By Noah Brasseur
Welcome back everyone. We’ve got some interesting stories to tackle this time around.
First, Biden issued his first veto.
Last Monday, March 20, President Biden issued his first veto of his presidency. This might mark the start of a more confrontational relationship between the White House and Congress, as the House of Representatives is now Republican-controlled.
The measure in particular that was denied had been put forward by said party. It was an effort to rollback a policy the Biden administration had recently put into effect which allowed retirement plan managers to factor environmental and social issues into financial decisions.
In an official statement, Biden said he axed the bill because it would put retirement savings at risk.
Opponents, however, see the matter differently. They say that allowing these considerations means that people will not get the most they possibly could have from their savings.
“This is trying to parallel financial return with an ideological push,” Republican Senator Mike Braun said.
Given that an override of a presidential veto requires a two-thirds majority of both chambers of Congress, the move expectedly failed when put to vote a few days later.
Next, Trump Arrest Tuesday goes off without a hitch- because it didn’t happen.
Despite claims from former President Trump that he would be arrested on March 21, nothing has happened.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, the social media company he owns, that the “corrupt & highly political” District Attorney of Manhattan would have him arrested “with no crime being able to be proven.”
Despite calls from the previous president to protest, there was a fairly muted response from his political base. On Tuesday, reporters intending to cover the protest wound up outnumbering the Trump followers who showed up.
Since then, there hasn’t been much legal activity. The grand jury investigating whether or not Trump had committed a crime had been postponed for a few days without explanation.
The crime in question, at least in this particular case, regards alleged hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels regarding a potential affair she had with Trump.
Manhattan’s District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, is attempting to prove that Trump violated campaign finance laws with these payments.
This has legal problems, one of which is that campaign finance is a federal offense, and the Department of Justice declined to prosecute the same charges Bragg is now pursuing.
Should the grand jury agree with the District Attorney, however, Trump would become the first American president to face formal criminal charges.
Finally, some more local news. Grand Valley State University announces controversial graduation changes… or did they?
GVSU announced it was hosting “five unique graduation celebrations designed to honor our diverse graduates,” as well as the main ceremony, according to an official email from the university.
Beyond the main event, they would be hosting a separate “graduation celebration”, as the email termed it, for the Asian, Black, LGBT, Latino, and Native American communities.
The move was derided as being racist, with comparisons being made to segregation practices from the Jim Crow era.
GVSU is not the first college to do this, with New York’s Columbia University implementing a similar practice in 2021. That move also garnered much of the same criticisms being directed toward the Michigan-based college this week.
However, GVSU says the email is missing context. According to spokesperson Chris Knape, the university holds one unified commencement ceremony for all who are eligible to graduate. The events mentioned in the email are more “intimate celebrations” meant to be a complement to the unified ceremony, not a replacement.
Additionally, Knape says the university had been hosting these events for over a decade, with the oldest having started in 2007.
