Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard ( born April 12, 1981) is an American politician and Hawaii Army National Guard major who serves as the U.S. Representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district. Elected in 2012, she is the first Hindu member of Congress and the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress. In 2002, Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives. Gabbard served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009 as Army Military Police platoon leader. She was a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 to 2016, when she resigned to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Gabbard supports a Medicare for All health care plan she calls "Single Payer Plus" and strengthening Roe v. Wade by codifying it into federal law. She co-sponsored the Family Act for paid family and medical leave and endorsed universal basic income. Until 2004 she voted and lobbied against same-sex marriage in Hawaii. She publicly apologized for those positions in 2012, and again after launching her presidential campaign in 2019. She opposes military interventionism and has called herself a "hawk" on terrorism. Her decision to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and her skeptical approach to two claims that he had used chemical weapons were controversial. Gabbard's announcement of her intention to seek the Democratic nomination in the 2020 US presidential election made her the first female combat veteran to run for president.