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congress

Tracy Mitrano J.D. ’95 Announces Rematch Against Rep. Tom Reed

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After a disappointing loss in the midterm election last year to four-time incumbent Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) for New York’s 23rd Congressional District seat, Tracy Mitrano J.D. ’95 is back and ready to launch a second attempt to win the district. “I’m running again because I love this region. I love the beauty of the land and of the passion, power, and resiliency of the people,” Mitrano said in a statement to The Sun. Mitrano, a graduate of Cornell Law School, has been buoyed by widespread Democratic Party support. She has already achieved the endorsements of several county committees, as reported by the Ithaca Journal, making a primary challenger less likely.

Community members held up signs in support of divestment at the Student Assembly meeting on March 28th, 2019.
BDS

A Divided House Debates BDS at Student Assembly Meeting

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The Student Assembly convened Thursday for a public forum on a resolution for the boycott, divest and sanction movement on campus. Community members voiced often emotional opinions on the pro-divestment Resolution 36 and delivered pointed appeals toward S.A. members in a packed room. Several supporters of the resolution wielded large signs with slogans such as “Cornell has blood on its hands” and “Our tuition is funding oppression.”

The resolution, which calls upon Cornell to “divest from companies participating in the human rights violations in the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” was introduced by co-sponsors Max Greenberg ’22 and Mahfuza Shovik ’19 — S.A. representative for the College of Engineering —  as well as leaders from Students for Justice in Palestine Adam Khatib ’20 and Omar Din ’19, who is also S.A. representative for the College of Human Ecology. BDS has commanded the spotlight in the Student Assembly this semester, emerging as a major focus of S.A. presidential debates and assembly meetings, The Sun previously reported. At last week’s S.A. meeting, controversy erupted over allegations that supporters of the resolution had tried to force an early private vote, culminating in what observers called “Islamaphobic” comments.

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Polling location at Alice Cook House on November 6th, 2018. (Boris Tsang / Sun Assistant Photography Editor)

CHANG | Platform Complacency Will Prove Fatal For Democrats In 2020

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The 2018 Midterm was serious business. Cornell has been a roaring fire of political intensity for the last two weeks. Opinion columnists (I’m sure you can guess the specific ones) have been yelling all night. More of my friends voted than I thought possible, although some Cornellians — either disillusioned with the political process (fine, but a weak excuse) or simply disinterested (c’mon) — never filled out a ballot. Although we probably won’t get a true break from electioneering until after the 2020 race, I’ll be content with clearing my inbox of daily asks for campaign donations and “shockingly new analysis” from pollsters and Nate Silver himself.

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Voting at St Luke Lutheran Church on Nov 6th, 2018 (Michael Wenye Li / Sun Photography Editor)

VALDETARO | A Democracy, If We Can Keep It

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At the point of writing, the next holders of many of the 470 federal offices on the ballot this year have been decided. Beginning with Kentucky at 6 p.m., polls have closed across the country, with Democrats taking the House and Republicans consolidating their control of the Senate. Perhaps even more important than these federal elections, though, are state elections, which will have more numerous and longer-lasting implications. In the midst of our current political divisions, state governments not only provide a place for opponents of federal policies to try out their own policies, but state attorneys general have increasingly used their offices to launch legal challenges against the actions and policies of presidential administrations. It is not just in their role as laboratories of democracy, though, that the results of state elections will play an important role in future elections.

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Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, campaigns with Vice president Joe Biden during a rally at the Riverfront Sports Complex in Scranton, Pa.

VALDETARO | Job Opening: 2020 Democratic Nominee

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Tonight, when election results start rolling in, professional pundits and party power-players will descend upon their studio desks and bleak backrooms to opine on and debate the implications of this election for the one that will take place just under two years from now. Attempts to divine the electorate’s views on President Trump will be especially earnest within the Democratic Party, still recovering from a 2016 election in which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million votes but lost the electoral college by fewer than 80,000 aggregate votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. From the moment polls close, the varying successes and failures of unabashed liberals running in traditionally-red states (such as Beto O’Rourke, Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum) and the staying power of their moderate counterparts in increasingly-red states (namely Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.)) will be compared and contrasted in an attempt to divine which type of candidate would have the best chance to defeat President Trump. In the face of these inevitable electability prognostications, though, I want to offer my fellow Democrats my view on what what characteristics the party’s nominee in 2020 should have. In an election in which it feels like the fate of the country, not to mention the fate of the millions whose lives have already been negatively affected by a Trump presidency, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in 2020 should have the courage to be bold and the willingness to acknowledge nuance.

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Tracy Mitrano rally at Southside Community Center on October 29th, 2018. (Boris Tsang / Sun Assistant Photography Editor)

EDITORIAL: Tracy Mitrano J.D. ’95 for Congress

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This week’s midterm elections will be among the most consequential in recent memory. At stake is nothing less than the direction of our democracy and our nation. The past two years have not been easy for many Americans — the Trump administration has embarked on a substantial rollback of rights and protections for women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, religious minorities and more. Congress tried repeatedly (though unsuccessfully) to repeal the lifesaving Affordable Care Act, and succeeded in passing in passing a massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of working people. And a growing but still fragile economy finds itself at the mercy of a capricious administration’s trade policy.