SAN JOSE, Calif. & SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. & SANTA CRUZ, Calif. & MONTEREY, Calif. - s4story -- Peter Coe Verbica is the independently minded, fiscally conservative candidate for California's 19th Congressional District. Neither the party establishment nor the press has bothered to describe him accurately. He agrees with President Trump on the diagnosis of what ails the country, but holds the presidency itself to a sharper standard. This distinction provides headroom for moderate No Party Preference voters, centrist Democrats, and Republicans willing to exercise critical thinking — voters who care about fiscal responsibility, including reining in fraud and pork barrel politics. Verbica refuses to wear a T-shirt or a hat with a slogan. He's no chest-beater. Political independence requires more than calling yourself independent; it requires the backbone to tell your own side when you think it's wrong.

"I share the conviction that American power, innovation, production scalability, and independence matter," Verbica said. "Where I part ways is on method — on what it costs a republic when strength curdles into personal domination."

Verbica's platform tracks Trump's on the substance that matters most: rebuilding domestic semiconductor and defense manufacturing, treating Chinese Communist Party supply-chain dependence as a national-security liability rather than a commercial nuisance, and refusing to pretend commercial integration alone will tame an authoritarian regime. He backs targeted reshoring of critical industries over blanket tariffs, and credible force over transactional bluster.

The differences start with character. Verbica has criticized ad hominem politics, staff turmoil, and the substitution of loyalty for competence, arguing that personnel and policy problems are rarely as simple as "for me or against me." He has warned specifically against cult-of-personality politics, in which unwavering fealty is prized over the cold-eyed review that catches mistakes before they become expensive ones. He favors an older discipline: criticize in private, praise in public — correction that lands without humiliating the person receiving it, and credit that builds loyalty instead of demanding it.

"The Golden Rule has remarkably little to do with gold — and nothing at all to do with gilded furniture," Verbica said. On ethics, Verbica applies one standard to both parties. He has called out foreign investment funds, former politicians turned lobbyists, paid board seats, and foreign consulting arrangements as the same problem wearing different colors: non-U.S. capital and influence finding its way to a president's relatives. "You don't get to pick which family's conflicts of interest bother you," Verbica said. "The standard has to survive a change in party control, or it isn't a standard."

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Verbica is no defender of unchecked bureaucracy. At its worst, the administrative state can become a kind of soul-less algae, spreading for the sake of spreading and eventually choking the institutions it was created to serve. But the cure for unaccountable bureaucracy is not unaccountable executive power.

Verbica also draws a hard line on the concentration of executive power. He argues that any power a president claims to overcome resistance today will eventually sit in the hands of a president from the other party — and that the question to ask before expanding executive discretion isn't whether the current occupant deserves it, but whether one would want an ideological adversary to have it too. "That's not bureaucratic worship," Verbica said. "That's just remembering the office outlasts whoever holds it."

Verbica's case for Western civilization rests on more than slogans. He points to a Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Anglican-imperial inheritance — a confluence, he argues, that loses its magnificence the moment any one strand is removed or judged in isolation. He draws on John Locke and Marcus Aurelius as intellectual forebears of the founders, and on Friedrich Hayek's warnings against centralized planning, Richard Pipes's case for property as the foundation of liberty, and Thomas Sowell's insistence on data over ideology.

He is equally blunt about American education. Verbica believes meritocracy needs to improve on our own shores first, and that closing the STEM and literacy gap starts with the K-through-12 system, not with importing talent to paper over a homegrown shortfall. He has flagged a widening STEM gap against Chinese competitors and a literacy problem that goes beyond decoding words to actual comprehension — the ability to follow an argument into its assumptions. He favors mastery-based instruction, of the kind pioneered by Khan Academy, over pushing students forward before they have mastered the material, and argues that meritocracy in grading, admissions, and hiring is a competitiveness issue, not merely a cultural one.

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On fiscal policy, Verbica breaks sharply with Washington's bipartisan tolerance for deficit spending and monetary accommodation. He calls unchecked currency expansion "the cruelest tax of all" — invisible, regressive, and levied without a vote — and argues it inflates asset values for people who already own assets while pricing out recent graduates and immigrants starting from zero. He has called for the Federal Reserve to restructure its balance sheet to reduce exposure to rising rates, for a fuller accounting of foreign ownership of U.S. public and private assets as the real measure of the trade imbalance, and for procurement reform to end cost-plus defense contracting that rewards overruns instead of penalizing them. He has also pointed to Singapore's healthcare model — mandated savings accounts paired with price transparency — as one example worth studying to bring down federal healthcare costs.

"Exceptionalism isn't a status you get to claim," Verbica said. "It's earned, continuously, through performance and the willingness to admit when something isn't working and fix it. Populism is good at identifying grievances. It's statesmanship's job to turn a grievance into a policy that still works ten years later."

About Peter Coe Verbica

Peter Coe Verbica is a fifth-generation Californian, an Independently-Minded Republican, and Principal and Managing Director of Silicon Private Wealth®. He holds a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law, an M.S from MIT, and a B.A. from Santa Clara University, and is a CFP® (Certified Financial Planner®). A graduate of Bellarmine College Preparatory, Verbica has worked as a venture capital fund manager, CFO, and private equity investor, and has taught as an economics professor. He chairs the investment committee of a longstanding nonprofit, and serves as a co-inventor and trustee. On his mother's side, Verbica descends from the Coe family of ranchers whose donation formed the heart of Henry Coe State Park, California's second-largest state park. He is a candidate for California's 19th Congressional District.

For more information: peterverbica.com

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