Presidential Policies & Impeachment Reform

 

Political cartoon by Steve Benson

This week’s supplemental reading discussed the federal budget process, outlining how we go from the president’s budget request to the congressional budget resolution and enacting budget legislation (CBPP, 2020). It was surprising (or maybe, not so surprising) to learn that our Congress typically doesn’t pass a budget resolution at all, which is why policies seem to stay the same and Americans continue to suffer. This fact is even scarier when you look at the harmful budgets suggested by our president.

Our second supplemental reading—a Huffington Post article on Trump’s 2018 budget proposal—showed that the president planned to make cuts in art, legal service, education, anti-poverty, housing assistance, and children’s health insurance programs, all while advocating for tax cuts for America’s elite (Meng, 2017). At the time the article was written, the author stated that members of the House Appropriations Committee were not sure if the budget request would go through. Upon analyzing policies Trump has enacted since being in office—tax cuts for the rich, speeding up drug approval times, revising the asylum process to diminish immigration, increasing military funding, and trying to build a wall at our border—we can see where his priorities lie (Bump, 2019). Meng (2017) states that “the federal budget is a moral issue”, and it is clear that Donald Trump’s morals revolve around narcissism, individualism, and rich white male privilege.

In recent policy news, Trump declared that he will not provide additional COVID-19 relief until after the election (Taylor & Madhani, 2020). This is while millions of Americans are unemployed, lacking health insurance, facing eviction, and struggling to make ends meet. Trump made this decision after Nancy Pelosi proposed a $2 trillion stimulus package--which Republican congressmen refuse to enact—and after seeing that his numbers are down in election polls (Taylor & Madhani, 2020). We know from reading Stephanie Kelton’s (2020) book that we don’t have to “come up with” the money for COVID-19 relief. In fact, “as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, ‘We write unlimited blank checks for war. We just wrote a $2 trillion check for that tax, the GOP tax cut, and nobody asked those folks, ‘How are they are going to pay for it?’” (p.240). It is unfair for Trump to hold stimulus checks over the heads of drowning Americans to buy their vote, and it is unethical to stand by while 200,000+ members of our society die from a virus that has been virtually eradicated in other countries.

How Does Impeachment Work?

When thinking about what policy changes are relevant to this issue, I would like to hold our government—especially the president—more accountable. This could be accomplished through reforming impeachment procedures. We can see from Trump’s impeachment trial that a confounding variable is having more than half of the senate in support of the defendant’s actions. I would like to see the American people play a role in convicting those in positions of power. While the people who make the final decision about policies or impeachment hearings in Washington may be more educated on law and order, they are not the folks impacted by federal decisions. I believe that if all Americans—especially those who are starving, homeless, incarcerated, and targets of systemic racism—were given the opportunity to vote on Trump's impeachment hearing, we would have had a much different outcome in February. This would, of course, also require reform of voting procedures to make them more accessible (e.g. allowing people to vote online, having same-day registration and polling locations open for 24 hours, giving incarcerated folks the ability to vote). 

References:

• Bump, P. (2019, October 25). Three years later, evaluating the 10 laws Trump said he’d pass in the first 100 days. The Washington Post. Retrieved on October 7, 2020 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/25/three-years-later-evaluating-laws-trump-said-hed-pass-his-first-days/
•  Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2020, April 2). Policy basics: Introduction to the federal budget process. Retrieved October 7, 2020 from https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-introduction-to-the-federal-budget-process
• Kelton, S. (2020). The deficit myth: Modern monetary theory and the birth of the people's economy. PublicAffairs. Kindle edition.
• Meng, G. (2017, May 26). The federal budget is a moral document. Huffington Post. Retrieved October 7, 2020 from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-federal-budget-is-a-moral-document_b_5926eebce4b090bac9d46bfb
• Taylor, A. & Madhani, A. (2020, October 7). Trump halts COVID-19 relief talks until after the election. Fox 44 News. Retrieved October 7, 2020 from https://www.fox44news.com/news/business-news/trump-halts-covid-19-relief-talks-until-after-election/