Distraction in The Age of Trump

In his Blog Stage 5 post, my colleague Will analyzes the effect of Hillary Clinton's emails on the current state of our government. He believes that the State Department may be purposely dragging its feet in regards to the release of the documents turned over to them, and therefore is undermining President Trump's power. He cites his sources and creates an effective argument. While I agree that we as a country need to settle and move on from this "scandal", I think that President Trump and others place too much emphasis on this issue. 
Like my colleague points out, Trump has been pushing for the public release and government probing of these documents since the beginning of his campaign. At first, it was a smart move on Trump's part to use Clinton's emails to diminish her credibility. Clinton has been under investigation surrounding this issue for years, and first turned over 30,000 emails to the FBI in early 2015. Since then, there have been lawsuits, more investigations by multiple agencies, and misleading accusations between the political parties. At the beginning of his presidency, Trump continued to push for the indictment of his opponent, and a Federal Judge ordered the State Department to process 500 of her emails a month, which they complied with (CNN). At no point has the State Department, or any government agency for that matter, ignored the rulings and prevented public information from getting out to the people.
On Thursday, November 9th, The Washington Post reported that a Federal Judge had thrown out a lawsuit from two conservative watchdog groups demanding that the government "shake the tree harder...for more emails". The judge contested the claim, saying that the FBI has done everything they could. At this point, and probably earlier, the issue is dead, but President Trump seems to be using it as a way to distract the public from his antics. He continues to beat the controversy because he doesn't want people to really take note of his inability to effectively lead our nation. As I said earlier, I agree with my colleague in that American citizens need to move on, but I don't think we will be able to until our President lets us.

Our No Good, Very Bad Voter Turnout

      Our electoral system is fueled by the participation of the electorate. Unfortunately, we still have many barriers in place that discourage and effectively prevent many eligible voters from participating in our electoral system. Our laws seem to be trending in the opposite direction, with voter ID laws passed in many states that suppress the vote rather than encourage voter participation. These voter ID laws are based on spurious claims of voter fraud that have little or no evidence to justify their implementation. The total turnout for the 2014 elections was only 36.6 percent of the voting age population, according to The United States Elections Project at the University of Florida. This number was only slightly exceeded in the 2016 presidential election, reaffirming the need for change to the system. We need laws that encourage electoral participation, not prevent American citizens from exercising their electoral rights.

      A good first step in this direction would be making Election Day a National Holiday. While state laws vary in allowing time off to vote, making Election Day a holiday would bring some uniformity to these individual statewide laws. This would also increase voter turnout by giving people the time to wait in long poll lines, an all too common occurrence these days, without fear of missing work when they step out to vote on a lunch break. Providing a holiday would also increase participation of lower income workers who would not need to choose between their job and their country.

      Voting is not only a right of every citizen of the United States, it is also a responsibility. We should not be satisfied with a democracy in which more than 60 percent of our people don’t vote. We must do better than that. While making election day a National Holiday wouldn’t be a cure-all, it would indicate a national commitment to creating a more vibrant democracy.