In the first debate for the presidency of the United States, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden swapped verbal punches over American manufacturing jobs.
"They said it would take a miracle to bring back manufacturing,” Trump said last night. “I brought back 700,000 jobs. They brought back nothing. They gave up on manufacturing." However, Biden claimed "manufacturing went into a hole" before the coronavirus pandemic.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) says the manufacturing slowdown is actually a matter of finding qualified workers. Manufacturing companies would say, according to the congressman, “We would be building a new facility, we’d be doing more but we just can’t find enough workers.”
Of last night’s debate, Gallagher called it “more just an all-out verbal brawl.”
“I’m not sure it changed anybody’s minds,” the congressman told Cheddar. “It probably forced a lot of people to change the channel.”
Still Rep. Gallagher stressed the importance of presidential debates. He said they allow for important policy disagreements to be discussed openly, like policing in America. “I think there’s a meaningful disagreement between both candidates on the issue of law and order, how we can support our police,” Gallagher told Cheddar.
Gallagher serves his state’s 8th district, an area in northeast Wisconsin which includes Green Bay. It’s just north of Kenosha, which has recently been at the center of the conversation over systematic racism in America’s police force. In August, police shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, seven times in front of his children in broad daylight. The state saw widespread protests in the wake of his shooting.
Gallagher said he believes there are dangers to the “demonization” of police officers after incidents like Blake’s. “Our cops are not all evil racists that wake up every day trying to hurt people because of the color of their skin,” the congressman said. “They want to keep the community safe and we've got to keep those relationships healthy.”
Lawmakers probing the cause of last month’s deadly Maui wildfire did not get many answers during Thursday's congressional hearing on the role the electrical grid played in the disaster.
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that federal disaster assistance is available for Louisiana, which is working to slow a mass inflow of salt water creeping up the Mississippi River and threatening drinking water supplies in the southern part of the state.
A new law in California will raise the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 per hour next year, an acknowledgment from the state's Democratic leaders that most of the often overlooked workforce are the primary earners for their low-income households.
From Sunday, workers at the main United States base in Antarctica will no longer be able to walk into a bar and order a beer, after the U.S. federal agency that oversees the research program decided to stop serving alcohol.
House Republicans launched a formal impeachment hearing Thursday against President Joe Biden, promising to “provide accountability” as they probe the family finances and business dealings of his son Hunter and make their case to the public, colleagues and a skeptical Senate.
The FBI and other government agencies should be required to get court approval before reviewing the communications of U.S. citizens collected through a secretive foreign surveillance program, a sharply divided privacy oversight board recommended on Thursday.
The federal government is just days away from a shutdown that will disrupt many services, squeeze workers and roil politics as Republicans in the House, fueled by hard-right demands, force a confrontation over federal spending.
The Biden administration is finalizing a new rule that would cut federal funding for colleges that leave graduates with low pay and high debt after graduating.
The Biden administration is finalizing a new rule that would cut federal funding for colleges that leave graduates with low pay and high debt after graduating.
