College Republicans, Democrats debate election-year issues

With red on the right and blue on the left, students packed MU’s Ellis Auditorium on Tuesday to show their colors.

About 300 students watched the Mizzou College Republicans face off against the MU College Democrats in a debate about eight major issues this election season, including abortion, immigration, the war on terror and stem cell research.

Four debaters from each side came with stacks of data and passionate words to prove to the crowd — and each other — who’s right and who’s left.

Presidents from both groups said that the purpose of the debate was to inform students about the issues and each party’s stance on them.

“The most important thing to us is to educate the audience,” said College Republicans President Tyson Mutrux. “We want to get our views out there.”

Throughout the evening, audience members seemed to have no qualms about challenging debaters and scoffing at some rebuttals with laughter.

The Republican representatives showed fatigue at some of the crowd’s heckling and responded by saying the Democrats were “putting on a show.”

On the topic of the war on terror, College Democrats representative Rick Puig moved the crowd to explosive applause with his speech on the Patriot Act.

“In this country, you do not give up liberty for any cause,” Puig said to a roaring crowd. “And that’s the bottom line.”

Republicans hit the issue of abortion hard with member Henry Atkinson’s graphic description of the procedure during a partial-birth abortion and by arguing down the Democrats’ claim that the debate was a “Christian theology issue.”

The crowd thinned as the two-hour debate wore on.

“For some of it, it seemed like it got down to a cat fight,” said Amy Williams, 19, a sophomore at MU studying biological engineering. “In some ways, I feel our election has come to that.”

Planning for the event began midway through the summer, Mutrux said, when the College Democrats and the College Republicans met and each chose four topics to debate. In addition to the issues listed above, the groups debated the war in Iraq, minimum wage, government spending and taxes, and education.

Each representative had three minutes to open, two minutes to cross-examine and two minutes for a rebuttal. Topics were drawn randomly, and a coin was tossed to see who would begin first.

At the end of the night, whether students who came uninformed left educated remained up for debate.

“I hope people would come here tonight to get some illumination on the issues,” said Dustin Dunstedter, 23, a senior studying history at MU. “I came pretty much for entertainment.”