Editorial Roundup: United States
News > National News
Audio By Carbonatix
3:28 PM on Tuesday, May 12
By The Associated Press
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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May 8
The Washington Post on Trump's second tariff defeat
The Trump administration is trying to pick up the pieces of its global tariff agenda after a major Supreme Court rebuke this term. That might not be as easy as administration officials hoped, judging by Thursday’s ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade that the president’s substitute border taxes are also illegal.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in February that the president lacked authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose unlimited tariffs on a whim. He responded by invoking a new authority, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, to replace the taxes the court had struck down.
No dice, the trade court said in a 2-1 decision. Section 122 authorizes the president to impose a tariff of up to 15 percent for up to 150 days to address “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” The two judges in the majority, both appointees of President Barack Obama, said the trade deficits that preoccupy President Donald Trump don’t qualify as balance-of-payments deficits under the meaning of Section 122.
It’s a somewhat technical distinction. The U.S. has a trade deficit because it imports more than it exports. Balance of payments is a broader measure capturing all flows of capital and money in and out of the U.S.
That measure had a greater significance in the mid-20th century. Back then the U.S. dollar was pegged to gold, and foreign currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar. The supply of gold was limited, so too many dollars flowing out of the United States threatened the international financial system.
President Richard M. Nixon imposed temporary tariffs in 1971 to address this. Congress wrote the 1974 law with Nixon’s action in mind. But now the gold standard is gone and the dollar “floats” against other currencies. That means the flow of money in and out of the U.S. equalizes on its own. “It is unlikely,” the majority opinion says, “that ‘large and serious balance-of-payments deficits’ within the meaning of Section 122 could occur today.”
The dissenting judge, appointed by President George W. Bush, would give the president more leeway to define what constitutes a balance-of-payments deficit under modern financial conditions. Trade deficits are at least a part of the country’s balance of payments.
How much leeway should a president get in deciding when and how much to tax Americans? The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to levy taxes, and that’s a crucial check on the power of government. The court in this case took a strict reading of the law Congress passed.
On appeal, some judges might be inclined to a more flexible reading. Regardless, the legal gap between the Trump administration and tariffs plaintiffs is shrinking. With his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Trump claimed virtually unlimited power to impose tariffs of any amount and for any duration based on a law that didn’t even mention tariffs.
The law now in question specifically contemplates tariffs, and Trump concedes that it limits his tariff power to 150 days at a 15 percent rate. Lawyers are merely debating a specialized economic term — balance of payments — to decide whether the conditions for tariffs have been met.
Whatever happens on appeal, the trade court’s ruling should go into effect immediately. In the tariffs litigation beginning in 2025, Trump lost at every stage, but the rulings were stayed until the Supreme Court could weigh in this year. That meant the duties stayed in effect for months longer than necessary, leading to more economic distortion and larger refunds.
The price increases from tariffs have damaged Trump politically. He campaigned in 2024 on lowering prices, but he won’t back off this key part of his economic agenda. Perhaps some of his political advisers secretly hope that the courts will hold the line.
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May 8
The New York Times calls for economic and climate policy reform
Eight years ago, local officials in Washington learned that a section of a sewage line next to the Potomac River had become corroded and was at risk of bursting. They wanted to repair it urgently. But the officials first needed to apply for a federal permit.
When they did, federal officials demanded an exhaustive review of the project’s potential effects on trees, wildflowers and bats rather than granting the permit, The Washington Post has documented. Four months ago, the section burst, spewing hundreds of millions of gallons of raw human waste into the Potomac.
This example is extreme, but it shows how well-meaning permitting laws have stymied vital projects in the United States. Government agencies can take years to grant permits. The highest toll comes from the accumulated harm of the millions of projects that are never built: homes that would make housing more affordable; roads, bridges and transit that would speed movement; factories and office buildings that would provide good jobs; power plants that would be cleaner than those they replaced.
Congress now has an opportunity to lift some of the regulatory burden. In December, the House passed a bill to reform federal permitting rules, the Speed Act, with 11 Democrats joining most Republicans. The bill is a good start but could stand to be improved. Senators from both parties recently restarted talks on their own version of a bill.
The politics are more favorable to progress than they have been in a long time. One reason is that Democrats, who are traditionally wary of deregulation, increasingly recognize that dense permitting rules are obstructing progressive goals, such as reducing living costs and protecting the environment. “We need to build, and fast,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democratic senator known for his passion about climate policy. Failing to do so, he said, “will look grossly negligent.”
Congressional Republicans and President Trump, for their part, have often gone too far in the other direction and unwound valuable regulation. But Republicans now have reason to consider compromise on a reform bill: the fear that voters’ unhappiness about affordability could cost them their majority in the midterm elections this year. In Mr. Trump’s 15 months in office, his policies have mostly increased prices, through his war in Iran and his tariffs, as well as the foolish cancellation of clean energy projects.
A deal that makes it easier to build in America is feasible, and we urge Congress to work toward one.
The broad outlines are already visible. Democrats want to aid green energy; Republicans want to promote fossil fuel projects and other types of building that they feel environmental reviews have stymied. These divergent aims require different changes in the law. The two sides should make a deal.
Renewables such as wind and solar power have become very cheap to build and operate — that is, if they can plug into the grid. One obstacle to building more renewables is the lack of high-voltage transmission lines to move electricity from areas where the wind blows and the sun shines to the rest of the country. Not nearly enough of these lines exist today, and that undermines the production of clean energy and raises energy costs for both households and businesses. The problem is likely to worsen, given the increasing demand for electricity, coming from A.I. data centers, electric cars and other sources.
The approval process for new lines today is maddening. The TransWest Express, a line that is supposed to transmit renewable electricity from Wyoming to the Southwest, took 18 years to receive final approval and is still under construction. A power line to move energy from Kansas to Indiana has been in the works since 2010 and remains unfinished, mired in politics and litigation.
A congressional bill that centralized oversight of power lines in a single federal authority, one with a mandate to link the country’s electric grids, would speed things up. A comparable process already exists for natural gas pipelines. The bill that the House passed in December did not do enough to solve the problems with power lines, and a Senate bill should do more.
As for the political trade, Republicans are more likely to agree to this reform if Democrats accede to easing environmental review laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and other statutes that restrict construction projects. There’s good reason to do this, too. Since NEPA became law in 1970, judges and regulators have expanded the intensity of environmental reviews to the point of paralysis. The time it takes to prepare an environmental-impact statement is long and has become longer over the decades, stretching to about four years on average in recent years. Litigation and other hurdles can add more time, even for the projects that clear legal review.
We understand why many Democrats are wary of permitting reform. Environmental laws have accomplished tremendous good over the past half century, cleaning our air, water and more. Republicans frequently exaggerate the downsides of laws like NEPA and sometimes tell outright lies. As president, Mr. Trump has shown disdain for the serious harms and risks of climate change.
At the same time, overregulation has become a problem in some areas. Too often, today’s regulations fail to accomplish their mission of balancing the nation’s varied interests and arriving at the best collective solution. Fixing the excesses while still keeping the best parts of permitting laws is possible.
Many projects, like the Potomac sewage line repair, should not require intensive scrutiny that lasts for years. Builders should be able to object when a process is moving too slowly. And regulators should face binding timelines to complete their reviews. Federal agencies should also be adequately staffed; some are not, and the Trump administration has aggravated the problem. These steps would preserve the core function of environmental regulation: requiring reasonable but not excessive assessment of a construction project’s impact.
Leaving things as they are would help to preserve a status quo that has proved inadequate for the challenges the country faces: disconnected power grids; dirty energy; creaky roads, bridges and rail lines. The system is tilted in favor of those who seek to preserve their own parochial interests at the expense of their broader communities and the country.
More Democratic leaders are starting to strike a better balance. In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis has pushed through reforms such as allowing more building density near mass transit lines. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has eased the requirements of his state’s version of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Congress should join this movement now, before it largely shuts down this summer for midterm campaigning. The American economy and the climate would both benefit from permitting reform.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/permit-reform-economy-climate-us.html
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May 11
The Wall Street Journal says Iran thinks Trump is bluffing
Days late and tons of enriched uranium short, Iran’s regime rejected the U.S. peace offer on Sunday and replied with unserious demands. On Monday President Trump called Iran’s counteroffer a “piece of garbage” that leaves the cease-fire “on massive life support—where the doctor walks in and says, ‘Sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living.’”
Call it a standoff. Before Iran’s response Mr. Trump had said, “If they don’t agree, the bombing starts.” He had also said, “We may go back to Project Freedom,” the U.S. effort to guide commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, “if things don’t happen.” This would be “Project Freedom plus other things,” which may be necessary to protect oil tankers.
Iran spent last week trashing the cease-fire, twice attacking U.S. warships with missiles, drones and speed boats, and repeatedly firing on the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. ally. The U.S. responded only to the sources of the fire with what the President called “just a love tap.”
By clinging to the cease-fire through it all, Mr. Trump sent the wrong signal. Iran’s regime clearly thinks it can outlast a President who no longer wants the fight. “They think that I’ll get tired of this or I’ll get bored, or I’ll have some pressure,” Mr. Trump recognized in his Monday remarks, “but there’s no pressure at all. We’re going to have a complete victory.”
The problem is that he is under pressure, and everyone knows it. Why else is the President now talking about pausing the gas tax? Mr. Trump is right about the regime’s perception of him, but he’ll have to prove it wrong.
The achievements of the war are real, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. Iran’s long-range missiles, missile production, navy and air defenses have been smashed, along with nuclear scientists and nuclear weaponization sites. The regime is showing fissures and has lost much of its “money machine,” plus its immunity from direct attack.
“We broke the barrier of fear,” Mr. Netanyahu said. The regime must now take that into account.
Yet Mr. Netanyahu didn’t mince words about what remains to be done. “It’s not over,” he said. “There’s still nuclear material, enriched uranium, that has to be taken out of Iran. There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled. . . . There are ballistic missiles that they still want to produce.”
Mr. Netanyahu reiterated a plan to “draw down to zero” U.S. military aid, by the way, noting that he previously ended reliance on U.S. economic aid. Israel has “tiny territory but gigantic talent,” he said, shares “gems of intelligence” and military technology, and “everybody’s pro-American because we appreciate what America stands for.” This is the ally that Democrats and some on the right increasingly want to renounce, naturally.
Could a deal address the outstanding issues in Iran? So far, no. The regime’s counteroffer rejected any dismantling of nuclear facilities. It demanded major sanctions relief before making nuclear commitments, and sought to hang on to much of its enriched uranium and shorten a moratorium on further enrichment.
This is a regime that thinks it can absorb economic pain from the U.S. blockade longer than Mr. Trump can tolerate higher prices for oil and petrochemicals. Mr. Trump will have to persuade Tehran’s leaders they’ve underestimated him—and the pain.
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May 12
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on America's re-gerrymandering
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.
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
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May 11
The Philadelphia Inquirer on the SCOTUS and discriminatory legislative maps
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court giving its seal of approval to Republican attempts to turn back the clock on voting rights in America is that, after long ago overcoming racist efforts to dilute the power of voters of color, we now see similar vipers slithering past the corroded gates of hell that were supposed to hold them in check.
The court defied reason with an opinion that, in essence, neutered the 1965 Voting Rights Act by ruling government efforts to remedy past racism, which tipped the scales in favor of white political candidates, are also racist — unless those remedies can be tied to specific acts of past discrimination that made them necessary.
The decision has opened the door for states to attempt to invalidate any congressional district lines drawn to favor candidates of color.
The court’s conservative majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has given Republican-controlled state governments permission to abandon congressional district lines that were drawn after the Voting Rights Act was passed 61 years ago. The purportedly nonpartisan justices gave Republicans another assist Monday by granting a request to immediately finalize their ruling so legislatures can redraw district lines to favor GOP congressional candidates before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Some could hardly wait. A day after the initial ruling, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry suspended ongoing House primaries — in which about 42,000 votes had already been cast — so his state’s GOP-controlled legislature can produce a new map. Governors in Tennessee and Alabama have already called lawmakers into special session to make the changes.
This foul-smelling scheme seems so un-American, but actually it’s eerily similar to the post-Civil War, racially biased political machinations that occurred after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, just five days after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. The fate of Black people was subsequently left largely in the hands of new President Andrew Johnson, a former enslaver and vehement racist from Tennessee.
The 14th Amendment making Black people full citizens was passed by Congress in 1866 despite the veto of Johnson, who said making “our entire colored population” citizens would discriminate against “intelligent, worthy and patriotic foreigners … in favor of the Negro,” who, due to his “previous unfortunate condition of servitude,” is less informed “than he who, coming from abroad, has to some extent, at least, familiarized himself with the principles of a government.”
The 15th Amendment, which explicitly prohibited racial discrimination in voting by men, became law in 1870. (It would be another 50 years before women received the same privilege.) Despite the law, terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Knights of the White Camelia, and the Pale Faces used lynchings, beatings, and other fear tactics to make sure formerly enslaved people — who in many Southern communities outnumbered their former masters — remained segregated and didn’t dare vote.
Such intimidation wasn’t limited to the South. On Oct. 10, 1871, Union Army veteran Octavius V. Catto was headed to the polls from the school where he taught to take part in only the second election open to Black Americans in Philadelphia. Black neighborhoods were terrorized that day, and Black men were shot for attempting to vote. Catto voted, but while walking home, was shot and killed by Frank Kelly, a white man with ties to a local white supremacist organization. Kelly was arrested and tried for murder, but acquitted by an all-white jury.
Under Johnson and his successors, Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, the Reconstruction program aimed at raising Black people from former servitude to full participation in America’s democracy was eventually abandoned. Lee, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and other rebel leaders received little, if any, punishment for the rebellion. Many instead returned home and participated in activities to keep Black Americans subservient, which included not allowing them to vote.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, between 1873 and 1883, issued ruling after ruling that weakened laws passed to protect the rights of Black people. It undercut the Civil Rights Act of 1875 with an 1883 opinion that said the federal government lacked the power to initiate civil rights lawsuits, even though many Black people didn’t have the means to hire attorneys. In 1896, the high court ruled 8-1 in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case (Justice John Marshall Harlan being the only dissenter) that segregation laws were constitutional.
“If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane,” said the court. The fallacy of that reasoning, of course, was that Black Americans were not being treated equally in politics either. Klan activity and the literacy tests and poll taxes that came later suppressed the Black vote. So much so that between 1901 and 1929, there were no Black members of Congress.
History tells us the Supreme Court is not unbiased, but rather like any other political entity, subject to the views of each justice based on experience and current associations. History also tells us it is the responsibility of Congress to course-correct, when necessary, with effective and durable legislation.
