Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

July 22

The Washington Post on what Kamala Harris needs to do to win the election

With President Biden’s exit from the race, Democrats are quickly coalescing around Vice President Harris. Too quickly, arguably: Both she and the country would be better served by a brief, contested nomination process that tested her skills as a presidential campaigner and sparked discussion about where the next generation of Democratic leaders should take the party.

The party seems to have made up its mind, though. So now it’s the nation’s turn. Fate has presented Ms. Harris the rarest of political opportunities: to start a presidential campaign in the summer of an election year as a fresh, all-but-anointed candidate free to present her vision to all voters, not just to her own party. Though many Americans might already have feelings about their vice president, they are listening now.

To a country that could use reassurance — indeed, to those Americans who like much of Mr. Biden’s record — Ms. Harris could start by explaining how much of a reset she would represent. A clean break from Bidenism would be a mistake.

When Ms. Harris sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, she tried to play down her record as a tough-on-crime California prosecutor and embrace the progressive left of the Democratic Party, backing policies that lacked broad appeal, such as Medicare-for-all. She did not make it out of 2019 before folding her campaign. Mr. Biden prevailed, in both the primaries and the general, after declining to court the passionate minority to whom candidates such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) appealed. Amid much activist mockery of his refusal to give up on bipartisanship or on a return to civility in politics — indeed, on the broad middle of the country — Mr. Biden built a coalition of liberals, voters of color, moderates and ex-Republicans.

In the White House, Mr. Biden’s approach helped get substantial bipartisan bills over the finish line, investing in national infrastructure and critical semiconductor manufacturing. He also signed a bill that should have been bipartisan: the nation’s most ambitious climate change policy to date.

Ms. Harris should both resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow. Ms. Harris’s pick of running mate could be a revealing early indicator, too. Tapping a politician likely to appeal to the median voter would serve her — and the country — best.

Ms. Harris appears to be showing due respect for Mr. Biden. Speaking Monday at the White House to college athletes who won national championships this school year, she signaled that she intends to run on Mr. Biden’s record. “In one term, he has already surpassed the legacy of most presidents who have served two terms,” she said. She traveled in the afternoon to Wilmington, Del., to deliver a pep talk to Biden campaign staffers, who now all work for her.

This is not to say that Mr. Biden has made no mistakes, or that Ms. Harris should run as a Biden clone. The president has sometimes tried to pander to voters with policies such as widespread student debt cancellation or, more recently, nationwide rent stabilization. Mr. Biden has generally picked smart, competent staff — but not always — and Ms. Harris could say which of them she might keep.

More to the point, Mr. Biden’s approval rating has been mired in the 30s. Majorities disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of several issues that voters care about most, including inflation and immigration.

Ms. Harris might look at those numbers, and the complexity of the issues, and be tempted to ride a glide path to the nomination, taking few risks between now and when delegates vote in August. She should do the opposite. She could deliver a detailed national address and take substantive questions from journalists, hold a televised town hall to engage directly with voters and give interviews after rallies in battleground states. She could even take part in forums with fellow Democrats to showcase that the party is more than any one individual. The goal is to emerge from vice-presidential muddiness to presidential sharpness.

A change in messenger might help convince people that, say, the president’s handling of the Ukraine war has actually been strong, or that the economy is, in fact, humming. It also allows the Democratic ticket to sketch its vision. The pen is in Ms. Harris’s hand.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/22/kamala-harris-dnc-biden-differences/

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July 19

The New York Times on Russia silencing journalism, Evan Gershkovich

The only surprise in the guilty verdict against Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent who was arrested in Russia last year on phony charges of espionage, was that it came so quickly. The charge itself was a farce. No evidence was ever made public, the hearings were held in secret, and Mr. Gershkovich’s lawyers were barred from saying anything in public about the case.

Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest, trial and conviction all serve President Vladimir Putin’s goal of silencing any honest reporting from inside Russia about the invasion of Ukraine and of making Russians even warier of speaking with any foreigner about the war.

Independent Russian news outlets have been almost entirely shut down and their journalists imprisoned or forced to leave the country, so foreign correspondents are among the few remaining sources of independent reporting from inside Russia. Mr. Gershkovich’s last published article before his arrest, on March 29, 2023, was headlined “ Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone ” — just the sort of vital independent journalism that challenges Mr. Putin’s claims of a strong and vibrant Russia fighting a just war.

Russian prosecutors claimed that Mr. Gershkovich, acting on instructions from Washington, used “painstaking conspiratorial methods” to obtain “secret information” about Uralvagonzavod, a Russian weapons factory near Yekaterinburg, where he was arrested and tried.

The existence of this massive industrial complex is well known, but the charge of espionage allowed Russian prosecutors to keep the entire proceeding secret while fueling Mr. Putin’s propaganda about efforts by the United States and Europe to destabilize Russia.

Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free expression, especially about the war in Ukraine, is unrelenting. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 22 in detention, including Mr. Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, a U.S.-Russian dual citizen and an editor with the U.S.-government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Over the past few weeks, the Kremlin has banned 81 European Union media outlets, including Der Spiegel and Politico, for “systematically disseminating false information about the progress of the special military operation” — the only legal way to refer to the war against Ukraine. Russian authorities have also designated The Moscow Times, an English-language publication that now publishes from outside Russia, an “ undesirable organization,” making it dangerous for anyone in Russia to have any contact with it. Masha Gessen, a Times Opinion columnist, was tried in absentia and sentenced to eight years in prison this week for criticizing the Russian military.

Just as important to Mr. Putin’s political aims: He has been able to use Mr. Gershkovich as a hostage, as he did with the American basketball player Brittney Griner, who was freed in 2022 after 10 months in prison in exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in the United States.

There is a sliver of good news here. This trial could have dragged on for years if Mr. Putin had so desired. That it ended just hours after closing arguments strongly suggests that a deal has been reached on swapping the American reporter for a Russian imprisoned in the West. On Wednesday the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said that the United States and Russia were holding talks on a possible swap. The most likely candidate is believed to be Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of an exiled Chechen commander in Berlin. If a swap happens, we welcome the possibility that Mr. Gershkovich could be quickly released and returned to his family in the United States.

But Mr. Gershkovich has already spent 16 months in detention in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, and the conviction means he would have to serve his sentence in a high-security penal colony. Several other Americans are also being held in Russia, and one or more of them could also be released as part of a deal.

Any celebration over Mr. Gershkovich’s potential release is overshadowed by the utter cynicism of Russian authorities’ decision to detain him in the first place.

Mr. Putin’s police state has made a habit of seizing hostages any time one of its agents is caught. And yet the determination of reporters like Mr. Gershkovich, and the many Russians who are risking their freedom to describe the realities behind Mr. Putin’s elaborate myths, has not been crushed. They have no illusions about the risks, but they understand the critical importance of puncturing Mr. Putin’s lies. That is journalism, not espionage, and it deserves the unwavering support of the United States and the world.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opinion/evan-gershkovich-russia-journalist.html

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July 22

The Wall Street Journal on the Secret Service, the attempted assassination of Trump

Everyone with a video screen knows about the failure to protect Donald Trump from a would-be assassin in Butler, Pa. But don’t look to Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle for answers because she doesn’t have any.

That was the bottom line from a House Oversight Committee hearing on Monday. Ms. Cheatle said the agency failed in protecting the former President—no kidding—but did little to explain the staggering operational mistakes. She couldn’t illuminate even basic facts about how a young shooter, apparently acting alone, was able to get an AR-15 style rifle within a few hundred feet of the former President.

We know law enforcement noticed the alleged gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, before the rally began and designated him as suspicious. Local police alerted the Secret Service because of the man’s behavior near the magnetometers. Around 5:30 p.m. the shooter was spotted again looking through a rangefinder, a device shooters use to calculate distance to a target.

Those moments should have been enough to transform Crooks from a “person of interest” to an active threat. But that didn’t happen, and Ms. Cheatle deflected lawmakers’ questions with a bureaucratic defense. “I think we’re conflating the difference between the term ‘threat’ and ‘suspicious,’” she said. “An individual with a backpack is not a threat. . . . An individual with a range finder is not a threat.”

She was wrong about that. Instead of law enforcement questioning and searching him, the gunman continued his amateurish plan unmolested. About 10 minutes before Mr. Trump took the stage, Crooks had climbed atop a building a few hundred yards away with an unobstructed view of Mr. Trump’s podium.

The Secret Service has said the building where the shooter perched was outside its security perimeter for the event, but why? When Oversight Chairman James Comer (R., Ken.) asked about responsibility for the roof, Ms. Cheatle said there was “a plan in place to provide overwatch” but didn’t provide details.

The Secret Service has acknowledged that its agents should have been in control of the building rather than relying on local law enforcement. This alone is a huge failure. Police provide additional security, but the Secret Service is the protection detail. Agents should be clearing all areas and keeping eyes on risky corners with drones or other surveillance.

In the minutes before he tried to kill Mr. Trump, the shooter was spotted by rally attendees who pointed and shouted to alert law enforcement. Why wasn’t the gunman taken out by snipers before he fired into the crowd. Why was Mr. Trump even allowed on stage?

Ms. Cheatle failed to answer those questions, telling lawmakers she needed to wait until the internal investigation is done in some 60 days, Her non-answers managed the rare feat of uniting Democrats and Republicans in calls for her resignation. Mr. Comer and ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) both say she should go.

At the hearing, progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) asked Ms. Cheatle if she knew what Secret Service director Stuart Knight did after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. “He remained on duty,” Ms. Cheatle said. Mr. Khanna replied, “He resigned.”

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/articles/clueless-at-the-secret-service-279e0d04?mod=editorials_article_pos8

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July 18

The Los Angeles Times on the GOP and abortion rights

It’s not surprising that the Republican Party took out of its platform, after decades, support of a national abortion ban.

Not that Donald Trump and his new vice presidential running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, have had some epiphany and renounced their long-standing opposition to reproductive rights. It’s more likely that party leaders realized the stance risks alienating the millions of voters in conservative and swing states who support reproductive rights. States that voted for Trump in 2020, such as Ohio and Kansas, more recently voted to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions or rejected measures that would prohibit doing so after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022.

So instead, the party slipped a seemingly innocuous statement into its platform, which delegates approved this week at the Republican National Convention, about standing for “families and Life.” That sounds reasonable, but it’s much more sinister than it seems.

The statement continues with the observation that the 14th Amendment “guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” It then proclaims, “After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People.” This is a reference to the Supreme Court taking away the federal right to abortion.

It may be subtle, but it is clearly signaling that the party hasn’t changed its values. It’s a call for more fetal personhood laws, which can be much more extreme and wide-reaching than abortion bans. These laws confer all the same rights on fetuses in a uterus — and sometimes just fertilized eggs — of any person walking around. More significantly, the fetus’ rights supersede those of the pregnant woman.

It’s outrageous that anyone would support laws that take away personhood rights from pregnant women while bestowing that status on their fetuses. As with all antiabortion statutes, they turn the pregnant person into little more than an incubator.

There are already 18 states with some kind of fetal personhood law or fetal personhood protection established by court decisions, according to Pregnancy Justice, an organization that advocates for the rights of pregnant people. Depending on how they are interpreted, personhood laws could affect access to abortion, in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures and certain types of contraception such as IUDs because they occasionally act after fertilization.

Personhood statutes were kept in check by Roe vs. Wade. Now that Roe is overturned it’s possible these laws could be used to ban abortion. For example, just days after the Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case, abortion services stopped in Arizona because it has a law on the books granting personhood to fetuses, embryos and fertilized eggs. Advocates successfully got part of the law blocked in federal court. There are likely more legal fights ahead here and in other states with similar laws.

But the reason to worry about these laws is that they could be used not just to stop a person from getting an abortion but criminalize a pregnant person for falling down a flight of stairs, using even legal drugs or having a miscarriage. “You are making that person a walking crime scene,” says Karen Thompson, the legal director of Pregnancy Justice.

Fetal personhood laws may also end up stopping IVF procedures. The Alabama Supreme Court decision this year that frozen embryos have the same rights as children provoked a national uproar and caused IVF clinics in the state to suddenly stop services. (Alabama then passed a law protecting IVF providers from civil and criminal liability for loss of embryos during the treatments.) Interestingly, the GOP platform also specifically states the party supports IVF.

Trump continues to take credit for putting three justices on the Supreme Court who were instrumental in overturning Roe vs. Wade. Even as he tries to disown his past support for a national ban, he refused to tell Time magazine in April if he would veto such a ban if he becomes president. His running mate opposed the Ohio ballot measure last year enshrining abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution. He signed a letter from a group of Republican senators and Congress members last year calling on Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland to enforce part of a moribund 19th century vice law, the Comstock Act, that could be used to ban the mailing of abortion pills.

This new statement in the platform is just a change in language, not values. The GOP will not protect a woman’s right to control her own body. And voters should not think otherwise.

ONLINE: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-07-18/rnc-platform-personhood-abortion-gop

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July 21

The Houston Chronicle on the Trump shooting, gun violence in the U.S.

For Texas youngsters not too many years ago — usually boys, occasionally girls — a gun represented a more common rite of passage. Graduating at a tender age from leather-holstered cap pistols and backyard shoot-outs with black-hatted bad guys astride broomstick horses, a kid anticipated the next step: a long, narrow package under the Christmas tree signaling that Santa had dropped in with a Daisy Red Ryder BB rifle in his gift arsenal. Daisy was, and is, the BB gun manufacturer. Red Ryder was a popular comic strip character, who, with his Native American sidekick Little Beaver, rode the range and kept the peace in the 1890s, Red astride his mighty steed Thunder, Little Beaver trying to keep up on a pony called Papoose.

Back then, a few years firing BBs at tin cans or birds (or another kid’s rear end) might lead during the early teen years to a real gun — a .410 shotgun for dove or quail hunting with dad, maybe at some point a .22 rifle for deer hunting, almost always accompanied by strict instructions about gun safety.

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump by a young man barely out of his teens is the latest horrific example that things have changed drastically in this country since Red Ryder and his pal rode off into the sunset. Too many youngsters around the country seem to be skipping the BB guns phase and, with various levels of parental acquiescence, graduating to weapons of war designed not just to kill human beings, but to pulverize them. These days, birds and squirrels are relatively safe; humans are the hunted.

We live with that fatalistic reality, a reality so disturbing that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a first-ever advisory last month declaring gun violence a national public health crisis. Murthy recommended that we start taking firearm violence as seriously as the alarming statistics: Since 2020, for example, firearm-related injury has been the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents, ages 1 to 19. Here’s another statistic that underscores how our national gun obsession warps everyday life: In 2021,gun deaths hit a three-decade high, driven by increases in homicides and suicides.

The 20-year-old shooter at the Trump rally July 13 used an AR-15 his father had bought a dozen or so years ago and apparently kept around the house. Firing his military weapon from about 450 feet away, the shooter reportedly came within a quarter of an inch of killing a once and perhaps future president. Incidentally, USA Today reported that the brand of the rifle, DPMS, is now owned by the parent of South Carolina-based Palmetto State armory, which Trump visited just last year on the campaign trail, snapping photos with the owner and admiring the grip of a Glock engraved with his face.

Although the would-be assassin’s weapon of choice has been used to destroy human beings in schools, movie theaters, churches and grocery stores, it had never been used to try to assassinate a former president. Until that Saturday.

“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump on Thursday told a Republican National Convention crowd that stood riveted, some in tears, as he recounted the shooting.

“Yes you are!” the crowd chanted back.

“Thank you, but I’m not,” Trump responded. “And I’ll tell you, I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.”

One of the rally attendees didn’t survive.

Corey Comperatore, a small-town firefighter and engineer, died trying to shield his family. Two other people suffered critical injuries but Trump said they were on the mend.

The Pennsylvania shooter, shot and killed by law enforcement after he fired at Trump, appears to have taken advantage of family inattention or irresponsibility in obtaining his father’s weapon. He’s not the first. An uncle, perhaps unwittingly, drove the18-year-old Uvalde shooter to the gun store to buy the AR-15 he used to slaughter 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in May 2022.

After a 19-year-old fatally shot seven people at a Fourth of July parade in suburban Chicago, also in 2022, his father, Robert Crimo Jr, initially faced several felony counts of reckless conduct. Prosecutors said he helped his son acquire the guns despite warnings that he could be a public safety risk.

As far back as 2012, Nancy Lanza, the mother of a 21-year-old who killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, collected powerful weapons and began taking her deeply troubled son to shooting ranges to practice using her guns together. Her son used her .22-caliber Savage Mark II rifle to kill her first.

Earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley of Michigan became the first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for ignoring signs that their 15-year-old son was a danger to himself and others. For Christmas one year, his parents had bought him a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun. In 2021, he took the gun to school and murdered four of his classmates, injuring seven more.

So, this is the world we live in — or, rather, this is the nation we live in, a nation where approximately 400 million guns are in circulation, including some 20 million of the AR-15 military-style rifles; where more than 1,500 school shootings have occurred since 1997, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Tens of thousands of gun deaths every year are a uniquely American phenomenon. Other nations have dealt with outbursts of gun violence by taking swift and effective action; Australia and New Zealand come to mind. In this country, courts, Congress and state legislatures, not to mention well-funded lobbying organizations, make it almost impossible to take sensible action. We choose to live with the threat, or, more precisely, to die with it.

Just last week, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota’s ban preventing residents ages 18 to 20 from carrying handguns in public is unconstitutional. It was merely the latest of numerous gun laws overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision last month that said gun laws must align with “history and tradition.” If Trump returns to the White House, sensible gun-safety measures will likely become history (despite his own brush with dying at the hands of a shooter).

If a nation has to acquiesce to gun ubiquity, there has to be another way to protect ourselves. Surgeon General Murthy’s recommendation is a long-range proposal designed to support research and apply science to the gun-violence crisis. Under the rubric “national crisis,” institutions and experts will collect data, develop and test prevention strategies and endorse programs found to be effective. (We might find out, for example, whether holding parents responsible for their children’s actions is an effective technique.) Declaring gun violence a public-health crisis, Murthy hopes, will lead eventually to reforms similar to those that brought about drastic reductions in deaths and injuries from tobacco and from motor-vehicle crashes.

“I want people to understand the full impact of firearm violence in our country, and I want them to see it as a public health issue,” Murthy said in a Washington Post interview. “I know it’s been polarizing, and I know it’s been politicized, but if we can see it as a public health issue, we can come together and implement a public health solution.”

Once upon a time, Americans smoked on airplanes and in restaurants and theaters; smokers some years back died of cancer at alarming levels. Once upon a time, motorists entrusted their lives to vehicles “unsafe at any speed.” Over time, we managed to implement life-saving reforms. In the face of our gun obsession, those efforts seem almost as quaint as Red Ryder and his buddy, Little Beaver (who, by the way, relied on a bow and arrow to help subdue the bad guys).

Gun-safety advocates may feel like they’re astride Little Beaver’s pony Papoose in their daunting battle with the gun lobby, but they must not surrender. Labeling gun violence a crisis is the least they can do — and, these days, probably the most.

ONLINE: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/trump-assassination-ar-15-public-health-crisis-19584273.php

By The Associated Press