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(03/26/17 12:34am)
We live in an intensely politically polarized society. Everyone inhabits their own echo chambers, only ever encountering viewpoints they agree with. Democrats watch MSNBC, Republicans watch Fox News. There’s no room for civil debate, which creates the kind of hyperpartisan atmosphere that leads to the election of someone like Donald Trump.
Well, not anymore.
Daniel Sandberg is a senior at Duke University. He’s the Vice President of his student government. He plays the clarinet in his free time, and is an avid reader.
He’s also a goddamn hero.
At 11:39 AM Thursday morning, scrolling through Facebook headlines on his phone while eating lunch at the union, Daniel stopped, produced a large needle from his pocket, and proceeded to forcefully pop the bubble that had surrounded him up to that point.
In other words, he began following the National Review on Facebook.
As the soapy particles settled around his immediate area, Daniel continued scrolling. A few minutes later, he was given his first taste of the outside world.
It was a headline that read, “Trump is right to cut PBS/NPR funding. It’s just elitist propaganda anyway.”
At first Daniel was shocked. But as he continued scrolling, he realized the beauty of the decision he had made. He closed his eyes and imagined a great door opening before him, revealing a world more vast and diverse than he could ever have foreseen. It was as if he had gone from seeing only shades of gray to seeing all the colors of the rainbow, and he felt his soul physically expand.
His eyes had been forever opened. He would no longer see only liberal headlines, but wrong ones as well.
If only we all had the courage that Daniel had. The world might be a more open, peaceful place.
(03/13/17 8:10pm)
In an attempt to engage with students and debate some important and contested topics, all of the tickets running for IUSA, or the Indiana University Student Association, met for a town hall event at the Indiana Memorial Union on March 7th. Five tickets attended, including IGNITE, Refund Supreme, Empower IU, Focus for IUSA, and Engage with IUSA. A list of potential questions that had been submitted by students on Facebook floated around the room at the beginning which had several questions about increasing diversity and inclusion in student government, making IU safer for victims of sexual assault, and divesting from fossil fuels in favor of green energy initiatives. Notably, however, the list also contained several pointed questions about candidates’ previous public support for Donald Trump.
The first couple of questions were relatively innocuous and uncontroversial; they had to do with getting more students engaged in IUSA and including more underrepresented groups in the student government. Several presidential candidates spoke out on the importance of achieving these goals, and pointed to a few specific steps, like increasing tabling in order to have more face-to-face interactions with students and making better use of the Freshman Internship Program to get more people involved.
Quickly, though, the conversation shifted to the IUSA budget. This is where the debate became significantly more fraught. One ticket, Refund Supreme, was particularly animated and opinionated when it came to the ways that IUSA leaders were spending the money they were given. Samuel Patterson, the presidential candidate for Refund, condemned the spending of money on personal expenses such as parking passes and luncheons.
“I don’t want to call it corruption, but it’s certainly gross,” Patterson said.
Refund’s argument was that the money should be given back to the students. This was met with skepticism by the other tickets; IGNITE’s candidate for Vice President of Congress, Iman Mahoui, pointed out that, if this was done, each student would receive one dollar as their refund. IGNITE’s presidential candidate, William McKinney, said that making IU a non-dry campus would allow drinks to be sold at sporting events and would create more income that could be spent on students, rather than issuing a refund. Some people agreed with elements of Patterson’s argument; a member of EmpowerIU said he also thought that parking passes and luncheons were wasteful. However, he defended the use of executive scholarships as a means of ensuring that any student can take part in student government, regardless of how busy they are in other areas of their lives.
A question about the source of IUSA’s negative reputation on campus sparked an earnest discussion about the group’s shortcomings. D’Angelo King from EmpowerIU pointed to a lack of inclusion as a key factor, while other people on the ticket said that members of Greek life had too big an influence on IUSA, and reiterated their point that executive scholarships allow for people in all walks of life to take part. Mahoui made the case that the executive branch has much more power than Congress. Patterson argued this was due to the fact that seats in Congress are sold for votes, which makes the attrition rate high.
At the end, one student produced several sheets of paper that he said were pledges not to accept money from any outside political organizations. After the presidential candidates gave their 30-second summaries of their tickets’ platforms, he went around the room and asked them all to sign them.
The election for IUSA will be on March 22nd and 23rd.
(02/09/17 4:04pm)
On Jan. 31, President Donald Trump nominated Federal Appeals Court Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court seat left open by the death of Antonin Scalia a year ago. Seeing as Gorsuch is a new figure on the national stage, this article sets out to answer a few questions about who he is, what his record is, and what his beliefs are.
At 49 years old, Gorsuch has an extensive judicial resume. He graduated from Columbia, Harvard (where he was classmates with former President Barack Obama) and Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), clerked for several prominent judges, including two Supreme Court justices, Byron White and Anthony Kennedy, and Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was a high-ranking official in George W. Bush’s Justice Department before then-President Bush appointed him to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Colorado on May 10, 2006, on which he still serves.
In his personal life he is an outdoorsman who enjoys fishing, hunting and skiing, drives a gold-colored Mercedes convertible (often with the top down), and lives on a ranch with his wife and two teenage daughters (they have some horses and chickens as well as a barn cat). He is also a Protestant, and would be the first Protestant on the court since Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010.
Ideologically he is conservative; he supports religious freedom, is against assisted suicide, and is unforgiving when it comes to the death penalty. But as a judge, he is a strict textualist, following the Constitution to the letter, much like his would-be predecessor Antonin Scalia. From this perspective, some of his past decisions are easy to explain; he has not helped people who have appealed the death penalty because, due to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of the 1990s, there are very few cases where the penalty could reasonably be revoked. It is less clear if textualism was the reason he chose to side with Hobby Lobby and other entities claiming religious freedom; he has repeatedly said that the contraception requirements in the Affordable Care Act have burdened people’s religious exercise under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993.
He shares many similarities with Scalia, which may have contributed to his nomination. When it comes to criminal law, he believes the law should be written clearly, and interpreted in favor of the defendant if possible, even to the extent that it hurts the government prosecution; he thinks people should be able to freely express their religion in public spaces; he is wary of deferring to legislative history; and he dislikes the dormant commerce clause, which is an economic provision that does not actually exist in the Constitution but has been used in several cases. He is also known to be a sharp legal thinker and a (relatively) readable and entertaining legal writer, something that Scalia was also known for.
Among his peers, he has a reputation for being friendly, easy to work with, and averse to twisting the words of the law to his own ideological advantage. Republicans and Democrats alike see him as an eminently qualified and respectable judge who would do the job well. However, Democrats are not going to be quick to forget the treatment received by their judge, Merrick Garland, nominated by former President Barack Obama and ignored by Republicans for almost a year – they didn’t even give him a hearing. Whether Democrats choose to treat Gorsuch the same way remains to be seen.