No more years: US needs Biden

No more years: America needs

The case for Biden

The Tornado Times is endorsing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden for president of the United States.

While the best argument for a Biden presidency is that he simply isn’t Trump, there are some more reasons to vote for the Democratic nominee in this election.

One of the biggest long term threats to our planet is the climate disaster. Biden has promised to listen to scientists and commit to working on a solution for the problem. During his time as vice president, President Barack Obama’s administration rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline, raised fuel efficiency standards in automobiles, released the Clean Power Plan and joined the Paris climate agreement.

Many of these actions have been undone by President Trump.

Somewhat ironically, the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters endorse Biden despite his vow to block further development of the Keystone pipeline.

Biden’s plan for the environment has the U.S. reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Later than we’d like, but it’s better than having no such plan like Trump. He also plans on investing over $1 trillion over 10 years into domestic green energy, combating climate change while creating high skilled and well paying jobs in the U.S.

Biden’s approach to climate change, recognizing that the environment and the economy are not necessary antagonists, comes from his centrist ideology, which will help unify the country in this period of hyper-polarization, and his relative civility and decorum is something the country desperately needs in its leader.

A Biden administration would also be more likely to restore order and calm the civil unrest in the United States. As district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris has the experience needed to effectively crack down on crime. Meanwhile, Biden has promised to reform the police and emphasize community policing while also saying he does not plan on defunding the police. He says he will end for-profit prisons, one of the most reprehensible aspects of our criminal justice system, and will commit to rehabilitation rather than punishment.

Biden has actually shown interest in working with reform groups to address the grievances being aired by the Black community. Furthermore, he denounces White supremacists with no hesitation, which is more than can be said for Trump.

While Trump’s racism makes Biden look like Martin Luther King, Jr., he does admittedly have some unforgivable moments in his political career, such as calling Obama the “first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright.” However, by appointing Harris, a Black woman and someone who criticized Biden for working with senators who supported segregation, as his running mate, Biden sends the message that he is willing to admit his mistakes and is working towards fixing the issues with race in this country.

Biden’s social policy will also restore rights and freedoms to underrepresented groups. The Trump administration has come after the rights of transgender Americans, restricting their ability to serve in the military and turning a blind eye to noncompliance with Title IX.

Furthermore, Vice President Mike Pence’s history with the LGBTQ+ community can be described only as appalling. He has long been against anti-discrimination laws protecting the rights of gay people and has been a strong opponent of gay marriage.

The Trump administration has violated some of the most basic human rights of undocumented immigrants, forcibly sterilizing detained women and holding children who have been separated from their parents in cages. While a simple reversal of these horrifying and backwards actions and mentality would be a tremendous first step, Biden actually supports restoring and improving the rights of the underrepresented.

In terms of the economy, Biden is the clear choice. Under the Obama administration, Biden helped bring the U.S. back from a financial disaster. Trump has sent America into one.

The Obama administration inherited the housing crisis and the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, Obama and Biden were able to turn this around in eight years and handed over a thriving economy to the new president. After maintaining the upward trend for a few years, Trump’s poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic has sent America back into a downward spiral from which it will struggle to recover.

Biden’s tax plans would undo the excessive cuts made by the Trump administration, which saved a few Americans billions in dollars while others were left with much less than what Trump promised despite social programs being cut.

Joe Biden has a clear vision and plan when it comes to protecting and restoring our environment, his economic experience in times of crisis will help restore our national economy, he has shown a willingness and desire to fix race relations in this country

and reform the policing and criminal justice systems. Socially, Biden’s policy will push America closer towards being the free and fair nation our founders envisioned. He is the clear choice for president.

The case against Trump

On all levels, President Donald J. Trump has shown a supreme failure to lead. On the national scale, polls by the Pew Research Center have shown that the divide between Democrats and Republicans has steadily grown, and a vast majority of the population and both sides of the aisle expect

America needs Joe Biden

this divide to keep growing.

Meanwhile, his leadership in the White House has not been any better. The rate of turnover in Trump’s cabinet makes the White House look like a McDonald’s in a college town. During Obama’s first term four executive departments saw a change in leadership, including those in cabinet level positions and excluding temporary or acting officials. Under the same criteria, in Trump’s first term, 15 executive departments have had their heads changed.

The coronavirus pandemic has shown just how desperately America has needed better leadership. President Trump consistently spread misinformation about the virus and failed to decisively enact policies that would help the situation. By his own admission, Trump knowingly downplayed the virus, likening it to the flu, causing many Americans to underestimate the severity of the situation.

Trump did not wear a mask in public until July 11, and he disregarded the advice of almost all public health experts, holding gatherings of thousands of people, many of whom also did not wear masks. And while health experts universally agree that the key to an effective response to the pandemic is testing, President Trump has repeatedly said that we should “slow the testing down” and early plans to expand testing “went poof, into thin air,” according to someone who worked on a pandemic response plan with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had taken a leading role in the effort.

In the early stages of the pandemic, the president said the hope was to keep death numbers under 100,000 people while the White House said the upper limit for deaths was 240,000. Trump doubled down on the 100,000 figure in May and argued for reopening the economy, fearing that an economic crash would kill more people than the virus. The result: over 220,000 deaths at the time of writing, with the number rising every day, and one of the worst economic crises in American history.

Trump tried to trade American lives for economic recovery and failed. His attitude and actions have contributed to the fact that the U.S. is among the worst countries in deaths per capita due to COVID-19, with 63 people per 100,000 dying as a result of the virus.

Trump’s hesitancy to condemn white nationalism and white supremacy makes him absolutely unfit to be president. Racial tensions have flared under Trump’s time in office and rather than trying to unite the country, he attacked victims of police brutality and blamed the “radical left” for the strife.

While Trump claims that violence is a “left-wing problem,” his own FBI director, Christopher Wray, testified under oath before Congress that a majority of the 100 arrests for domestic terrorism in 2020 were “motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

And while ambivalence to racism is a problem on its own, Trump takes this a step further and actively supports it. He has retweeted a video in which a supporter of his yells “white power,” claimed that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that African-American congresswoman Ayanna Pressley was not born in the United States, called the phrase “Black Lives Matter” a symbol of hate, and refered to Haiti and some African nations as “s---hole countries.” There is no justification for pandering to racists, let alone participating in racist rhetoric and actions.

On top of all of this, Trump has even failed to deliver on his campaign promises. The US is still in NATO, only three miles of “the wall” has been added to the southern border, and none of it has been paid for by Mexico, Obamacare is still largely intact and Hillary Clinton has not been prosecuted.

In fact, if you’re on the search for corrupt politicians, Trump’s team is a good place to start. Trump’s campaign officials are more likely to be charged with a crime than illegal immigrants, not exactly what you would expect from a “law and order” president.

Trump seemingly has no regard for the ethical standards and expectations of the president. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, no member of the executive branch can “use his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of friends, relatives.” The rampant nepotism in the administration is unethical to the point of negligence, considering the fact that Kushner was appointed to lead the coronavirus pandemic response despite no medical or public health background.

This nepotism also led whithouse.gov to promote the jewelry line of Ivanka Trump and led Ivanka herself to promote Goya beans after her father received praise from company executives.

When it comes to Trump’s impeachment, few have put it better than Mark Galli, former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today: “The facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”

As a final note, the Tornado Times finds it worrying that for 10 out of 15 years before being inaugurated as president, each member of our staff paid the same amount of money in federal income tax as the President of the United States, a multi-billionaire.

The case against President Donald Trump, in the opinion of the Tornado Times staff, is frankly overwhelming and cannot be surmised in 1,000 words. What we can say is that he is largely responsible for one of the biggest disasters in the history of the U.S., he has failed to deliver on many of his campaign promises, his ethical record is staggering, and the country is more divided now than it was before he entered office. Donald Trump should not be reelected as president of the United States of America.