Addressing climate change in a major way. If we don’t do this, everything else is deck chairs on the Titanic. There are things we can fix a decade or three down the road if we botch them now. This is not one of them.
Assuming we manage that:
Make illegal all the ways that state and local governments make it hard for people to vote, and (by gerrymandering and the like) keep their votes from counting.
Do things that make a big difference in people’s lives quickly: increase the minimum wage substantially (immediately to at least $10 on the way to $15), make college affordable and drastically reduce student debt, empower unions (including outlawing right-to-work) so that workers have leverage to address the particular problems at their own workplaces, pass a national abortion-rights law that would supersede state laws, lower the Medicare eligibility age to 50.
I want the next president to avoid use of twitter except in the case of official announcements (that are professionally conducted) and marking calendar events.
Statehood was polling at 52% before the last referendum on it in PR, to 17% current status, 15% free association/independence, 9% abstain, and 7% undecided. Voting (with major anti parties boycotting) had a 23% turnout which went 97% for statehood.
That doesn’t seem like something that supports what you think even if the poor turnout does not allow that 97% yes vote to be convincing evidence that most do want it.
We need a fully empowered independent commission to untangle the Trump crime syndicate and every corrupt act that it committed, and prosecute those who helped abet or conceal those acts.
These mobsters aren’t going away after Trump leaves office, the rest of their careers will be devoted not to governing but to gaining more power and covering their own tracks. It’s naive to think the government can do anything useful until this cancer is fully exposed and removed.
I’ll agree that corruption, white-collar crime, and contemptible behavior by the super-rich are big problems in America. We’ve got to put an end to the regulatory “revolving door.” I’ve not been a fan of term limits, but perhaps stark measures like that are necessary to reduce corruption. More power should be given to anti-corruption inspectors. More white-collar criminals shuld be sent to prison. Perhaps the left-wing is right, and corporations should be made accountable to their employees, customers and the public.
BUT I do not see a"Trump crime syndicate" as a large or central part of this. (Does this term encompass high-ranking government officials who’d never met Trump but became Trump-enablers? Yes, they should be demoted or dismissed.) The problems of corruption are far broader than just Trump and his mob. As just one recent example, there were allegations of criminal conduct against Devin Nunes before he ever met Trump.
Any broad-based anti-corruption purge will become too political. Clinton’s “Nannygate” will be revisited, and so on. It’s better just to look toward the future.
Universal healthcare (which I am for)
Higher taxes on the rich (which I am for but I doubt will happen because they control both parties plus they will just move their money off shore)
Open borders (call it what you want but if you abolish ICE and get rid of ways to control refugees and discourage them from coming, its open borders)
Pullout of US troops overseas (which I’m for)
Now I dont tend to vote democrat but I would like to see;
An increase in medicaid funding.
More k-12 funding.
End of policies that discourage fatherhood.
End the collusion between drug companies and insurance companies that cause alot of the high costs of healthcare.
Apply marketplace solutions to environmental issues ( I would love to see someone become a billionaire by developing something like new solar panels)
Elimination of the penny.
Reboot of Star Wars after Disney has screwed it up.
The Trump crime syndicate did not cause these things, but it’s a blinking red warning light that these behaviors are now considered business as usual by the GOP. It would be dangerously irresponsible to leave that signal unchallenged. If we decide to let bygones be bygones, then someone else is going to do everything Trump did, and take it to a higher level. And soon.
You can’t always remove all the cancer, but you can remove the biggest tumors and treat the remaining ones with the next best means. It may not work but the alternative is to let the patient die.
And to reiterate, leaving the patient sick means it can’t do things it normally would (the analogy being a healthy government with democratic institutions that can execute policy on behalf of the people).
Term limits would increase corruption. Politicians in their final term, facing imminent unemployment and no accountability to the electorate, would be motivated to graft while the grafting is good.
The example that proves the rule is SCOTUS justices. They aren’t accountable to the electorate, nor should they be, but they also shouldn’t enjoy a lifetime term of unaccountable decision-making as their brains slowly turn to mush while they lose touch with the changing world around them.
I’m not an American (and hence not a Democrat voter), but if I were, one of the biggest political problems in the USA is gerrymandering, and other efforts to subvert the democratic will of the people. It feeds into many of the other issues that face the USA. If I were the Democrats, then I would make every effort to make a national anti-gerrymandering law.
I tend to agree. That’s one of the primary tap roots of the systemic problems we face. Right now, every decade the party in power basically gets to redraw the electoral districts in their own favor, however they perceive that to be.
What we end up with is legislative districts that don’t reflect the actual makeup of the electorate- you have places like Texas that are a lot closer to Republican/Democrat parity than the makeup of the Congressional delegation or the State Legislature would indicate. And at least in Texas, the boundaries are typically drawn to emphasize rural and suburban areas, and minimize urban ones, which is interesting because something like 2/3 of the Texas population lives in the Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio metro areas, and something like half live within the cities proper.
A lot of policy stuff would be secondary for me. There are a lot of really fucked up structural things that need to be addressed. The senate is a completely broken institution that gives veto power on legislation, cabinet positions, and the judiciary to a bunch of empty land. That can’t be fixed, but statehood for DC and PR would help a lot.
*Major voting rights protections.
*Legalization of marijuana and restoring voting rights to related felons
Merrick Garland and Kavanaugh lying under oath during his confirmation make stacking SCOTUS acceptable for me, but I would worry about the backlash in future elections. Might be worth it anyway
Anti-gerrymandering legislation
Then, yes, lots of healthcare; restoring normalcy to DHS, DOE, EPA, etc; normalizing foreign relations, affirming NATO and SK alliances; start taking in refugees again; immigration reform; …
I can’t strongly emphasize enough how much I agree that making DC and Puerto Rico states should be top priority. Seriously, giving them statehood is such a small drop in the bucket in terms of amelioriating the Democrats’ structural disadvantage in the Senate that it amazes me that doing this is even a controversial idea. We should really be making all of the territories states (so American Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands, etc.) and look at breaking CA into 6 or 7 smaller states if we actually wanted to fix the Senate.
Expanding the House is a good idea, too.
Basically I think that institutional reforms should be prioritized because everything else I want becomes easier after that. Hell, the next Dem POTUS should demand the resignation of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh from SCOTUS in his/her inauguration speech, and if those partisan hacks refuse to step down then SCOTUS should be increased to 15-20 Justices.
The problem is that the economy is running on a Keynesian sugar high fueled by unfunded tax cuts and military spending.
To be fair, the attacks against him were pretty partisan.
Replacing a swing vote like Kennedy with a staunch conservative like Kavanaugh was just as problematic for the Democrats as replacing Scalia with Garland.
Ultimately, The Democrats couldn’t do anything because we failed to retain the senate in 2014 (we lost nine fucking seats. NINE!!!) and then we failed to beat Trump in 2016.
Elections have consequences.
Really? AFAICT, every department in the government has seen an increase in their budget between 2016 and 2018. That’s how Trump has been keeping this economy going. He has been goosing consumption by reducing taxes without reducing spending. It’s Keynesian deficit spending.
Look at tables 5.4 and 5.6
I could cut costs in about every department. Defense/Military is about half of discretionary spending so about half of the cuts would come from there.
Military spending used to be half of the discretionary budget so as a percentage of spending, social programs have gone up considerably as a percentage of discretionary spending and discretionary spending generally has gone up considerably overall.
Why is it right wing? Free state college education is a pretty progressive idea.
I’d like to see the new POTUS do a televised address where (s)he apologizes to the people of earth who were either harmed or insulted during the previous administration. If the POTUS can speak some Spanish, it would be nice to apologize to those people in Mexico, Central/South America in their tongue.