Kymone Freeman

Where Freeman stands

Topic headings are Vote Book’s; quoted words are each candidate’s own, with the source under each one. “As reported” items are a news outlet’s description, not an exact quote.

Taxes & spending

What are your two top priorities and how will you make them happen?

My top issues are: Ending taxation without representation once and for all by advocating that DC join all the other “US territories” i.e., Puerto Rico, Guam, etc., in being exempt from federal income taxes. The late great Johnnie Cochran said at Union Temple Baptist Church in Anacostia, that the best way to air your grievances against the federal gov't is the withholding of income taxes & that DC had a legal precedence for it. Expand the HUD guideline that stipulates that housing should not cost any more than 30% of one’s income plus utilities into a federal law as a housing cap and ban private equity from owning homes at all. Senator Raphael Warnock has already paved the way by championing the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.

Jobs, wages & cost of living

How will you use this job to protect our rights and keep Congress and the President out of our local government business?

In order to achieve self-determination, we must abandon the entire notion of our colonial relationship with the federal government to achieve civic liberation. Make no mistake about it, just like the founders of this country broke with King George in England to put an end to taxation without representation 250 years ago, there can be no progress without conflict. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. After decades of begging for self-governance and Statehood, we must now sign our own Emancipation Proclamation by drawing a line in wet cement. I will pursue federal taxation exemption until Statehood is achieved through legislation, litigation and personal civil disobedience, i.e., Good Trouble.

Elections, ethics & government

How will you show people across the country that DC does not have full and fair voting rights?

Now that the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act has spread taxation w/o representation nationwide, we can now more effectively make the case that DC Statehood is not a local issue. When I met David Hogg, Leaders We Deserve & ousted vice chair of the DNC for having the audacity to primary older incumbents, he told me that nobody cares about DC because we don’t have a vote. It was a "bad investment" with no bang for the buck. Everyone has a national office here, but will never engage in “local” politics. Now is the time for the necessary resistance required to get movement on the issue of self-determination & provide the much needed leverage to confront our federally imposed colonial relationship & reign in a rogue, authoritarian regime.

Other priorities

Should the Delegate be involved in the push for statehood? Why or why not?

Eleanor Holmes Norton has spent the last 37 years fighting for DC Statehood as our “Warrior on the Hill.” We were led to believe that the evil GOP were the only obstacles to achieving it. That if only the Democrats were in charge, then the “good guys” would win. Well, during the first two years of Obama’s first administration, the Democrats had the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. But the issue of DC Statehood never even came up. We keep putting them first and they keep putting us last. Therefore, anyone claiming to bring DC Statehood without my radical approach of ending taxation without representation is being both disingenuous to reality and disrespectful to the legacy of our beloved Congresswoman’s best efforts