Ro Khanna Biography
Ro Khanna is an American academic, lawyer, and politician serving as the U.S. Representative from California’s 17th congressional district, since 2017.
A member of the Democratic Party, he defeated eight-term incumbent Democratic Representative Mike Honda in the general election on November 8, 2016, after first running for the same seat in 2014. Khanna also served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the United States Department of Commerce under President Barack Obama from August 8, 2009, to August 2011.On February 21, 2019,Ro Khanna was named a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.He is considered to be a potential member of the Cabinet should Sanders win the presidency.
Ro Khanna Age
Ro Khanna was born in 1976 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 13, 1976. He is currently 43 years old as of 2019.
Ro Khanna Early Life
Ro Khanna’s parents are Punjabi Indian immigrants who came to the United States. His father is a chemical engineer who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the University of Michigan, and his mother is a former substitute school teacher. Khanna’s maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, was part of India’s independence movement, working with Lala Lajpat Rai, and spent years in jail in the pursuit of human rights and freedom.
In a Boston Globe op-ed, Khanna and Representative John Lewis examined how Gandhi’s movement was intertwined with the civil rights movement. Khanna received his B.A. degree in economics with honors from the University of Chicago in 1998, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.He attended Yale Law School, receiving his Juris Doctor in 2001. He specialized in intellectual property law.
Ro Khanna Wife
Ro Khanna resides in Fremont, California, with his wife, Ritu, and their two children Zara and Soren.
Ro Khanna Early work in politics
As a student at the University of Chicago, Ro Khanna worked for William D. Burns walking precincts during Barack Obama’s first campaign for the Illinois Senate in 1996. Ro Khanna interned for Jack Quinn when Quinn served as the Chief of Staff for Vice President Al Gore. As a sophomore, he interned at former president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center. President Carter later endorsed Khanna when he ran for Congress.
Khanna was a visiting lecturer of economics at Stanford University (2012-2016) and also taught law at the Santa Clara University School of Law, and has taught American Jurisprudence at San Francisco State University. He wrote a book on American competitiveness in business, Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America’s Future, which was published in 2012. Governor Jerry Brown appointed Ro Khanna to the California Workforce Investment Board in 2012. Ro Khanna served on the board of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte from 2006 until 2013 while on leave from the Obama Administration.
Ro Khanna Economics
Ro Khanna has called on his colleagues to adopt a more progressive economic platform.He is an original co-sponsor of Senator Bernie Sanders’s bill to make college affordable to all.He also has proposed $1 trillion expansion of the earned income tax credit (EITC), financed by a financial transaction tax, to help working families across America.In the Budget Committee, Khanna pointed out that Trump was for a single-payer healthcare system in 2000. He now supports a bill to provide “Medicare for All” in the House.
Fred Hiatt, the editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page, has suggested that Ro Khanna is a thoughtful and new economic voice for the Democratic Party. Ro Khanna has co-sponsored the Reward Work Act of 2018, to reform US labor law and corporate law by guaranteeing the right of employees in listed companies to elect one third of the board of directors.
Ro Khanna Elections
Khanna ran one of the nation’s first anti-Iraq war campaigns for the United States House of Representatives in the 2004 elections, unsuccessfully challenging Tom Lantos in the Democratic primary in California’s 12th congressional district.[138] He received endorsements from prominent officials, including Matt Gonzalez, and newspapers, including the San Mateo County Times,but lost.
On April 2, 2013, Khanna announced that he would challenge Mike Honda in California’s 17th congressional district in the 2014 midterm elections.[144] He assembled a campaign team composed of top members of President Obama’s reelection team, including Jeremy Bird, Obama’s 2012 national field director, and Steve Spinner, one of Obama’s top three fundraisers.
In June 2015 Ro Khanna announced his intention to run again for the U.S. House of Representatives in California’s 17th congressional district.He took no donations from PACs or corporations for his 2016 campaign. Ro Khanna raised $480,500 from individuals associated with the securities and investment industry and $170,752 from individuals associated with the electronics manufacturing industry. Khanna won reelection against Republican Ron Cohen in the 2018 general election, by a margin of 72.5% to 27.5%
Ro Khanna Committees
Committee assignments
- Committee on Armed Services
- Subcommittee on Readiness
- Subcommittee on Strategic Forces
- Committee on the Budget
- United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform
- Subcommittee on Government Operations
- Subcommittee on Economic Policy
Ro Khanna 2020
Obviously, we still have not seen all the details of what Mueller and his team have learned regarding Russia’s violation of our sovereignty in 2016. But the clock is ticking; we cannot wait for the publication of that report to begin taking necessary actions to protect the vote of the American people in 2020.
First, we must minimize the use of online communication platforms by foreign governments to suppress and sway voters through divisive messaging to favor certain candidates. Private companies, the intelligence community and Mueller all attributed this activity in 2016 to a variety of privately owned but state-aligned actors in Russia.
Second, in parallel, the U.S. intelligence community must implement plans to assist these companies in thwarting disinformation and influence campaigns from foreign governments through rapid declassification of technical indicators and regular updates on potential threats. The tech platforms received almost no assistance in the run-up to the 2016 election, a situation that only marginally improved with the 2018 midterms. By early next year, we will need tight coordination between the U.S. agencies and the tech platforms. Third-party oversight would enhance the credibility of these interactions.
Third, Congress must debate, amend and pass the Honest Ads Act to set fair and reasonable guidelines for online advertising in political campaigns. President Trump must then sign this legislation into law. This act can be strengthened with a broader definition of political advertising, technical requirements around transparency and strong limits on the use of hyper-targeting. Congress has a responsibility to set the standards for the thousands of relevant companies in this space, but nothing is preventing the largest companies, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, from creating self-regulatory frameworks in the meantime.
Fourth, we should enact reforms and norms to help deter future “hack and leak” or doxing operations by foreign intelligence organizations. The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, may have done the most damage to our electoral process when Russian officers stole information from the Democratic National Committee and others and then used the data to help Trump. Political parties and campaigns have stepped up their security precautions, but these private efforts can be bolstered by campaign finance reforms that would allow parties and campaigns to spend more on secure technologies and for outside organizations to offer nonpartisan security assistance.
Fifth, we must act quickly and boldly to enhance the cybersecurity of our voting infrastructure. Roughly 10,000 local authorities, operating without centralized standards, are responsible for conducting our national elections. The level of readiness against fraud and external attack varies widely; many states are woefully unprepared to face the quality of hacker available to the governments of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. We can respect the rights of states and localities to operate their own election procedures while also setting basic security requirements. The Protecting American Votes and Elections Act is a smart proposal to require the use of unhackable paper trails and mandate risk-limiting audits across the United States.
Securing our democracy is not a partisan project. All Americans must have the right to select their elected officials without foreign interference or manipulation. Although more questions remain, Mueller and his team have done a lot of the hard work of investigating Russia’s interference in our 2016 presidential election. Now is the time to use these insights to prevent such actions by any foreign actor in 2020.
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