Amy Klobuchar

Amy Jean Klobuchar (born May 25, 1960) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the senior United States senator from the state of Minnesota since 2007. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), Minnesota's branch of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the Hennepin County Attorney where she was responsible for all criminal prosecution in Minnesota's most populous county. In February 2019, she announced her candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination in the 2020 Presidential election.

Political Spectrum


Beliefs


Immigration
Klobuchar supports allowing immigration to the United States. She believes that immigrants are a vital component of the US economy. She states she is proud to represent a state that has the largest Somali population and the second-largest Hmong population, many of whom arrived as refugees. Most undocumented immigrants would get legal status and path to citizenship under immigration plans Klobuchar has supported, including the 2013 immigration bill passed by the Senate. She has also stated she would support increasing legal immigration, with a focus on expanding the number of temporary work visas available. Klobuchar supports reforming the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but would not abolish the agency.

If elected President, Klobuchar pledges to push for following immigration-oriented initiatives:
 * Jump-start negotiations for comprehensive immigration reform — which includes a pathway to citizenship, the DREAM Act, and border security — with the stated goal of passing it in the first year of her presidency. Comprehensive immigration could reduce the deficit by $158 billion over ten years.
 * Issue an Executive Order putting an immediate end to the cruel and inhumane policy where the government is taking kids away from their parents and ensuring children are reunited with their parents without delay.
 * Reverse this administration’s attempt to overrule the Flores Settlement Agreement, which prevents prolonged detention of children and prevents children from being detained in inhumane conditions by requiring basic levels of food, water, and health care.
 * Allow asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle countries to seek asylum in their home countries.
 * End the for-profit detention of asylum seekers and reduce the size of the immigration detention system, limit ICE’s detention budget and expand alternatives to detention and the successful Family Case Management Program.
 * Shift funding from ICE’s enforcement and removal operations to support services for children seeking asylum and anti-trafficking programs, increase funding for immigration judges and support personnel to more effectively process cases, and reassess the current bond system for immigration courts.
 * Protect DREAMers and immigrants who are living, working, and succeeding here under Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforcement Departure.
 * Put an immediate end to the Trump Administration’s travel ban.
 * Restore asylum for the victims of gender-based violence by overturning former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ opinion in Matter of A-B.
 * Direct the State Department to restore the refugee admissions cap to at least its pre-Trump Administration level.
 * Stop the diversion of funds needed to modernize our military bases from being used for the border wall. Senator Klobuchar will rescind President Trump’s national emergency declaration and return funding for its intended purpose.
 * Reopen international U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices, which deal primarily with international adoptions, family visa applications, petitions for citizenship for military members stationed in foreign countries, and citizenship applications, along with help on refugee processing and investigations of fraud.
 * Protect funding for the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, recognizing that the cuts present a serious risk to our national security and undermine efforts to address the underlying conditions driving migration to the United States.
 * Build on the Conrad 30 program that allows international doctors trained in the United States to extend their stay in the country if they agree to practice in underserved communities.

Abortion
Speaking on the matter of abortion during her 2006 Senate run, Klobuchar said that "no one wants abortions" and the procedure should be "rare" -- remarks that strike a marked contrast with more recent Democratic rhetoric on the subject, including from her own 2020 campaign. Though she noted that she was pro-choice, she also touted the endorsement of pro-life Democratic Rep. "There are plenty of pro-life Democrats and I'm pleased to have the support of Congressman Oberstar and others," she said. "And we need to talk about reducing the number of abortions and making them safe, but making them rare. And there is common ground on encouraging adoption, reducing abortions." Klobuchar, now a Minnesota Democratic senator, continued: "I mean, no one wants abortions. Everyone wants to reduce the number of abortions, it's just that people haven't been talking about it that way. I know I've been talking about it that way since I started as an elected official."

Klobuchar views abortion as a decision between a woman and her doctor. In 2006, Klobuchar said that “we need to start talking about common ground, and about reducing the number of abortions — making them safe and making them rare.” Klobuchar co-sponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act. The legislation prohibits states from setting restrictions on abortion.

In an interview with the Guardian, she said she would immediately reverse key Trump funding cuts for family planning and overturn the domestic and international “gag rules” that make it more difficult to access abortion information and services. She would also make abortion rights a key issue in making judicial appointments. She would also try to avoid any damage done to reproductive rights by the conservative majority on the US supreme court by codifying Roe v Wade, the court’s landmark 1973 ruling that declared abortion to be constitutionally protected. “We don’t know what the supreme court will do, so we have to safeguard a woman’s right to choose” by legislating through Congress, she said. She lambasted the Trump administration for pursuing policies that are having the exact opposite impact to those stated by the president. Studies have shown the international gag rule – also known as the Mexico City policy – has had the perverse effect of increasing abortion rates around the world. The domestic gag rule which Trump reinstated in May 2018 blocks federal funding of any family planning clinic providing abortion services. It came into effect in August and immediately led to Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest provider of sexual and reproductive healthcare in the US, pulling out of the federal family planning program.

Gun Laws
Amy Klobuchar holds an F rating from the National Rifle Association. In the past, she has voted YES on banning high-capacity magazines of over 10 bullets, spoke in favor of extending the assault weapons ban: "Q: What about assault weapons? A: I did favor extending the ban on assault weapons. Unfortunately, we didn’t prevail.", and co-sponsored the Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act which aimed at prohibiting the transfer or possession of large-capacity ammunition feeding devices.  In the 2020 race for the democratic nomination Klobuchar came forward with a plan to reduce gun violence, it includes:
 * Instituting universal background checks by closing the gun show loophole.
 * Banning bump stocks that can increase a semiautomatic rifle’s rate of fire to 700 rounds per minute.
 * Banning high capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
 * Quickly raising the age to buy military-style assault weapons from 18 to 21 and fighting to ban the sale of assault weapons.
 * Providing grants to states to implement extreme risk provisions to empower families and law enforcement to keep guns away from people who show signs of threatening behavior.
 * Closing the “Charleston loophole” by giving law enforcement additional time to complete background checks.
 * Closing the “boyfriend loophole” by preventing people who have abused dating partners from buying or owning firearms.
 * Establishing a waiting period for sales of handguns and assault rifles, which law enforcement can waive in the case of an emergency.
 * Prohibiting the online publication of code for 3D printing firearms.
 * Holding manufacturers and distributors of gun kits to the same standards as those of completed firearms.
 * Providing funding for the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention to research firearm safety and gun violence prevention.

Senator plans to achieve part of these goals by using executive authority within her first 100 days in office if elected.

Healthcare
Senator Klobuchar would like to expand Medicare to include Americans age 55 and older. She has stated that her rivals’ plans to achieve universal health care coverage through the “Medicare for All” program are too expensive and unrealistic.

In the Senate, Klobuchar made attempts at lowering drug prices by introducing a bill allowing Medicare to directly negotiate prices and co-authoring another legislation with Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, aimed at speeding up the availability of generic versions of high-cost drugs.

Senator supports the idea of universal health care for all Americans, she believes the quickest way to achieve it is by introducing a public option plan that expands Medicare or Medicaid. She supports changes to the Affordable Care Act to help bring down costs to consumers including providing cost-sharing reductions, making it easier for states to put reinsurance in place, and continuing to implement delivery system reform. And she’s been fighting her whole life to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

Klobuchar's dad's struggle with alcoholism made her realize that mental health and substance use disorders can take on families and communities. As President, she promises to combat substance use disorder and prioritize mental health, including launching new prevention and early intervention initiatives, expanding access to treatment, and giving Americans a path to sustainable recovery. Her plan will ensure that everyone has the right — and the opportunity — to be pursued by grace and receive effective, professional treatment and help. Building on her leadership in the Senate when it comes to lowering the cost of prescription drugs and addressing the challenges American seniors face, Klobuchar pledges to tackle Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, enhance health care and retirement security, keep Social Security and Medicare strong, invest in long-term care and caregivers, reduce skyrocketing prescription drug costs and combat senior fraud and abuse.

In 2017, she also spoke about improving upon the Affordable Care Act, telling CNN, “We can do something quickly to fix the Affordable Care Act. That’s why we can’t afford to let them ram through a bill that’s going to make things worse by cutting millions off of health care, jacking up premiums, and doing nothing about skyrocketing drug costs.” She's released a $100 billion plan to combat drug and alcohol addiction and improve mental health care. The plan is focused on prevention, treatment and ongoing recovery.

LGBT Rights
When it comes to LGBTQ rights, Klobuchar has a solid history of support and several proposals that should keep her in contention with so-called “equality voters.” Under the Obama administration, Klobuchar supported efforts to reduce bullying and harassment of LGBTQ students in schools. She also voted for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, an LGBTQ-inclusive version of the Violence Against Women Act, and opposed a ballot proposal in Minnesota to introduce a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Under the Trump administration, Klobuchar was part of a group of U.S. senators who opposed the deletion of LGBTQ-specific health information from federal websites. She signed onto a letter to former HHS Secretary Tom Price asking him to restore LGBTQ demographic questions on federal health surveys to provide better data for health care providers and others in the medical field. And she has questioned State Department officials on the lack of recognition for LGBTQ Pride Month and internal guidance barring the flying of rainbow flags on official embassy flagpoles.

Klobuchar has said discrimination is “bad for business.” In a 2013 report, Klobuchar detailed how LGBTQ discrimination doesn’t just hold moral implications, but can damage the economy as well. (link to the report - https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/8e0d743a-ec6b-4474-88e7-7e59e3938cd9/enda---final-11.5.13.pdf)

Senator Klobuchar has laid out a plan for her first 100 days that includes executive action she can take immediately to protect and strengthen the rights of the LGBTQ community:
 * 1) Lift the ban preventing qualified transgender people from serving in the military and restore protections for the LGBTQ community
 * 2) Protect LGBTQ people from government-sanctioned discrimination
 * 3) Prioritize LGBTQ antidiscrimination policies across the federal government to address homelessness, suicide, and access to life-saving drugs
 * 4) Collect data to address LGBTQ disparities
 * 5) Restore asylum for the victims of gender-based violence
 * 6) Take on domestic terrorism
 * 7) Reinstate visas for same-sex partners of foreign diplomats
 * 8) Restore the White House Office of National AIDS Policy

Justice System Reform
Senator Klobuchar plans to overhaul the Criminal Justice System by introducing the Second Step Act which she calls the next step after The First Step Act — "which made key federal sentencing and prison reforms — only applied to those held in federal prisons and didn’t help the nearly 90 percent of incarcerated populations in state and local facilities." Senator wants to create federal incentives so that states can restore some discretion from mandatory sentencing for nonviolent offenders. She will also reform the cash bail system, expand funding for public defenders, eliminate obstacles to re-entering and participating fully in society, and fight for expanded drug courts.

During the first month of her presidency, Klobuchar vows to create a clemency advisory board as well as a position in the White House — outside of the Department of Justice — that advises the President from a criminal justice reform perspective.

Global warming
Months into her first Senate term in 2007, Klobuchar introduced a bill to start a carbon-tracking program as a step toward a cap-and-trade system to address climate change. Another bill of hers called for an expansion of renewable energy tax credits, provisions of which later became law as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar says that if elected president she will tackle climate change by restoring and expanding Obama-era policies while creating incentives to expand climate research and clean energy.

Klobuchar's plan would largely follow the same executive-action based path advanced by former President Barack Obama by implementing strict fuel efficiency standards for automobiles and limits on carbon pollution from power plants, policies now being rolled back by President Donald Trump. She would like to promote research and private sector action, and she wants to use U.S. power to force other countries to be more aggressive in curbing their emissions. Executive agencies would carry out the bulk of Klobuchar's plan. She would direct the EPA to restore and expand the Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama's regulatory effort to force coal plants into retirement that was later stayed by the Supreme Court and withdrawn by Trump's EPA.

If elected president, Klobuchar would aim to meet the goals of the U.N. panel on climate change, which include cutting the emission of greenhouse gases by 45 percent by 2030 and increasing the share of renewable energy in the U.S electricity mix by up to 47 percent by 2050. She has not given specifics on how she would achieve those goals. However, in 2008, Klobuchar pushed for a bill to cut emissions by 70 percent by the year 2050 via a cap-and-trade market system. Klobuchar also claims she would rejoin the Paris accord and push to set national guidelines to boost renewable fuel use.

Wall Street Regulations
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, in an op-ed for her home state’s Duluth News Tribune two years after the 2008 financial crisis, criticized Wall Street for delivering bonuses worth $146 billion to executives at its top firms when national per capita income had declined. She blasted the big Wall Street firms for making “unconscionable bets” that they hid from market regulators that “threatened” the stability of the U.S. economy when they lost.

Klobuchar, with $526,377 coming into her campaign committee from security-and-investment sources, has received $31,048 from contributors related to Wells Fargo, $29,500 from Goldman Sachs, and $26,979 from JPMorgan Chase.

If elected, the Minnesota Senator plans to strengthen antitrust enforcement. Part of that effort includes investigating monopolization claims and reviewing corporate mergers that have already taken place. As President, Senator Klobuchar vows to harness the power of investigations to look at acquisitions that have already occurred and investigate monopolization claims, including whether the integration of services insulates tech companies from competition. She promises to make sure that the national antitrust agencies have the resources they need to be aggressive and effective, updating the outdated merger filing fees so that the merging parties of the largest deals start paying their fair share. Senator will also give the agencies tools to analyze the effectiveness of merger conditions so they can make better and stronger enforcement decisions.

Income and Corporate Taxes
As Senator, Klobuchar voted NO on raising the Estate Tax exemption to $5 million and establishing a low tax rate for smaller estates and a maximum rate no higher than 35%.

She also voted down a bill that would eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax - reducing the revenue of the Government by $533 billion over 5 years. Her tax proposals for the 2020 democratic primary include


 * Increasing income and payroll taxes for high-income earners by an unspecified amount.
 * Raising the corporate tax rate to 25%, 10% lower than before the President Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was enacted.
 * Levying a minimum tax on the biggest corporations.
 * Scraping tax breaks for fossil fuel companies.
 * Creating new tax preferences for communities impacted by climate change.
 * Establishing tax credits for farmers, businesses investing in research, manufacturers upgrading equipment, and employers helping workers save up for retirement.
 * Expanding earned-income tax credit to benefit families.
 * Implementing new payroll tax for Social Security on employees earning above $250,000.
 * Taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income currently mandated by President Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

Election Reform
If elected president, Klobuchar plans to reform the Federal Election Commission, which enforces the nation’s campaign finance laws. Her plan includes “reducing the number of members from six to five, ensuring the commission has an accountable chair with a clear distribution of duties between the chair and the FEC and preventing commissioners from remaining in office indefinitely as holdovers.” The current FEC lacks a quorum and, therefore, lost the ability to do most of its business.

As President, Senator Klobuchar promises to push enactment of the Honest Ads Act, as well as the PAID ADs Act to make it illegal for foreign nationals to purchase election ads and will work to ban foreign nationals from involvement in decisions regarding political expenditures by corporations, PACs and Super PACs.

She also promises to make every American who turned 18 automatically registered to vote, restore the key parts of the Voting Rights Act that were struck down after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, and restore protections for voters in states with a recent history of discrimination.

To make voting easier Senator Klobuchar plans to promote early voting and no-excuse absentee voting to make it available in every single state. She vows to establish minimum notification requirements for voters affected by polling place changes, making it no later than seven days before the date of the election or the first day of an early voting period. Minnesotian pledges to designate election day as a federal holiday and supplementary to her voting registration pledge she will establish Same-Day Voting Registration by pushing the Same-Day Voter Registration Act through the Senate.

The last part of her agenda is to increase accessibility in voting for people with disabilities by strengthening requirements for increased accessibility at polling places and providing grants for states to make it easier for people with disabilities to vote.

Wealth Tax
When asked about the workability of a wealth tax imposed on the richest Americans during a CNN debate, Klobuchar responded by saying that: "It could work. I am open to it.". She later added: "I would repeal significant portions of that tax bill that helped the rich, including what he did with the corporate tax rate, including what he did on international taxation.".

Social Security
In 2006 Klobuchar was strongly opposed to the idea of cutting Medicare and Social Security and raising the retirement age. When asked if she will go after Medicare and pensions during a Minnesota Senate Debate Klobuchar denied any intention of it, as well as intentions to raise the retirement age. She was also a staunch critic of President Bush's attempts to privatize Social Security, calling it a "risky scheme" that would turn the guarantee of a secure retirement into a gamble.

In July of 2019, Klobuchar released her plan for seniors which addresses the issue of making the Social Security solvent after 2042, the current insolvency date. Klobuchar wants to do that by lifting the Social Security payroll cap to all incomes above $250,000. She also pledges to improve Social Security benefits for widows and people who took significant time out of the paid workforce to care for their children, aging parents, or sick family members. Klobuchar believes that expanding retirement savings is essential to the well being of average Americans, that's why she wants to create innovative, portable personal savings accounts called Up Accounts that can be used for retirement and emergencies by establishing a minimum employer contribution to a savings plan. Under her plan, employers will set aside at least 50 cents per hour worked, helping a worker build more than $600,000 in wealth throughout a career. And Senator Klobuchar will work to reduce disparities when it comes to retirement savings. According to a recent study, the median wealth for white families was more than $134,000, but for African American families it was just $11,000. Defend pensions.

If elected President, Minnesota's Senator promises to recommend that Treasury heighten the scrutiny of any applications to reduce retiree benefits under the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014.