Sam Forstag

Even in 2023, when at that point I was working, organizing with Montana Innocence Project, we passed a reform to ban fines and fees for juvenile defendants in the criminal justice system.

Kids facing time behind bars in Miles City in eastern Montana who were getting out of juvie with $10,000 plus of debt just from the court fees that they'd racked up.

and you wonder why recidivism rates are so high, right?

You wonder what the heck you're supposed to do when you get out of juvie at 18 and you got $10,000 of debt and no resources, no prospects.

Well, that's a system that is designed for people to fail, and we were able to pass that in a Republican supermajority because even folks on the right, people who voted for the other side, they might know what it's like to have a family who's tied up in the carceral system.

Those are broadly the issues I was working on.

I would say if there was anything redemptive about the America First platform, it was this notion that we were going to end these needless, endless wars.

And it turned out that that was just another lie.

And now we are raining chaos and cruelty overseas in Iran at immense cost and blood and treasure to us as Americans, to service members.

And that doesn't benefit any of us.

And I read a headline that we are planning to potentially spend $300 billion to pay for reconstruction of the damage that we wrought as a

country.

Imagine the good that we can do with that kind of investment.

I mean, when I go around Montana, I'm sitting down in a mobile home lot last week with a gal who has watched her lot rent

increased by two to three times in the last five years.

There are people being priced out of house and home.

There are people who are losing healthcare coverage by the millions because, well, we let those ACA subsidies expire and we don't have the gall or gumption to actually fix a healthcare system.

$300 billion could do a lot of good.

It could pay for a lot of free childcare.

And instead what it's paying for is us rebuilding something that we just blew up.