Editorial Roundup: Excerpts from recent editorials
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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July 5
The Boston Herald on President Donald Trump's upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin:
So, it's finally going to happen. President Trump will come face to face with the world leader he insisted he was going to find so much common ground with - Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Trump and Putin will meet this week on the sidelines of the G-20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany.
And sure, under most circumstances, the list of possible topics would be a lengthy one - the war in Syria, Russian aggression in Ukraine, continuing cyberattacks traced back to Russia. But we all know this is no ordinary president and these are no ordinary times.
"There's no specific agenda - it's really going to be whatever the president wants to talk about," said Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the president's national security adviser.
(Well, let's just hope the topic of Mika Brzezinski's alleged facelift doesn't come up.)
Trump, you'll recall, carried on quite the little long-distance bromance with Putin during the 2016 campaign. Time and time again he insisted "wouldn't it be a great thing if we could get along with Russia," even as Putin was ordering up cyberattacks aimed at skewing the American election.
Trump can deny the existence of those attacks all he wants - and we'll be the first to admit they had little or no impact on the election results - but to continue to deny the threat posed by the world's most territorially ambitious leader would be hopelessly naïve.
Then, of course, there was Trump being Trump in a September interview with NBC's Matt Lauer:
"If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him. I've already said, he is really very much of a leader. I mean, you can say, 'Oh, isn't that a terrible thing' - the man has very strong control over a country. Now, it's a very different system, and I don't happen to like the system. But certainly, in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader."
Yes, Trump has a certain fondness for despots. He proved during his meetings in Saudi Arabia and in a White House meeting with Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he gets along quite nicely with them.
Certainly Trump's own advisers harbor no illusions about the nature of the Putin threat. McMaster has insisted the president will aim to confront "Russia's destabilizing behavior," including cyberthreats or political subversion.
We remember the words of President George W. Bush - words he would regret the rest of his political life - who after meeting Putin said, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy?.?.?.?I was able to get a sense of his soul."
Sen. John McCain came much closer when he said, "When I looked in Putin's eyes I saw three letters - K-G-B."
Online: http://www.bostonherald.com/
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July 4
St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the President's Advisory Commission on Election Integrity:
Last week Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, managed the rare feat of bringing officials of both political parties together. In his capacity as vice chairman of President Donald Trump's Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Kobach sent a letter to election officials in all 50 states asking for copies of their voter data. This has all the signs of a badly disguised, new effort to suppress votes of likely Democrats.
At last count, officials in 29 states had either rejected Kobach's request outright or promised not to send him all the information he requested. "They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from," said Delbert Hosemann, Mississippi's Republican secretary of state.
Among the states that won't be fully complying: Kansas. Kobach's own office said state law prevents him from releasing everything he asked for: "the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of Social Security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, canceled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information."
On the other hand, there's Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican whose initial response to Kobach's letter was that he'd be happy to comply. Upon further review, Ashcroft's office said it would be supplying only data that's available to the general public through open records requests. That's basically just names, addresses, dates of birth and voting participation. Political candidates use such data to target frequent voters or those who vote in specific party primaries.
Kobach's voter integrity commission, co-chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, is based on Trump's absurd claim that rampant fraud by illegal immigrants cost him the popular vote on Nov. 8. Independent studies have shown that voter impersonation is so rare as to be nonexistent. Kobach himself has convicted only one non-citizen who voted in Kansas.
But Americans often move from state to state and may be registered in two states; it doesn't mean they vote in both. Millions of people with similar names risk being disqualified if Kobach, a leading proponent of the vote-fraud myth, succeeds.
In Kansas, Kobach's voter suppression effort led to 35,000 people - most of them young people who tend to vote Democratic - being denied registration because they didn't have a birth certificate or passport with them. A study found 1 percent of them were non-citizens. To think that he doesn't have bigger plans is to ignore his history of politically motivated voter suppression.
The Constitution gives states the right to manage elections. American democracy doesn't need Kris Kobach's help.
Online: http://www.stltoday.com/
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June 30
The Denver Post on the arrests of health care repeal protesters:
U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner should have left protesters in his office Thursday until he got into town that night - regardless of the time his airplane's wheels touched down - and met with them to discuss their fears that Republican cuts to Medicaid would also cut off life-supporting services.
Instead, the first-term Republican's staff had the disabled protesters arrested and physically removed from his downtown Denver office Thursday night as he was headed into town for the congressional break.
The arrests were hard to watch.
We are ashamed. This is a man who we have stood up for when he didn't hold town hall meetings. We've given him the benefit of the doubt that he would fight for a better version of the Republican repeal of Obamacare, using his vote as leverage for a more moderate bill.
Our disappointment is tempered only by assurances that for two days Gardner's local staff members slept in the office with protesters - a move that allowed the protesters to stay and ensured they would have access to bathrooms and other care. Gardner's staffers were facing pressure from the building owners and other tenants. Gardner's downtown office lobby space is small, and nine overnight protesters inconvenienced others in the building. Gardner met with members of ADAPT - a Colorado-born group fighting for disability rights - once this year. His staff members have met or held phone calls with ADAPT members another 15 times in the last year.
We don't condone the behavior of the protesters. There's a more effective way to get things done, even in politics today, than breaking laws and getting arrested.
That said, we agree with the message of the protest.
The Republican bill has been silent - by design - on how $772 billion would impact Medicaid patients over the next 10 years. The disabled community has valid reason to fear. As Denver Post reporters Danika Worthington and Mark Matthews reported, the disabled make up 7 percent of Medicaid participants in Colorado but account for 27 percent of the program's costs. Republicans in Congress are trying to cut Medicaid funding without reform or specification of what should be cut. "Let states figure it out" has been the mantra.
No doubt, Gardner faced a tough situation, and its complications were multiplied, his spokesman, Alex Siciliano tells us, by the fact the senator's plane back to Denver International Airport was diverted and didn't land until around midnight.
But surely a senator facing such a scene back in Denver could have demanded that he be allowed to meet with the protesters and try to defuse the situation.
The GOP created the uncertainty for vulnerable populations that in part drove ADAPT protests across the country to step up their opposition. In Rochester, N.Y., 25 people were arrested. Gardner shares in that responsibility.
The senator should have been a leader and tried to use his skills as a politician to convince ADAPT that their concerns were valid and had been heard, but that now it was time to leave for health and safety reasons. After that, police intervention could have been warranted.
Online: http://www.denverpost.com/
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July 3
The New York Times on the Federal Reserve announcing that all of the nation's big banks are healthy:
In the first systemwide all-clear since the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve announced last week that all of the nation's big banks are healthy.
Hold the applause. The banks are certainly healthier now than they were in 2011, when the Fed began annual "stress tests" to assess their ability to withstand financial and economic downturns. But to the extent they are healthy, credit belongs in large part to banking reforms enacted after the crisis. And it is precisely those reforms that are now in the cross hairs of the Trump administration.
The reforms were aimed at improving lending standards, restricting trading practices and strengthening capital requirements. Better loan standards and less trading have kept banks away from the reckless practices that precipitated the crash, while more capital helps to ensure that the banks can absorb any losses that may occur.
A more stable financial system and greater protection against economically ruinous booms and busts have resulted.
But these vital measures are all under attack by the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. The stated rationale, expressed most recently in a report by the Treasury Department, is that regulation has impeded bank lending and, by extension, economic growth.
That's wrong. Bank lending has expanded at a decent pace in recent years; economic growth has suffered largely from Congress's failure to provide fiscal support. What the banks and their enablers in the administration and Congress want is a return to the days when excessive risk-taking led to outsize profits. They want to turn back the clock by rolling back the rules.
History tells us that things won't end well if that happens. Deregulation led to the financial crash in 2008. It's safe to assume that repeating the mistake will lead to the same result.
Knee-jerk deregulation is not the only threat to financial stability. It's entirely possible that the system is more fragile than the Fed's stress tests indicate. By the Fed's calculations, capital held by the nation's eight largest banks was nearly 14 percent of assets, weighted by risk, at the end of 2016.
Alternative calculations of capital, including those that use international accounting rules rather than American accounting principles, put the capital cushion much lower, at 6.3 percent. The difference is largely attributable to regulators' differing assessment of the risks posed by derivatives, the complex instruments that blew up in the financial crisis and that still are a major part of the holdings of big American banks.
The passing grades on the Fed's stress tests pave the way for banks to pay their largest dividends in almost a decade. The hands-down winners will be shareholders and bank executives, who could see their stock-based compensation packages expand further.
But without continued bank regulation, and heightened vigilance of derivatives in particular, the good fortune of bank investors and bank executives is all too likely to come at the expense of most Americans, who do not share in bank profits but suffer severe and often irreversible setbacks when deregulation leads to a bust.
It has happened before.
Online: https://www.nytimes.com/
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June 30
Los Angeles Times on President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement:
Increased immigration enforcement has been one of the hallmarks of the Trump administration, with federal agents directed to seek the deportation of just about anyone they find in the country illegally no matter how long the person might have lived here or how deep the ties to family and community. In the first 100 days after the president's inauguration, immigration arrests climbed nearly 40% over the previous year, a pace that will almost certainly increase if Congress accedes to President Trump's request to hire an additional 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to be assigned to the nation's interior, and another 5,000 Border Patrol agents to work within 100 miles of the border.
Those buying into Trump's view of illegal immigrants as rapists, murderers and job stealers have no doubt been cheered by the enforcement effort, and they probably aren't bothered by the rush to expand detention space to house those facing deportation hearings. But even they should recognize that capturing and incarcerating people is only part of the equation.
While the government - under President Obama and now Trump - has been ramping up immigration enforcement and detention, it has not invested a parallel amount of money in expanding the immigration courts' capacity to handle the cases. Spending on immigration courts increased only 74% from 2003-2015 while enforcement spending went up 105%. Trump's 2018 budget would increase the total number of judicial positions, but it's not clear if that will become law and for the moment the backlog of cases is continuing to grow.
At the end of September, the number of pending immigration cases stood at 516,031, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By the end of May, that backlog had jumped to 598,943 cases, which have been pending for an average of 670 days each. New York City has the biggest backlog (78,670 cases), followed by Los Angeles (57,090).
Making matters worse, the Trump administration has temporarily reassigned judges to detention centers in Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to handle cases primarily involving recent border-crossers. The problem with that is that fewer people are getting caught at the border these days, so moving judges there makes little sense. Why then is it happening? The answer: Optics. Sending judges to the border looks like a commitment to stronger and more serious enforcement, when in reality it's a Potemkin effort that exacerbates backlogs in the courts from which the judges are transferred. At the same time, immigration lawyers say government attorneys have lately become tougher in their cases, taking harder lines with immigrants and reopening cases that had been suspended, adding more drag on the system.
This enormous backlog has real-life consequences. People in detention centers or jails are spending more time incarcerated as they await hearings on whether they will be allowed to remain in the country. For those with legitimate requests for asylum or other relief from deportation, the delays prolong uncertainty about whether they have found a sanctuary.
This should not make the anti-illegal immigration folks happy. If people aren't getting deported but are just stuck in limbo in the immigration system, then Trump's ramped-up enforcement program is a chimera. Those immigrants who should be found ineligible to remain in the country because of criminal pasts or other disqualifications wind up, in effect, with open-ended reprieves.
The system is not working well for anybody except, perhaps, the operators of private prisons and local jails with ICE contracts that handle most of the detained immigrants. For a president who prides himself on his business and managerial acumen, this is a grotesquely failed approach to management.
Instead of taking this piecemeal approach to immigration enforcement, the administration should work with Congress to develop comprehensive immigration reform legislation that would create a path to citizenship for those who have established roots in our communities while tightening up enforcement at the border and tackling visa overstays. The Republican Party controls the White House and Congress. It has no excuses for not getting this done.
Online: http://www.latimes.com/
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July 3
China Daily on how the United States' recent agreements with Taiwan affect U.S.-China relations:
The past week was nothing but eventful considering the relative peace China-US relations have enjoyed since Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump struck a constructive note for bilateral ties when they met in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, in April.
Over the past few days, Washington has approved a $1.4-billion arms sale to Taiwan and blacklisted a Chinese bank for alleged business ties with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the US Senate Armed Services Committee has approved a bill for US naval vessels to make regular stops at Taiwan ports and help the island develop undersea warfare capabilities.
The moves run counter to the consensus reached by the two presidents on that occasion that the two countries should work together to forge a constructive partnership.
Although the approval of the arms sales to Taiwan agreed last year is the most provocative move the Trump administration has taken thus far, it is actually the latest act of a decades-old routine stemming from the US Defense Authorization Act. It is hardly a novelty in bilateral ties, and is only surprising because of its timing, scale and the technologies involved.
The proposed port visits are another matter, should they gain the approval of Congress and the authorization of the president, the consequences for ties are likely to be extremely serious, because besides sending a misleading message to the secessionist forces in Taiwan, they would constitute a substantial infringement on China's sovereignty.
Washington is well aware that Beijing will not tolerate any external interference in its internal affairs, especially any challenge to the country's territorial integrity and sovereignty. Something Xi spelled out very clearly during his just-concluded visit to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
At this stage, the moves made last week are nothing more than annoying, and they do not necessarily measure up to a reversal in the US' China policies as some are claiming.
It may be the outcome-oriented Washington is anxious to leverage immediate gains from bilateral collaboration in relation to priority issues on its agenda or a price-hiking ploy prior to negotiations at the upcoming Comprehensive Economic Dialogue. Either way, going overboard in trying to put pressure on Beijing may prove counterproductive, since it will simply prompt a tit-for-tat response from which the US will not emerge unbruised.
Beijing, protesting against the moves, has called on Washington to correct its mistakes so that their cooperation on major issues will not be affected, showing the constructive partnership they have pledged to formulate is still attainable if there is a shared will.
Online: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/