5 critical agenda items for a potential lame duck POTUS
There’s no downside to acting now on pardons, declassification, bringing the troops home, Middle East peace, and fixing COVID testing.
For the sake of every American, the president needs to implement an aggressive agenda and operate under the notion that he’s a lame duck president. Sure, he should continue to leave no stone unturned in investigating the legitimacy of the election results, but there are no guarantees in life, and time is of the essence if he wants to secure major wins for the American people and for his legacy as president.
What the president can guarantee is that he will be president until at least Inauguration Day, and that’s why it’s so important to make these five major moves prior to January 20, 2021:
Pardons
There are several individuals who should be on the short list for securing a pardon or commutation.
That includes the several individuals on the president’s campaign, transition team, and administration that were unfairly prosecuted by rogue elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
More high-profile individual candidates for pardons include Ross Ulbricht, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden.
Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous Silk Road, was the victim of extreme over-prosecution. He has already served more than enough time for his admitted crimes, and he deserves to have his sentence commuted.
The U.S. government has never brought forth evidence linking Assange to the Russian government. We have to assume at this point that the evidence will never surface, because it doesn’t exist. Pardon Assange and extradite him to the United States.
Snowden has a mixed record, and I share concerns about his alleged involvement with China and Russia. On the other hand, he exposed a massive, illegal surveillance state in the United States. At the very least, he deserves the right to have his day in court in the United States. Snowden served his time in exile, and a pardon or commutation would signal a fair end to this saga.
Declassify
Since the Department of Justice under both Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions has demonstrably failed to bring justice to the “spygate” collaborators, the president can use his unilateral declassification authority to bring forward the evidence of their corruption and misconduct. Before a potential President Biden has the opportunity to sweep away the plot to delegitimize the Trump presidency, the president should aggressively use his declassification authority to show the world how the unaccountable class attempted to undermine his duly elected mandate.
Bring the troops home
There is no greater overseas boondoggle than the permanent war in Afghanistan, which has transformed into an annual $50 billion-plus spending spree that has enriched the so-called military industrial complex at the expense of American troops and the American taxpayer. The Biden Administration has already signaled — to the great approval of the uniparty ruling class in Washington, D.C. — that they intend on continuing the Afghanistan conflict in perpetuity. President Trump must ensure that all American soldiers are returned home from Afghanistan, and that all U.S.-backed projects in the country end immediately. The only way to guarantee the end of the 19 year conflict is to cancel all of the Afghanistan-related contracts with the U.S. government, cutting off the supply for the Pentagon and defense contracting industry, and bringing *all* of the troops home.
Change COVID testing standards
In order to assist America out of the “casedemic,” the White House needs to streamline the nationwide COVID-19 testing system to ensure that false positives are much less common. They can do so by throttling back the broken PCR cycle threshold standards and establish a more accurate testing system. Reforming our broken COVID-19 testing system is a critical necessity to get the nation back to pre-COVID normalcy.
Middle East peace
The president and his team have helped to broker unprecedented peace agreements in the Middle East and Africa, but there is still work to be done. There is no bigger peace deal than one involving Israel and Saudi Arabia. By encouraging the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to broker official ties with Israel, the president has set the stage for a signature end to the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict through a Saudi-Israel normalization deal. The president has already signaled he is working on this critical undertaking.
The agreements not only help to turn down the temperature in a troubled region, they also assist the United States in untangling its alliances and bolstering unity against common adversaries such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Uniting Arab allies and Israel under a common umbrella helps to preemptively trip up a Biden Administration’s attempt to realign U.S. regional interests back in favor of Iran and other American adversaries.
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