POLS 304@CSU Fall 2019

With President Trump's appointment of two Supreme Court Justices in one term, the balance of the Supreme Court has tilted noticeably in Republicans' favor. In response to this, some Democrats have revived a concept dating back to the Civil War: court packing, the act of changing the number of Justices on the Supreme Court in order to receive favorable rulings on legislation. If a Democratic President wins in 2020, and Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, these Democrats want to expand the number of Justices in the Supreme Court to defend existing rulings, and create new rulings in Democrats’ favor. Despite the reasons these Democrats have for coming out in favor of court packing, any attempt to pass an Act of Congress to change the Supreme Court size is almost certainly doomed to failure due to its radicalism and fear of voter reprisal. Court packing as a concept has been around for a long time. The most famous successful case of court packing happened throughout Abraham...

        The conversation concerning Syria in recent days has focused on the President withdrawing U.S. troops from the northern border zones with Turkey and functionally leaving the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are headed by Syrian Kurds under the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and their military branch the YPG or People's Protection Units, to fend for themselves . This was regarded by pundits and politicians alike a disastrous move and the abandonment of an ally. Bipartisan resistance of this magnitude is likely not something President Trump expected when he initially ceded territory to Turkish troops and the Russian agents in the area of operations. However, there is little Congress can do as the justification of the American intervention into Syria strained Constitutional limits at the time, and also re-solidified decades of Executive power grabbing from the reins of the Legislature.        ...

In today’s world, it is not uncommon for someone to believe that nothing ever gets done in Congress. A main reason for this is because arguably, no substantial legislation has been passed since the Affordable Care Act in 2010. People argue about who is to blame for the lack of legislation being passed in today’s Congress. Democrats want to blame the Republicans and the Republicans want to blame the Democrats. However, Congress was not always like this. For example, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first became president, there was a large amount of legislation passed within his first one hundred days. The purpose of this blog post is to examine the relationship between the amount of legislation passed and the level of polarization in Congress.  To begin, I believe it is important to establish what Political Polarization is. According to AJS, polarization is “the degree of ideological division between parties”. (AJS, 229) Essentially, this means that the Democratic ...

Bipartisanship, Climate Change, and Representation             Today’s political climate is seemingly quite hopeless. The polarization of the two parties within politics and specifically within Congress proves time and time again to be a dividing factor for Americans, politicians, and constituents. One of the most polarizing topics of today is the topic of climate change. With the recent climate strikes popping up globally and nationally many people have voiced their opinions on whether or not they agree with the subject of climate change. President Trump voiced is opinion tweeting, “ The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (Twitter.com/realdonaldtrump ). Whereas climate activists such as Greta Thunberg has said, “…if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe” (b...

          One of the major topics of international news in the past few months has been the protests in Hong Kong between pro-democracy citizens and the Chinese government. It all started with the proposal of the Fugitive Offenders amendment bill by the Hong Kong government. If the bill were to be enacted, it would allow for, “criminal suspects (in Hong Kong) to be extradited to mainland China under certain circumstances.” (“The Hong Kong…”). The proposal set off a chain of protests by democracy-seeking citizens that started in late March and have continued to this day. Photo of a pro-democracy protestor in China waving the American Flag.           Though it seems that most Americans are openly siding with those protesting, there is not much our government or people can do to aide them other than express our support for them. This must have been what was running through the mind of the Houston Rockets General Mana...