Dear John,

Friday’s announcement of the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Dobbs case was a jurisprudential earthquake. While we had a chance to see it coming due to the previous leak of Alito’s draft opinion, the decision remains no less outrageous in restricting reproductive freedom and subjecting women, girls, trans and non-binary folks to forced pregnancies.

In the days since then, the Supreme Court has also taken a hatchet to the First Amendment, breaking down the constitutional walls between church and state in two different cases. One invites religious practice in public institutions, including schools, while the other requires states that subsidize private education to include religious schools.

As a member of a marginalized religious minority in the United States, I see the writing on the wall that these decisions portend. It brings me no joy to recall how much Democrats from San Francisco did to enable these decisions, while hypocritically mouthing concerns about the predictable results of their complicity.

Can you stand with us to hold accountable complicit Democrats, and promote the checks and balances on the Court that I proposed over a decade ago?

Nancy Pelosi has been the Speaker of the House during two different sessions of Congress. When she led the House a decade ago, Democrats also held the Senate, but she affirmatively chose not to codify Roe v Wade, deferring to Obama’s decision to de-prioritize that campaign promise.

While the House more recently did vote to codify Roe, it did so only after the Senate was co-opted by the partisan gridlock that has made it a graveyard during the current session of Congress for everything from economic stimulus plans to proposals for worker rights, civil rights, voting rights, and more.

That’s not all.

Are you able to join us today to call out the hypocrisy—and complicity—of the Democratic establishment?

In addition to slow-walking the codification of reproductive liberty, Pelosi has also continued to take political positions undermining it.

For instance, she has repeatedly endorsed anti-choice conservatives in races against progressive women who favor the right to choose. That pattern continues in 2022: Pelosi’s endorsement of conservative Democrat Henry Cuellar (D-TX) made the difference in his run-off victory by under 200 votes against progressive lawyer Jessica Cisneros.

San Francisco Democrats have also enabled the right-wing Supreme Court in other ways. For example, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by President Trump in 2020, it was Senator Dianne Feinstein—who once served as our city’s mayor—who praised Barrett’s confirmation hearings as “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in,” ignoring the writing on the wall that so many have now been forced to confront.

Meanwhile, Pelosi had the unique power to force the Senate to suspend Barrett’s nomination hearings in order to focus instead on Articles of Impeachment. But rather than allow the process to proceed, or include the charges that could have brought down Trump, she slow-walked the process to give the Senate time to confirm Barrett, before limiting the Articles of Impeachment to exclude the corruption charges on which Trump was most vulnerable.

Want a voice in Congress who has stood for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and worker rights when Pelosi refused? We’ve been doing this work for decades, and can help defend your rights in Congress only with your support.

Our campaign is currently in the bizarre position of waiting for official certification of the June primary results, while standing within less than 600 votes of the general election. Because there’s a chance we might yet end up in the general election, we need to keep running at least until the Board of Elections certifies the results.

When I got in the race, I committed to making sure that every vote is counted. Can you stand with us today to help us fulfill that commitment?

Thanks for standing with us as we stand for reproductive rights, accountability, and the change our communities need in Washington!

Shahid