The Red Folder

Archived from March 11, 2024

Key stories for the week, brought to you by the distinguished newsman Sasha Morel.

Reading for the sake of reading sucks. Telling yourself to read to win a round is nice but ineffective. This condensed news brief helps you understand current domestic and international issues, analyze the news, and gives you opportunities to read more.

Domestic Stories

3 key domestic stories for the week:

1) The State of Dis-Union Nick Ostheimer

Last weekend, the American people were an enraptured audience for a play in two parts. President Joe Biden delivered a historical, energizing State of the Union that moonlighted as a campaign speech for his impending struggle against Donald Trump. Katie Britt, the junior Senator from Alabama, delivered the Republican response to his speech a day later. Some might say it was disastrous. But we'll get to that in a moment.

President Biden delivered one of the most political State of the Union speeches in American history. It served as a veritable campaign speech to kick off his fight for reelection in 2024. Though the State of the Union is traditionally a report to congress and the nation on the literal state of the United States of America, Biden's speech framed today's political environment as a struggle between democracy and Trump. Biden also tackled one of the biggest issues that voters have with him – his age. He ended his speech with a barrage of jokes about his seniority.

He also emphasized the struggle between productive bipartisan policy making and bad-faith Republican obstructionism in the House of Representatives. Biden repeatedly called out Trump – referring to him 13 times as his predecessor – for torpedoing an omnibus bill including $20.2 billion for investment in. U.S. border security.

In the 24 hours after his speech, Biden raised over $10 million in campaign funding. Despite his flagging approval rates and tendency to gaffe, he successfully framed the current political situation in clear terms and assuaged concerns about his mental aptitude. Biden is widely considered to have pulled off a pretty impressive State of the Union, with 6 in 10 Americans responding positively. Republicans had a high bar to clear with their response. They chose Katie Britt, the junior Senator from Alabama, to deliver the response just a day later.

Watch it here. She delivered the speech from a domestic setting – speaking directly to the viewer, elbow leaning on a kitchen countertop. This setting is seemingly intended to frame Britt as relatable and trustworthy, contrasting with the pomp and circumstance of Biden's speech, delivered from the House podium to a joint session of congress. However, the popular reception of the speech centered not on her setting or even her words, but her odd delivery. Britt's tone shifted every few seconds between slow, theatrical shock and offbeat lighthearted humor. Her uncanny performance garnered criticism even from Republicans across the board, from her colleagues to far-right ideologues like Charlie Kirk.

As for the content of her speech, Sen. Britt used numerous stories of abuse to condemn Biden's border policy. She invoked the murder of Laken Riley on February 22nd to claim that the immigrants America allows into the country are murderers and criminals. She also told a story of a woman raped and trafficked by Mexican cartels. Though her speech suggested that this happened in the United States and during Biden's presidency, neither was the case. Now, she faces criticism for having failed to explain that this not only took place in Mexico, but also during George Bush's presidency.

Read more here:

After the State of the Dis-Union, President Biden revealed his budget request for fiscal year 2025 – and it’s more budget than ever (even though it's $7.3 trillion). In a divided Congress, it’s unlikely to actually be made into law, but it serves as a campaign season reminder of his policy priorities. In an effort to combat the $34.5 trillion debt, for example, Biden called for tax hikes on large corporations and billionaires to pay a minimum 25% tax rate. He hopes that will slow down the growth of the federal deficit (and thus, the debt) by $3 trillion over the next 10 years, one of his key policy priorities.

This new proposal would also cut taxes for low income constituents, and lower the cost of child care, prescriptions, housing, and more. It includes tax credits for first time homeowners, restoring the Child Tax Credit with an addition of $2600 for low/middle income families, and increasing the pace of Medicare negotiations for lowered drug prices. It allocates $32 billion to support state law enforcement, and $17.7 billion for federal law enforcement, especially to reinforce the southern border and control immigration as he faces increased criticism over his handling of the issue. It calls for “375 new immigration judge teams'' to reduce the case backlog there too. In a ‘pivot to Asia’, it brings $4 billion to the Dept. of State to invest in the Indo-Pacific, but also puts $7.6 billion to invest in the Middle East, especially to support Palestinians in Gaza. Hypocritical, because he’s still submitting requests for more Israeli aid.

On defense and national security, he increased the budget by only 1%. With increasing escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan, this will likely strain efforts to rebuild weapons stocks and slow down spending on military programs. To be fair, that wasn’t entirely his decision – he was capped at a 1% increase following mid-2023 budget deals.

Unfortunately, the timing of this budget proposal comes as Congress still hasn’t even completely approved the 2024 budget, with the continuation of short term spending bills in order to keep the government running. 2025 is likely to be no different, as political polarization continues to worsen and Republicans propose a very different version – cutting $14 trillion from green subsidies and student loan forgiveness.

Budgets don’t usually become law on their first draft. But as polarization underscores the 2024 election season, and conflicts such as those in Gaza, Ukraine, and more divide Congress further, no matter how nice this budget sounds to liberals, it’ll only remain in our imaginations.

Read more here:

3) American Politics to Party City Roshan Shivnani

In the last year suspense has been building for one of America’s most politically influential events – the presidential elections. Recently though the political scene has been starting to clear up. Many expected Joe Biden sweep the primaries due to a lack of competition and he did just that in early states like Vermont and Virginia. In a similar fashion the republican primaries have now boiled down to Trump being the last competitor with Nikki Haley, the only realistic challenger suspending her campaign and leaving Trump as the last republican in the race.

Despite the anticipated Trump-Biden rematch being confirmed many are wondering if the distaste for the two could brew a successful environment for an independent candidate. Independent candidates or candidates not affiliated with Democrats/Republicans are often referred to as 3rd party candidates, yet usually see little success. In fact since 1900 there were only 4 elections where independents even made a tangible impact. While it’s clear that in all probability no independent candidate stands a real chance of victory, that doesn’t negate their potential impact on elections. This is especially true given the nature of American elections that are often incredibly tight with single digit deficits being the deciding factor in our nation's leader for the next 4 years.

However, that just extends third party candidates' impact. While with just two candidates on the ballot every vote must either go to Biden/Trump, yet with a third-party candidate it’s inevitable the third-party candidate will get some votes too. That’s where the million dollar question becomes incredibly simple – who loses more voters to third party candidates, Trump or Biden?

Thankfully we aren’t the first ones to ask such a question. Through national polling, the Economist found that with just Trump and Biden, Biden is only losing by 1.9% in 45.6% and 43.7% polling rates from Trump and Biden respectively. Yet with the introduction of third party candidates that gap widens to a 43.1%-38.5% Trump-Biden rematch, implying a 4.6% deficit.

But what do these numbers actually mean? Primarily they show that Democrats and Biden supporters are more likely to opt for a 3rd party candidate whom they believe expresses their beliefs than Trump supporters, who are all in for Trump and less likely to leave. Ultimately in the upcoming election it is abundantly clear Americans may receive the rematch they wished wouldn’t happen again, but it may be those with no real shot of winning the election that impact it the most.