College partisans face off in annual campus debate

The JHU College Republicans and Hopkins College Democrats held their annual debate Monday in Mudd Hall.

The event was moderated by the Charles St. News, a non-partisan student group that shares news stories on current events. For the first time, the debate included a cross-aisle round, in which debaters partnered with people from the opposite party. 

“I feel like Hopkins doesn’t have too much political activism, so I was excited to see something on campus about politics,” freshman Saloni Jain said.

The audience participated in the conversation by posting questions targeted at specific debaters on the Charles St. News’s Facebook page. Dan Adler, moderator and co-president of the Charles St. News, said that he got the idea from the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS), which used Twitter to engage the audience at a recent event. 

“I really like how we were able to use our page to have the audience ask cross-examination questions,” Adler said. “I always think it’s really cool to see social media used in creative ways, since it plays such a heavy role in our society.”

In the first round of the debate, members of the College Republicans and the College Democrats went head-to-head on the topic of the Affordable Care Act’s Contraception Mandate.

“I think that’s something that’s not always specifically debated,” Carrie Resnick, co-president of the College Democrats, said. “We didn’t want to just debate Obamacare; we wanted to be more specific, and this is something that college students would find interesting.”

The College Republicans argued that forcing employers to pay for something that they might view as a sin impedes religious freedom, while the College Democrats stressed the importance of ensuring that all women have access to reproductive healthcare.

“Contraceptives impede execution of a woman’s proper bodily function, [including] pregnancy,” Samantha Martinez, a College Republicans member, said. “They serve the same roles as plastic surgeries. They are merely enhancements to life circumstances, rather than restoring what a body is supposed to do.” 

This comment drew a strong reaction from both the live audience and posters on the Facebook page.

“Her comment on contraception improving women’s bodies [and] comparing it to plastic surgery made me want to vomit,” freshman Rebecca Van Voorhees said. 

In the second round, the parties debated raising the minimum wage. The College Democrats focused on the social outcome of increasing the minimum wage. 

“Raising the minimum wage is inherently fair — it would raise 900,000 people out of poverty ... According to studies, raising the minimum wage would have little to no effect on employment,” Akshai Bhatnagar, co-president of the Hopkins Democrats said.

The Republicans dismissed this argument as idealism.

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I can think of no better example than raising the federal minimum wage,” Clayton Hale of the College Republicans said.

They went on to say that, although raising the minimum wage would benefit some, it would steal wages from others.

“The real trade off in minimum wage is that if we raise the wage for some people, we are decreasing the livelihood of other people,” Luke Kanter of the College Republicans said.

The final round of the debate, the cross-aisle round, was on the National Security Agency (NSA).

“This was actually my favorite part of the debate,” Adler said. “The NSA’s right to violate Americans’ privacy has become such an extreme issue over the past year, and I like how the issue is not necessarily one-sided in each party.”

Adler also commented on partisan politics in America.

“American society, especially in the past six years, has become so divided through our two-party system,” Adler said. “Young people, especially college students, are becoming jaded with having such polarized parties. In the past six months, with issues such as the crisis in Syria, Ukraine and our reformation of the NSA, that’s been changing. I hope it continues to change [so] that, by the time our generation is in Congress, maybe there won’t be such a strong two-party system.”

Adler worked with fellow Charles St. News Co-President Agastya Mondal, as well as the presidents of the political groups, to ensure that the debate was fair to both parties. The topics were chosen by the presidents of the College Republicans and College Democrats.  

“It took probably at least a month to figure out things we thought would be interesting to the student body and that our clubs are interested in debating and that we didn’t agree too closely on,” Resnick said. “We all really worked together in making sure that even with the logistics, it wasn’t just one club taking care of that.”

While Adler said he was satisfied with Tuesday’s event, he shared his ideas for improving the debate in the future.

“I think we did a pretty good job setting up a debate structure and getting members of the College Democrats and Republicans to speak about issues they truly feel passionate about, [but] in the future, my main goal will be to try and get more students on campus involved in this event,” Adler said.

Adler commended the debate for its bipartisan dialogue.

“It’s truly one of the only annual events we hold on campus where students come together to debate these issues in front of a public audience. I really hope that we can get more students to be aware of these issues, and listen to some of the most popular opinions on them,” Adler said.

College Republicans President Christine McEvoy, Vice President Andrew Guernsey and PR Manager Alan Flores all declined to be quoted in this article.