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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Is your impression that being president and changing policy is like Star Trek, where you just sit around in a big room and stand up and go, "Make it so!" and everything changes?
Trump tried to do that, and he routinely got stymied because it didn't work like that. That's why he eventually took to making big announcements on Twitter of things he was ordering to have done. Some things work that way, but a lot of things don't.
What the fuck are you talking about? The state sponsors of terrorism list is under the sole purview of the State Department and can be modified at literally any time under literally any justification without the approval of Congress, the courts, or any other body. It literally is Joe Biden saying "Make it so!" in this case. He just chose to do so when it has zero meaningful consequence.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Sponsors_of_Terrorism_(U.S._list)#Cuba_(1982-2015,_2021-2025)
Biden is saying that he plans to notify congress that he seeks to have it removed from the list. It is, I think, a purely performative gesture, since between Trump and congress, nothing meaningful will happen. Doubly so because the full scope of the embargo and sanctions encompasses a lot more than just being on that one particular State Dept list. Except that, all those people did get freed. It sounds like it was some part of the deal that got them freed in the first place, which means it wasn't wholly performative. It mostly is, but what the hell, they're out now, however much or little this had to do with it.
I'm partly just annoyed at the number of people who are echoing one of the most easy bad-faith ways of criticizing any politician who ever does anything good. "Well, why is he doing it NOW! He could have done it earlier!"
I mean, yes. He was busy spending a trillion dollars on finally trying to do something about climate change, and trying in a limited way to make a start at reversing four decades of working-class wage fuckery. I'm not trying to sound like an after-school special, but that particular way of criticizing this particular thing that he did is a bunch of nonsense.
Edit: Rephrased so that I'm not making it sound like I think Biden fixed inequality
This is a State Department affair; none of what you listed that he was busy doing has to do with the State Department. He could've literally told them "Hey, I want Cuba off the list", they could've given him a report to sign off on, and boom. Done. I hope you understand that while the POTUS has final say over their Cabinet, they have a Cabinet so that they can, like, delegate things to them. So that, like, they don't have to be laser-focused on one or two issues for their entire term. The US' sanctions on Cuba have unjustly crippled the nation for decades, but he waits 99.9% of his presidency to actually effect change on the issue, which, again, amounts to telling some people in the State Department to make a report and then signing off on it. What Biden's done here is fucking meaningless, and it's surely only so late in his term out of sheer cowardice that he thought it'd hurt his/Kamala's election chances in Florida. Fuck him.
I literally sent you a well-sourced article explaining exactly what the process is. You can read footnote 27 if you want to find out more. And you want to sit here and think that if you insert "boom" "I hope you understand" "which, again" "fucking" "sheer cowardice" and "Fuck him.", then that'll mean you become right through sheer force of insistence.
Read what I sent you. Or don't. You are wrong.
Last I checked, 45 is less than 1460. I hope this helps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA
Bravo, sir.