Marist’s Democrats and Republicans Go Head To Head in a Political Debate

Provided by the Marist Republicans

Dressed in their best business attire, the Marist Democrats and Republicans gathered to debate current event issues in our country in the first political debate since the pandemic.

“It’s a really great thing we can bring this back after about two and a half years of not being able to do this debate. This is a coveted event that has been part of our clubs for a long time and we’re both excited to bring back,” said President of the Marist Democrats Julia Meyer ’22.

 “I want to make it clear that today we want to hear logical views, we want to hear reason, we want ration, and we want to hear development to topics. We do not want to hear bias, we do not want to hear prejudice, we do not want to hear any kind of divisive argument,” said president of the Marist Model United Nations club Cezar-Mihai Ungureanu ’22, who served as moderator for the event.

“This is a great opportunity for you guys to exact your power of argument, to exercise how much reason can get through and how much you can influence the other side,” added Ungureanu before commencing the debate.

Marist Republicans Vice President Matthew Fernandez ‘22 presented the three agreed upon topics of discussion for the debate: fracking and domestic drilling, defund the police and COVID-19 vaccine mandates. 

The debaters representing the Democrats were Meyer, August Boland ’24 and Jack Whitman ’24. The Republicans rotated seven debaters for each of the three rounds. Thomas Kilory ’24 and Kyle Clancy ’23 took on the fracking topic for the Republicans, which covered aspects such as the environment, jobs and public health. Oil has become a pertinent global issue, as Russia, who is currently waging war in Ukraine, is a large supplier of oil in the international community.

By the 10 minute mark, the question in summary posed by the Republicans was whether the negative impacts to the environment and wildlife inflicted by domestic drilling outweighed the impacts to the American economy when the United States outsources its oil. 

Meyer asserted the environment was not only at stake, but human lives, citing the numerous detrimental health effects suffered by those who live near drilling sites.

“A list of 632 chemicals that were identified with drilling operations throughout the U.S. basically found that 75% of these chemicals can affect skin, eyes, and other sensory organs, and the respiratory and gastrointestinal systems,” Meyer read from a 2011 Human and Ecological Risk Assessment.

After a few more minutes of discussion, Ungueranu opened the debate to the floor, allowing for the audience to put forward their own questions to the debaters. Several of the audience questions highlighted a shared stressor around the country: rising gas prices. 

Many students are more concerned about paying extra at the pump while waiting for the sources of green energy to kick in. The audience members pointed their questions to the Democrats, who argued on the offensive that green energy would be the solution to sustainable and safe energy, but had not addressed matters of efficacy and cost-effectiveness in the status quo.

The second topic of the afternoon was whether or not to defund the police, a popular petition that followed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The Republicans established in the opening statements that they were opposed to defunding the police, but rather additional funding to endow further training and reforms as needed. Debaters Kyle Clancy ’25 and Kyle Adams ’22, president of Marist Republicans, maintained that the police were necessary to maintain law and order.

“Through 2020, as protests rocked the country in response to the death of George Floyd, towns, counties and cities dramatically cut the funding for law enforcement. And again, statistics have shown that crime has increased since then,” said Adams.

The Democrats contended that defunding the police was not so literal, and rather an effort to demilitarize the police and redirect that funding to resources that stop crime at the source.

“The purpose of [the] police is not to prevent crime, it is only to respond [to] crime. So if you want to look at measures to reduce crime, violent crime, you have to look at the underlying reasons that crime occurred in the first place and that can be multiple things such as mental issues and poverty,” said Whitman.

By the third and final topic of the issue of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, the both sides forewent their prepared research in favor of metaphors and personal experiences during the pandemic. The topic proved to be the most divisive of the afternoon, a reflection of our country outside of Marist.