Declaration of Candidacy
Well, it’s official. Today, I went down to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office in Oakland. I submitted all of the necessary paperwork, signatures, and fees to qualify to be on the June 8th ballot as a candidate for State Assembly in the 20th District (Fremont, Newark, Union City, Milpitas).
After everything else was done, the final document that I had to fill out was the “Declaration of Candidacy”. On the back of that document is an Oath of Office that I had to sign. The oath reads:
I, Adnan Shahab, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.
I actually took the time to carefully read these words before I signed the Oath of Office. These words truly mean something to me. Unlike many other politicians, I have actually read the United States Constitution and the Constitution of the State of California. Those documents serve as a contract between our government and the people. It is important to understand what is and is not allowed according those documents, and we must legislate with faith and allegiance to those documents.
On a little bit of a tangent, I am still waiting for the Democratic candidates for Assembly District 20 to agree to a debate with me. A Silicon Valley business group had contacted me a few weeks ago, attempting to set up an all-candidate debate with candidates from both the Republican and Democratic parties. As I have been trying to set up a debate for months, I told them to name the place and time, and I would be there. At 1:38PM on Monday, I received an e-mail from the group confirming that the debate would take place on Thursday, March 4 at 9:15AM. Then at 9:42PM on Monday (eight hours after receiving the confirmation), I received another e-mail from the group stating that the debate would have to be postponed because “a majority of the candidates” could not be present. Let me think about this. Including me, there are three candidates running for the AD20 seat. In order to have “a majority of the candidates” present, we would need at least two candidates to show up. I told the group that I would be there. Does that mean that both Democratic candidates decided to bail out of the debate? Why are they hiding?
Please visit my official campaign website at:
www.Shahab2010.com