Hosted and moderated by the Political Science club, representatives from three of Oswego State’s student political clubs debated a wide variety of issues during Quest on Wednesday, April 3.

Connor Breese, president of College Democrats at Oswego State, Jason Harris, vice president of Oswego State Young Americans for Freedom, and Tyler Toomey, president of College Republicans, discussed the nature of debates, the criminal justice system, healthcare, immigration, funding Planned Parenthood and climate change.

Political Science club president Emily Tepfenhart and vice president Ericka Solomon moderated the discussion, titled, “Yes, We Can All Get Along: Debating Political Positions,” posing questions to the panel of students.

Starting out in general agreement, all three said debates now are mostly controlled by the person who can make the other angrier to make them look bad rather than being revolved around facts and a better argument. 

“I think we need to get to people that win debates with better arguments and better policy and better ideas, and less of who can throw that knockout punch and give them those media headlines after the next week,” Toomey said.

They also agreed that people often view others in association with their political beliefs. Breese said, in some cases, it can be hard for people to be separated from their political stances. For many across the political spectrum, there is room for respectful argument. He said he personally tries to separate a person’s political views from their moral character.

Harris referenced the discourse on campus a few weeks ago when he and other members of YAF set up a table advocating to build a wall at the southern border of the U.S. 

“There was someone who I was friends with that said, ‘I don’t want to associate with you anymore.’ And I went back a couple weeks later, [and] I texted her. I said, ‘Hey, it’s just a political view. I don’t necessarily think more or less of you,’” Harris said. “I think you can always separate it, go back and just see them as people.”

Toomey, who is also president of YAF and sat at the Build the Wall table, said that kind of tabling and the social media attached to it effectively gets the message to the community. He said the first step is to get the information on an issue out there and get mass attention, and then people can engage in debate about it.

“The tabling is what creates the attention and gets those conversations to happen,” Toomey said. 

Upon Solomon’s question on the criminal justice system and what improvements can be made, Breese discussed police departments reacting to crimes during or after the fact rather than a more preventative approach to be in the right place at the right time.

“Relying a lot more on data and relying a lot more on statistics can allow police departments to make more informed decisions about where they’re placing their police officers, areas that are being over policed or under policed, and through that, they might be able to build a better relationship with their communities,” Breese said.

Toomey questioned this approach by saying the communities with higher police presence could backlash and claim the area is being profiled. Breese clarified it should not be the quantity of crimes in the area, but the level of the crime in terms of violence. 

Both agreed there needs to be reform in regard to the prison system. Breese expressed people facing prison can often have issues with paying bail, access to transportation and losing their jobs. He asked Toomey about his thoughts on education in prison.

“We are paying a lot of money to be in school here, but if you go commit a crime and go to jail, you can in less than four years probably, get your degree,” Toomey said. “It’s obviously a lot tougher to get jobs, things like that, after prison, but you get that education for free, and there are some people who are using that. We need to correct that as well.”

The next question posed asked the panels if they consider healthcare to be a privilege or a right. Toomey said it is a privilege and that universal single-payer healthcare is not a realistic approach for the U.S. because people need options. He also said he would not want to be forced to pay taxes that would fund others’ healthcare when, “in some cases, these healthcare issues are people who are putting themselves in these situations.” As for unpreventable diseases, he said, charities exist to help.

“Healthcare is a service, and you don’t really have a right to a service, as much as that is unfortunate,” Harris said. “We lead the world in innovation in medical procedures. The reason the cost of healthcare is rising is because our innovation is just increasing exponentially.”

Breese said he considers healthcare to be a right because it is not fair what happens to a person based on a condition, such as losing a job. He said he supports a single-payer system and thinks parts of the Medicaid tax should be set aside for programs to help people prevent conditions based off poor lifestyle choices or poor access to better health options. Breese said making people healthier early on would use those taxes more efficiently.

Shifting to the topic of immigration, Harris said a common misconception he has noticed is the perceived crisis at the southern border of the U.S.

“It is a huge waste of our time and money to be taking care of those illegal aliens because they aren’t Americans, and they take away from Americans who did immigrate here legally,” Harris said. “So I think it’s a misconception that there are swarms of people coming across the border when there’s a lot of immigrants who are here on overstayed visas who are now technically illegal immigrants.”

Toomey said he believes there is a crisis regarding immigration and thinks securing the southern border with a fence or a wall is the first step. He also said the country needs to find a way to handle those who have expired visas before immigration reform as a whole.

Breese said he believes one of the biggest misconceptions is in regards to taxes. He said, in reality, 4.4 million undocumented immigrants paid $23.6 billion in payroll taxes due to the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number form for the IRS. This allows people without social security numbers to file taxes in order to begin a paper trail to help in the process of achieving citizenship.

In regards to building a wall at the southern border, Harris said undocumented immigrants cost Americans $116 billion in taxes, so the $54 billion wall would end up paying for itself. Harris said this would also stop about 1.5 million pounds of drugs from being smuggled across the border every year. Breese clarified with Harris that most of the drugs brought in are done so at ports of entry.

Breese said the U.S. has tried to secure the border under the Bush administration but is still fighting expensive legal battles with private landowners. With this, he said there would be many more costs other than the construction of the wall itself. 

When prompted to discuss Planned Parenthood, Breese started off by saying he believes women have the right to choose to have an abortion or not. He said it provides women’s health services to women beyond abortion, such as cervical cancer screenings.

“Planned Parenthood has a whole bunch of benefits of it that go beyond issues of abortion to actually make it an asset to our society more than a detriment,” Breese said.

Toomey said Planned Parenthood is partially funded by donations and taxes, and he believes it should be a private organization that is paid for solely by donations and the people who use the services. He said people should not be paying for others’ treatments. 

“What we don’t hear about is that, every day, Planned Parenthood kills around 700 babies in the country,” Toomey said. 

Breese rebutted by saying it has to be the decision of the woman to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term. 

“So can a woman in here choose to kill any of us?… My mother is still ‘stuck with me,’ so to speak. Can she murder me today?” Toomey said. 

Harris asked at what point does it become unacceptable to abort a fetus. Breese replied that every state has different standards and views on the timeline of terminating a pregnancy. He said Ohio recently cut it off at the point when a heartbeat is detected. Breese said he believes a woman needs to be given enough time to make that decision.

Switching to the topic of climate change and how to respond to it, Harris said, while people cannot stop burning gas and oil, it is important to advance solar and wind energy for a cleaner alternative. Breese said there would also be a need to provide options for those who would lose their jobs connected to gas and oil.

“What’s the point in fighting climate change if you’re not also fighting for people that are going to be hurt the most by the changes?” Breese said. 

Toomey said a lot of the U.S. involvement in the Middle East stems from the oil resources there, so if cleaner energy is used on U.S. soil, it would take away from that military involvement. 

This discussion was the first time the three organizations met with the purpose to engage in civil discourse. They are the three Student Association officially recognized political clubs on campus, with the exception of the newly formed Socialist club, which is just beginning its process to becoming recognized and funded by SA.

Photo by Kassadee Paulo | The Oswegonian