Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Jan. 10

The New York Times on fixing U.S. immigration issues

The federal government’s ability to regulate immigration, a basic function of any nation, is broken. Over the past four years, some eight million people settled in the United States, and most of them did so unlawfully. Instead of an immigration policy calibrated to the needs of the country, both Americans and immigrants are being let down by a set of outdated laws inconsistently enforced by underfunded agencies. Chaos has been a predictable result.

Donald Trump won a second term as president on the promise that he would turn back the clock, restoring order by returning immigrants whence they came. The president-elect has vowed to deport all immigrants who do not have legal permission to be in the United States, and some who do. He also has described plans to curtail both illegal and legal immigration.

The United States undoubtedly needs to establish control over immigration, and we describe below the necessary changes. But mass deportations, or reductions in future immigration, are not in the national interest.

Immigrants are America’s rocket fuel, powering our nation’s unsurpassed economic and cultural achievements. The famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty mischaracterizes those who leave their home countries behind. They are not the tired and the poor; they are people possessed of the determination, skill and resources to seek a better life. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 142 immigrants to the United States. Nearly half of the companies in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. Blue jeans, Tesla, basketball, “God Bless America” — all the work of immigrants.

There’s a more basic imperative, too. America needs more people. Americans no longer make enough babies to maintain the country’s population. To sustain economic growth, the United States needs an infusion of a few million immigrants every year.

Without immigrants, the population would start to decline immediately, leaving employers short-handed, curtailing the economy’s potential and causing the kinds of strains on public services and society that have plagued Rust Belt cities for decades.

In Japan, where the population has been in decline since 2009, there are no longer enough postal workers to deliver mail on Saturdays. Nine million homes have been abandoned, and a recent report estimated that more than 40 percent of Japanese municipalities might disappear. The challenges prompted Fumio Kishida, then the prime minister, to declare in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

An effective American immigration system requires three big shifts in federal policy, and all three are necessary for any to succeed.

1. The government must make every reasonable effort to prevent people from living and working illegally in the United States. Congress should allocate the resources necessary to secure the nation’s borders and to overhaul the shambolic asylum system so that decisions are made at the border. To further deter people from coming to the United States to seek work — including the significant share of undocumented workers who enter the country legally, on temporary visas, and then remain illegally — the United States also needs to hold employers accountable for the legal status of their workers.

2. Congress should legislate an orderly expansion of legal immigration, including a role for the federal government in directing people to the places that would benefit from population growth and in underwriting the transition costs.

3. The nation also needs to deal humanely with the estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants who already live here, including the more than three million “Dreamers” brought to this country as children. For too long, large parts of the economy have depended on the labor of immigrants neither paid nor treated as the equals of Americans, a system of exploitation that also undermines American workers and law-abiding employers. Most immigrants who have made their lives in this country should be given a path to citizenship.

Versions of this tripartite approach were once embraced by political leaders in both parties. But in recent elections Democrats increasingly cast themselves as full-throated defenders of immigrants, regardless of legal status, while Republicans increasingly portrayed even legal immigration as a negative force in American life. The influx of immigrants into the country, in record numbers in the modern era, has overwhelmed red and blue state approaches. Both parties need a reality check.

Democrats should embrace the need to control who enters the country. High rates of immigration across Europe and North America have not led to more tolerance of newcomers but instead have led to a resurgence of nativist political movements that have shaken liberal democracy. Climate change is likely to increase the pressure by propelling more migrants to search for safety and opportunity. The United States cannot admit everyone who wishes to come, and the choice of who may come should be intentional, not a result of a government’s lack of the will and the capacity to enforce its own laws.

Mr. Trump, for his part, is mistaken to portray immigration as a drain on the nation’s resources. He should be condemned for his routinely bigoted portrayal of immigrants, often in defiance of the facts, as a danger to the American people and to the nation’s identity.

Instead, immigration ought to be regarded as an investment in the nation’s future.

The difference between welcoming immigration and trying to suppress it is the difference between Houston and Birmingham, Ala.

Houston began to attract large numbers of immigrants in the mid-1980s. During a downturn in oil prices, large apartment complexes built for oil field workers in neighborhoods such as Gulfton, west of downtown, started advertising for new tenants in Spanish. The basic attractions have remained the same ever since: inexpensive housing, plentiful jobs and the comfort of following in the footsteps of other immigrants.

The Houston area’s population has quadrupled, and nearly a quarter of the 7.5 million residents were born outside the United States, including more than 40 percent of Houston’s doctors, petroleum engineers and scientists, according to the Center for Houston’s Future, a nonprofit research group funded by the local business community.

Ngoc Ho came from Vietnam with her parents in 2014 to join her grandfather, who settled in Houston after the Vietnam War. Ms. Ho, 33, who now runs a day care program, said she loves Houston for its diversity. “It’s like a hot pot,” she said. “You don’t feel different, because everybody has English as a second language.”

The region’s prosperity stands as a rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s insistence that immigration is bad for American workers. Immigrants without specialized skills have pushed Americans out of some types of low-wage work because they are willing to accept worse conditions and lower pay. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the current surge in immigration will slow the pace of wage growth for Americans without college degrees over the next few years.

But as immigrants spend the money they earn, they create more jobs than they fill. To care for roughly three dozen children, most of whose parents are immigrants, Ms. Ho employs eight people. The C.B.O. predicts that by 2034, because of the surge in immigration, the nation’s annual economic output will be 3 percent larger.

Americans have a long history of celebrating past waves of immigration while worrying that the newest arrivals will be different — perhaps less successful or less American. But in a study published in 2017, the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan found that the current generation of immigrants was assimilating culturally and prospering economically at essentially the same pace as previous generations.

“The children of immigrants from El Salvador are as likely to be economically successful nowadays as were the children of immigrants from Great Britain 150 years ago,” they wrote in “Streets of Gold,” a 2022 book describing their research.

In contrast to Houston, Alabama, in 2011, passed what was then the most restrictive anti-immigration measure in the country. It prohibited hiring, renting property to or transporting undocumented immigrants. It denied financial aid at state universities to undocumented students. Some parts of the law have since been repealed, but the state’s politicians continue to demonize immigrants, even though Alabama has relatively few.

“Alabama has a terrible reputation, well deserved, for not welcoming immigrants,” said David Sher, a former chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The state’s hostility to immigration helps to explain why Birmingham has lost population in every decade since 1960. It is a city of unfilled spaces — vacant lots, parking lots — and of open jobs. Alabama in August had just 55 available workers for every 100 job openings, among the lowest rates in the country, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Ashley McMakin, who has built a popular chain of four Ashley Mac’s restaurants around the Birmingham area, serving home-style lunches and takeaway dinners, said she struggles to find workers. She offers signing bonuses and the kinds of benefits rarely seen in restaurant work, including health insurance and flexible scheduling.

She has partnered with programs that help ex-felons and people recovering from substance abuse return to the labor force. But she still faces chronic staffing difficulties, which have forced her to postpone expansion plans. At one point, Ms. McMakin posted a picture of a T-shirt on her Instagram feed that read: “Please Be Patient, There’s Like 3 of Us.” The caption said: “Do you like our new staff shirts?! If we don’t keep laughing, we might start crying.”

In 1965, the Black playwright Douglas Turner Ward premiered a one-act satire that revolved around the premise that all of the Black workers in a Southern town had disappeared. Homes went uncleaned. Babies went unfed. The town’s factories were shuttered. A local businessman complained that “the absence of handymen, porters, sweepers, stock-movers, deliverers and miscellaneous dirty-work doers is disrupting the smooth harmony of marketing!”

Immigrants are now the dirty-work doers. Americans rely on people born in other countries to pick crops, pluck chickens, build homes. Visit a wealthy neighborhood in the middle of the day, and you will find the streets alive with immigrants caring for the children, the dogs and the lawns. It is a bitter irony that even as the United States was ending the legal segregation of African Americans, it was effectively creating a new caste system in which many immigrants were enlisted as workers but excluded from becoming citizens. Roughly 11 million people, one-fourth of the foreign-born population, do not have permission to live here.

There is an inescapable unfairness in offering a path to citizenship to people who are in the United States illegally while so many others wait for years or even decades for their chance for legal entry. After decades of political malpractice and misjudgment, there is also no better alternative.

Mr. Trump will not succeed in making immigrants disappear. During his first term, he deported 325,000 people who were living in the U.S. Even if he deports 10 times as many in his second term, a volume many experts regard as beyond the government’s capacity, millions of immigrants would remain in the country, more vulnerable to exploitation because it will be dangerous for them to seek help.

A saving grace of the current system is that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants are Americans in full; Mr. Trump’s avowed intention to end birthright citizenship, which would require a constitutional amendment, would make undocumented status hereditary.

Americans face a choice between perpetuating a society maintained by an underclass of unauthorized workers or moving closer to the democratic ideal of a nation of citizens — a nation in which all are equal before the law. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1958, “citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”

Maintaining an underclass limits not only what its members can achieve but also what they can contribute. Cesar Espinosa’s family entered the United States from Mexico illegally in 1991, when he was 5 years old. Thirteen years later, he was accepted to Yale University, but he could not enroll because, as an illegal immigrant, he could not obtain financial aid. Instead, Mr. Espinosa built a nonprofit, FIEL Houston, that pushes to make higher education available to undocumented immigrants.

“There’s a version of my life where I’m one of those people living in a condo downtown and working in the Energy Corridor,” he said, referring to the glass and steel Houston office towers where some of the nation’s largest companies are headquartered. “I’ve sat up all night sometimes thinking about it.”

Mr. Espinosa’s family was part of the wave of immigrants who entered the country after the last major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, which was intended to greatly reduce illegal immigration.

The fatal flaw was that the government did not impose any real obligations on employers.

It is illegal to knowingly employ illegal immigrants, but the penalties are modest. The government runs a verification system called E-Verify, which is optional for most employers and notoriously easy to game. Verification is based on possession of a valid Social Security number, but illegal immigrants can use someone else’s.

In the mid-2000s, Todd Davis, chief executive of an identity-protection company called LifeLock, published his Social Security number on billboards as a marketing gimmick. A Houston lawyer who works on immigration cases said he found at least 165 instances in which undocumented workers in the Houston area used Mr. Davis’s number.

The government’s longstanding focus on policing immigrants rather than employers is akin to arresting drug users rather than dealers, and it has been roughly as successful.

In 2009, Marek Brothers, a Houston construction company, fired dozens after a government review found the workers had used other people’s Social Security numbers. Stan Marek, the company’s chief executive, said he soon noticed that some of those workers found jobs doing the same work for independent contractors too small to be subjected to scrutiny by federal regulators.

The correctives are straightforward: Limit the classification of workers as independent contractors, so companies are responsible for more of their work forces; legislate an affirmative obligation for companies to verify the immigration status of those workers; create a robust verification system.

Verification would protect workers and law-abiding employers from unfair competition as well as protecting immigrants from exploitation.

Mr. Marek said his business is challenged not just by the low-priced competition but also by the difficulty in finding legal workers even at higher wages. He recruits at high schools and halfway houses, but a vast majority of those he is able to hire are legal immigrants, and there aren’t enough. “Immigrants do the hard work, and we haven’t had a legal way to have them do that since 1986,” he said.

Satish Nannapaneni left India on a student visa in 1997 to earn a master’s degree in software engineering at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. After obtaining a green card, he started Flexera Global, a tech services company based in Sugar Land. He is now an American citizen with 140 employees.

He’d like to hire more people, but he can’t find American workers. Those who have the skills are often uninterested in a job that requires regular travel.

Companies can use a special visa, the H-1B, to hire highly educated foreign workers, but the government hasn’t increased the number of visas since 2006. In 2024, Mr. Nannapaneni’s company applied for 47 H-1B visas and received nine.

“People want to come here, they’re talented, and still the politicians keep talking about it instead of fixing the issue,” Mr. Nannapaneni said.

From technology companies in Texas to turf farmers in Alabama, employers insist they can’t find enough domestic workers, and the numbers bear them out. The unemployment rate is low, and as Americans have fewer children, the shortage of workers is projected to increase. The nation must import more than 1.6 million people each year simply to maintain the population.

Proposals to expand legal immigration often focus on identifying immigrants who are most likely to contribute, economically or otherwise, to our national life.

Minimum standards, such as barring criminals, are a matter of common sense. Governments, however, are not always equipped to determine who will make the greatest contributions.

Hugo Ortega had no obvious skills when he arrived in Houston in 1984 at the age of 19.

He decided to leave Mexico City because he was hungry and facing homelessness. He knew that one of his uncles had found work in Texas, sometimes sending home letters that included $20 bills carefully wrapped in aluminum foil.

He was caught at the border five times before he succeeded in crossing on the sixth attempt. In Houston, he took a job as a dishwasher. Four decades later, he is a Houston icon, the chef and a co-owner of a string of celebrated restaurants. “I put my life at risk to come here, and I would do it in a heartbeat again and again and again,” he said.

The amnesty provisions in the 1986 immigration law allowed Mr. Ortega to obtain a green card in 1989 and to become an American citizen in 1996. Along the way he married the restaurant owner, and together they built a culinary empire introducing Houston, long the homeland of Tex-Mex food, to more authentic varieties of Mexican cuisine.

Houston restaurants now serve faithful renditions of a wide range of homeland cuisines, as well as mash-ups that may not be found anywhere else, like beef pho kolaches and brisket tikka masala. But Mr. Ortega knows that immigrant dishwashers in Houston today cannot follow his path. They have little chance of becoming full members of the society in which they work. Indeed, they now face the possibility of being forced to leave.

What would he say to Americans skeptical of immigration?

“Give us an opportunity,” Mr. Ortega said. “You know, just give us an opportunity to cook for you. Give us an opportunity to be part of this wonderful country.”

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/opinion/american-immigration-immigrants.html

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Jan. 14

The Wall Street Journal says Pete Hegseth was lobbed softballs by Senate

Americans didn’t learn much about Pentagon nominee Pete Hegseth at his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, but they did learn more about the world’s greatest nondeliberative body. Democrats mostly played into Mr. Hegseth’s hands with questions he easily parried, while Republicans asked little of substance.

The most effective Democratic questioning came from Virginia’s Tim Kaine, who wanted to know why Mr. Hegseth didn’t disclose to the Trump team a settlement he paid to a woman who accused him of sexual assault. Mr. Hegseth kept saying he was “falsely charged” but never answered the question.

Many Democrats wasted their time framing Mr. Hegseth’s previous comments on women in combat as if this were 1994. But Mr. Hegseth said he now believes women should be able to serve in the armed forces as long as they can meet the same physical standards as men.

Republicans didn’t do much scrutinizing. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) noted that Senators sometimes show up drunk for votes at night and cheat on their wives, but they aren’t in the chain of command of U.S. military forces. Tim Sheehy (R., Mont.), after opening his remarks by asking how many genders there are, did ask about Navy shipbuilding, to which Mr. Hegseth basically said Donald Trump wants to build ships. No details.

Ted Budd (R., N.C.) asked what the U.S. should do about its shortage of fighter aircraft, and Mr. Hegseth said he looked forward to “looking under the hood” once confirmed. He gave the same vague answer to Sen. Deb Fischer (R., Neb.) when she inquired whether the nominee supports a “nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile system” to counter Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities.

Mr. Hegseth made noises about restoring U.S. military deterrence, and that’s something. But it appears we’re on track to have a secretary of Defense whose real views are a mystery. Let’s hope he rises to the occasion.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/pete-hegseth-senate-hearing-pentagon-defense-secretary-donald-trump-001b4aca?mod=editorials_article_pos2

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Jan. 14

The Washington Post says California fires are an insurance crisis warning for America

The flames ripping through parts of Los Angeles and neighboring counties for the past week have been an unprecedented disaster, and persistent Santa Ana winds threaten to keep the smoke and horror going. At least 24 people have died and more than 40,000 acres have burned. Many residents will soon return to leveled neighborhoods, having watched via home security cameras or news feeds as the inferno engulfed their homes and businesses.

As the evacuees look ahead to rebuilding, they are seeing the limits of the region’s faulty insurance system — and the need to better protect homes from natural disasters made worse and more frequent by climate change.

Early estimates project that the fires will be among the costliest and most destructive in the country’s history, with losses so far between $135 billion and $150 billion. Analysts attribute the scale of damage to a combination of factors: the breadth, duration and intensity of the fires in densely populated neighborhoods of relatively expensive homes.

How will property owners pay for this? Insurance is offering inadequate answers. In recent years, many people living in parts of the state’s wildfire-prone areas have lost their home insurance coverage. Some insurers have stopped doing business in the state altogether, citing financial risks from too-frequent wildfires. Last March, State Farm General, the state’s largest insurer, declined to renew 30,000 policies — including 1,626 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood that was devastated by the fires. Allstate, Tokio Marine America Insurance Co. and others also have left California’s home insurance market.

After these cancellations, many residents across the state risked going without insurance. Others turned to FAIR, California’s public stopgap insurance program, which provides minimal coverage. In the past four years, enrollment in FAIR has more than doubled. FAIR has access to only $700 million and about $2.5 billion in reinsurance. But the program is exposed to nearly $6 billion of assets at risk in the Pacific Palisades alone.

Though the agency claims to have mechanisms in place to cover the recent fires, there’s a real hazard the program could become insolvent. It would be a calamity for the state, where climate change has increased the frequency and severity of wildfires. Fifteen of California’s 20 most destructive wildfires have come in the past decade. Making matters worse, if or when FAIR falls short of funds, the remaining liability will be turned over to the state’s private insurers, which can eventually pass these costs along to all their insured homeowners in the state through rate hikes.

The insurance crisis has been made worse by a 1988 state law, Proposition 103, that has held rates artificially low. The policy undercut a key purpose of insurance — signaling financial risk — by preventing insurers from raising premiums to account for reinsurance costs or to adhere to forward-looking catastrophe models (not commonly used when the law was passed). These restrictions limited insurers’ options at a time of heightened fire danger and helped drive companies out of California. The state has since undertaken a series of reforms to lure them back.

About a week before the Palisades fire, California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, announced rule changes that require insurers to cover more wildfire-prone areas, but with a concession: The industry could factor reinsurance and modern catastrophe modeling into their rates, enabling them to share the rising costs of wildfires with customers. But insurers still must get the state’s approval for any rate increases.

Higher premiums will be painful for homeowners, but accurate risk assessments are essential if markets are to realistically understand the dangers homeowners face. State lawmakers have to face the unpleasant reality that the cost of home insurance — and subsequently homeownership — will go up (exacerbating the ongoing affordability problem) because insurers will need even more latitude to operate without losses in the state.

Insurers and homeowners also could use the state’s and cities’ help to fireproof houses and buildings. The state can provide assistance with replacing roofs and siding, for example, and installing ember-resistant vents. It can also enforce requirements for buffer zones around properties to better contain fires. Cities, for their part, can shore up and enforce building codes to ensure that all homes are made fire-resistant.

Such steps can make a difference for the future. After the 2018 Camp Fire decimated Paradise, California, the town’s efforts to rebuild with a focus on fire resistance drew wary insurers back.

L.A.’s nightmare should serve as a warning to other states: Climate change is crushing insurance markets, and the solution is not to artificially lower premiums or rely on public options. States must act to protect homeowners from hazards — before the next natural disaster strikes.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/14/california-wildfires-home-insurance-crisis/

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Jan. 12

The Guardian on capital punishment and a rise in executions

The good news: Zimbabwe has just banned the death penalty. While it should remove an exemption clause, which might allow for capital punishment’s return were a state of emergency to be declared, the decision is another welcome step in the global journey towards abolition: 113 states have now banned executions.

The bad news is that fewer countries have been killing more people in the last few years. Last May, Amnesty International recorded 1,153 executions in 2023, a 31% increase from the previous year and the highest level for almost a decade. (The figure is an underestimate since countries including China, believed to be the world’s largest executioner, do not publish data on the death penalty.) There was no letup in 2024. Iran reportedly executed more than 900 people. Saudi Arabia is believed to have killed another 330, compared with 172 in 2023.

In the US, the toll was stable. But while more states have abolished capital punishment over recent years, there is a renewed push for executions in retentionist states. Three – Utah, South Carolina and Indiana – resumed killings last year after more than a decade.

Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of 37 men under federal death sentences in December was welcome. He should have sent a still clearer moral message by doing the same for the remaining three, who committed terrorist or hate-motivated mass murder.

But the spur to his action was clear. Thirteen federal prisoners were executed in the first term of Donald Trump, a death penalty zealot – more than under the previous 10 presidents combined. They included executions carried out against the wishes of prosecutors and victims. A new administration cannot undo the commutations, and the lengthy appeals process ensures that the remaining trio will not be executed on Mr Trump’s watch. But he has vowed to “vigorously pursue the death penalty” and called for the execution of everyone selling drugs. And state death sentences are vastly more common than federal: the Death Penalty Information Center says that about 2,250 prisoners are on death row.

In his last term, Mr Trump appointed federal and supreme court judges who have ensured that the default is now to refuse appeals instead of taking them. Above all, he has embedded and intensified a political culture that pursues executions with increasing ruthlessness. States are not only more aggressive in seeking and implementing death sentences, but are turning to crueller methods including nitrogen gas – banned by veterinarians for use on most mammals across Europe and the US.

Those killed are vastly more likely to be poor and to be people of colour; many have intellectual disabilities or histories of severe childhood abuse. In a startling number of cases there are serious doubts about their convictions. Missouri killed Marcellus Williams in September against the opposition of the victim’s family, jurors and even the office that prosecuted him. DNA traces from the scene could not be linked to Mr Williams.

That case, like others, has sparked a surprising backlash even among Republicans who back the death penalty. And, while the majority of Americans still support capital punishment, for the first time most young Americans oppose it – with support falling slightly among young Republicans too. That should give heart to abolitionists in the US and globally. While the blood-hungry may seem to be in the ascendant, there is more reason than ever to push for an end to state-mandated murder.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/12/the-guardian-view-on-capital-punishment-an-upsurge-in-executions-should-concern-us-all

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Jan. 12

The Boston Globe on Biden’s veto of judicial reform

In Washington, it is sadly rare for bipartisan legislation addressing an urgent need to pass and make its way to the desk of the president. But it happened as 2024 drew to a close: A bill that would have gone a long way to alleviate the decades-long federal judge shortage, which often slows the wheels of justice to a crawl, passed Congress and was presented to President Biden.

And Biden, a long proponent of this very kind of judicial reform, vetoed it.

In so doing, he scolded congressional Republicans who have raised the act of politicizing the federal judiciary to an art form. His criticism is sound, but his veto was misguided. It isn’t Republican lawmakers who will suffer from Biden’s veto. It’s the Americans who must rely on federal courts to get justice — justice that will now continue to be delayed, if not denied.

The vetoed bill, called the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved (JUDGES) Act of 2024, would have added 66 new trial-level federal district judgeships in 13 of the most backlogged states, staggered over the course of 10 years. That would have spread the nominations of those judges over three presidential terms.

The last major increase in the number of federal trial judges was nearly 35 years ago. Meanwhile, over the past two decades, the caseload of federal trial courts has increased more than threefold, growing from just over 18,000 pending cases in 2004 to more than 81,000 as of 2024, according to data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

That leads to not only increased workloads of judges but also long backlogs for litigants. The ripple effects are real and sometimes devastating. While the average time it takes a civil case to get to trial is two years after a complaint is filed, in the states where these new permanent judgeships would have been created the wait is as long as five years, according to federal court officials.

With that kind of wait time, businesses can fold before commercial disputes are settled, individuals who have suffered harms could face financial devastation before any compensation is awarded, and all litigants will have to pay much more in attorney fees and other costs.

In a statement accompanying his veto, Biden assailed Republicans for dragging their feet on the measure until after the presidential election results and then sending it to his desk with renewed fervor knowing President-elect Donald Trump would be the first to start filling the new vacancies.

Biden also accused lawmakers of failing to fully explore “how the work of senior status judges and magistrate judges affects the need for new judgeships.”

But the crux of Biden’s objection is that the measure would have created “new judgeships in States where Senators have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies. Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now.”

His criticism of Republican’s politicization of the measure are valid. Led by former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, efforts by the GOP senators to obstruct Democratic judicial nominees while speeding through judicial picks during Trump’s first term resulted in a federal judiciary farther to the ideological right than most of America.

And Biden has had a strong record on judicial confirmations, surpassing Trump’s total number of judicial appointments, and adding much-needed diversity to federal benches. But that doesn’t change the fact that the bipartisan drumbeat for more judgeships to handle the courts’ burgeoning demand predates even McConnell’s tenure as leader.

“It is not a bill that was hastily put together,” Judge Robert J. Conrad Jr., the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, said in a statement after Biden’s veto. “Rather it is the product of careful and detailed analysis which considers primarily the weighted caseload per active judge in each judicial district, while also factoring in the contribution of senior judges, magistrate judges, and visiting judges.”

And though Republicans have politicized the confirmation process, Biden following suit doesn’t right that wrong.

“This veto is a deviation from the long historical pattern of approving judgeship bills that awarded new judgeships to sitting Presidents,” Conrad said. “The President’s veto is contrary to the actions of Senator Biden who helped pass many of those bills.”

Biden, who presided over countless judicial confirmations as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee during his time in the upper chamber, should know better. He’s right to call out Republicans for playing politics but wrong to wade into the mud with them.

ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/12/opinion/biden-judges-courts-veto/

By The Associated Press