Editorial Roundup: United States
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
___
March 26
The Washington Post on foreign aid reform
The arguments the Trump administration makes to justify dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development are, for the most part, just ill-informed wisecracks.
To call the United States’ $10 million contribution to support male circumcision in Mozambique “ appalling waste,” as President Donald Trump has done, reveals his ignorance of how the procedure helps prevent HIV infections. A grant to support better farming practices in Liberia is hardly “ridiculous” or “malicious.” Though it is true that opium poppy growers in Afghanistan have benefited from aid to improve irrigation, irrigation aid for poor Afghan farmers in general is not a bad way to alleviate poverty and promote economic development.
Plenty of good arguments can be made in favor of reforming foreign assistance — to make it more effective and efficient. But neither the president nor cost-cutter Elon Musk has articulated them. Their ridicule of specific aid programs only muddles the important debate over how to ensure that foreign aid serves its core mission: to improve the lives of billions living in the world’s most impoverished nations.
Foreign assistance is under siege in other countries as well. The British government recently announced it would cut its aid budget to 0.3 percent of its gross domestic product by 2027, from 0.5 percent this year and 0.7 percent in 2020. The European Union is reportedly planning to slash funding to the world’s least-developed countries by 35 percent. The French, Dutch and Belgians are also trimming their foreign aid.
Foreign assistance strategies everywhere are more than likely to include some inefficient or misconceived programs. For instance, people who otherwise support aid to other countries might disapprove of funding for a musical in Ireland or a comic book in Peru. But this is not the main motivation for the cuts to programs around the world.
The global turn against aid stems from more fundamental problems — starting with tight budgets in donor countries. Notably, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coupled with China’s new assertiveness in Asia, is compelling countries across the Western world to spend more money on defense. Their foreign aid budgets offer a politically convenient source of funding.
Perhaps even more important are increasing calls for foreign aid to address an ever-expanding list of disparate, ambitious priorities, including helping poor countries adapt to climate change and ensuring “that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature,” one of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals that are supposed to be met by 2030.
According to U.N. estimates, the world faces a financing shortfall of $4 trillion annually to achieve these goals. This is a lot of money; it amounts to more than 6 percent of the total gross domestic product of the industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
And many of the goals the money is meant to fund are not realistic. It isn’t possible to end extreme poverty by 2030, for instance. All children will not “ complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes ” by then. In 2022, nine percent of the world’s population still earned less than $2.15 a day, in 2017 dollars. In 2019, just under half of kids emerging from lower secondary school failed to demonstrate minimum proficiency in math.
Goals should always be ambitious, but if they are unattainable (or incomprehensible), they undercut support for effective efforts to improve the world. According to one estimate, U.S. foreign assistance programs save as many as 5.6 million lives per year: more than a quarter million in Nigeria, almost 125,000 in Pakistan and more than 60,000 in Bangladesh.
U.S.-sponsored antiretroviral therapies alone prevent more than 1.6 million people from dying of AIDS each year. American funding supports basic nutrition and access to safe drinking water in some of the poorest parts of the world. It keeps millions of children from being paralyzed by polio. These are worth keeping.
There are plenty of good ideas for how to make American aid more efficient. For example, the United States could save a lot of money if it didn’t require much of its food aid to be grown by American farmers and shipped across the world on American ships. Trimming the layers of regulation and oversight that require a cadre of expensive experts to ensure compliance would also cut costs.
Indeed, the broad global conversation about what foreign assistance can achieve needs to be better focused. But aid is not “ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats,” as the White House described it. Aid cannot be the solution for all of the problems that impoverished countries face. But it is a necessary building block for a better world.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/26/trump-aid-development-usaid/
___
March 29
The New York Times says Democrats are in denial
Last year’s election was close, despite President Trump’s hyperbolic claims about his margin of victory. Still, the Democratic Party clearly lost — and not only the presidential race. It also lost control of the Senate and failed to recapture the House of Representatives. Of the 11 governor’s races held last year, Democrats won three. In state legislature races, they won fewer than 45 percent of the seats.
In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.
That explanation starts with the notion that Democrats were merely the unlucky victims of postpandemic inflation and that their party is more popular than it seems: If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine. “We’ve got the right message,” Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said while campaigning for the job. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”
A key part of this argument involves voter turnout. Party leaders claim that most Americans still prefer Democrats but that voter apathy allowed Mr. Trump to win. According to this logic, Democrats do not need to worry about winning back Trump voters and should instead try to animate the country’s natural liberal majority. “I don’t think we’re going to win over those 77 million that voted for Donald Trump,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the party’s 2024 vice-presidential nominee, said this month. “I’m concerned with the 90 million who stayed home.” It was an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton saying that millions of Trump voters were “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
As comforting as these explanations may feel to Democrats, they are a form of denial that will make it harder for the Democratic Party to win future elections.
Even many conservatives and Republicans should be concerned about the Democratic denial. The country needs two healthy political parties. It especially needs a healthy Democratic Party, given Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and his draconian behavior. Restraining him — and any successors who continue his policies — depends on Democrats taking an honest look at their problems.
The part of the Democratic story that contains the most truth is inflation. Prices surged during Covid’s supply-chain disruptions, and incumbent parties around the world have suffered. Whether on the political right or left, ruling parties lost power in the United States, Brazil, Britain, Germany and Italy.
But some incumbent parties managed to win re-election, including in Denmark, France, India, Japan, Mexico and Spain. A healthier Democratic Party could have joined them last year. The Democrats, after all, were running against a Republican whose favorability rating rarely exceeded 45 percent. Most voters did not like Mr. Trump. They did prefer him to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Polls make clear that inflation was not the only reason. Voters also trusted Republicans more than Democrats on immigration, crime, government spending, global trade and foreign policy. Among the few exceptions were abortion and health care. As the headline of a recent Times news article summarized, “Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump.” Only 27 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. It is the party’s lowest approval rating in decades.
The part of that Democratic story that contains the least truth is voter turnout. Nonvoters appear to have favored Mr. Trump by an even wider margin than voters, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has reported. David Shor, the bracingly honest Democratic data scientist, put it well: “We’re now at a point where the more people vote, the better Republicans do.”
The good news for Democrats is that winning over nonvoters and Trump voters is not in conflict. People who do not vote have many of the same concerns as voters who flipped to Mr. Trump. Nonvoters are disproportionately working class, young, Asian, Black, Latino or foreign-born, and each of these groups shifted away from Democrats. When Democrats call for ignoring the country’s 77 million Trump voters, they are writing off a diverse group of Americans, many of whom voted Democratic before.
We recognize that the Democratic Party is in a difficult position. It must compete with a Republican Party that shows an alarming hostility to American democracy. And we urge Democrats to continue speaking out against Mr. Trump’s authoritarian behavior — his bullying of military leaders, judges, law firms, universities and the media; his disdain for Congress; his attempts to chill speech through deportation; his tolerance for incompetent cabinet secretaries who endanger American troops. Whatever polls say about the political wisdom of such criticism, Democratic silence on these issues would only encourage timidity from other parts of society.
It is the rest of the Democratic strategy that requires more rigorous and less wishful reflection. To regain voters’ trust, Democrats should take at least three steps.
First, they should admit that their party mishandled Mr. Biden’s age. Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise. Party leaders even attempted to shout down anybody who raised concerns, before reversing course and pushing Mr. Biden out of the race. Already, many voters believe that Democrats refuse to admit uncomfortable truths on some subjects, including crime, illegal immigration, inflation and Covid lockdowns. Mr. Biden’s age became a glaring example. Acknowledging as much may be backward looking, but it would send an important signal.
Second, Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017. The old video clips of Ms. Harris that the Trump campaign gleefully replayed last year — on decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners — highlighted the problem. Yes, she tried to abandon these stances before the election, but she never spoke forthrightly to voters and acknowledged she had changed her position.
Even today, the party remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences — by race, gender, sexuality and religion — rather than our shared values. On these issues, progressives sometimes adopt a scolding, censorious posture. It is worth emphasizing that this posture has alienated growing numbers of Asian, Black and Latino voters. Democrats who won last year in places where Mr. Trump also won, such as Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, adopted a more moderate tone. They were hawkish about border security and law enforcement, criticizing their own party. They did not make the common Democratic mistake of trying to talk about only economic policy and refusing to engage with Americans’ concerns on difficult social issues.
Third, the party has to offer new ideas. When Democrats emerged from the wilderness in the past, they often did so with fresh ideas. They updated the proud Democratic tradition of improving life for all Americans. Bill Clinton remade the party in the early 1990s and spoke of “putting people first.” In 2008, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards offered exciting plans to improve health care, reduce inequality and slow climate change. These candidates provided intellectual leadership.
Ms. Harris failed to do so in last year’s campaign, and few Democrats are doing so today. Where is the Democrat with bold plans to cut living costs? Or fight the ills of social media? Or help aimless boys who are struggling in school? Where is the governor who does more than talk about an abundance agenda and actually cuts regulations to help America build? New ideas should come from both the party’s progressives and its centrists. The most successful American politicians, like Mr. Obama and Ronald Reagan, deftly mix boldness and moderation. One benefit of being out of power is that it offers time to develop ideas and see which resonate. It is not a time to say, “We’ve got the right message.”
Even without reforming themselves, Democrats may fare well in elections over the next two years. Opposition parties usually thrive in midterms. The longer-term picture is less sanguine. The next Republican leader may be more disciplined than Mr. Trump. And both the Senate and the Electoral College look challenging for Democrats. Of the seven states whose population has grown the most since 2020, the Democratic Party won none in last year’s presidential election.
Defeat has a long history of inspiring honest reflection in politics. In this time of frustration and anxiety for Democrats, they should give it a try.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/democrats-strategy-2024.html
___
March 30
The Wall Street Journal
Does the pope keep a detailed time card? That’s a joke, but it’s also a legal argument relevant to a case at the Supreme Court on Monday. Under Wisconsin law, the Diocese of Superior is exempt from paying taxes into the state’s unemployment system. Yet the state says this opt out doesn’t cover the diocese’s Catholic Charities nonprofit and its sub-entities.
“Their activities are secular in nature,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court, newly controlled by a 4-3 liberal majority, held last year. They “neither attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith nor supply any religious materials.” The majority therefore ruled that the Catholic Charities arm—whose president, for the record, is the local bishop—is “not operated primarily for religious purposes,” at least under this Wisconsin law.
Hence the U.S. Supreme Court’s argument Monday in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin. The nonprofit, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, argues that the First Amendment prohibits the state’s “effort to pick and choose among religious groups—and carve out works of mercy from the realm of the ‘religious’ altogether.” The group’s mission is to be “an effective sign of the charity of Christ,” and its expression of that includes providing services to the disabled.
Under Wisconsin law, the tax exemption is available only to outfits “supervised, controlled, or principally supported by a church,” so this isn’t a loophole industrial titans are scheming to claim. Also, Catholic Charities isn’t trying to deny its employees a safety net; it says it simply wants to switch into a church unemployment system created by the bishops.
In its brief, Wisconsin says its test is to ask whether a group “primarily engages in distinctively religious activities like ‘worship services, religious outreach, ceremony, or religious education.’” The state suggests the U.S. Supreme Court has blessed this type of “functional” analysis in its precedents on the “ministerial exception.” We read those cases differently, which brings us to the pope’s time card.
The question in Hosanna-Tabor (2012) was whether a Lutheran school’s right to be free from government meddling meant it couldn’t be sued for discrimination by a former elementary teacher. Her religious duties took only 45 minutes a workday, but when the argument turned to the idea that she wasn’t a minister due to her “important secular functions,” Chief Justice John Roberts jumped into the quarrel at oral argument.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” he said, according to the transcript, “but that can’t be the test. The pope is a head of state carrying out secular functions, right? (Laughter.) Those are important. So, he is not a minister?” In the eventual unanimous ruling, the Chief said that who’s a minister can’t be “resolved by a stopwatch.” A later 7-2 case extended the “ministerial exception” to cover a lay teacher at a Catholic school who instructed students in doctrine, despite no longer practicing the religion herself.
What’s at issue Monday isn’t the status of individual employees, but whether the Catholic Charities nonprofit itself is run for “religious purposes,” so the context of the dispute is different. But one thing that Hosanna-Tabor stands for is the difficulty of judicial inquiries that attempt to disentangle, over protests by some faith community, which of their conduct isn’t “primarily” or “distinctively” religious, to use Wisconsin’s terms.
By the way, Wisconsin’s ruling against Catholic Charities was written by state Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who is retiring. On Tuesday (see nearby) voters will pick her replacement.
ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/supreme-court-case-is-catholic-charities-secular-wisconsin-nonprofit-religion-3993e867?mod=editorials_article_pos4
___
March 27
The Guardian on Trump, alternative facts and erasing history
What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.
Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.
The impact is already painfully evident. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have affected not only climate records but also an extreme weather risk tool. The purge’s results are absurd as well as damaging. A webpage on the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, appears to have been marked for deletion because it was mistaken for a reference to LGBTQ+ issues.
Yet the disparity between the data dump on the Kennedy assassination and the removal of other material is not a contradiction. It speaks volumes about the administration’s approach to truth and knowledge, which it regards as contingent and a matter of convenience. (Tellingly, it is also axing the body that provides most federal funding to libraries.)
The 1963 presidential assassination is not only an event around which multiple theories circle but one that helped feed a broader culture of conspiracy theorising and distrust in authority. That has metastatised to the bizarre and extreme claims embraced and even promoted by Mr Trump or figures around him, including birtherism, Pizzagate and QAnon. These increasingly fantastical narratives have had real-world consequences. Facts, science and rationality itself are under attack.
In his first term, Mr Trump’s aides shamelessly promoted “alternative facts” while decrying actual facts as “fake news”. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over those four years. This time round, his administration is removing existing sources of information. Websites, datasets and other information vanished from federal health websites – such as that for the Centers for Disease Control – last month, though some has since reappeared. One scientist called it “a digital book burning”. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that “critically important science conducted at many US agencies, institutions, and universities (is) under increasing assault”.
Ad hoc preservation of essential national information and records is usually the work of those faced with the destructive force of foreign invasions, jihadist insurgencies or dictators. But as this bonfire blazes, a motley but committed array of individuals – “nerds who care”, in the words of one – are fighting back by preserving data before it is deleted. Their admirable effort to defend the truth deserves support.
ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/27/the-guardian-view-on-trump-and-reality-from-promoting-alternative-facts-to-erasing-truths
___
March 30
The Houston Chronicle says El Paso is a model for an alternative to immigration strife for the United States
On March 6, two days after the release of his second book, Richard Parker died of a chronic heart condition at age 61. The El Paso writer, who over the years wrote articles and columns for the Houston Chronicle, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other publications, left behind his mother, a sister, two daughters and numerous friends in the El Paso area and beyond. He also left behind “The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story.”
At a time when this nation is caught up in spasms of turmoil and tribulation over immigration and border issues, “The Crossing” is a shift of the kaleidoscope — a provocative counter-narrative of sorts. Claiming that more immigrants have passed through El Paso than Ellis Island, Parker contends in his book that the sunbaked border metropolis is a thriving multiethnic community that has learned through nearly five centuries of existence how to overcome hate and distrust. El Pasoans, he maintains, know how to live, work and thrive as neighbors despite differences rooted in race, ethnicity, creed and color. Despite, as well, a deliberate — and dangerous — fanning of tensions and distrust emanating from both Washington and Austin.
“El Paso,” in Parker’s words, “is where Native, Spanish, European, African, Jewish and Arab cultures fought, bled, died, and forged ties, including intermarriage: this vibrantly diverse culture paved the way for our melting-pot nation and serves as a model for an America ever torn over race, ethnicity and religion.”
Parker himself proudly embodied the city’s cross-cultural heritage. “As the son of a Mexican immigrant mother and a white Southern American father,” he writes, “I consider Mexico my culture, but the United States is my country. I am not conflicted about being one versus the other.”
Parker was a ruminative sort, an observer more than an activist, but he might well have joined hundreds of his fellow El Pasoans last Monday evening for a rally at San Jacinto Plaza in the heart of the city’s historic downtown. Organized by the Catholic Diocese of El Paso in collaboration with others, including Hope Border Institute, an El Paso-based immigrant advocacy nonprofit, the rally and subsequent half-mile march to Sacred Heart Church was a loud and earnest protest against the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and asylum bans.
Immigration advocates, lay people, and clergy joined area residents young and old, many with young children in tow. Together they marched – actually some strolled – with Catholic prelates from the United States, Canada and Mexico. A number of robed archbishops from around the U.S. made the walk, along with Cardinal Fabio Baggio of Bassano del Grappa, Italy, representing the Vatican. Loud and boisterous matachines, indigenous dance troupes in colorful regalia, led the way, their drumming and exuberant stomping echoing off downtown buildings. Marchers waved homemade signs: “Immigration Built This Nation”; “Keep Immigrants/Deport Trump”; “Jesus Was an Immigrant.”
Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration, told the crowd that the Trump administration’s radical immigration policy represented nothing less than a “war on the poor.”
The denial of asylum and the threat of mass deportations was “a fundamental attack on the human community,” the bishop said. “Mass deportations are another tool to keep people afraid, to keep a people divided, to extinguish the charity and love that keep a people alive.”
At the vigil inside the historic church, Bishop Seitz reminded the standing-room-only crowd that the rally was being held on the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Saint Óscar Romero. As the archbishop of El Salvador’s capital, Romero fearlessly condemned right-wing oppression, left-wing guerillas, and the U.S.-financed weapons that ravaged his people. His powerful homilies, listing weekly torment, disappearances and killings, reached more listeners than any program in the nation, becoming a voice of truth amid terror. The anniversary timing was “no accident,” Seitz said, in light of today’s “attack on immigrants.” (He did not mention that the Trump administration had just disappeared alleged Venezuelan gang members – due process be damned – to a notorious Salvadoran prison.)
“El Paso is a proud and beautiful border community,” said El Paso Auxiliary Bishop Anthony C. Celino. One that “stands as a testament to how welcoming others fosters a safe, prosperous and vibrant environment for all.” (Over the past two decades, this majority-Hispanic border city has consistently ranked as one of the safest major cities in the nation.)
“It is from the border that things are seen more clearly,” Bishop Seitz said. We believe the late author of “The Crossing” would have agreed.
In a Texas Monthly review of the book, historian Andrew Graybill contends that Parker was a bit too exuberant about El Paso’s potential to “show America how to begin again.” The fact remains, though, that the city’s embrace of the stranger, the refugee, the foreigner has worked to its advantage. (A similar openness to diversity has worked to Houston’s advantage, as well.)
Seventy-six-year-old Mary Alice Gabaldon Szostek attended the rally in honor of that heritage. “My grandparents, they came from Mexico with absolutely nothing,” she told a member of the editorial board. A kind farm family gave them a chance. Every one of their 10 kids went to college. “My sisters and I started a chain of dress shops,” Gabaldon Szostek said. “This is the American dream.”
As we have written many times before, we want an orderly, lawful and humane border. With our tragically tangled immigration policy, an immovable gaggle of craven elected officials and a heartless administration uninterested in truly American solutions, we can hope that the El Paso demonstration represents the beginning of a nationwide awakening. Stunned and disoriented Americans, we hope, are waking to the danger — not only to the undocumented among us, but danger also to any American, especially those of color, documented or not; danger to the economy; danger to the rule of law. We may be awakening to the painful truth that immigrants familiar with our history have known all along — that is, our sporadic crusades against the outsider are not easily controlled. Like noxious algae on a summer pond, they invariably spread.
Parker knew that. As he explains in his book, he covered the 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart for the New York Times, and he notes that most Americans believe the shooter was motivated by Donald Trump’s outrageous anti-immigrant rhetoric. He reminds us that Gov. Greg Abbott, like the Walmart shooter, speaks of “invasion.”
Richard Parker also knew he was dying. His doctor told him a few weeks ago he would not see another spring.
ONLINE: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/el-paso-richard-parker-immigration-walmart-20244636.php
By The Associated Press
