Editorial Roundup: United States
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Jan. 2
The Washington Post on raises for Congress
As a new Congress is sworn in Friday, this might seem like a bad time to talk about raising federal lawmakers’ pay. A government funding package failed last month, throwing Washington into a frantic effort to keep the government open, in part because it included a small pay increase for members of Congress.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, posted falsely that the provision meant members would get a 40 percent pay increase — more than 10 times the reality. His post has 34 million views. Following his lead, President-elect Donald Trump wrote that “this is not a good time for Congress to be asking for pay increases.” Front-line members joined the chorus: Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Washington) s aid a pay boost, “any way you slice it,” would be “bananas.”
Actually, it would be smart.
Members of the House and Senate haven’t received any bump to their $174,000 annual salary since 2009, and that’s bad for the country. The 27th Amendment stipulates that lawmakers may not raise their own pay — just that of future Congresses. Friday’s new Congress should do so for the next.
The arguments against boosting Congress’s pay seem overwhelming. Gallup’s latest polling shows just 17 percent of Americans approve of the job the legislative branch is doing. Members already make far more than the median national income. “If members can’t get by on our already generous salaries and benefits, they should find another line of work,” said Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine).
Actually, that’s the danger. Writing the nation’s laws is not an average job. Serving in Congress is a privilege — but one that should be attractive not only to politics fanatics, the independently wealthy, go-for-broke ideologues or those open to supplementing their official salaries by leveraging their positions for personal gain.
The majority of members, especially those with postgraduate degrees in medicine or law, could make vastly more in the private sector than they do now. Many highly qualified people — particularly talented young Americans — forgo public service for the same reason. Moreover, everyday people don’t need to maintain two residences, as most members do, including in D.C., one of the most expensive places in the country in which to live.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/02/congressional-salaries-pay-increase-cr/
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Jan. 3
The Wall Street Journal says good riddance to Net Neutrality
The courts are slowly catching up with the many illegal Biden Administration rules, and on Thursday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals cleaned up after the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality rule. Credit an assist from the Supreme Court.
Democrats on the FCC last year resurrected the Obama-era regulation that classified broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. Chair Jessica Rosenworcel claimed the rule was needed to protect national security, but the real goal was to give bureaucrats power to micromanage broadband pricing and investment.
The Sixth Circuit panel ruled 3-0 that the FCC exceeded its statutory authority, citing the Supreme Court’s 6-3 landmark Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision last year. Loper Bright overturned the Court’s Chevron doctrine, which required judges to defer to an agency’s interpretations of a supposedly vague law as long as it was “reasonable.”
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld a similar Obama net-neutrality rule based on Chevron. But now “we no longer afford deference to the FCC’s reading of the statute,” Judge Richard Allen Griffin explained in his opinion. The panel held that broadband providers are properly considered an “information service,” and as such can’t be regulated as common carriers.
That should have been clear all along. But Democrats invoked a decades-old law so they could expand political control over the internet. The resulting regulatory uncertainty was one reason investment fell after the Obama rule. After Mr. Trump’s first-term FCC Chair Ajit Pai repealed the Obama rule, investment increased.
The Sixth Circuit decision means the next Trump FCC won’t have to go through a drawn-out rule-making to repeal it. It also means that Democrats in the future will have to pass legislation to restore it. “Applying Loper Bright means we can end the FCC’s vacillations,” Judge Griffin noted. Hear, hear.
The Sixth Circuit decision illustrates how ending Chevron will make it harder for regulators to exceed their authority. It could also bring more certainty to businesses as regulations won’t shift based on arbitrary interpretations of law. This a victory for self-government and the private economy over the willful administrative state. There will be more, thanks to Loper Bright.
ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/fcc-net-neutrality-rule-struck-down-sixth-circuit-jessica-rosenworcel-2a111ef7?mod=editorials_article_pos7
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Jan. 3
The Boston Globe on judicial system reform
A year of widening political divisions ended with the sobering news that confidence in the nation’s judicial system has also taken a hit, dropping to a record low 35 percent, according to the most recent Gallup poll.
Between 2020 and 2024, public confidence in the judicial system plummeted 24 points — from 59 percent to 35 percent — a precipitous decline.
Sure, there was the US Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade and overturning 50 years of abortion rights. And judicial decisions at several levels involving the possible prosecution of President-elect Donald Trump and presidential immunity. But a report released recently by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on the ethical challenges facing the nation’s highest court — and its inability to deal with them — gives already skeptical Americans a host of new reasons to be less than confident in those sworn to deliver fair and impartial justice.
The 20-month investigation — in which committee Republicans refused to participate — found newly discovered evidence of ethical lapses by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in connection with his three-decade relationship to Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, but it also faulted the Judicial Conference, the policymaking body for the federal courts, for its failure to police the system.
“Now more than ever before, as a result of information gathered by subpoenas, we know the extent to which the Supreme Court is mired in an ethical crisis of its own making,” Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said in a statement. “It’s clear that the justices are losing the trust of the American people at the hands of a gaggle of fawning billionaires.”
The probe turned up two previously unreported trips in 2021 by Thomas courtesy of Crow — on top of the numerous trips and gifts previously reported by ProPublica — but also faulted Thomas and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for recent failures to recuse themselves when cases before the court posed potential conflicts of interest. Thomas sat on cases involving the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection despite his wife’s involvement in the “Stop the Steal” movement, the report noted. And Alito refused to recuse himself in Jan. 6-related cases even after his wife flew politically charged flags at their homes.
“The Supreme Court has mired itself in an ethical crisis of its own making by failing to address justices’ ethical misconduct for decades,” the report said. “Despite post-Watergate Congressional efforts to renew faith in all three branches of the federal government through ethics legislation, the Supreme Court has allowed a culture of misconduct to metastasize into a full-blown crisis that has driven public opinion of the Court to historic lows.”
Disclosures of gifts and travel, after all, have a purpose. That purpose is to alert the public to the potential for bias — the kind of bias or appearance of bias that would require any self-respecting judge to recuse himself from a case.
But the committee report, some 93 pages accompanied by 800 pages of related documents, faults not just the justices but the Judicial Conference, which, it notes, for decades “has failed to adequately perform financial disclosure reviews, conduct investigations, and respond appropriately to ethical misconduct complaints against the justices.”
The Judicial Conference is made up of the chief judge of each judicial circuit, a district judge from each regional circuit, and the chief judge of the Court of International Trade. Its work is done largely in its nearly two dozen committees, including one on codes of conduct and another on financial disclosure.
But the failures of what is essentially a peer-review process to adequately police what for decades in the cases of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Thomas was laughingly called “personal hospitality” by their billionaire buddies are now notorious. In fact, as recently as September, the report notes, the conference attempted to “clarify” the rules allowing exemptions for disclosures of gifts of food, travel, lodging, and entertainment but ended up broadening the exemption to include that offered not just at properties owned by an individual but those owned by a corporate entity.
And when it is confronted by a request to investigate — as it was in April 2023 by a referral from congressional Democrats to investigate Thomas’s financial disclosures — its response has thus far been none at all.
A number of Senate Democrats, most prominently Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, have filed legislation aimed at requiring the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of conduct with a mechanism to investigate and enforce its provisions. Chances of its passage in a Republican controlled Congress with Donald Trump in the White House are virtually nonexistent.
But that’s not to say the conference — with some help from Congress — couldn’t clean up its act in some more modest ways. The report suggests a change to the Ethics in Government Act, which governs financial disclosure, to require retention of those disclosure statements well beyond the current six-year period currently in force for the judiciary. After all, lifetime tenure may mean careers lasting decades. Why shouldn’t those reports be retained throughout a judge’s tenure?
The report also recommends additional staff for the conference to help review those reports too, and for the conference to review its own process to assure the reports are accurate — rather than waiting for the press to track down unreported trips and dubious “hospitality” accepted by judges.
The Gallup poll — which focused not on the Supreme Court but on the judiciary as a whole — should provide a wake-up call to members of the Judicial Conference that it’s their reputations and credibility on the line too, not just that of the well-traveled Thomas. It’s time this too quiescent body took some responsibility for policing its high court colleagues.
ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/03/opinion/scotus-ethics-reform-thomas/
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Jan. 2
The Guardian on the New Orleans attack
The deadly attack on new year revellers in New Orleans, which killed at least 15 people and injured dozens more, was all the more terrible for its familiar characteristics. The method of attack – ploughing a vehicle into crowds – and the decision to strike those celebrating at a time associated with togetherness and joy are now far too well recognised internationally. It is less than a fortnight since a man used a car to kill at least five, including a nine-year-old child, at a Christmas market near Magdeburg in Germany.
Part of the grimness of this event is that ordinary activities that should require no special protections are now guarded as a matter of course – and that even such precautions can prove inadequate. Bollards were reportedly being upgraded in New Orleans ahead of next month’s Super Bowl, and patrols and barricades were being used in the meantime. In Magdeburg, the perpetrator used an entrance for emergency vehicles.
The FBI has said that the New Orleans attack was a terrorist act and that it now believes the assailant, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, acted alone. An Islamic State flag was found in the truck he used, and he recorded videos proclaiming his allegiance to IS. While several perpetrators of vehicle-ramming attacks have allied themselves with IS, others have had varying motives; the Magdeburg driver had spread anti-Islamic propaganda.
Analysts had warned of a heightened IS threat to the west in the holiday season, and the Department of Homeland Security’s 2025 threat assessment, released in October, warned that the risk of terrorism was expected to remain high, with lone offenders and small groups most likely to carry out attacks with little or no warning. It also noted that most mass casualty attacks were related to mental illness or relationship grievances rather than ideology. Authorities say that in Jabbar’s videos, he described originally intending to harm family and friends, before deciding that that wouldn’t have illustrated the “war between the believers and the disbelievers”.
The army veteran, who had served in Afghanistan, was shot dead by police as he fired from the truck. He had also placed two explosive devices nearby. Authorities are examining any potential connection with the explosion of a Tesla truck packed with fireworks and gas canisters outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on the same day, but by Thursday had found “no definitive link”. The driver of that vehicle, who was killed in the blast, was reportedly an off-duty special forces operations sergeant.
Yet the uncertainties surrounding the New Orleans attack have done nothing to temper the incoming president’s response. While Joe Biden’s remarks focused on the need for a full and assiduous investigation, and the prevention of any further threat, Donald Trump – who takes office on 20 January – seized the opportunity to fearmonger and point-score. He called the US a laughing stock, appeared to blame law enforcement and tried to link the attack to immigration even after it emerged that Jabbar was a US citizen born in Texas.
Mr Trump has directly espoused and amplified Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric, and has vowed to expand his first-term “Muslim ban” on migration. His choice of personnel, as well as his authoritarian tendencies, increase concerns about how his administration may respond to this and similar attacks. Reliable information and a determined, reasoned response from their president, rather than a hysterical, inaccurate and xenophobic reaction, are the best way to keep Americans safe.
ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/02/the-guardian-view-on-the-new-orleans-attack-a-familiar-horror-marks-an-anxious-new-year
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Jan. 2
The Philadelphia Inquirer says we need immigration reform, not crackdowns
Migrants aren’t the only ones dying — more than 5,000 in the last decade — because politics has replaced common sense as a way to solve the human crisis occurring daily at the U.S. border with Mexico.
Seventeen of the more than 10,000 Texas National Guardsmen unnecessarily deployed at the border since March 2021 have died from various causes, including seven suicides, two accidental shootings, two motor vehicle accidents, and the drowning of a guardsman who tried to save migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande.
Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has blamed the guardsmen’s deaths on “the Biden-Harris administration’s dangerous open border policies.” But he’s the one who ordered the guardsmen to the border as part of his Operation Lone Star deployment that has cost Texas taxpayers more than $11 billion since it began nearly four years ago.
Some of that money was spent to stretch razor wire across porous sections of the border. Some was spent to bus migrants — many of them asylum-seekers — to northern cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Abbott’s troop deployments have increased interactions with migrants, but have had no clearly discernible impact on decreased border crossings.
Federal authorities apprehended 32% fewer people crossing the border without authorization in June, but that was after President Joe Biden issued an executive order that stopped most grants of asylum to migrants. Also playing a role was Mexico’s improved efforts in the past year to apprehend and detain migrants before they reach the border.
The guardsmen’s deaths are hard to accept when one considers the futility of their mission. After years of seeing immigrants risk even their children’s lives to enter this country, it is clear no matter how difficult the journey is, they will not be deterred.
Many migrants have relatives and friends who have lived in this country for years without proper documentation, yet are able to work and send money back home. It’s understandable that they believe all they need to do is get here.
Blame that on the other broken part of America’s immigration system — the part that is supposed to stop employers from exploiting undocumented migrants by paying them low wages to toil in unhealthy conditions that they dare not complain about in fear of being deported.
Since 1996, the federal government has maintained a database that employers may use to verify the legal status of job applicants. But mandating use of the E-Verify system has been left to the states, and most have done a poor job. That’s mainly by choice. Manufacturers and farm businesses that depend on cheap labor have successfully lobbied politicians to limit the system’s use.
Meanwhile, when federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials do get tough with companies hiring undocumented immigrants, it is the workers rather than their supposedly unwitting employers who typically bear the brunt of any punishment. Local residents still haven’t gotten over a raid of seven poultry plants near Morton, Miss., five years ago that led to nearly 700 friends, neighbors, and relatives being deported.
Much worse can be expected if President-elect Donald Trump fulfills a campaign promise to begin mass deportations of anyone without proper authorization to live in the United States. The prohibitive cost of such a project, estimated at from $86 billion to $315 billion a year, may limit what ICE can do, given its current $230 million budget shortfall, but Trump typically does just enough to claim he kept a promise.
Being left out of the conversation is the need to impose higher sanctions not just on employers but other sections of American society that find profit in taking advantage of the undocumented status of migrants. That includes the landlords of substandard housing who rent to people who again dare not complain to public agencies about poor plumbing or no heat in winter months because they don’t want to call attention to themselves.
Migrants’ belief that even those aspects of America are preferable to what they left behind is why many won’t willingly go back. Most are good members of their new communities. They’re not taking anyone else’s jobs. Many are doing work their employers argue otherwise would not get done. And undocumented workers do pay taxes — $35 billion in 2022, according to the latest census data.
Twenty years ago, Congress worked on a commonsense path to citizenship that included fines for breaking immigration laws for those who deserve to remain in this country, but politics got in the way.
Isn’t it time this nation renewed that conversation?
ONLINE: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-mass-deportations-immigration-greg-abbott-texas-20250102.html
By The Associated Press
