Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on the Supreme Court keeping Trump on ballot (March 4):
No, there is no one weird trick to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot and out of the White House. That is the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, which ruled Monday that the 14th Amendment does not authorize states to disqualify presidential candidates from seeking the office based on alleged oath-breaking and insurrection. This settles a legal controversy whose answer ought always to have been clear, leaving primary responsibility for preventing Trump 2.0 in the hands of voters.
Nearly as important as the substance of the Supreme Court’s decision this week was its speed. The justices expedited review of the Colorado Supreme Court’s Dec. 19 ruling that Trump was ineligible thanks to the Constitution’s “insurrection clause.” Thus their opinion arrived one day before Super Tuesday’s nominating contests. That allows voters to choose from among all the candidates without worry that their preferred option will be removed by the time of the general election. The country would benefit from similar promptness in another matter under the high court’s consideration: Trump’s weak claim that he is immune from criminal prosecution.
Of course, the substance of the 14th Amendment case was what matters most. The notion that an arcane Civil War-era provision could be used to exclude Trump from presidential politics was always a bit too good to be true. The arguments in favor contained multiple points of failure: Did the insurrection clause even apply to the presidency, as opposed to the “offices” it explicitly named? Had the rule against rebels returning to power in Washington, approved soon after the Civil War, already been expunged with the Amnesty Act of 1872? Was the former president even an insurrectionist, and who should decide? As it happened, the Supreme Court didn’t need to bother with these intricacies. The justices turned instead, sensibly, to federalism.
The framers designed the presidency as a uniquely national office, so it made little sense to suppose that the authors of the 14th Amendment could have intended to make eligibility subject to a de facto state veto. The justices accordingly noted that federal officers “owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not a portion, of the people.” They warned against the “patchwork” that would result from allowing various states with various rules to make various determinations about who may or may not run for federal office.
More compelling still, the justices put these precepts in historical context. The 14th Amendment, drafted in the immediate aftermath of a rebellion carried out under the bogus “states’ rights” banner, was at its core a rebalancing of power between the states and the federal government — to limit the former and strengthen the latter. “It would be incongruous,” they pointed out, “to read this particular amendment as granting the states the power — silently no less — to disqualify a candidate for federal office.”
To be sure, the court’s unanimity was not perfect. In a disgruntled joint concurring opinion, liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson took their conservative colleagues to task for declining to limit their rationale to federalism. Instead, the court’s majority opinion went on to say that nobody can enforce Section 3 against anybody without an act of Congress detailing whom the provision disqualifies. The three liberals called this judicial overreach, designed to “insulate this court and petitioner” from future political firestorms.
They have a point: The 14th Amendment is far from clear on the matter, and Section 3 does become harder to employ if only Congress can do so. The court leaves no room for Congress to refuse to certify the election of an alleged insurrectionist, for instance, and no room for courts to consider lawsuits against a president or their appointees on the grounds that they’ve been improperly installed. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, agreed with the liberals. What she objected to, however, in a short concurrence that read more like a blog post than a legal opinion, was the “stridency” with which the three expressed their quibble. “All nine justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”
Barrett might not be the right messenger — spin is not part of the court’s job description — but it was the right message. This often bitterly divided Supreme Court managed to reach the same bottom line: Whatever else it might do, the 14th Amendment does not authorize states to cull the presidential ballot. It struck a blow both for federalism and for democracy — albeit ironically, given Trump’s own antidemocratic tendencies. The way to prevent his comeback remains clear: to vote.
The Los Angeles Times on the slippery slope of abortion rights (March 4):
The Alabama Supreme Court decision last month determining that frozen embryos have the same rights as children brought the personhood debate to a surreal level that should terrify anyone who supports the right to terminate a pregnancy or start one in a lab through in vitro fertilization.
It was a preposterous ruling — three couples whose frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic were found to have the right to sue for wrongful death. But it is an example of the growing anti-abortion effort to redefine embryos — in utero and in laboratory dishes — and fetuses as people with the 14th Amendment right of equal protection under the law.
It’s all part of the chaos over reproductive rights that has engulfed the country since the Supreme Court took away the constitutional right to an abortion in June 2022, and conservative states rushed new and horrible restrictions into law. Now conservative anti-abortion politicians and their supporters have finally found out what it’s like to have a court interfere with their reproductive freedom.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Alabama quickly passed a bill Thursday to protect in vitro fertilization providers from criminal and civil liability — some clinics halted procedures after the ruling. It wasn’t a victory for reproductive rights, however, just a stop-gap measure that will be obliterated if the personhood movement gains more traction in state legislatures.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, more than a dozen states have introduced personhood bills bestowing legal rights upon fetuses or embryos, or both. Legislators in Iowa and Colorado have introduced bills that would define personhood as beginning at fertilization and subject to the state’s homicide, wrongful death and assault laws — with no IVF exceptions.
Last week, after the Alabama decision, lawmakers in Florida shelved a bill that protected “unborn” children from wrongful death. But it likely will return in some form.
And 18 members of the U.S. Senate and 166 members of the U.S. House co-sponsored legislation in 2021 that would have conferred equal rights under the 14th Amendment to a fertilized egg. The bills have gone nowhere, but that could change depending on the outcome of the election in November.
A number of personhood laws are already on the books. A Georgia law called the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act declares a fetus a person after six weeks of pregnancy and bans abortion after that point. Louisiana has a law specifically preventing the destruction of embryos.
Abortion foes have been trying to shift the storyline, with a slew of new state laws, from punishing pregnant women to championing innocent fetuses, which is an easier sell to the public. Even Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker, in his concurrence, waxed on about how “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
While personhood laws define an embryo or fetus as having legal rights, state fetal homicide laws vary in how broadly they consider fetuses and embryos as potential victims. Some don’t say anything about abortion. Others exclude it. California’s murder statute extends to killing a fetus if it is done maliciously. But it specifically excludes abortion or any action taken by a person carrying the fetus.
This move toward declaring fetuses and embryos people with legal rights is all the more reason we need a federal law protecting the right to abortion. The decisions that voters make this year in elections will have enormous implications for how much bodily autonomy women are allowed, and could set a course for a dystopian future where their rights are trumped by the rights of their embryos.
Even straightforward legislative efforts to protect IVF have stalled in Washington, D.C. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-ill., tried to parlay bipartisan concern about the Alabama ruling into support to rush through a bill that would protect an individual’s right to IVF and a clinic’s right to do the procedure. The bill also would allow the U.S. attorney general, an individual or a health care provider to sue a state or municipality preventing or limiting that access.
Apparently all that was a bridge too far for Sen. Cindy Hyde-smith, R-miss., whose “no” vote quashed its chances. The urgency bill could only pass with unanimous support in the Senate. Hyde-smith claimed falsely that the bill would, among other things, legalize human cloning and commercial surrogacy (which is already legal in a few states).
The IVF ruling illustrates the further confusion that will come from personhood laws. The IVF procedure involves collecting multiple eggs to fertilize and store so a patient can have several attempts at getting pregnant or determine with their doctor which embryos have the best chance of developing into a healthy pregnancy. If destroying the unused embryos is a crime equal to killing, say, an infant, then another reproductive right will be lost to Americans.
Abortion opponents have so fetishized embryos and fetuses that even when they support the concept of IVF, they can’t let go of their quest for personhood laws that may end up not just prohibiting abortion but making infeasible the IVF procedure that has been such a lifeline for so many who cannot conceive on their own.
The Pittsburgh Post-gazette on the cruelty of solitary confinement (March 6):
On Monday, inmates who have collectively spent decades in solitary confinement filed a lawsuit, through the Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Center, against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The suit reflects what experts have known for decades: Solitary confinement only harms the incarcerated, especially those with mental illnesses, and reduces their ability to succeed when they leave the facility.
It should be banned across the commonwealth and the country, for people with mental illness and for everybody.
This comes nearly a decade after the DOC settled a lawsuit by agreeing to prohibit seriously mentally ill inmates from being held in long-term isolation. The suit claims these practices continue in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
There are many names and classifications of solitary confinement, also known euphemistically as “administrative segregation,” in Pennsylvania’s criminal justice system. The Allegheny County Jail, for example, has a “segregated” housing unit on the top floor, where inmates who are considered to be dangerous are placed, either in cells along the perimeter or in a cage in the center of the room.
The lawsuit’s definition of solitary confinement is broad, acknowledging the more insidious mental damage caused by a lack of any environmental stimulation. For them, solitary is “defined less by the purpose for which it is imposed, or the exact amount of time during which prisoners are confined to their cells, than by the degree to which they are deprived of normal, direct, meaningful social contact and denied access to positive environmental stimulation, programming and activity.”
Even under this broad definition, the experiences of the plaintiffs are clearly egregious violations of the 2015 settlement, of the Constitution and of human dignity.
Khalil Hammond, 35, was diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD and PTSD prior to his incarceration. After 10 years in solitary, he still can’t participate in programs that would make him parole-eligible, speak to his family regularly or marry his long-time girlfriend. David Thompson, 25, was diagnosed with depression and anxiety when he was still in elementary school, and has spent a total of five years in solitary confinement. After an attempt to hang himself in 2020, he was pepper sprayed by correctional officers, issued a misconduct and again placed in solitary confinement.
Studies of people in these conditions show how, within hours, isolation can begin to measurably affect the brain. Delirium, psychosis, depression and hallucinations all become more likely. While 5% of Pennsylvania state inmates are in solitary confinement at any given time, 40% of suicide attempts happen there.
This lawsuit underscores what has been known about America’s carceral system for decades: Its punitive and inhumane conditions lead to mental deterioration, damaging the very people they claim they are trying to reform.
Eliminating solitary confinement for seriously mentally ill people, as argued in this lawsuit and by a bill now before the legislature, is a basic, obvious reform. But solitary confinement shouldn’t be meted out to anyone. In denying the incarcerated human contact, the practice denies their humanity, and nothing can ever justify that.
The New York Daily News on the impact of immigration on the economy (March 6):
Simple question: Are you happy that inflation has stabilized? The economic indicators don’t and can’t capture everyone’s circumstances, but real wages have gone up and costs have held steady. We’re certainly much better situated than the recession that many economists had predicted would be engulfing the nation by now. The soft landing that had seemed like a significant reach has come to pass without even a blip of economic strife.
To some extent, we can thank the Federal Reserve’s needle-threading on rate hikes and the pro-labor and pro-industrial policy stances of the Biden administration. But what really stuck the landing is what’s been the United States’ economic secret sauce for two centuries: immigration.
Recent economic analyses by the Economic Policy Institute, the Congressional Research Service and others show that the labor force has grown enormously in large part on the back of rebounding immigration, which had fallen during the pandemic. This helped plug labor force problems that were in large part leading to inflation, as well as kept consumer demand high and money flowing around the economy.
Here we can hear critics jumping in to roll out the persistent myth that these foreign-born workers are “taking” jobs from the native born; that would pack some more punch if unemployment weren’t at historic lows across the board, or wages rising especially for lower-income populations, immigrant and native born alike.
To the extent that there are negative economic circumstances, such as rising child poverty rates following the expiration of pandemic-era child care and other assistance programs, these are areas where immigration can be a significant boon.
Birthrates have dropped below replacement levels in the United States, and a big chunk of the child care, nursing and general health care workforce now is drawing from immigrants, who will ensure against the demographic crash.
Unfortunately, you won’t hear much about this from political leaders, from President Joe Biden to former President Donald Trump, who are competing for who can appear tougher on immigrants rather than touting the substantial benefits of continuing to be a global destination for talent and culture.
New York Mayor Eric Adams last week upped the ante on his public frustrations with immigrants, suggesting that New York should essentially reverse its sanctuary policies and begin cooperating with ICE just when an immigrant is suspected of a crime, not convicted, suggesting that they “should be held accountable.”
The mayor apparently forgot that the criminal justice system that he was a part of for decades as a police officer is already the entity responsible for holding accountable people suspected of crimes. There are specific and in fact constitutional reasons why people who are suspected of criminal activity — regardless of what activity that is — are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and not sentenced until that guilt is legally established.
Deportation is a very harsh fate, yet the mayor is suggesting we effectively presume guilt for immigrants arrested for crimes and send them packing.
It’s not right and it’s not in keeping with New York values. Rather than threatening heavy-handed enforcement, Adams should focus on cutting down on the massive waste happening in migrant services contracts and continuing to push the Biden administration to assist arriving migrants itself instead of foisting it all on municipalities and states.