Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
May 16
The Washington Post on Kamala Harris pushing Democrats to pack the SCOTUS
The rule of law for thee, but not me? To “fight fire with fire,” former vice president Kamala Harris is calling on Democrats to consider packing the Supreme Court with liberals and punishing conservative justices for lying during their confirmation hearings. “This is a moment where there are no bad ideas,” she said on a podcast this week.
In any moment, these bad ideas would endanger the constitutional order. No matter how much someone disagrees with recent decisions by the high court, threatening to subordinate judicial independence to the whims of a political party befits a banana republic. Turning the court into a partisan plaything would destroy one of America’s strongest bulwarks against tyranny.
The Supreme Court remains strongly independent of the legislative and the executive branches, as evidenced by rulings against President Donald Trump’s tariffs and National Guard deployments in unwilling states. In pending cases, the court also looks likely to frustrate his attempts to curtail birthright citizenship and remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board.
Liberals and principled conservatives are understandably concerned about Trump’s executive excess. Yet targeting judicial independence in the hopes of getting a more ideologically appealing court is like trying to cure a cold by taking up smoking. The cure isn’t just worse than the disease; it isn’t even a cure.
Tribalism renders too many partisans unable to think ahead more than one election. This has been the case with the redistricting spiral Republicans recently started. It’s also what motivates shortsighted efforts to end the Senate filibuster. When Democratic leader Harry M. Reid got rid of the 60-vote threshold for lower-court nominees in 2013, it became inevitable that Republican leader Mitch McConnell would get rid of the 60-vote requirement for Supreme Court nominees in 2017.
If Democrats expand the Supreme Court in 2029, Republicans would do it when they return to power. Its size would metastasize as its authority collapses. Constitutional checks on executive power would disappear, as presidents would keep nominating new justices until they get the ruling they want. They might not have to bother if the justices know they can be removed any time they anger enough senators.
Presidential candidates would come under growing pressure to specify their choices in advance, effectively turning future justices into co-campaigners on the ticket. Beyond the norms of recusal, there’s nothing to stop a presidential nominee’s potential pick from appearing with him or her on the stump. If Harris got her way, the perception would be that these are administration officials, not impartial judges.
Since 1869, the court has had nine justices. It’s been 89 years since President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to install six additional liberal justices after the Supreme Court blocked some of his unconstitutional overreach. FDR dropped the court-packing scheme amid blowback from allies, who recognized it as authoritarian.
Polls show most Americans understand that court-packing would take the country in a dark direction. Candidates who support it tend to be desperate for support from the left. When Pete Buttigieg floated a 15-member Supreme Court during his 2020 presidential campaign, for example, he was properly ridiculed by institutionalists. Sadly, protecting institutions has gone out of style.
In her 2024 concession speech, Harris said that “we will never give up the fight” for “the rule of law” and “equal justice.” What she’s suggesting would doom both.
May 13
The New York Times says Trump's China policy has weakened America
U.S.-China summits can change the world. President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing gave the United States an advantage over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. President Jiang Zemin’s 1997 tour of the United States eased China’s entry into the global economy and accelerated its national rise. The summit that begins Thursday in Beijing between President Trump and President Xi Jinping is taking place at another important juncture in the two countries’ relationship.
When Mr. Trump first won the presidency a decade ago, he correctly labeled China a threat to American interests and criticized past U.S. presidents for their naïveté. In both his terms in office, however, Mr. Trump has weakened the United States relative to China. The damage has been especially bad in his second term.
His failed tariffs have been the central example, setting off a humbling chain of events. The tariffs proved ineffective at intimidating China even before the Supreme Court ruled some of them illegal. In response, China restricted U.S. access to valuable rare-earth metals — and learned just how much leverage it has. To regain access to the minerals, Mr. Trump agreed to allow China to buy advanced American semiconductors that power artificial intelligence.
He has also diluted instruments of American power that have long been crucial to constraining foreign adversaries. He has alienated partners that can help counter China, including Japan, Australia, India, the European Union and Canada. He has cut funding for scientific research, diminishing American prowess in A.I., green energy and other realms.
Mr. Trump arrives in Beijing without the aura of strength that he cherishes. His war in Iran has hurt the American economy, and he reportedly plans to lobby Mr. Xi to buy more American goods, in agriculture and other sectors. In exchange, Mr. Xi wants weaker American support for Taiwan and even more access to American semiconductors. Either of these exchanges would be a bad deal for the United States.
Mr. Trump and his aides should recognize that Mr. Xi has his own problems, starting with wary Asian neighbors, a real-estate downturn, a disappointing job market and a demographic collapse. The safest outcome from the summit would be narrow agreements on shared interests, such as limits on A.I. to prevent the development of bioweapons. The two countries should also try to stabilize their relationship and ensure that bilateral military communications continue. A limited agreement along these lines would buy time for the United States to undo some of Mr. Trump’s damage and start rebuilding for the long competition ahead.
China policy is a rare area in which Mr. Trump shifted the consensus in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. In his 2016 campaign, he argued that China had exploited the United States and that American leaders needed to get tougher. After taking office, he imposed targeted tariffs on semiconductors, steel, electronics, industrial machinery and other products. The Biden administration largely maintained or expanded those tariffs, and it strengthened alliances in Asia to restrain China’s aggression. For a time, Mr. Trump seemed to have started a bipartisan era of realpolitik toward a country that seeks to diminish American power.
As is so often the case, though, Mr. Trump showed little strategic discipline, and he prioritized his own personal and political interests over the nation’s. Before his first term had ended, he had begun to abandon his apparent concern over China. In his second term, he has become even more accommodating.
His administration’s National Security Strategy no longer uses the phrase “great power competition” to describe the relationship with China, as Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution noted. Mr. Trump instead seems tempted to allow China to dominate Asia, while the United States focuses on Latin America and the Middle East. “It was as if the president decided that the United States was now content to run aside China rather than slow it down or run faster,” Evan Medeiros wrote for the Chicago Council of Global Affairs.
The second-term tariffs typified his failures. They applied to virtually the entire world, including American allies, and Mr. Trump imposed them haphazardly and illegally. “The United States is losing ground in Asia,” the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, recently concluded. In the past few months, the war in Iran has continued the trend. Some countries skeptical of China, like Vietnam and the Philippines, have nonetheless turned to Beijing for help in getting access to energy. And America’s inability to defeat Iran’s much smaller military has raised questions about whether it could help defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.
The biggest risk of this week’s summit is that Mr. Trump will trade short-term American gains, such as the exporting of more soybeans and other agricultural goods, for long-term Chinese advantages. Mr. Xi, as part of his effort to reunify Taiwan with mainland China, may ask the United States to explicitly oppose Taiwanese independence or delay weapons sales to the island. Either move would be a mistake. Already, Mr. Trump has signaled a worrisome lack of interest in Taiwan’s future as a democratic ally and economic partner.
Semiconductors are a related area of concern. Taiwan manufactures many of the semiconductors that American companies use. China, for its part, remains significantly behind the United States in the race to develop the most advanced A.I. The Biden administration deserves some credit for the gap because it refused to allow American companies to sell the most advanced line of semiconductors to China. Mr. Trump has been weaker on the issue.
Mr. Xi very much wants the restrictions removed, and Mr. Trump has begun to loosen them. China now has permission to purchase Nvidia’s high-end H200 chips, but it is still blocked from buying the company’s top-line chips, known as Blackwell. If Mr. Trump ever lifts that restriction, he will be handing Mr. Xi a huge victory.
The competition between the United States and China matters to the entire world. China wants to dominate Asia and expand its global influence. It wants to discredit democracy and downgrade the importance of human rights and political equality. It wants a world where ethnic and religious oppression is accepted. China is the most important ally of several brutal dictatorships, including Russia, North Korea and Iran. Anybody who believes in pluralism, freedom and other liberal values should be rooting against a world where Mr. Xi and the Chinese Communist Party have more sway.
The best hope for the United States to win this competition is to reject Mr. Trump’s shambolic, self-serving approach to governing and diplomacy. In the long term, the United States should employ a version of the strategy that prevailed in the long 20th-century struggles against fascism and communism. It involves alliances to rebuild international systems of trade and security for today’s world. Doing that will take time. In Beijing this week, Mr. Trump should not make the task harder by handing China more victories.
May 13
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says re-gerrymandering mustn't become the new norm
The redistricting arms race now roiling American politics was not merely predictable, but inevitable. It began the moment President Donald Trump picked up the phone last year to demand that Missouri, Texas and other red states gerrymander their congressional districts mid-decade to give Republicans an advantage in the upcoming midterms. Some Democratic-held states have responded in kind.
The result is that in much of America this November, voters won’t be allowed to choose their politicians; the politicians are instead choosing their voters. It’s an untenable situation that will only get worse unless and until Congress steps in with legislation to impose uniform redistricting standards, putting the process outside the political whims of any president or party.
Gerrymandering — twisting congressional boundaries to favor one party or the other — is a rotten old bipartisan tradition that, before now, always occurred after the release of new census figures every 10 years.
Recommended for you
But any argument that the current situation is merely an extension of that both-sides-do-it phenomenon must be forcefully rejected. This was all Trump. The president demanded that states controlled by his party re-gerrymander mid-decade without even the pretense of it being anything but a partisan power play.
That was, until now, unheard of. With that seal broken, Democrats in California and elsewhere were not merely justified in doing the same thing, but virtually obligated to.
Still, the current scorecard shows that Republicans have been far more successful at this dark stunt than Democrats have: To date, ruling Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida and Tennessee have all re-gerrymandered at Trump’s insistence to stack the deck with friendly House districts.
Democrats have responded in kind in California, Utah and Virginia — though the Virginia Supreme Court last week shot down Virginia’s re-gerrymandering bid based on a technicality.
Pretty much all of it is being fought out in the courts. Legal challenges to Missouri’s re-gerrymandering scheme were set for verbal arguments before the state Supreme Court on Tuesday.
If everything stands, Republicans nationally could in theory add as many as eight seats to their thin House majority in the fall midterms. But that’s based on the assumption that voters in these newly redrawn districts will all do exactly what the map-drawers expect, based on past elections and demographics. Gerrymandering isn’t an exact science. It can backfire.
The whole point of Trump’s end-run around long-established redistricting norms is to try and break the usual historical pattern in which the president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms. But his own dismal 40% approval rating of late could still make that an uphill climb.
In Missouri, the state’s redrawn map divides the Kansas City-based Fifth District House seat, currently held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver, in an attempt to ensure it goes to a Republican in November. That would leave the state with just one Democratic House member out of eight seats (Rep. Wesley Bell’s St. Louis-based First District) despite the fact that Democratic voters routinely account for 40% of statewide votes.
Missouri voters aren’t helpless against this cynical game. The pending referendum effort aimed at letting the voters scuttle the corrupt new map later this year is among the issues before the Missouri Supreme Court this week. Should that measure make it onto the ballot, anyone of any party who cares about fairness in elections should step up and support it.
In any case, now that the once-solid norm of only redistricting in response to new census figures has been knocked down like the East Wing of the White House, the national situation will only get worse going forward.
The New York Times reports that at least four additional red states — Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi — are already planning re-gerrymandering schemes after this year. It’s not hard to imagine (in fact, it’s impossible not to) that scrambling the map in almost every state with an eye toward partisan advantage will quickly become the new norm every two years.
That cannot be allowed to happen. “Regular” gerrymandering after every census was bad enough. But a scenario in which states’ maps are constantly being redrawn to shut out voters of whichever party isn’t in power is intolerable to democracy.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding congressional elections. That would presumably include setting a standardized, nationwide fair-map process to not only end mid-decade re-gerrymandering, but finally get rid of “regular” gerrymandering as well.
Of course, that would require a Congress far more functional than the current one is. But it’s something the country must start talking about. The alternative is a system in which the only votes that matter anywhere are the ones in the statehouses.
ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_75977f78-30bc-423f-8ad2-dc8a93be5ba3.html
May 17
The Wall Street Journal says Trump's desire for revenge is jeopardizing the GOP's control of the Senate
President Trump proved again Saturday that he can crush Republican dissenters by helping to defeat Sen. Bill Cassidy in a Louisiana primary. The question is to what end?
Mr. Cassidy earned Mr. Trump’s eternal enmity when he was one of seven GOP Senators who voted to convict him after he was impeached a second time in 2021 after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. It was a vote of conscience for Mr. Cassidy, but fealty counts for more than principle in the Trump universe.
Mr. Cassidy tried to earn back Mr. Trump’s support by overcoming the Senator’s misgivings and voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary. But Mr. Trump was never going to forget, much less forgive.
The Louisiana GOP, led by Gov. Jeff Landry, helped seal Mr. Cassidy’s fate by passing a law that changed the state’s electoral process from an open primary into closed partisan primaries. Mr. Cassidy has traditionally had support among independents and Democrats. Louisiana is now the reverse partisan image of Democratic New York in restricting voter choice.
Louisiana is a conservative state, so whoever wins the GOP runoff between Rep. Julia Letlow (Mr. Trump’s favorite) and state treasurer John Fleming is likely to hold the seat in November. But Mr. Trump may find he’s now liberated Mr. Cassidy, who can vote as he pleases this year without fear of further retribution. Watch what happens if Mr. Trump tries to nominate Jeanine Pirro as Attorney General.
Mr. Trump is desperate to hold off the day when he is seen is a lame duck, but what matters more than his sway over the GOP is his overall approval rating. At 40.1% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, that rating puts Republican control of the House and Senate in serious jeopardy.
Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign has already made the Senate harder to hold. He drove incumbent Thom Tillis into retirement in North Carolina, and Democrats have a strong candidate who is now the favorite.
Mr. Trump has said Maine Sen. Susan Collins should “never be elected to office again” because of a vote on war powers that had no chance of becoming law and that could hurt GOP turnout for her in a difficult state for Republicans. MAGA threats may also have contributed to Sen. Joni Ernst’s retirement in Iowa, and that seat is now a possible Democrat pickup as the farm economy struggles amid tariffs and inflation.
Then there’s Mr. Trump’s refusal to endorse Sen. John Cornyn in the Texas primary, despite pleas by Majority Leader John Thune and campaign chairman Tim Scott. That opens the door to a possible primary win by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who divides the GOP and could lose to Democrat James Talarico.
Losing all of those seats would take the GOP down to 49 seats, barring other partisan change in other states. If Republicans lose the House, the President’s legislative agenda is effectively over. If they lose the Senate, his ability to nominate conservative judges will be done. He’ll spend two years defending himself against nonstop Democratic investigations into his family businesses, and so much more.
Mr. Trump has dominated GOP fund-raising since his re-election. He’d better be ready to spend it all if he doesn’t want to spend his final two years as a really lame duck.
May 17
The Guardian says Cuba belongs to its people, not to Donald Trump
While the world watched the pomp of Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing, the US was turning up the pressure thousands of miles away. Its oil blockade has plunged Cuba into a humanitarian crisis, sparking nationwide blackouts that have prompted rare protests, closing schools and universities and leaving hospitals battling to treat patients. Surveillance flights are circling. US media reported this weekend that federal prosecutors are preparing an indictment for Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president and brother of Fidel. Mr Trump has casually observed, while bragging about the kidnapping of Venezuela’s then leader Nicolás Maduro in January, that “Cuba is next”.
A military assault on Havana would be vastly more fraught for the US – even without the war on Iran – and disastrous for Cubans. Washington hopes that threats and privation will be sufficient. UN experts warn that the blockade is unlawful, puts human rights at risk and may amount to collective punishment. The government admitted on Wednesday that fuel oil had run out. Tourism has collapsed. The Canadian mining company Sherritt pulled out of a joint venture and countries have axed their contracts for Cuban doctors – a vital source of income for the island, and trained medical staff for others. Havana may hope that it can stagger on. But Mr Trump is not patient.
On Thursday, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, travelled to Cuba to demand “fundamental changes”. The US wants economic reform, the closure of Chinese and Russian intelligence posts, and reportedly the removal of President Miguel Díaz‑Canel. That would reinforce the administration’s message that it controls the Americas. Marco Rubio, secretary of state and the child of Cuban migrants, has long taken a harsh line towards Havana, and Cuban‑Americans are an important part of Mr Trump’s base. A cut in migration – Cuban rates have rocketed in recent years – would please supporters.
The decades-long US embargo has been punitive. But Cubans’ hostility to the US does not preclude anger at their own leaders, who failed to push through promised economic reforms during Barack Obama’s thaw, and launched a 2021 currency restructuring that proved disastrous amid deep domestic weaknesses and intensified US sanctions. That – and the violent crackdown on resulting protests – destroyed the faith of many who believed in the promises and achievements of the revolution.
Cuba’s deputy prime minister, Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, has said it is open to relationships with US companies in “key sectors”. The US has said that’s not enough. Alongside ideological diehards at the top are those with vested interests in the status quo, especially via Gaesa, the military-run conglomerate controlling a huge swathe of the economy. Yet some judge that they would do better from a deal with the US.
Many years ago, Trump organisation officials explored future options for golf and hotels in Cuba. Massive expansion of the private sector, ore extraction and foreign investment on Washington’s terms would benefit US businesses and a few well‑connected figures in Havana, rather than Cubans as a whole. A highly educated population is ripe for change that would allow older generations dignity, and give younger ones opportunity. Instead they appear to face ongoing collapse, a sordid deal or – worst of all – a military attack. Mr Trump talks of “taking” Cuba. But it belongs to the Cuban people.
(0) comments
Welcome to the discussion.
Log In
Keep the discussion civilized. Absolutely NO personal attacks or insults directed toward writers, nor others who make comments.
Keep it clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
Don't threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Anyone violating these rules will be issued a warning. After the warning, comment privileges can be revoked.