible in every piece of legislation that serves a donor rather than a constituent. The For the People Act must pass. Disclosure requirements must be absolute. No candidate for federal office should be able to receive a dollar of funding from a source that is not publicly identified. And before any candidate appears on a ballot for federal office, they must pass through a vetting process that includes a full background investigation, a mental health assessment conducted by more than one independent professional specialist, a financial disclosure that is complete and verified, and a review by a nonpartisan panel whose composition reflects the full professional range of the republic they are asking to serve. The presidency of the United States is the most powerful office in the history of human civilization. The American people deserve to know who they are electing before they elect them, not after.
We are not asking you to do any of this. We are telling you. We stood in those lines. We cast those votes. We gave you the majority you needed and the mandate that goes with it, and we gave it to you without ambiguity and without reservation. We know what broken looks like. We lived in it. We buried some of it. We are done.
Fix it. All of it. Without fear, without equivocation, without the kind of bipartisan softening that mistakes courtesy for governance and compromise for virtue when what the moment requires is the full institutional force of the democratic republic doing exactly what it was designed to do.
We will be watching every vote. Every hearing. Every subpoena issued and every one declined. Every confirmation granted and every one that should have been denied. Every piece of legislation that reaches the floor and every one that dies in committee because someone decided the moment did not require courage after all.
It requires courage. It has always required courage. That is why we sent you and not someone else.
The American People of the United States of America
We sent you. We are watching. Do not mistake one for the other.
Sincerely,
The People of the United States of America
Photo: Stock Adobe
https://lynnfarma.substack.com/p/to-the-120th-united-states-senate
Source: www.dailykos.com
