Central Speaks what’s the student body concerned about?

by: HENRY HUSHCKE staff writer graphic: J. Doerr

High school can be tough. Between school, sports, clubs, social life, family responsibilities, work, and other obligations, it’s a stressful life, and sometimes there are little things that can get under our skin or brighten our day.Central Speaks is a forum for students to share their thoughts about the ups and downs of the “Central” Life. Here’s what students like you had to say. “I really hate the smell of the school when I arrive in the morning. It would be fantastic if we could use some sort of fragrance in the school. I think it would help to make me excited to be at school in the morning.” -Nick Barresi ‘21

“I find it REALLY stupid that domestic abusers don’t have to be registered like sex offenders do. Forcing abusers to be registered onto a national database would decrease the amount of recurring domestic abuse, especially because if someone moves to another state, the people there could research their background. This could completely change so many people’s lives.” -Leah Bell ‘20

“My name is Samantha Maldonado and I am an exchange student from Ecuador. This is my second year at CHS and sadly my last one as I am a Senior. When I first arrived to Central on September 2018 I realized I was in the right school to learn, make new friends, and be part of a connected community. I was very nervous and scared during my first day of school about being part of a new learning community in a foreign country. Thankfully, many students and staff members gave me a warm welcome. They helped me to get to my classes and taught me with patience how things worked. Soon, I started to feel confident about expressing myself and taking part in different classes, extracurricular activities, and clubs. I is a huge honor for me to be able to graduate from Central. I feel that this community is inclusive, there are big connections between students and staff members, its members are involved not just in the school community but also in the Traverse City community, Central is known for its diverse challenging academic courses, and extracurricular activities that bring people together. Central could not be perfect, but it is definitely a community that I enjoy being a part of.”-Samantha Moldonado

“I wish lunch was about ten minutes longer. If they could just push the end of school from 2:56 to 3:06 it would be so nice. I find myself constantly rushing during just to get back to my fourth hour on time. It is always a major source of stress in my day.” -Elijah Chung ‘21

“I’m so against homework. On top of sports, extracurriculars, and socializing, most students don’t have enough time for the amount of homework they are assigned each night. It feels like most teachers disregard the fact that students have several other classes and assign hours of work. It cuts into sleep and social time, causes stress, and most teachers don’t give students specific feedback on their work, so students don’t even gain from it.” -Mason Waskiewicz ‘20

If you would like to submit your thoughts for the next issue, send your message to bgq@tcapsstudent.net!

Why and How Does Impeachment Work by: HENRY HUSHCKE staff writer

What Is Impeachment? According to the Legal Dictionary, impeachment is a process that is used to charge public officials for misconduct while in office. If impeachment is a charge of misconduct, the first question becomes what is misconduct? Misconduct is defined by the Constitu tion as being “treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors.” The Constitution outlines treason as aiding enemies or levying war against the United States. Bribery is defined by the legal dictionary as, “The offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an official in the discharge of his or her public or legal duties.” High crimes and misdemeanors have an ambiguous definition. They have been interpreted in previous impeachments to mean anything from lying under oath to incompetence. Mostly, impeachment charges based on high crimes and misdemeanors have been dictated by the politics of the time.

What is the timeline for Impeachment? The process of impeachment is fairly straightforward, however navigating the tumultuous seas of misinformation surrounding the current impeachment hearings can be quite confusing. Here is a brief guide to help with this process. The process for presidential impeachment starts in the House of Representatives. Members of the House conduct an investigation into the alleged misconduct and then draft the articles of impeachment, which are the charges against a public official (President Trump). Then, the House will debate and eventually hold a vote on the articles. After the vote to impeach succeeded, the drafted articles of impeachment were sent across the capitol building to the Senate. In the Senate, is being conducted by the Chief Justice (John Roberts) into the various charges the House has levied against the official in question (President Trump). If the trial were for an official other than the president, the vice president would oversee it. After the trial, the Senate will vote to either confirm or reject the articles of impeachment. In order to confirm and remove the official from office, they need a two-thirds majority. If they confirm the articles, the president is removed from office. In the past, both President Johnson and President Clinton were impeached but not removed because the Senate did not convict them. To be clear, the president would not be imprisoned if they were removed. To be incarcerated, they would have to be prosecuted in a normal civilian court and found guilty of crimes.

What has President Trump been Impeached for? President Trump has been impeached on two counts, Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress, both of which fall under High Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Abuse of Power charge is based on a phone call made by President Trump to the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, on July 25, 2019. This phone call was first made public by an anonymous whistleblower within the Trump Administration. According to extensive testimony from many, including Lt. Alexander Vindman who was on the call, and the transcript released by the president, Trump asked Zelensky for a “favor.” The favor had two parts. The first was a request to look into Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate potential Russian interference in 2016. The

other demand was to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden is the son of Joe Biden, a front-runner (as of early January) for the 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination. Since there is a fair chance that Trump will be in direct competition for the presidency with Biden, the president has been charged with abusing his power to gain a political advantage. The president’s abuse of power charge is also based on testimony from many witnesses, including top diplomat to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, also attested that he utilized 400 million dollars in Congressionally approved military aid as leverage over Ukraine in this negotiation. The other charge levied against the president is Obstruction of Congress. President Trump has refused to comply with multiple subpoenas (a legal order requiring someone to produce a piece of evidence) for testimony which constitutes obstructing a congressional investigation.

Politics are exhausting. Even when there isn’t a major presidential or local election in the works, the heat doesn’t cool down. Ever since the public announcement of President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry in late September, it seems as though the only headlines making it into major newspapers and magazines are related to the political scandal in some way, shape, or form. Comics, human rela tions, human interests, features, and all of the other captivating stories have been put on the back burner to make way for information and opinions on the impeachment. Reading through pages and pages of nothing but political drama and he said, she said is a surefire way to upset others. The continuous cycle of politicians being flustered by their opponents will lead to nothing less than a further division of society. As the Founding Fathers feared, political parties have progressively divided people due to their beliefs. The National Archives stores a letter from former President John Adams to Jonathan Jackson in 1780 where Adams described his fear, stating, “there is nothing which I dread so much as the decision of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other.” Politically debated issues have become less about morality and ethics and more about winning and losing. As time goes on, the boundary that divides right and wrong shifts, making said boundary more difficult to pinpoint. Politicians take advantage of this and use it as an excuse when action is taken too far. People’s obsessive need to be right in a given situation has steadily taken a turn further and further from the intended course. The focus is taken away from solving an issue and shifted toward being part of the party to find the solution. Arguments and debates about contentious topics are demoralizing the population because politicians, whatever their allegiances, are infected with an unrelenting and righteous myopathy. This results in the inability to consider other perspectives with even a modicum of reason and level-headedness. They seem to forget the basic principle associated with every issue, political or not: we’re all humans, and as such we are imperfect by design and one of those imperfections. Recognizing this is the first step towards compromise and working issues out rationally. The ignorance of this principle is the equivalent of building an impenetrable, elaborate wall hundreds of miles long at the cost of relationships. by: MALLORY SWOPE staff writer Differences in opinions, especially regarding widelydebated political subjects, are no stranger to causing cumbersome conversations. The involvement people have with politics seems to have the ability to temporarily deactivate parts of the brain that controls judgment and reasoning to feed people’s obsession. This obsession, in addition to nurturing the hunger for being right, pulls people from their lives. It only takes a minute to make a memory that lasts a lifetime, but people’s time has become allconsumed by catching up on the latest Democratic and Republican debates looking ahead at the 2020 presidential election. Friends and families will continue to be divided by the news and debates displayed online and on TV screens everywhere they go with no end in sight. Three and a half years after the last presidential election, there are still talks of whether the right choice was made. Elections of any officeholder are the results of campaigns entailing over-exaggerated and under-executed promises. More times than not, the legislation or political reform the general public is promised during the campaigning phase of an election are swept under the rug when the term comes around. These promises are not new to society, and not all of them relate directly to the government. Take the idea of flying cars for example. When Ford started the assembly line and car production roared in the early twentieth century, the rumors of flying cars by the year 2000 were also sent soaring. Twenty years later, we’re still waiting. The same is true for immigra tion policy, tax reform, and several other hot topics touched on by presidents of the last two to three decades. The more promises are made and the more it looks like they might actually be carried out, the more stimulated people get over it, and their hopes are crushed when everything falls through whether it be days, weeks, months, or years later. Politics are just plain tedious more than anything else. What one officeholder might spend their entire term striving to fulfill can be completely reversed once the next person takes over. The constant changes that local, national, and international news broadcast are so hard to follow it seems easier to not follow them at all. For hundreds of years now, the country has been evolving and the government hasn’t been far behind. Tributaries continue to be built onto the endless stream of evolution as people form new political ideals and stray from the norm. In the long run, life is simply too short to divide people based on their political identification. //