Going with the supposition that Kerry wins the election, what do you think his first official act…
My votes are
Prepare a legal defense team for the inevitable Kenneth Starr-style witchhunt.
I guarantee that his first official act will be that of formally appointing his cabinet. After that formality, his first official act should be to hunker down with the military leaders and formulate an exit plan for Iraq. Changing tax code is going to take some weeks or months.
Filling out the Cabinet can take a while, FYI.
How about this as an alternate “should”-giving a full pardon to Bush. 
Step down in favor of the true Presidnet of the United States of America. Al Gore.
I’m not sure that I’m wrong. It was my understanding that the appointments get through Congress before Inauguration day and the president signs them right after giving his Inaugural address.
Since revoking the tax cut on families earning over $200K is supposed to fund his health care plan, I think he should wait on that until he has a health care plan ready to submit to Congress.
I can’t remember whether Bush’s revisions on who gets overtime and who doesn’t are simply an executive order, or whether they’ve been ratified by Congress. If the former, then Kerry’s first act should be an executive order reinstating overtime to those stripped of it by Bush’s actions. (But without taking it away from anyone who got overtime due to those actions. I can’t see a reason it shouldn’t be both/and, rather than either/or.)
Or Kerry’s first act could be to submit a bill to Congress raising the minimum wage to $7/hr over the next three years.
I think Kerry will have to advance his own programs, but one thing he definitely should do is clean the Pubbie operatives out of the Justice Department and get them to work investigating the electoral shenanigans in 2000. This will keep the Pubbies on the defensive and give them something to focus on while he advances the rest of his agenda.
Also, a really SPIRITED investigation of Tom DeLay’s activities, instead of the half-assed stuff that the Pubbie Congress has been doing, should be productive. It’ll also keep the media and the Pubbies focussed while hopefully a constructive legislative agenda can slide by without too much scrutiny.
Let’s go way, way beyond that: truth is, we’ll need one of those Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, like they had in South Africa after apartheid and in Chile after Pinochet, to sort through all the bad shit that the GOP has done, but has been able to cover up over the past four years, due to its control of the entire government. But that’s not a good public first step; that should be done quietly and behind the scenes, until they’re ready to go public with the evidence of a fairly wide range of Bush/GOP misdeeds.
He can’t change the tax code-- only Congress can do that. Do you mean he’ll push Congress to revoke the tax cuts? I think he’ll lose if he does.
I think Kerry’s first official act should be to ask Congress to suspend draft registration for one year. (We’ve done it before).
There are possibly hundreds of thousands of 17-18 year old boys and their parents who are scared to death(unneccsarily) that the draft might soon be reinstated. There is close to zero chance of this and there’s no need to scare people of an imaginary risk.
Heh… I’m sure he would. I have no doubt he’s already looked into it, in the event that he wins. I have no doubt that there are plenty of congressional Republicans who have drawn up impeachment papers already, just in case their boy loses the election next month and no longer gets to be president afterward.
Kerry’s first act as president? An international summit on Iraq, with an eye to build a real coalition and to try to work out the problems there. I mean, I’m very happy that Uzbekistan and the Solomon Islands want to help out, but we need a president to try to coax participation in this mess from other counties with real militaries and strong economies. I don’t expect he’ll strongarm anyone; the United States really doesn’t have the political capital for that anymore, and Kerry’s more of a diplomat, anyway. The rest of the world might not listen, but I imagine he’ll be able to make some progress in smoothing over the damage caused by the Bush administration, which has been America’s absolute worst for international relations in our history. This mess will take a long time to clean up, and will be a scar on the United States for a long time. We need to get started, and who better to do it than a man who’s intimately familiar with the consequences of hurtling this country headlong into an ill-advised, unwinnable war?
While I would love for his first act to be “unleash AG Eliot Spitzer” (or start a truth commission) to deal with various chicaneries of the past four years I tend to think that it has to be done in such a way that it does not look like victor’s justice. Regardless of the truth of the allegations versus hypothetical future charges it must not be allowed to increase partisan divisions. Somehow enough grown-up republicans have to be brought on board to make a truly bipartisan effort. We can’t just have someone who can be considered the “Democratic Ken Starr”, regardless of what we consider the facts to be. Of course, if investigations that started under Bush’s AG come to fruition under Kerry so be it.
Actually the Solomon Islanders were none too keen about their inclusion in the Coalition of the “Willing” either.
Coalition of the Willing? Not us, say Solomon islanders
Do you think so? At some point something will have to be done about the deficit and its unlikely that they will find enough spending to cut, so at some point they’ll have to raise taxes. I’m sure that at least some of the house GOP realizes this, and they would probably rather have it done under a democrat then a repub. They could make a big show about how they don’t really want to do it but that Kerry’s strong arming them, and thus still make themselves look like the party of low taxes.
Or perhaps I’m overly optimistic
Speaking as a former journalist, I think his third or fourth act should be the Declassification Initiative: He should have somebody compile a database of all, and I mean all, federal government info, records and documents that are still classified as “classified,” or that have, for whatever reason, never been opened for public inspection. They should be sorted by date. Then, assign a team, a Declassification Commission (including reps from the State Department, Justice Department, CIA, FBI, DIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff – but all of them have to be officials Kerry himself has appointed to those agencies, no Bush holdovers allowed) to go through them one item at a time and decide whether there is any good reason to still keep the document classified; in all close calls they are instructed to decide in favor of declassification. Then copies of the declassified record are made and distributed to all major media outlets. The job should be simple when they’re dealing with stuff left over from WWII that nobody ever got around to declassifying – but when they get a little further, say, to records regarding Vietnam or JFK’s assassination, things should start to get really, really, interesting – but by that time, you see, release of the older records has piqued the media’s and public’s interest such a bit and the Declassification Commission is being closely watched, with pundits loudly speculating on what they’re going to release and what they’re going to sit on and why.
It could be like an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission, without the live testimony. Of course, it could set events in motion that could result in live testimony being taken in a wide range of proceedings . . .
His first act should be to fire the neo-cons in the Pentagon–Feith, Perle, etc.–and sit down with the military and state department professionals to begin to restore sanity to our foreign policy. On this, everything depends.
While I’m all for declassification, and think Kerry should order his people to be much more forthcoming when it comes to FOIA requsts, I think the repubs would justifiably attack your suggestion on the grounds that our CIA, FBI, etc. folk have a lot more important things to be doing right now then going over records that were dated when Eisenhower was president.