Boris Velasquez

Boris Velasquez served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2009 to 2013. He earned an associate degree from Northern Virginia Community College in 2015 and a bachelor's degree from George Mason University in 2018. His career experience includes working as an analyst.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I am Boris Velasquez. Marine Corps veteran, son of Salvadoran immigrants, a product of the capital region, and a resident of Montgomery County. I enlisted with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and have spent the years since working in national security technology, because the oath I swore at eighteen did not come with an expiration date.

I am running for Congress in Maryland's 8th because in 1944, a dying president named the unfinished work of this country: a right to a job, a living wage, a decent home, medical care, a good education, protection from the fears of old age and sickness and unemployment. Eighty-two years later, we are still arguing whether a nurse in Silver Spring deserves to see a doctor without going bankrupt, whether a janitor in Gaithersburg deserves a wage she can live on, whether a child in Wheaton deserves a school that does not ask her teacher to buy the pencils. We were promised a floor. We were given a trapdoor.

I do not believe representation is a performance. The job is to stand at the gate when ICE comes for a mother of three, on the line when the pipefitters walk out, and to keep standing there until the people in power remember who they answer to.

I am not running against a man. I am running against a forty-year project, financed by economic royalists, that has moved seventy-nine trillion dollars from the bottom ninety percent to the top one percent since 1975. The oath to the republic is eternal, and so is our work.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

The Second Bill of Rights is the floor.

In 1944, FDR named the entitlements a free nation owes its citizens and what a free nation requires to remain free. A job, a living wage, a home, medical care, an education, protection from the fears of old age and sickness and unemployment. Through these floor-level rights a democracy is kept healthy and evils like oligarchy are kept at bay. We must demand a right to organize, a right to vote, a right to bodily autonomy, full accountability of a perverse and self-serving government with no more forget-to-heal gaslighting, and full dignification of D.C., Puerto Rico, and the other territories whose people have been governed without being represented for far too long.Representation is kinetic, dynamic, and benevolent. Not theatrical, not stiff, not self-serving. For too long we have trusted people who have not walked in our shoes, and the country has been given theater in place of action, eloquence in place of ferocity, the well-turned phrase in place of the willingness to stand in the way of harm. The institution has been shaped by a lawyer's culture that rewards explanation over consequence. That is no insult to lawyers, many of whom have served honorably. It is an indictment of an institution that has learned to mistake the speech for the act. If you had to choose someone to care for you, would you choose the person willing to risk their life for you, or the person willing to file a brief?The seventy-nine trillion dollar heist has a name and an address.

Since 1975, seventy-nine trillion dollars have moved from the bottom ninety percent of Americans to the top one percent. That transfer has caused wars, famine, racism, division, and death. The oligarchs who engineered it do not care about us because they do not see us as human. They are incapable of empathy and see it as a weakness. Empathy, one of the evolutionary traits that propelled our species to the apex of this planet, is detested by those with the most power, by those who buy elections, by those who buy the puppets who write and judge the laws that oppress us. If we are to create a more perfect union, is it not natural to rid our nation of this cancer?

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

I am passionate about the full dignification of our land and its people. Impeaching every corrupt judge and subpoenaing the powerful. Justice is blind, not forgetful. Protecting our land and water from oligarchs, data centers, and every polluter who sacrifices either. A right to organize, a right to vote, a right to medical care, a right to education, a right to every self-evident, natural-law, Creator-given entitlement a free people are owed. I am passionate about the fruit of a worker's labor staying where the work is done, not flowing to Wall Street and the conglomerates that skim contracts owed to the small and medium businesses doing the work. I am passionate about the veteran, the widowed, and the orphaned.

Who do you look up to? Whose example would you like to follow, and why?

Thaddeus Stevens, who fought for abolition and full citizenship and lost in his lifetime because the country was not ready and the country still is not. He did the work anyway. Reconstruction is still unfinished. The seat he held is still unfinished. So is mine.

Atlacatl, the Pipil chief who fought the Spanish conquest with a stone-tipped spear and wounded Pedro de Alvarado at Acajutla in 1524. He is the ancestor I claim. The U.S.-trained battalion that took his name and committed El Mozote and murdered the Jesuits at the UCA had no right to it. The name belongs to the man who resisted, not to the men who served the empire he resisted.

Dolores Huerta, who organized workers no one else would organize, in the language they actually spoke, and is still doing it at ninety-five. Sí se puede was not a slogan. It was an answer.

Saint Romero, who told the soldiers at the altar that no order from a government overrides the law of God, and was shot the next morning for saying it. The killing did not stop the words. The words have outlived every government that wanted them silent.

Marine General Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, who came home from forty years of empire and said war is a racket and meant it. He told the truth about who he had been fighting for and spent the rest of his life warning the Marines coming up behind him.

What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

Five, drilled into me by my family, my friends, the Marine Corps, and by every honest person I have ever served alongside. Stoicism, because the office will be tested by failure, by ridicule, by the temptation to quit, and the people you represent need to see you carry it without flinching. Empathy, the trait the oligarchs treat as weakness and the one evolution made us strongest by. Humility, because the seat is rented, not owned, and a member who forgets that has already failed. Sympathy, the willingness to feel the weight of another person's life as if it had landed on your own shoulders. And bearing, the daily insistence that how you carry yourself in the small things is how you will be carried in the large ones.

What do you believe are the core responsibilities for someone elected to this office?

To do what is right without much regard to how it will be received. To explain in plain English why a member of Congress in a safely blue district keeps a six million dollar warchest, and from whom it came, and to whom it has been promised. To explain why members of Congress stay in the same seat for decades while the country they were sent to serve gets younger, poorer, and angrier. To explain what it cost to become Ranking Member of a committee, and what got quieter in the asking. To explain the refusal to evolve in the face of dynamic challenges, the insistence on the same tools that have yielded headlines and no convictions, no safer nation, no safer district, no fewer evils, no greater goods, no peace. The office is not a career. It is a fiduciary duty to the people who sent you, and a fiduciary cannot serve two masters. The job is to tell the truth as you see it, take the vote as your conscience demands, and let the consequences fall where they fall.

What legacy would you like to leave?

A legacy of impact, of maintained action, and of a forgotten name.

The work outliving the worker. The fight continuing without the fighter. A district where the wages rose and stayed risen, where the schools were funded and stayed funded, where the children breathed cleaner air than their parents did, where the federal worker was no longer a body in a contract but a citizen with a craft, where the janitor and the teacher and the pipefitter and the nurse stood at the same table and bargained for the same dignity. A country where the entitlements FDR named in 1944 were no longer aspirations to be argued about in election years but floors the next generation took for granted, the way our grandparents took Social Security for granted within a decade of its passing.

If the name on the building is mine in fifty years, I will have failed. If the streets are named after me and the schools wear my picture, I will have failed. If a janitor in Gaithersburg is paid twenty-four dollars an hour and does not know who passed the law that did it, I will have done the job.

The country was not built by the men who needed to be remembered. It was built by the ones who did the work and went home. Saint Romero said that, in the language of the gospel he preached and the country he died for. Smedley Butler said it, when he came home from the wars and told the truth about who they had been fought for. Dolores Huerta said it, every time she organized a worker who would never know her name. Thaddeus Stevens said it, when he asked to be buried in a cemetery that admitted Black Americans because the rest would not, and let the stone do the talking after he was gone.

That is the legacy. The work outlives the worker. The republic outlives the representative. The oath outlives the one who swore it.

What was your very first job? How long did you have it?

Cashier at CVS, for about two years. It burned into my memory the goodwill and hard work of decent people simply trying to survive, set against the greed and laziness of a corporation whose only goal was to squeeze as much as possible out of them for as little as possible in return.

What is something that has been a struggle in your life?

The pull between civic duty and the temptation of apathy.

I snuck out of my house five days after my eighteenth birthday to sign the papers for the Marines. I knew the country had no business in half the wars it was fighting. I knew Smedley Butler had told the truth in 1935 and the country had filed it away. I knew the men who would send me would not be the men who went. And I went, because the country my parents left El Salvador to give me was worth more than my disgust with the men who were running it into the ground.

That is what a republic asks of you. To know the rot and serve the foundation. To see the failure and refuse the surrender. To hold the knowledge that one vote will not turn an election and to cast it anyway, because the day this country stops believing one vote matters is the day it has already lost.

The cynics call that naïve. They were wrong about the abolitionists. They were wrong about the suffragettes. They were wrong about every working man who walked off the floor and every woman who sat at the wrong counter. They have been wrong about every gain this country has ever made, and they are wrong now. The struggle is to keep voting, keep enlisting, keep showing up, keep doing the work, while the cynics keep being wrong.

What qualities does the U.S. House of Representatives possess that makes it unique as an institution?

The House belongs to the people. That is the design, and that is the betrayal.

The framers built it that way deliberately. Direct election from the start, when the Senate was still chosen by state legislatures behind closed doors. Two-year terms, the shortest in the federal government, so the people could return their representatives to private life at the first sign of failure. Smaller districts and larger membership, so a citizen could plausibly know the person sent to Washington in their name. Sole power to originate revenue bills, so the people who paid the taxes controlled the chamber that levied them. Sole power of impeachment, so the people's representatives, not the appointed judges or the indirectly chosen senators, held the first instrument of accountability against a lawless executive.

That was the design. Look at what we have done with it.

The chamber that was supposed to belong to the people now belongs to the donor class. A member of Congress spends thirty hours a week dialing for dollars, in a call center across the street from the Capitol, because the price of a competitive race has tripled in a generation and the money does not come from the constituents. Citizens United did not happen to us. It was done to us, and the chamber that was supposed to fight it has been complicit in the doing.

The two-year term was supposed to enforce accountability through frequent return to the voters. Gerrymandering and the safe-seat math have turned most general elections into formalities, and the seniority system has made the only real path to power the willingness to stay in the same seat for decades while the country you were sent to serve gets younger, poorer, and angrier. The framers wrote two-year terms. We have built a lifetime appointment.

The smaller-district design was supposed to keep representatives intimately connected to their constituents. The 435 cap was set in 1929 and has not moved since, while the country has nearly tripled in size. Each member now represents more constituents than lived in some founding-era states. The intimate sympathy Madison described has been mathematically erased and replaced with a postcard and a town hall once a year.

The power of the purse was supposed to be the people's check on the executive. It has been traded for continuing resolutions and omnibus bills written in conference rooms and dropped on members the night before the vote. The chamber that was supposed to control the appropriations now signs off on bills no human being could have read in the time allotted. The power did not disappear. It was surrendered.

The power of impeachment was supposed to be the people's check on a lawless executive. It has been used, and acquitted, and used, and acquitted, and most recently moved to table by members of the body who had publicly named the conduct impeachable. The framers gave the House the sword. The House has chosen to leave it in the scabbard.

This is what makes the House unique. It is the chamber the framers entrusted with the closest relationship to the people, and it is the chamber in which that relationship has been most thoroughly broken. The tools are still there. The two-year term still exists. The power of the purse still exists. The power of impeachment still exists. The framers did their work. The question is whether the people we send next will do theirs, or whether they will spend another generation explaining, eloquently and at length, why the work cannot be done.

What do you perceive to be the United States' greatest challenges as a nation over the next decade?

One problem with three heads.

The oligarchy. A class of people who own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined, who collect more in subsidies and pay millions to villainize the single mother, the elder on Social Security, and our sisters and brothers on disability, who fund campaigns on both sides, who hire the lobbyists who write the laws, who buy the politicians that then enact the laws. Every other challenge this country faces is downstream of this one. The climate will die while ExxonMobil writes the energy policy. The wages will not rise while private equity owns the hospital and the nursing home and the apartment building. The prisons will fill as long as it is profitable. Our rights will expire as long as politicians are bought and compromised.

China and its puppet Russia. China is the rising power, methodically, patiently, and without apology about what it is doing. Russia is a smaller economy than Italy now, kept afloat by Chinese trade and Chinese currency, fighting a war it is losing in slow motion against a Ukraine the United States should have armed fully on day one. China is moving in our very own backyard in Latin America. It is moving in Africa, it is moving in Europe, and it is moving in Asia. It is determined, it is focused, and it is arming itself. It is no longer hiding its intentions or its goals. We meanwhile have a defense budget the size of the next ten countries combined and an industrial base that cannot make the ammunition we have promised our allies. The next decade will be decided by whether the United States can compete with China on industrial policy, on critical minerals, on semiconductors, on shipbuilding, and on iron will and determination. We must meet the challenge, we must stand by our allies, and we must do so united.

The Democratic establishment that refuses to evolve and refuses to fight. Every poll shows the country is angry. Every focus group shows the country wants someone to name the people who built the failure and to go after them. The Democratic establishment looks at this and decides the answer is another carefully worded statement, another panel of consultants, another vote to table the impeachment, another fundraiser at the Georgetown townhouse. The cost is not just elections lost. The cost is apathy, which is the precondition for every authoritarianism this country has ever faced and the one rising now.

These are not three problems. They are one problem. The oligarchy buys the establishment that refuses to fight, and the foreign adversaries exploit the dysfunction. Break any one of the three and the other two get easier. Refuse to break any of them and the next decade is the one we lose.

Do you believe that compromise is necessary or desirable for policymaking?

Absolutely not.

Look at where we are. Look at what compromise has delivered. A federal minimum wage of seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, frozen since 2009, while the corporate tax rate was cut in half. A Supreme Court reshaped by a forty-year project the right pursued without compromise while the left was told to be reasonable. A healthcare system that bankrupts its citizens because the public option was traded away to get a vote that never came. An immigration system that built the cages and called it the humane alternative. A war machine that has not won a war in eighty years and has bankrupted three generations to feed itself. This is the country compromise built. The people who built it are still in the room, still drawing their salaries, still telling us we have to be patient and meet the other side halfway.

The other side has never met us halfway. The other side has spent forty years moving the country to the right and has not compromised once. They got the Federalist Society, the corporate tax cuts, the deregulation, the Citizens United decision, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the overturning of Roe, the wholesale capture of the federal judiciary, the dismantling of the administrative state. They did not get any of that by compromising with us. They got it by deciding what they wanted and going after it for as long as it took.

The ambitious good in this country has never been won by compromise either. Emancipation was not a compromise with the slaveholders. The eight-hour day was not a compromise with the Pinkertons. The Voting Rights Act was not a compromise with Bull Connor. Social Security was not a compromise with the men who wanted to let the elderly die in the streets. Every right we have was won by people who were told to be reasonable and refused, and the country we now take for granted is the country those unreasonable people built.

The question is not whether to compromise. The question is with whom, and at whose cost. I will compromise with the truth. I will compromise with the Constitution. I will compromise with the people who sent me. I will not compromise with the donor class that broke this country, the lobbyists who write the laws against the people who pay for them, or the political consultants who have spent a generation losing elegantly. The country does not need another careful loss. It needs an ambitious win.

What was the first historical event that happened in your lifetime that you remember?

The D.C. sniper. October 2002. I was eleven years old in Reston, and for three weeks the region I grew up in learned to walk to school with our heads down, to zigzag between the pumps at the gas station, to look twice at every parking lot before we crossed it. Schools went into Code Blue. Recess moved indoors. The people who died were pumping gas, mowing a lawn, sitting on a bench.

I remember when they caught Muhammad and Malvo at the rest stop on I-70, and I remember the adults around me trying to explain it and not finding the words.