Alyssa Royce
Professor Michael Rodriguez
The Life of The Mind
30 September 2016
Blog Event #1: Constitution Day
Constitution Day, held on September 21st, featured keynote speaker Akhil Reed Amar, Professor of Law at Yale Law. The following is an abstract and reaction of Amar’s address:
Foremost, I want to acknowledge the fact that I consider myself to be both politically active and politically aware; I closely follow the ongoing election, I am a frequent and active viewer of Fox News, I work at a polling institute where I collect data regarding local politics in my region, and I have even lobbied and held congressional briefings on Capitol Hill. I acknowledge this fact not to help lengthen my paper, but to demonstrate my political activism and to segway into where I lie on the political spectrum. If you happen to have attended the keynote address, you will have undoubtedly recognized the leftist nature of this dialogue. Though I will not explicitly state my political affiliation, I am sure it will be made evident that my views lie on the opposite end of the spectrum and that my opinions directly contradict that of Amar’s.
To begin, I would like to discuss Amar’s comparison of Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln as this was the one claim that stood out to me the most. Simply put, President Obama is one of the worst presidents this nation has ever seen: a bold statement, perhaps, but not a false one. In terms of the United States economy, Obama has worsened our economic condition immensely. Following previous recessions in US history, the economy has consistently strengthened and compensated for its losses, including but not limited to following the Great Depression. After what is now known as the “the Great Recession,” America has not by any means regained our economic standing pre 2008. Rather, Obama has nearly doubled our national debt and has led to the perpetual increase of Americans living in poverty and depending on government programs for financial assistance. President Abraham Lincoln did not by any means destroy the US economy the way Obama has; Lincoln, in fact, strengthened it, for instance, through the passage of the Pacific Railway Act which supported a transcontinental railroad, a tremendous asset to the US economy.
I, of course, must also discuss the discrepancy between racial tensions in modern day and in the 1860s and how poorly Obama has handled our current condition, specifically in comparison to Lincoln. There is no denying that race is a heated topic today, specifically with the prominence and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. To avoid hurting feelings, I will try my best to put this lightly: Americans are not being killed due to limited gun control nor are they being killed because law enforcement is a racist and trigger happy institution. Although I will not digress and discuss why I disagree with the existence of systematic racism and why I am a firm supporter of the Blue Lives Matter movement, I will say that a major contributor to racial tensions in the United States is crime. More specifically, crime is a huge issue in this country and is a major contributor to death, especially among the African American community. By way of explanation, in 2013, out of the 660,000 crimes committed, African Americans were the perpetrators 85% of the time, despite accounting for roughly 13% of the population. I must pose the question: what has President Obama done to combat this? Obama adamantly opposes the War on Drugs despite the fact that drug use and distribution is a major contributor to crime and that even his home city, Chicago, is notoriously the murder capital of the nation. Obama has made little to no effort to support African Americans and to relieve them of crime and its consequences. Comparatively, it goes without saying that Lincoln made great efforts to support and even free African Americans. Lincoln is, of course, known as the Great Emancipator, after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Hopefully it goes without saying at this point, but Obama is by no means comparable to Abraham Lincoln.
Moreover, I find it appalling and, in a way, unethical that Stockton would pay someone to essentially endorse a presidential candidate in front of a room filled with naive and fickle college students. On several occasions, Amar commented on Donald Trump’s attitudes, opinions, and beliefs and inexplicably prompted the audience the vote for Hillary Clinton. Presumably at this point my partisanship has become evident and it is clear that I would disagree with his supporting Clinton.
There were many arguments which Akhil Reed Amar made during his address that I strongly disagree with, yet those mentioned above are just a few that greatly peaked my interest. Overall, I was thoroughly angered by this presentation and I undeniably felt misled by its title: Constitution Day. The content of this presentation had very little to do with the Constitution, but moreso illustrated Amar’s personal political affiliation and why we should vote democratic this November, which I can assure you will not be doing nonetheless.