The Supreme Court has blocked President Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for more than 40 million Americans. The court’s conservative justices expressed skepticism about Biden’s authority to forgive student loan debt without direct authorization from Congress.
Elections matter! Hold your nose and vote Democrat at the Federal level. Vote third party at the local level if they are sane.
The only way nothings will change is if we at least hold the line at the top and drive change at the lower levels.
I don’t need to hold my nose to vote for Democrats, but I like to pretend I’m a realist. It should be a no-brainer that with plurality voting, any vote not for democrats is helping republicans. I’d also like to think that it’s pretty obvious that helping republicans hurts America. Well, obvious to most people, anyway.
You and I don’t need to hold our noses, but many others do. We’ve all heard from them over the years.
What I truly don’t understand is when presented with actual positions on policy issues, a vast majority of people in the US agree with the Democrats’ platform. They only go insane when you tell them the Democrats support a certain position on that topic.
The most famous example is the ACA. Explain what the bill does, the benefits, the requirements to spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on healthcare, demands to cover certain things like prescriptions and various screenings, people love it. Tell them it’s “Obamacare” and they suddenly hate socialist communists stealing your money to pay for abortions.
It’s so infuriating. It’s like the culture war programming blinds them to seeing that they are voting against their own interests and policies they actually support
It sucks to be a centrist like myself sometimes who holds very strong opinions about important issues from both left and right. Truly a “how exactly do I want my gov’t to screw this country” situation because no matter which party gets elected they focus on the exact opposite of the issues I want them to focus on. One of the few things I appreciated Trump for, came through for me in ways that help others, but very much screwed me over personally here. I hope the sometimes-crazy activists for the GOP-led issue or two I do care about that the Court ruled in favor of are incredibly appreciative and maybe will take some of the massive donations they get to help poor college grads like me pay off the predatory loans they just pushed the Court to keep in place for the sake of their own pet issues.
What Trump views do you agree with?
I’m a Catholic who takes my faith seriously when it comes to political/social issues, which is why I don’t particularly care for either party here in the US, they both get it right and wrong on some things. The primary thing I agree with the GOP on, which is why the Supreme Court justice issue was important to me, is that I’m strongly pro-life/anti-abortion. I don’t much care for the political pro-life movement, because they’ve grafted themselves so hard to the GOP platform they’ve lost their way on many other things, but I do still care about the issue itself. On “culture war” stuff I’m more on the GOP side, not out of actual hate for certain groups, but because I do think in their push for acceptance they’re starting to push too far. Parents and families should be the primary teachers of children when it comes to those types of things, and should have the final say in what’s best for their child on them. For adults, I’m not personally in support of such stuff, but I’m more hands-off legally, as long as religious institutions aren’t forced to celebrate or acknowledge things they don’t believe in. What consenting adults do is none of my legal business, and religiously it’s between them and God, even if I and the Church think that what they’re doing is wrong. God will have the final say one way or the other. Basically, I’m more on the GOP side in “religious freedom” issues. Doesn’t mean I have any disrespect or hard feelings for LGBTQ-so on people, but the buck stops at forcing certain views of those issues on children without parental consent.
Other social issues, i.e. racial issues, I’m more of a straight-up centrist on. Equal is equal, no special treatment for anyone, positive or negative, regardless of race, gender, or any other demographic title people don’t have control over. That’s how it should be, IMO.
I do lean more liberal on things like immigration, environmental issues/climate change, labor/employment/wage issues (or I may be more “centrist” on that really), healthcare and education funding (i.e., universal healthcare/education), and slightly left on the economy in general, economically more of a Democrat-leaning capitalist than a socialist/social democrat.