Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post argues that banning books about Black and LGBTQ people is un-American (April 23):
As if there were not enough challenges facing the United States right now, Americans have to be on alert for a resurgence of book-banning campaigns at their local libraries. Across the nation, groups of mostly white conservatives are demanding that books be locked up or taken off the shelves entirely. Their main targets? Books about Black and LGBTQ people.
The numbers are staggering. The American Library Association recorded 729 challenges to library, school and university materials in 2021 that targeted more than 1,500 book titles. That’s a record for attempted book bans since the ALA started tracking them in 2000. A similar analysis by PEN America from July through March found 1,586 instances of books being banned.
Attempts to censor and ban books are not a new phenomenon. In 1650, Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to get what they thought were blasphemous books removed from their community. But what sets this latest wave of book banning apart is how much of it is being driven by politicians. PEN America found that more than 40% of the bans were “tied to directives from state officials or elected lawmakers to investigate or remove books in schools.” The Post’s Annie Gowen chronicled how a Texas county judge personally walked into a local library and took books off the shelves, ignoring the library’s procedures in which a person is supposed to fill out a challenge form to be reviewed by librarians.
The United States was founded on the principle of freedom of expression. We might not always like what our neighbors and fellow citizens have to say, but watching the severe restriction of news and information flow in Russia is the latest reminder of how quickly censorship can turn into something truly sinister. Librarian and editor Mary Jo Godwin once said that a truly great library contains something to offend everyone. But the reverse is also true: Great libraries have materials on their shelves (or in their e-circulation platforms) to support everyone trying to educate themselves, from home-schooling Christians to LGBTQ youths.
The ALA’s list of the most-challenged books lately is telling: At the top is “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, a memoir about coming of age as nonbinary. The second is “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, about a young biracial man trying to understand race, class and sexual-identity issues in modern America. Both books are highly rated on websites such as Goodreads, where readers give feedback, yet the fact that a few people object to “sexually explicit” content in the books has been enough to get them taken off public library shelves.
Purging libraries of books without a proper process and input from librarians, teachers and a range of community members is wrong. And it won’t be long before this latest book-ban push will likely prove to be counterproductive. Consider how the Confederacy banned books such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for portraying slavery in a negative way. Or recall that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was outcry that the Harry Potter books were dangerous for children. The series went on to sell half a billion books worldwide and inspire a love of reading among many young people.
These latest book bans are not about protecting youths. Librarians and concerned citizens are right to fight them.
The New York Times asks if economic sanctions will stop Putin (April 22):
When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February, trampling on the sovereignty of a neighbor, international sanctions were the best path forward for the United States and its allies to take. The ruthlessness and grave atrocities toward civilians that have ensued since only reinforce that call.
As of this week, those sanctions have made dents in both Russia’s economy and its ability to wage war in Ukraine. As foreign companies have withdrawn operations from Russia, Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, estimated that some 200,000 people there are at risk of losing their jobs, and there’s some evidence that the decision by Europe and the United States to restrict the export of microchips has already affected Russia’s ability to produce and repair tanks. The sanctions have also sent a vital message of support to the Ukrainian people.
It is undeniable that the United States and its allies were — and still are — right to use sanctions to try to end this war.
Yet as the Biden administration weighs the next phase of this conflict, Americans should be clear-eyed about the limits of what sanctions are likely to achieve.
It’s too early to know how history will judge this unprecedented, sweeping effort to make Putin pay a price for his war. Nor can we predict the unintended consequences these sanctions may produce in the coming months or years. But there are lots of indications that the war — and the sanctions it triggered — could last a long time. As it is wise to have definite goals and an exit strategy when a country enters a military conflict, the same is true for waging economic warfare.
The West has turned to sanctions as a tool with growing frequency since World War II — in places as varied as South Africa, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Iran. It is relatively easy to apply sanctions, and they nearly always satisfy the domestic political need to “do something” short of military engagement.
Here’s the issue: Sanctions historically have not been particularly effective in changing regimes, and their record at changing dictators’ behavior is mixed at best.
Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea never bowed to American demands. Where there are success stories, they are modest: Crippling sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program, but that regime never stopped asserting its right to enrich uranium. The bite of sanctions eventually contributed to the end of white-minority rule in South Africa, but it was just one of many factors.
Or, to understand the limits of sanctions, Americans might consider our own national experience. When Arab nations imposed an oil embargo on the United States in the 1970s, it caused a lot of pain, but it did not cause the United States to stop supporting Israel.
The Biden administration deserves credit for laying the groundwork for multilateral sanctions, which are the only kind that have the hope of success. The greatest effects seen so far from the sanctions have been by unplugging Russia, if only partially, from the international financial system through moves like freezing billions of dollars in assets overseas and taking some Russian banks off SWIFT, the global messaging system for financial transactions. These far-reaching punishments, unthinkable even a few months ago, displayed a new sense of cooperation among the United States and the other Group of 7 countries.
Even Putin acknowledged that they have “achieved certain results.” But focusing on helping Ukraine financially and with military equipment might prove more productive than thinking up new sanctions on Russia. The Biden administration appears to recognize this, at least in part, with its latest $800 million in military aid and $500 million in emergency funding announced Thursday.
Sanctions alone — at least any sanctions that European countries would be willing to now consider — will not bring Russia to its knees any time soon. As long as Europeans still depend on Russian oil and gas, Russia will be able to depend on significant income from that relationship. The spat over whether gas deliveries will be paid in rubles, as Russia has demanded, only highlights the bind that European countries find themselves in.
The oligarchs who are losing their yachts and the people who are tightening their belts have little sway over the Kremlin. In Russia, with average citizens, Putin has grist for a loud “I told you so” about the West’s purported longing to bring down Russia.
Will the sanctions imposed by the Group of 7 nations truly isolate Russia? No. A number of countries, including Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and, most significantly, China, remain on friendly terms with Russia. The fact that this list also includes archrivals Pakistan and India, as well as Iran and Israel, illustrates Putin’s influence as an arms dealer and a power broker in South Asia and the Middle East.
The United States could tighten the economic screws on Russia by imposing secondary sanctions. U.S. officials already appear to be threatening as much in meetings and calls with officials in India and China. Secondary sanctions are a powerful tool to compel other countries to get in line with American policy. But the potential benefits need to be weighed against the risks and costs. The extraterritorial application of American laws can also incite deep resentment, even from European allies at times. Secondary sanctions should be used sparingly, and only after consultation with partners.
Sanctions can have other unintended consequences as well. They can actually end up strengthening a dictator’s grip on power by tightening state control over the economy. Private businesses can have a hard time weathering the storm of sanctions, but authoritarian regimes and their state-owned enterprises often find ways to circumvent them. Sanctions also provide dictators with a credible external enemy to blame for the misery of their people. Instead of pushing people to rise up against their rulers, sanctions often inspire a rally-around-the-flag effect. After Western sanctions were placed on Russia in 2014, in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea, 71% of Russians saw them as an attempt to “weaken and humiliate Russia,” according to an independent poll.
It is also worth remembering that, although Russia’s invasion proves that economic integration is no cure for war, economic isolation is also not a recipe for peace. Sanctions are often sold as an alternative to war. But they can also be a precursor to war, as seen with the institution of the American oil embargo against Japan and the freezing of Japanese assets about five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
So, while sanctions can hobble economies, they rarely compel the kinds of wholesale political changes that American officials would like to see. Research has shown that they produced some meaningful changes in behavior about 40% of the time. Change is unlikely to occur when sanctions are imposed without communicating the steps that must be taken for them to be rolled back.
All the more reason that the United States should have a clear plan for how and under what circumstances it would be appropriate to roll back these latest sanctions. Right now, this has been left deliberately vague to allow the Ukrainians to directly negotiate with Russia. It is laudable to give deference to Ukrainians whose lives are on the line in this terrible war. But creating clear goals and communicating benchmarks for sanctions relief are important factors in successful sanctions. Too often, sanctions are left in place for decades, without evaluation of whether or not they are achieving what they were put in place to do.
The United States and its allies have been wise in tightening the economic screws on Russia, so long as they bear no illusions about what this can and cannot achieve.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel says Trump-appointed judge got it wrong on masks (April 25):
COVID-19 caught the United States unprepared and unwilling in some ways to defend itself against the viral pandemic that has now taken nearly a million American lives. More than 400,000 had been lost by the time Joe Biden, on his first day as president, ordered face-masking across an array of federal agencies. His predecessor had been scornful of it.
There is no reasonable doubt that masks have saved lives, eased the burden on hospitals and helped Americans return to a semblance of normalcy. But a key element of that defense has been swept away by a Florida-based federal judge’s ludicrous interpretation of the word “sanitation” in a 1944 law to mean only cleaning and to disallow face masks. For now, at least, the government is powerless to mandate masking in public transportation, even with infections rising again.
The nation is newly more vulnerable to the next inevitable pandemic and to more of COVID19’s frequent mutations.
This is the result of how Donald Trump and Senate Republicans damaged the federal judiciary by packing it with people obsessed with “textualism.” It is a legal doctrine that means taking words as literally as possible, regardless of changed circumstances or common sense.
To extend the mask mandate ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle to its ultimate absurdity, the CDC could require airline, train and bus companies to do nothing more than wipe down everything with Lysol.
In her fixation on the word “sanitation” in the 1944 Public Health Service Act, Mizelle deftly ignored a subsequent phrase “and other measures, as … may be necessary.”
Yet she conceded the CDC’s finding that the mandate would limit transmission of the disease and reduce serious illness and death. But she added that it wasn’t enough “to establish good cause.”
Mizelle was on firmer ground in holding that the CDC impermissibly skirted legal requirements for public notice and comment, but that’s easily fixable. Her textualist fantasy, however, can be overcome only by an appeal or by a new law.
The Biden administration has no practical option other than to appeal, which it is doing. Given how COVID-19 precautions have been politicized, congressional action would be at best too slow and perhaps impossible.
An appeal has its own obstacles, which could have even more damaging results. The first stage of an appeal is in the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where a series of Trump appointments, including two from Florida, have skewed the court to the right. It now has seven judges appointed by Republicans and four chosen by Democratic presidents.
Beyond lies the Supreme Court, which has already made a mixed record on COVID defenses. With a 6-3 conservative majority — again due to Trump and the Republican Senate — it overturned the CDC’s moratorium on evictions as well as OSHA’s mask mandate for larger businesses. On the other hand, it upheld mandates for military personnel and vaccination requirements for health workers.
Historians in the future will surely be as astonished as many people are today at how vaccination and face-masking, two of the proven front-line defenses against deadly diseases, became the fulcrums of political division between Republicans and Democrats. It is reflected in death statistics as well as in public opinion polls.
Opportunistic state leaders like Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody are to blame for fostering and exploiting that division. With the privately financed lawsuit against the CDC already nearing a decision before Mizelle at the U.S. District Court in Tampa, DeSantis and Moody led 20 other Republican states in filing yet another in the same court against the CDC and other federal agencies. Perhaps long before any court rules, it will pay off handsomely in their fundraising.
Mizelle’s appointment exemplifies how not to pick a judge to serve for a lifetime. With the Senate still controlled by the Republicans in December 2020, after Trump’s defeat, she was nominated by the lame-duck president and confirmed on a 49-41 party-line vote, despite being rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Judiciary. It cited her relative inexperience — she was 33 at the time — having been a lawyer only eight years, and alleged that she had not tried to completion a civil or criminal case as a lead or co-counsel.
Civil rights organizations objected to her record as a Justice Department attorney in helping to rescind Title IX guidance that protected transgender students and to filing a brief arguing in the Supreme Court that businesses have the right to discriminate against LGBTQ customers.
What undoubtedly mattered more to Trump was that she had been a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and belonged to the Federalist Society, Trump’s go-to source for lifetime judicial appointments. She reportedly referred to Thomas as “the greatest living American.”
The Society is also one of DeSantis’ litmus tests for judicial appointment. The group exalts textualism in the interpretation of constitutional and statutory language. It’s a convenient pretext for rejecting anything the authors of the state and federal constitutions did not explicitly foresee — like a pandemic.
Republicans unabashedly promise more of the same if they regain control of the Senate and return Trump to the presidency. Marco Rubio, Florida’s senior senator, hailed Mizelle’s decision and took credit for recommending her. That bears remembering in November.