The vision and policy of Kings County Politics since its birth has been and continues to be bipartisan. That is we support people and ideas, and not party politics.
As KCP wrote in several editorials in its coverage of the recent presidential elections, we felt both major party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were extremely flawed.
Russian hacking and other shenanigans aside from both political parties, we believe President Donald Trump won the election fair and square as per the United States rules of election. For that reason, although we found much of his campaign rhetoric reprehensible, we believed he deserved, as every president is afforded, a grace period or honeymoon.
Since becoming president a mere 10 days ago, President Trump has rescinded the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement, and greenlighted the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipeline. Both of these executive orders are debatable, but whichever side one falls on these issues – we believe they are within the purview of the office of president.
Trump then went ahead with furthering his plans to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and signed an executive order to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.
In light of Trump’s reprehensible and well-documented Anti-Mexican rhetoric here and here during the campaign, his dealings with our southern neighbor and obsession with building a wall strongly raised KCP’s eyebrows. But once again, we bit our tongue out of respect for the office of the President of the United States.
That brings us to his latest executive order signed on Friday. The order bars entry to refugees from anywhere in the world for 120 days and from Syria indefinitely. It blocks any visitors for 90 days from seven designated countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The Department of Homeland Security initially said the order would bar permanent alien residents, also known as green card holders, from those seven countries from returning to the United States. It has since recanted that part of the order.
This order, we strongly believe was not only ill thought out, but went against the very grain of American principles of what we are as a nation of immigrants and refugees. It also showed extremely poor governance in not letting federal customs and immigration agents know what was going on resulting in chaos at a number of both American and international airports. It also caused the detention of hundreds of people – almost all of whom had the proper paperwork to get to where they were going.
This rightfully sparked mass protests around the country and drew condemnation from respected federal lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. It should be noted that missing of the Muslim countries that Trump banned any visitors from coming to this country were several in which his company does business, but who have exported terrorists. This, we believe, is a fairly clear indication of a breach of public trust.
Over the weekend, Trump also promoted his chief political strategist, Stephen Bannon to his National Security Council team. Bannon is at best a highly skilled media strategist, but at worst a right-wing demagogue whose own agenda is highly questionable regarding American interests.
The U.S. Constitution lists amongst it grounds for impeaching a president, high crimes and misdemeanors. After doing a brief Google search on what this means, KCP believes President Donald Trump should be impeached on these charges sooner rather than later.
Further we believe that his Vice President Michael Pence should replace Trump until the next presidential election in 2020. While we disagree with Pence on a number of issues, we believe him to be an honorable citizen of the United States and fully capable of governing this nation until the next election.
Sadly, this can not be said for Donald Trump. Therefore, KCP believes the time to act is now, and Congress should begin proceedings to remove him from office before more damage is done to tear apart our great nation.
