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LEGISLATION
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POLICY REGION |
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Criminal Justice Reform – (First Step Act signed) Reformed sentencing laws.
Border Wall as a counter for illegal immigration
Increased troops deployed to southern border
Tariffs on Chinese Goods and new trade deal
USMCA (US, Mexico, Canada Agreement)
Infrastructure Bill
Price transparency for American patients |
Domestic Policy
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
Domestic Policy
Domestic Policy |
SWA#3
Atul Sonthalia
At multiple times during the speech, Trump mentioned that it was not legislation of either side but of America as a whole. Most of the policies he signed were conservative policies. This shows that the democratic side did not get many of their policies across even though the house was democratic, since the majority of the senate was republican. Trump does not mention specifically working with the house majority of democrats, he refers to the house and senate as his administration.
In his speech Trump tended to take a lot of credit for policies on himself. He mentions multiple times that most of the “good things” that came in the past two years were his doing. After running a fact check on the speech it was found that he lied about almost all statistics, and the US is not actually growing as fast as he portrayed it to be growing. (It grew almost 2 times faster with the Obama administration). This lead me to consider the speech with some degree of scepticism thereby making it hard to understand his views of exerting his presidency.
The democratic speaker Stacey Adams brings out an issue that was not discussed by the president. Education. She believes that the costs of attaining higher education is still extremely high and is getting higher, she also believes that schools need to be safer and says that the white house responds timidly even when they see first graders practice active shooter drills. Furthermore, she wants gun control laws to be more strict- another issue not discussed by the president. In his speech the president talked about how the middle class is more prosperous than ever under his administration. Adams does not agree to this, she says that people are “striving for a middle class where a salary truly equals economic security”. She also says that under the current administration, far too many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck lives and they do not even have labour unions to protect individual workers. She does not agree with the building of the wall, she believes that America is made stronger because of its immigrants and not because of walls. For healthcare, Abrams wants the government to listen to the majority in 14 states and expand Medicaid.
One of the things addressed in the state of the union was the problem regarding education – mentioned by the democratic response. This aligns directly with the issues regarding education in North Carolina. In North Carolina schools have been accused of being biased against students of colour, and also have issues with their state grading systems for their middle schools. An investment to improve education could help fix the problem. The National Parks in North Carolina are too small for the growing population and there need to be better means to deal with national disasters like hurricane Florence. An overall problem that this can be seen under is climate change. The trump administration did not talk about climate change in the state of the union, but Adams said something should be done to curb the negative effects on her rebuttal speech.
(References- Used the resources provided under State of the Union on moodle)