Editorial Roundup: Excerpts from recent editorials
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Nov. 2
The Baltimore Sun on early voting:
Even before Maryland's week-long period of early voting concludes Thursday night, voter turnout records have been set. At the current pace, it's expected that more than 800,000 Maryland voters will have cast their ballots at one of the state's 69 early voting centers this year. If turnout is similar to 2012, that will represent about one-third of all Maryland's votes cast, even more if the state's 200,000 outstanding absentees are included.
By any measure, that makes this state's six-year experience with early voting an extraordinary success in at least one regard - it has made it easier to vote. The impact on turnout in 2016? That won't be known until after Election Day, of course, but on the national level, research has suggested it may improve turnout by 2 percent to 4 percent.
There are two often heard criticisms of early voting - that it causes voters to make decisions too early and that it enables fraud. Given that in-person voter fraud is such a rarity in Maryland and elsewhere, restricting early voting because of it is a bit like saying we ought to build fences to keep unicorns off the highways. But the recent disclosure by FBI Director James Comey to Congress that his agents are currently examining email potentially relevant to the agency's investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private server when she was secretary of state certainly highlights the informed-electorate question.
But maybe not by much. It's unlikely voters will be any better informed about the email by the time Election Day rolls around. And given the state of misinformation coming from the various campaigns and supporters, and especially on social media, the broader claim that the electorate will be better informed tomorrow, the next day or next week is certainly quaint but probably naive.
Here's the real impact. Waiting lines are shorter, at least generally. While early voting center lines may be their longest on Thursday (traditionally the busiest early voting day), they have not been nearly as bad as in years past. And better yet, a bigger turnout for early voting means that Maryland's 1,900 or so polling places will be that much less inundated this Tuesday.
That was one of the conclusions, incidentally, of a thoughtful 2014 report on early voting by the University of Baltimore's Schaefer Center for Public Policy, which found people who voted early were generally happy with the experience. The study also caused some changes - including increasing the number of voting centers statewide from 47 to 69.
Such a study group ought to be convened again. Maryland might consider, for example, conducting its week-long early voting period Sunday-to-Sunday prior to an election rather than Thursday-to-Thursday. The reason it doesn't today is simply a matter of technology and cost - updating Election Day polling books to reflect early voting takes time. Invest $2 million or more to network the state's polling places, and the labor-intensive updates would no longer be a stumbling block.
There are other matters that ought to be studied as well - universal voter registration (that is, requiring a qualified person to opt-out rather than opt-in), expanding the pool of election judges and allowing Marylanders to take ballot selfies. That last one may seem obscure, but in a world of Twitter and Facebook, it seems reasonable to allow people to express their enthusiasm for voting as long as it doesn't compromise the privacy of others.
One more observation about early voting: The high turnout this week could mean that Maryland polling places will be packed on Nov. 8. In 2012, 430,573 people took advantage of early voting in the general election, and in 2014, it was 307,646. That this year's total hit 609,000 by Tuesday could be an indicator of turnout as much as an expression of preference for early voting - or of a worry about voter suppression efforts on Election Day.
Conventional wisdom is that early voting favors the elderly and the partisan and that Democrats in Maryland have endorsed it simply because they have effective get-out-the-vote operations that benefit from the bigger window of opportunity. All of that may be true, but getting more people to vote - whether they prefer Ms. Clinton or Donald Trump or anyone else - ought to be a high priority for any democracy. Even if the Maryland tally reaches or exceeds 2012's 2.7 million, it will still far, far short of the 3.9 million registered voters. As popular as early voting has become, we should still work to make it better.
Online:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/
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Nov. 1
The Miami Herald on FBI Director James Comey:
When FBI Director James B. Comey on Friday hurled a political bombshell about new emails that may (or may not) be relevant to the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server, he changed the focus of the presidential campaign in the closing days.
His action represents a dreadful mistake that does not serve the American public or the best interest of his agency. It may set a bad precedent for involvement of the FBI in a political campaign. Whatever Mr. Comey intended, the result has been to inflict damage on the role and reputation of the FBI.
- His disclosure violates longstanding policy and puts the FBI in the unenviable position of being an active player in an election. The Department of Justice and its various divisions have a well-founded practice of not commenting on existing ongoing investigations. They don't even acknowledge them - for good reason: To maintain public trust in the ability of the department to avoid political influence. To ensure a fair investigation. And, above all, to prevent investigations from unfairly or unintentionally casting public suspicion on public officials who have done nothing wrong.
- That leads us to the next point: Mr. Comey's 166-word statement was virtually content-free. It contained nothing of substance that materially changes what we already know. Yet it casts suspicion on Ms. Clinton and her campaign even though Mr. Comey admits they may have done nothing wrong. Despite the eagerness of some Republicans to suggest otherwise, the investigation has not been reopened.
- Mr. Comey says he acted in the interests of transparency. That's puzzling. Rather than reassuring anyone or providing substantial new information, Mr. Comey opened a new set of questions 11 days before an election yet conceded he can't answer them. How is that transparent? Or fair, for that matter?
- Mr. Comey says he was motivated by a promise he made to Congress to keep its members informed about the investigation. Yet in a letter to employees explaining his actions, he added: "I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record." This is a totally different justification that creates a significantly distinct standard for FBI investigation of public figures around election time. Is this going to be the new rule going forward: Always tell the public when a public figure running for office is under investigation? Or, even more vaguely, when information that may - or may not - be relevant turns up? If that is not the new standard, why make an exception in this case?
An FBI director has never made such a disclosure to Congress so close to an election. To justify a break in that tradition would require far more substantial information than Mr. Comey claims to have in his possession. If hard evidence turns up that a presidential candidate has violated the law, the FBI director could indeed be obliged to say so, disregarding tradition. But by Mr. Comey's own admission, the bureau has yet to determine whether "this material may be significant."
Mr. Comey can erase some of the damage by taking firm action to dispel the uncertainty created by his unwise decision to involve the FBI in the election. If the agency knows nothing, it should say so clearly and loudly. Not for the sake of any campaign, but rather in the public interest and for the sake of Mr. Comey's own reputation and that of the agency he leads.
Online:
http://www.miamiherald.com/
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Nov. 1
The Washington Post on blacklisting presidential appointees:
Hillary Clinton's election as president is hardly a sure thing. Nevertheless, progressives in the Democratic Party, feeling emboldened by the strong showing of Sen.?Bernie Sanders in the primaries, are preparing their demands for a second Clinton administration. Following the old Washington adage that "personnel is policy," unions, activists and think-tankers, under the informal auspices of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Mr. Sanders, are putting together lists of acceptable candidates for senior administration jobs - and a blacklist of unacceptable ones.
A certain amount of factional horse-trading over nominations is par for the course in politics; it's especially so in a year when Ms. Clinton is reliant on support of the Warren-Sanders troops. We might add, though, that if Ms. Warren wanted to ensure her choices got picked, she could have run for president herself, as many urged her to do; Mr. Sanders did run, but failed to get more votes than Ms. Clinton, so his entitlement to determine administration staffing is a bit debatable as well.
The real problem, though, is not the fact of the lobbying but its nature: Ms. Clinton is being told, apparently, to apply a series of litmus tests to her potential nominees that include not only adherence to the Democratic Party platform, the drafting of which she largely (though not totally) ceded to Mr.?Sanders, but also avoidance of any connection to the financial industry - notwithstanding whatever expertise it might confer. These conditions, or others unknown, may disqualify two able potential treasury secretaries, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and current Federal Reserve Board member Lael Brainard. Ms. Warren also wants Ms. Clinton to grant a demand that President Obama has so far refused: to fire Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White for her refusal to advance a regulation - largely symbolic and arguably irrelevant to the SEC's statutory mandate - requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their political donations.
That would set a troubling precedent by linking a current official's tenure at an independent regulatory agency to his or her policy decisions. The advance veto on future nominees that Ms. Warren and Mr.?Sanders are seeking, if carried to its logical extreme, would make them de facto usurpers of presidential power. The left's model is its successful campaign against Mr. Obama's choice of former investment banker Antonio Weiss as undersecretary of treasury for domestic finance in 2014. Under fire from Ms. Warren because of his role in the now-forgotten merger of Burger King and a Canadian company, Mr. Weiss withdrew early last year without a Senate hearing. In the end, this blackballing accomplished nothing practical: Mr. Weiss accepted a Treasury job that did not require Senate confirmation, and ably shepherded bipartisan legislation to restructure Puerto Rico's finances. Meanwhile, the job for which he was originally tapped remains empty. Such end runs could take place in a Clinton administration, too, thwarting the left but at the risk of muddied lines of accountability in the bureaucracy.
People should be nominated based on their individual merits by the person with clear constitutional power to do the nominating. If elected, Ms. Clinton should declare from the outset that is how she will operate.
Online:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Nov. 2
The Los Angeles Times on using politicians as analysts on TV news:
Donna Brazile has been a powerful force in Democratic politics for years. She worked on the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Walter Mondale and Richard Gephardt, and she ran Al Gore's 2000 campaign. She's a partisan, a strategist, an operative - a political hack to some, a party loyalist to others. What she's not is an independent, dispassionate analyst of the news.
She's been playing one on TV, however - as a talking head for CNN. She was omnipresent in the early campaign coverage (before taking a leave), where she was routinely identified merely as a "CNN commentator." Then, this week, the network severed ties with her after learning from hacked emails posted on WikiLeaks that she had surreptitiously fed debate questions to the Clinton campaign during the Democratic primaries. On Tuesday, CNN chief Jeff Zucker called Brazile's actions "unethical" and "disgusting."
But really, what did he expect? Isn't it obvious that if you employ "commentators" who are already committed partisans on one side or the other, they're going to be hard-pressed to live up to the traditional ethical standards of even-handed journalism? Paying political operatives to act as journalists inevitably creates dual loyalties and encourages situations like this one.
Brazile unquestionably behaved in a duplicitous manner, and CNN was right to be upset. But the bigger problem, arguably, is that she and a raft of other political operatives from both major parties had contracts with CNN in the first place. These are examples of the cozy relationship between the network and the people it covers (the same can be said for Fox and its stable of political insiders) that undercut journalistic credibility, and make it difficult for the public to find trustworthy analysis on the talking-head cable TV shows.
Instead of offering insight, they often engage in outrageously illogical contortions to buff up whichever candidate they support, or try to dent whomever they oppose.
And why wouldn't they? Who would expect Mary Matalin, say, to acknowledge the flaws of a Republican candidate? Why would Paul Begala say anything to undermine his friends in the Democratic party?
A recent low point: Trump surrogate Jeffrey Lord's bizarre assertion on CNN during the primaries that the 19th century Ku Klux Klan was "a liberal leftist terrorist organization" and formed "the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party," which (and this part is true) supported slavery in the lead up to the Civil War. Other partisans similarly defy credulity, particularly former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who collected severance checks and advised the Trump campaign, with whom he had signed nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements, while under contract with CNN.
The persistent presence of these spin doctors on news programs not only confuses voters, it can compromise journalistic efforts to bring clarity to what the candidates are saying and doing. Given Trump's inability to tell the truth or stick to a lie, it doesn't help when his surrogates, appearing as paid commentators, take to the air to persuade voters that their candidate didn't just say what everyone clearly heard him say.
The cable news networks are entitled to hire whomever they want, of course. But they might want to do some soul-searching after election day about the nature of political analysis and the benefit of keeping some distance between the news and the political campaigns they are putatively covering.
Online:
http://www.latimes.com/
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Nov. 1
The New York Times on Donald Trump avoiding taxes:
Donald Trump's claim that he was smart for figuring out how not to pay federal income taxes was obnoxious when he said it, at least for the millions of Americans who pay their fair share. Now we learn that he was able to avoid some of those taxes decades ago with a tactic that is illegal now and was highly dubious even then.
In the 1990s, with his Atlantic City casinos and other businesses tottering on the verge of collapse, Mr. Trump negotiated a deal under which his creditors - investors and banks - would forgive part of the debt in exchange for equity in partnerships he controlled. Without such swaps, Mr. Trump would have had to report the forgiven debt as income, offsetting a big portion of the $916 million loss he claimed on his tax return in 1995. That loss allowed him to avoid paying taxes for up to 18 years.
It is impossible to know whether the Internal Revenue Service challenged Mr. Trump's use of the swaps because, unlike every major party presidential nominee for nearly 40 years, he refuses to release his tax returns. But as The Times reported on Monday, the maneuver was so suspect that his lawyers advised against it.
And it's clear that even then tax officials and federal lawmakers were hoping to end the practice because it allowed businesses and rich individuals to avoid taxes by swapping forgiven debt with equity that was worth little or nothing. Indeed, even as Mr. Trump's lawyers were advising him against this approach, one tax expert wrote that trying to find legal support for it was like trying to find evidence for "the existence of the Loch Ness monster."
Congress barred such swaps by corporations in 1993, and by partnerships, the business structure Mr. Trump uses, in 2004.
As is its habit, Mr. Trump's campaign chose to regard these latest revelations as yet another display of his genius. But like any other effort to game the tax system, his tactics imposed real costs by shifting the burden to taxpayers who have no recourse to such strategies and must pay full freight, including people whose taxes are withheld and cannot shelter their income even if they want to.
It has become ever more difficult for the I.R.S. to police the kind of tax avoidance Mr. Trump has engaged in. The Republican-controlled Congress cut the I.R.S.'s budget by about $500 million in 2015, and last year the agency audited just 0.8 percent of individual taxpayers, down from 1.1 percent in 2010. Its enforcement staff has shrunk by 23 percent since 2010, to 39,000 people, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The latest disclosures about Mr. Trump's taxes also further undercut the argument that he is uniquely qualified to fix what he has called a rigged system. Why would a man who has spent most of his professional life avoiding the shared responsibility of taxes all of a sudden care about helping others, especially those less fortunate? The truth is, of course, that he has no intention of doing so; according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Trump's tax proposals would confer by far the greatest advantages on the wealthiest Americans.
Online:
http://www.nytimes.com/
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Nov. 1
The Telegraph on Parliament and Britain's free press:
For the second day running the Commons chamber echoed to the thunderous hypocrisy of the Labour Party. On Monday they wanted an inquiry into the so-called Battle of Orgreave to right a perceived "injustice" that never happened. The next day, Labour MPs demanded fresh curbs on the press because some feel aggrieved at their treatment by a few newspapers.
Fortunately, as with Amber Rudd in rejecting the Orgreave inquiry, so Karen Bradley, the Culture Minister, faced down the Opposition's faux outrage as she announced a further consultation on measures affecting the press. Tom Watson, the Labour deputy leader who encouraged the police hunt for a non-existent establishment paedophile ring, said the victims of press intrusion were being "thrown to the wolves" - seemingly oblivious to the impact of his accusations on innocent people.
At issue is whether to proceed with stage two of the Leveson Inquiry and whether newspapers failing to sign up to the officially recognised regulator Impress should pay court costs even in libel actions that they win. Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act - a blatant attempt to blackmail newspapers to join Impress, bankrolled by Max Mosley, and desert the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) - has yet to be triggered and in our view it should not be.
Nor is there any public interest in holding another inquiry. Section 40 would further damage an industry in financial difficulties, especially local papers, while leaving online media giants like Facebook unregulated. More importantly, it is an attack on a viable free press. We look to Parliament to uphold our liberties, not undermine them.
Online:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/