Protect your freedom in general election
As the primaries pass and general-election season approaches, it’s time to decide how our representatives are serving us. We usually consider Democrats and Republicans in terms of big government and small government, but that’s the wrong question. The better question is, “Do they protect our rights or limit them?”
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Sometimes regulations restrict freedom, but there are plenty of times a bigger government means greater freedom.
Many regulations protect people: labor laws; voting rights; food and medicine safety, or freedom from monopolies. However, there are times I believe our laws limit freedoms: Criminalizing addiction or homelessness; over-regulating protests; limiting free speech; impediments to voting access, or imposing a single religious perspective.
Democrats have run on supporting women’s rights but have failed to codify abortion access — so underregulation lost us freedoms. They also ran on supporting social safety nets, but as I see it, in practice they have fallen short of protecting affordable healthcare, Medicaid, Medicare and SNAP from Republican cuts.
Republicans ran on small government but militarized ICE domestically, empowering state actors to hold people without due process. When they did cut regulations, Republicans removed individual protections with cuts to the Veterans and Social Security administrations, the Centers for Disease Control and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Without such protections, I believe we are functionally less free.
For the upcoming election in November, look beyond party labels and campaign slogans. Neither party has a monopoly on protecting freedom. Ask: Will these policies leave Floridians with greater access to voting, to financial security, to health and safety? Will we have more freedom?
— Jessica Pollack, Satellite Beach
U.S. is not the world’s policeman
The United States has had a stated policy that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I believe this is untenable and never should have been said.
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Keeping Iran from nuclear weapons will likely require the use of our own nuclear weapons or a very costly ground invasion to destroy all Iranian opposition. The problem is continued groupthink from both political parties… believing we are still the world’s policeman, which I see as a highly flawed ideology popular from around 1950. Some people study history, but I’m not sure we learn anything from it.
— Scott Wiley, Orlando
Trump’s midterm grades are failures
When we hear “midterms,” we think of U.S. congressional elections halfway through a president’s term. But for students in academia, it’s something entirely different: Midterms are a performance-based report card. Applying that same perspective to Donald Trump’s two-year tenure, in my opinion, it comes down to three core subjects: domestic policy, foreign policy, and constitutional law.
Reckless tariffs and lackluster job growth have triggered an affordability crisis in this country. Compounding this economic instability is blatant domestic corruption defined by self-enrichment.
All strategic objectives in Iran are failing, while half-hearted support for Ukraine has resulted in a devastating surge in civilian casualties. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since the early months of Russia’s invasion.
As for the Constitution, Trump treats foundational legal principles as an annoyance. His overreaching executive authority and voter suppression attempts amount to subversive governance.
In my view, he has earned a resounding grade of F on all three counts.
— Jane Larkin, Tampa
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