Marijuana needs legalized. Minimum sentencing guidelines need to be replaced with maximums. For-profit prisons need to disappear. More work needs put into counseling and mentoring at-risk youths.
But how do we get there? Do we find another politician to hang our hopes on? Last time I voted for someone campaigning on Hope and Change we saw more civil rights disappear than ever, and Gitmo is still running.
I think believing a single person/president/whatever can fix all problems is wishful thinking, and indeed a system in which that was possible would likely not be a democracy.
Start by blaming all the representatives who pushed for or voted against ending the programs you don't like, and voting accordingly. Look at the voting histories of candidates rather than what they say. Look at who funds the candidates , not at what the candidates say. Actually, listen to everything other than what candidates say during election season; the game is set up in such a way that you will always be disappointed if you simply believe what is said, no matter the candidate.
He's literally the leader of the armed forces, he has all the power he needs to shut that place down any time he wants.
Point is that shutting down Gitmo was something the Administration attempted to do and that Congress forcefully blocked.
"The President...shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."
Article II, Section 2, Clause 1
They are detainees of the USA. He has full power to bestow each and every one of them a full unequivocal presidential pardon for all crimes accused and committed against the US. No if's, and's, or but's.
If you aren't willing to gamble that you'll need/get a Presidential pardon, then you clearly don't know enough to justify what you're about to do to the suspect.
That'd be a little less extreme, and a little more, I dunno, constitutional?
Gitmo does not get closed by one lone person..it takes Congress
Actually, the Congress governs the armed forces; the Constitutional designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief simply means limits the Congress, in adopting rules governing the military, from appointing someone else as supreme commander of the military within those rules.
The President isn't the King of the military, or anything else.
Another possibly overlapping portion believes the executive and judicial branches need more power to do their jobs correctly. That usually means legislating away rights and reducing accountability for those involved.
And yet another portion is being too systemically harassed and locked up on a massive scale to have a real front for public discourse.
The rest/majority don't give a shit unless it becomes their problem and it rarely does.
Akin: Employment. Personally, I am finished watching my local labor force hollowed out because some version of... "labor arbitrage", I guess, can save a buck an hour moving the work over a border. (And, as often as not, that saving is being indirectly paid for by me, anyway: Outsized military to secure energy interests used for attendant goods transportation. Inflated retail prices feeding telecom oligopolies whose networks, while I like the connectivity, similarly afford displacement of intellectual labor.)
Is such localization perfect? No. But, you asked what/how things might change.
People will start tending to their own communities, as a priority, if and when they want them to get better.
There will be significant downsides to this, as well (e.g. the potential for increased prejudice, perhaps). But, as one old supervisor used to like to state, "everything is a pendulum." I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, but as I get older and my perspective... "matures?", there does seem to be a lot of it around.
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1. For various and significantly differing values of "local".