• Was it illegal for Bernie Sanders to campaign on free medical and college?

    No because that would have been done through normal policy change and actually a thing an elected official should try and do. What Trump is doing (even if it is a lie) is bribery. It’s not even remotely the same, and it speaks volumes of your character that you would even try and equate them.

    • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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      1 day ago

      Trump’s and Bernie’s plans would both require congress because the president literally has no access to funds without it.

      I worry about people spreading these lies because it is in fact a great policy stance.

      • PapaStevesy@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        If it’s a great policy stance, they should do it now when they know they have control of both legislatures. Why wait?

      • Lasherz@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        Your suposition is that the power of the purse still applies here. Trump has operated the executive as a collective slush fund, many times using horrible arguments that fail in court and then proceeding anyways. Also he’s allocated money from military coup projects like Venezuala to funds not under congressional control illegally.

        Bernies plan is to first expand Medicare to all ages. Going off Trump’s logic this would be done by directing CMS by executive order to adjust the rates, the treasury department to allocate the necessary trust fund expenditures, the IRS to apply the necessary taxes, and the justice department to aggressively target every single possible violation in the private health insurance industry. Bernie’s actual plan is to use the bully pulpit as intended to pressure congress to act in accordance with those changes ahead of time, completely different. That’s because Trump moves to erode government into the pockets of the rich and Bernie seeks to build it stronger to benefit everyone. Executive overreach expansion has only been applied to benefit the rich effectively where everywhere else it had failed.

        • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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          11 hours ago

          The DHS and especially ICE also lost funding and shut down a lot of offices for over a month until the GOP passed a reconciliation bill.

          Even if overreach is occuring he is not going to pull 1.5 Trillion Dollars out of his ass.