Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Baltimore Sun called out officials in Anne Arundel County, Md., for intolerant, ill-conceived flag bans (Aug. 30):
Outside the Arundel Center, the headquarters of Anne Arundel County government in Annapolis, a POW-MIA flag proudly flies. If the county adopts Bill 74-22, it will have to be taken down. The flag honoring those still missing and unaccounted for from the Vietnam War would also be banned from any other county-owned flagpole, nor could it be displayed inside or outside any county building. Under the ordinance filed by County Councilman Nathan Volke, only the national flag of the United States, the state flag of Maryland and the official flag of Anne Arundel County could be displayed anywhere on county property. So farewell, POW-MIA flag, not to mention the flag of Annapolis which includes a tribute to namesake Queen Anne and the Latin phrase, “vixi liber et moriar” or “I have lived free and will die so.”
Of course, that’s not the intent of the ordinance. This is an election year. Councilman Volke is clearly trying to score some conservative points by appearing to “protect” his constituents from the possibility that somebody somewhere will display a Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ+ Pride flag on his or her (or their) desk.
Anne Arundel residents can probably take heart from the fact that the measure has little chance of passage. Even if amended to allow the POW-MIA flag — or any other banner judged sufficiently noble and patriotic to Mr. Volke’s standards — the majority Democratic Anne Arundel County Council is likely to reject it after a scheduled hearing set for Sept. 6. Mr. Volke, a Republican who represents Pasadena, knows this.
So does County Executive Steuart Pittman, who comes from a background of horse farming, so he understands a thing or two about manure when he sees it being slung. The Democrat generously describes the legislation as a product of the “silly season” right before elections, when there is, as the Bard might observe, much sound and fury signifying nothing. But Mr. Pittman also rightly worries that his county has become an incubator for this kind of extremism within Maryland.
Consider, for example, an earlier effort to ban county tax dollars from being spent on equity, inclusion and diversity that failed on a party-line vote. Was there suddenly a fear of costly disability ramps? No, radicals on the council just wanted to generate their share of “critical race theory” hysteria or perhaps it was “replacement theory” hysteria. Sometimes, it’s hard to sort through all the various strains of white nationalism.
Nor should one forget that Michael Anthony Peroutka, the Republican nominee to be Maryland attorney general, is a former Anne Arundel County Council member himself. He’s expressed some pro-secessionist views in the past and was a member of the League of the South. He’s also promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories or what his fellow Republican, Gov. Larry Hogan, has described as “disgusting lies.” The governor’s distaste for Mr. Peroutka and GOP gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox have been noted at length. It would be nice if other sensible Republicans took a moment to denounce their extremism and foolish flag regulations, too. First in line ought to be County Councilmember Jessica Haire who is now running against Mr. Pittman to be county executive.
Flags appear to be a trigger word for the far-right these days, but the suppression effort is no laughing matter. The Carroll County Board of Education earlier this year voted 4-to-1 to ban various nonu.s. non-maryland state flags including LGBTQ+ Pride flags from schools. The damage done to gay teens struggling for acceptance could prove substantial. The harm done to the general public from this mindless kind of dog whistling is bad enough. Soon, it will be up to voters to express their disapproval. One can only hope they do so bigly.
In New Mexico, the Albuquerque Journal demanded a full explanation for the death of a migrant in ICE custody (Aug. 31):
We often hear our immigration system is broken. Sometimes we not only hear it, we see it.
Tragic instances of migrants dying of exposure somewhere in the desert or drowning in the Rio Grande have become much too frequent. Earlier this summer, 53 migrants from Mexico and Central America died after being trapped by their coyotes in a sweltering tractor-trailer found in San Antonio. The gruesome crime scene was the deadliest migrant smuggling case in U.S. history.
But we don’t expect, and shouldn’t accept, the deaths of migrants in U.S. custody.
The recent hanging death of a Brazilian man in New Mexico raises serious questions about the welfare of migrants in federal custody.
Kesley Vial of Brazil, who was just 23 years old, was found unresponsive Aug. 17 in his cell at the Torrance County Detention Facility. He died a week later.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say Vial was caught by Border Patrol agents April 22 after entering the country illegally near El
Paso, Texas. Immigration rights advocates say he was in ICE custody for months in “abhorrent conditions” while awaiting proceedings. The ACLU of New Mexico claims he was being “detained indefinitely.”
Vial had sought asylum in the United States but was denied after failing a “fear interview” in June, according to the ACLU, which added Vial was “unable to get clear or consistent information from ICE about when he would be removed.”
An average stay at the Torrance County facility, according to ICE records, is 45 days. But Vial had been there for more than three months. Why so long? There was no criminal concern. Why wasn’t he returned to Brazil promptly after failing to move forward in the asylum process?
A Journal reporter attempted to get some answers, but an ICE spokeswoman did not respond to a call or email.
Sophia Genovese, a senior attorney with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, says some migrants have to wait up to two months just to see a judge because of court delays. She said the wait for Vial became “just too much.”
All this follows a disturbing report by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general in February that called the conditions at the facility in Estancia unsafe and unsanitary. The IG report went so far as to recommend all of the roughly 150 migrants detained there be immediately transferred elsewhere. The ACLU of New Mexico has called for their “immediate release, not transfer.”
Genovese says Vial’s death was “preventable.” She says her group has received complaints that male detainees at the Torrance County facility are allowed to go outside for only an hour a day, if at all, due to staffing shortages; the food is “inedible”; and there is not enough water.
ICE and Corecivic, a private company that runs the Torrance County facility for about $2 million per month, dispute the IG’S report. A lawyer for Tennessee-based Corecivic has claimed the IG’S Office manufactured evidence and staged misleading photographs “to achieve preconceived conclusions.”
It’s still not clear who’s painting the truer picture.
U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-albuquerque, has called on the Biden administration for “increased oversight” of the Torrance County facility, which it merits based on recent reports. “My office and I will continue our oversight efforts to ensure that the public fully understands the causes and circumstances surrounding this death and are here to support the community,” Stansbury said this week.
ICE says it is “undertaking a comprehensive agency-wide review” of Vial’s death. A public report is expected in a month. The “detainee death review” detailing Vial’s time in federal custody needs to be a thorough and transparent report explaining why Vial was denied asylum, why he was detained so long, and what, if any, communication preceded his death.
Anything less is unacceptable if ICE wants the public’s trust.
The Justice Department had good reason to believe Trump kept highly classified materials on purpose, according to the New York Daily News (Sept. 1):
Whaddya know, pathological liar Donald Trump may have purposely kept records containing sensitive government secrets at Mar-a-lago despite claiming to have conducted a thorough search and returned them all. So says the Justice Department in a damning new court filing.
The DOJ response to Trump’s request that the court appoint a special master, leaves no doubt that the ex-president played games with the government, even as he told the public he was cooperating.
As we already knew, throughout 2021, the National Archives tried retrieving missing papers through voluntary cooperation. That ultimately yielded 15 boxes in January 2022 — which turned out to contain highly classified records.
When, even after that long and dragged-out compliance, the FBI obtained evidence that still more classified docs remained, the government got a grand jury subpoena for the files. Trump’s counsel in June returned “a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape” — along with a signed pledge that a “diligent search” had been conducted and “any and all responsive documents accompany this certification.”
In that envelope, produced nearly five months after the initial boxes were surrendered, were 38 files with classification markings, 17 of them marked “top secret.”
Then came — yep — yet more evidence from many sources that additional classified files remained, and that they weren’t confined to the storage room where Trump’s counsel had insisted that all such files were kept.
It was only then that the feds got a search warrant — and recovered 33 boxes containing more than 100 classified documents. Some were so sensitive that “even the FBI counterintelligence personnel and DOJ attorneys conducting the review required additional clearances before they were permitted to review certain documents.”
Says the government: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former president’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”
Obstruction, thy name is Donald.
And in Maine, the Bangor Daily News celebrated the Inflation Reduction Act’s language returning authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to the EPA (Aug. 28):
The Inflation Reduction Act has been touted as the largest investment in efforts to address climate change. Many, including
us, have been doubtful that those investments — most of which are tax incentives — will be particularly effective.
But, it turns out, there is language in the bill, which President Joe Biden signed into law earlier this month, that can make a big difference in America’s ongoing efforts to reduce emissions of pollutants that trap heat around the earth.
A provision of the act explicitly gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. This is significant because the U.S. Supreme Court recently pared back the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
The court ruled in June that Congress hadn’t given the agency the authority to require specific methods to reduce emissions of these gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, from power plants, one of the major sources of these emissions. Namely, the court said that the EPA could not require power plants to switch from coal to cleaner sources of energy, such as solar and wind, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The new language doesn’t undo the court ruling, but it makes it clear that the EPA can set limits on greenhouse gas emissions going forward.
“The new law does amend the Clean Air Act — the nation’s primary air quality law — to define several greenhouse gases as air pollutants. So it will help the EPA as it plans future regulations,” Patrick Parenteau, a professor of law at the Vermont Law School, recently wrote for The Conversation. “But it doesn’t specifically grant the EPA new authority to regulate power plants.”
He explained that the legislation, passed through a process called reconciliation, which means it was backed by only Democratic members of the Senate, defines greenhouse gases to include the six specific gases that the EPA determined in 2009 pose a risk to public health and welfare.
This “endangerment finding” was challenged by industry and other groups, but upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014.
With this new definition in the Inflation Reduction Act, the agency can move forward with regulations of these gases.
In addition, the new language could bolster the agency’s authority in the face of likely future court challenges. In the June case, West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, relying on the “major questions doctrine,” ruled that Congress had not given the EPA the specific authority it used to act on the significant question of climate change. The new language in the Inflation Reduction Act addresses this argument.
The new sections in the act that define the EPA’S authority “are going to be pretty helpful to EPA lawyers, and in general are going to show that EPA isn’t acting like some kind of rogue woke agency in pursuing some of these climate change measures,” University of California Berkeley professor Dan Farber told Bloomberg Law.
The provisions giving the EPA express authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions may end up being the biggest legacy of the Inflation Reduction Act.