Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on regaining trust in the ethics of the U.S. Supreme Court (Nov. 23):
Once again, the Supreme Court is finding its ethics under scrutiny. Last week, Justice Clarence Thomas declined to recuse himself in a case involving the plot to overturn Arizona’s 2020 presidential vote, despite his wife’s efforts to pressure state lawmakers to set aside Joe Biden’s victory there. Then, The New York Times reported on allegations that a decision in a 2014 case involving contraception and religious rights leaked to a high-profile abortion foe — a troubling precursor, if true, to the breach that occurred this spring when a draft opinion of its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade became public.
Unlike other federal judges, the justices on the Supreme Court are subject to no code of conduct. It is time for the court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, to set ethics standards for itself that are transparent, consistent and actually work. At stake is no less than its legitimacy, which has been battered by growing public doubts that it truly operates as an apolitical arbiter of the law.
The Post reported in June that Thomas’ wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, urged at least 29 Arizona lawmakers to overturn the popular vote in their state following the 2020 presidential election, asking legislators in one email to “fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen.” Despite his wife’s efforts to upend the election result, Justice Thomas failed to recuse himself this year from a case involving the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack by Trump supporters who were seeking to achieve the same end. The panel, which she had called an “overtly partisan political persecution,” subsequently interviewed Ms. Thomas about her postelection 2020 activities.
Justice Thomas once again declined to recuse himself last week from a case regarding Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward’s alleged efforts to set aside the 2020 presidential vote in her state. He was one of two justices who dissented from the court’s decision allowing the Jan. 6 committee to access some of Ward’s phone records.
Washington is populated by countless power couples, and conflicts of interest — or appearances of them — are bound to occur from time to time. But Ms. Thomas’ activities stand out as particularly blatant. “Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them,” the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote this year. “And many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.” One glaring example: Ms. Thomas’ consultancy received more than $200,000 from right-wing activist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, according to Mayer, as Gaffney urged the court to rule favorably on President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. Justice Thomas voted to uphold the ban, and he did not disclose the $200,000 payment to his wife.
Meanwhile, the Times reported that a former antiabortion activist, the Rev. Rob Schenck, claims he was told how the court would rule on a major 2014 birth control case, saying that Justice Samuel Alito tipped off two associates of his. There is limited corroborating evidence, and Alito and others allegedly involved deny this happened. Yet Schenck’s contemporaneous emails and conversations indicating that he knew the case’s outcome and the author of the opinion are reason to worry. He says he ran “Operation Higher Court,” a years-long effort among conservative activists to ingratiate themselves with justices via donations to the Supreme Court Historical Society, meals and trips to places such as Jackson Hole, Wyo. “I saw us as pushing the boundaries of appropriateness,” Schenck said, and the Times’ reporting suggests his operatives achieved high levels of access to certain justices.
An ethics code binds lower-court judges but not Supreme Court justices. Roberts says that justices refer to the code but make their own ethical calls. This is not enough. The justices should formally bind themselves to a judicial code of conduct, rather than simply consulting one when they are so inclined.
Then there is the question of how to enforce such rules. One option is to have the whole court review requests that, for example, certain justices recuse themselves. Another is to create a panel of outside judges, perhaps distinguished retired jurists whose work the high court no longer oversees, to consider Supreme Court ethical questions referred to them.
Critics of such an arrangement point out that, unlike on lower courts, the Supreme Court risks deadlocking 4-4 on major cases if a justice is recused. This could leave important legal questions unresolved and lower courts without definitive precedents to apply. Limiting justices’ work because of their spouses’ conduct, meanwhile, raises the prospect that talented people with professionally active partners will not pursue careers on the bench.
Yet the court’s reputation is indispensable; its power rests both on its constitutional mandate and its credibility. The justices should not continue to dismiss Americans’ declining confidence as the product of misunderstandings about how they work. Moreover, if the court fails to adjust, Congress might step in. Federal lawmakers are considering several reforms, including imposing restrictions on compensated travel and setting requirements that justices must disclose with whom they meet.
Congressional action, however, would no doubt raise separation-of-powers issues. That is all the more reason that justices should acknowledge that they have given the public reason for its mistrust, and take it upon themselves to restore faith in their impartiality.
The Los Angeles Times says DACA recipients need permanent relief (Nov. 22):
One of the few issues most Americans can agree on when it comes to the thorny topic of immigration is that longtime residents who were brought into the United States illegally as children should be granted permanent status. Congress should seize the opportunity during the lameduck session to pass such legislation before the end of the year.
With the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy in peril in federal court, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-calif., has joined other Democratic senators to corral support to pass bipartisan legislation after Thanksgiving that would provide a permanent solution for these immigrants whose fates have been in limbo for years. Legislation could be a standalone bill or language attached to a must-pass government spending bill. Either way, such legislation would need the support of at least 10 Republicans and all 50 Democrats to pass. Padilla, who heads the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, is appealing to common sense, making the case to Republicans that offering permanent residency to immigrants who’ve lived in the country most of their lives and work in essential jobs boosts the economy.
It’s a last-ditch effort to resolve a problem that’s hounded legislators for decades. There’s a short window of opportunity before Republicans take over control of the House, closing the door for at least two more years on any permanent fix. The House passed a bill to give Dreamers legal status in 2021. It’s time for the Senate to approve the legislation and send it to President Joe Biden’s desk.
President Barack Obama created DACA by executive order in 2012 after Congress failed to pass a bill that would have offered young immigrants who met certain requirements the opportunity for legal residency. DACA has allowed more than 800,000 young immigrants in the U.S. to live, work and travel legally, but it was intended to be a temporary solution. It has survived legal challenges, but its fate will now be decided by a U.S. district judge who has previously ruled that DACA is illegal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has sent the case back to the judge for a final resolution.
Instead of waiting for the resolution of that case, Congress
must find a way to offer permanent relief to Dreamers, who are thoroughly American and have built lives here as college students, entrepreneurs, essential workers and valued members of every community.
Is this a long shot? Perhaps, but now would be a good time to remember that the original Dream Act was introduced in 2001 by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-utah, and combined elements of two bills sponsored by Democratic and Republican legislators. The Dream Act’s initial bipartisan support eroded dramatically in the weeks after the 9/11 attack heightened security concerns.
Since then, various attempts to revive different versions of the Dream Act have fallen short in Congress because Republicans want stricter border controls. The border has been fortified in many ways through the years, yet the fate of Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants remains uncertain. DACA now symbolizes the long-standing failure by federal lawmakers to craft much-needed comprehensive immigration reform.
Poll after poll show that most Americans want DACA recipients to be allowed to remain legally in the U.S. An analysis conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute in 2017 found that “Americans’ general feelings toward immigrants and immigration have become more positive in recent years.”
Of course, some people may prefer to have DACA recipients leave the country, perhaps thinking that these immigrants are a financial drain on taxpayers. But Dreamers contribute about $6.2 billion in federal taxes and $3.3 billion in state and local taxes annually, according to the nonpartisan Center for American Progress.
It’s time for senators to put aside their differences and show leadership in addressing the fate of Dreamers.
The New York Times on extremism in the Republican Party (Nov. 26):
On Oct. 12, 2018, a crowd of Proud Boys arrived at the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan. They had come to the Upper East Side club from around the country for a speech by the group’s founder, Gavin Mcinnes. It was a high point for the Proud Boys — which until that point had been known best as an all-male right-wing street-fighting group — in their embrace by mainstream politics.
The Metropolitan Republican Club is an emblem of the Republican establishment. It was founded in 1902 by supporters of Theodore Roosevelt, and it’s where New York City Republicans such as Fiorello La Guardia and Rudy Giuliani announced their campaigns. But the presidency of Donald Trump whipped a faction of the Metropolitan Republican Club into “an ecstatic frenzy,” said John William Schiffbauer, a Republican consultant who used to work for the state GOP on the second floor of the club.
The Mcinnes invitation was controversial, even before a group of Proud Boys left the building and violently confronted protesters who had gathered outside. Two of the Proud Boys were later convicted of attempted assault and riot, and given four years in prison. The judge who sentenced them explained the relatively long prison term: “I know enough
about history to know what happened in Europe in the ’30s when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system,” he said. Seven others pleaded guilty in the episode.
And yet Republicans at the club have not distanced themselves from the Proud Boys. Soon after the incident, a candidate named Ian Reilly, who, former club members say, had a lead role in planning the speech, won the next club presidency. He did so in part by recruiting followers of farright figures, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, to pack the club’s ranks at the last minute. A similar group of men repeated the strategy at the New York Young Republicans Club, filling it with far-right members, too.
Many moderate Republicans have quit the clubs in disgust. Looking back, Schiffbauer said, Oct. 12, 2018, was a “proto” Jan. 6.
In conflicts like this one there is a fight underway for the soul of the Republican Party. On one side are Trump and his followers, including extremist groups. On the other stand those in the party who remain committed to the principle that politics, even the most contentious politics, must operate within the constraints of peaceful democracy. It is vital that this pro-democracy faction win out over the extremists and push the fringes back to the fringes.extremist violence is the country’s top domestic terrorist threat, according to a three-year investigation by the Democratic staff members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which reported its findings last week. “Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased,” the committee said in its report. “National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland. This increase in domestic terror attacks has been predominantly perpetrated by white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” While there have been recent episodes of violent left-wing extremism, for the past few years, political violence has come primarily from the right.
It is impossible to fully untangle the relationship between conspiracy theories and violence. But what Americans do know should sound alarms: A survey this year found that some 18 million Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that force is justified to return him to power. Of those 18 million, 8 million own guns, and a million either belong to a paramilitary group or know someone who does. That’s alarming because violent people who belong to communities, online or offline, where violence is widely accepted are more likely to act. A portion of the GOP has become such a community.
The full extent of this violence is not well documented. The Senate committee’s report concluded that the federal government, specifically the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, has “failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism as required by federal law, has not appropriately allocated its resources to match the current threat and has not aligned its definitions to make its investigations consistent and its actions proportional to the threat of domestic terrorism.” Those shortcomings need to be urgently remedied.
Beyond the obvious need for better data on extremist violence, preventing or stopping the spread of extremism is complicated, although there are some important, concrete steps that can be taken. This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, closer monitoring of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and better international cooperation to tackle this transnational issue. Social media companies need to develop new tools to keep extremist material off their platforms and adjust their algorithms so users aren’t exposed to ever more extreme content.
Yet one of the most effective ways to deter political violence is to make it unacceptable in public life. To do that, all political leaders have an important role to play. In a speech in September, President Joe Biden did his part, when he identified the threat that the dominance of specifically “MAGA Republicans” poses not just to the Democratic Party but to the entire country. “They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country,” Biden said.
A couple of months after that speech, Americans voted in midterm elections in which hundreds of “MAGA Republicans” who had enthusiastically spread extremist statements, lies and conspiracy theories ran for local, state and federal offices. Voters rejected many of them, and while that is encouraging, elections alone are not enough.
The campaign season was marked by numerous incidents in which many Republicans used speech that has been linked to violence. They depicted gay and transgender people as “groomers”; they helped spread the racist so-called great replacement theory that has inspired numerous mass shootings; they promoted the Qanon conspiracy theory, not to mention ubiquitous lies about fraud and the 2020 election, which led to the Jan. 6 attack.
Despite voters’ repudiation of many of his acolytes, Trump has announced his return to the campaign trail, a move that promises to dial up the enthusiasm of his most devoted adherents. They include, of course, members of the Proud Boys. During a debate in 2020, Trump refused to disavow them or their movement and instead told them to “stand back and stand by.” And so they did until Jan. 6.
Trump’s reinstatement on Twitter means not only further proliferation of “degrading and dehumanizing discourse,” as Brian L. Ott, an author of “The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage,” warned, but also a greater likelihood of violence. As Ott explains: “Social media generally and Twitter specifically lend themselves to simple, urgent, unreflective and emotionally charged communication. When the message is one of intolerance and violence, the result is all but certain.”
Leaders in politics, law enforcement, the media and elsewhere have an obligation to do everything they can to remove from public life those who participate in or endorse political violence.
The onus falls on Republicans. While voters rejected some of the most extreme candidates, the party is still very much under the spell of Trump and his brand of authoritarianism. Two prominent Republicans who have been outspoken about right-wing extremism and baseless lies, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, have been driven out of office. Meanwhile, the spread of conspiracy theories that have already inspired violence continues unabated from politicians and conservative media.
Even if Trump doesn’t become the party’s nominee for president, the party and many of its supporters seem to have convinced themselves that the spread of extremism in service of their causes is not an urgent concern. Those who can influence the direction of the party — its voters and its biggest donors and supporters — must do everything they can to convince them otherwise. American democracy depends on it.