Editorials from around New England

Excerpts of recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New England newspapers:

The (New London) Day (Conn.), March 27, 2017

And now for our next act.

The failure of the American Health Care Act to make it across home plate had the minute-by-minute drama of a closely contested game, right down to the breaking news that House Speaker Paul Ryan was “rushing” to the White House to inform the president that he couldn’t get the votes to pass the bill.

Imagine the sighs of relief in the Senate bleachers, where the third of the membership facing elections in 2018 have escaped at least one shamefaced vote, and in the House, where any single member could win or lose the next election based on the act’s drastic impact on Americans’ health.

The collapse of the Republicans’ health care bill shows that the party has been so consumed with being against Obamacare provisions that it hasn’t been able to agree on what it wants. Having mounted a strong defense against virtually every proposal from the Obama administration, the party has let its strategic offense skills atrophy.

This is a humiliating lesson for the Republicans but a temporary relief for Americans who would have lost health care coverage - by estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, 24 million over the next decade. Still, Obamacare needs reform, and for that Congress needs to regroup,

Some things can be predicted as coming next: Congress will move on to the next priority on the Republican agenda. Majority leaders will go back to the consensus building they thought they had achieved with the party’s January meeting in Philadelphia.

Ugly as this process has been to watch, it bodes some improvement for the balance of powers that exists not because of majority-minority party politics but because of the U.S. Constitution. The executive branch proposes and the legislative branch disposes or, as in this scenario, refuses to.

That dynamic has seriously weakened over the last few administrations, in which frustrated presidents of both parties have used executive orders to get what Congress won’t give them and have even booked major military spending - on the Iraq War, for example - outside the budget.

Leading the effort to resurrect Republican unity and congressional authority, besides the bloodied Ryan, will be Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has said he won’t be supporting the cuts in foreign aid and medical research in President Trump’s proposed spending plan. That was a rare moment in which McConnell, the Senate’s Wizard of No, said he’d use his power to block provisions constructively rather than as an obstruction.

What’s vital now is for citizens to keep their eyes on the next acts of Congress - not just tax-cutting or The Wall or the Supreme Court confirmation vote on Neil Gorsuch but the hearings the Trump administration would like us all to overlook.

Don’t be distracted. As Congress investigates the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia, questioning by panel members will ripple across the campaign staff and the administration. Anyone who remembers the Watergate investigations into President Richard Nixon and his staff will notice the sense of dejà vu.

As it was in the 1970s, it can be now. The hearings are bipartisan affairs in which panel members have the political cover to think of themselves as representatives of the American people first, and party members second, if they so choose. That’s what happened as the Watergate hearings proceeded.

If Congress can exercise its constitutional share of the balance of powers by conducting fair, open investigations into the allegations of undue influence and inappropriate contact, in the process it may regain some self-awareness of what it’s like to function as a bipartisan body.

And that would make reform of the health care law, the tax code and other urgent matters a lot more likely to succeed.

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Online:

https://bit.ly/2nDcgti

The Kennebec Journal (Maine), March 30, 2017

Imagine if a day after calling the washing machine repairman, a salesman, tipped off by your phone company, showed up at your door, wondering if you’d like to buy a new one. Most people would consider that an egregious violation of privacy.

But the same thing happens online millions of times a day - in fact, it is the backbone of the internet, generating billions of dollars for companies like Facebook and Google. Does anyone really care? Has the internet changed our very concept of privacy? Republicans are about to find out.

The U.S. House this week voted largely along party lines to allow internet service providers like AT&T and Verizon to collect and sell the information generated by their customers, following a similar vote in the Senate. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill into law.

The action, which repealed a set of protections created by the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama administration, will allow browsing history, location data, app usage and other online activity to be curated into an individual profile and used to target advertising directly at a consumer, all without the consumer’s consent.

Websites like Facebook and Google, which fall under a different regulatory framework, have been doing this for years, making sure that when you search for a ski jacket online, you’re inundated with ads for L.L. Bean and The North Face.

Online advertising is an $83 billion a year business, and it is growing. Internet service providers are in a unique position to capitalize on it, if only they can get people to go along.

Unlike Google, Facebook, and their affiliated sites, which internet users can avoid with a little inconvenience, internet service providers are a requirement to access the internet, and in most markets they hold a monopoly or near-monopoly. Consumers can’t just switch if they don’t like how their ISP is handling their personal information.

And ISPs have access not only to your searches and Facebook likes, but every site you visit, every physical location you go to, and every app you use. That information is enough to create a strong profile, and advertisers want it.

Consumers are unlikely to give it up, however, if ISPs have to get their explicit consent. The big telecommunication companies know this, and they lobbied Congress hard to repeal the Obama-era rules, which had yet to go into effect.

Opponents of the rules, like Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, say they put ISPs at a disadvantage against websites that can sell personal information. But that doesn’t explain why Republicans want to withdraw the protections, not extend them to other parts of the internet.

No, this is about providing the giants in the telecommunications industry a new market. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and others are hoping that consumers won’t search for the “opt-out” option, hidden deep in their preferences, or move en masse toward services that encrypt their online actions or turn off tracking. They hope there isn’t a call for more local providers that put consumers before profit.

Republicans hope that this will pass unnoticed, that there is so much else to worry about in the Trump administration that this won’t even be acknowledged.

But most of all, they hope that as more and more of our lives are conducted online, the line between public and private becomes blurred so much that it doesn’t matter. Judging from how differently we treat the telephone and the internet, they may be right.

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Online:

https://bit.ly/2nPgdvp

The MetroWest Daily News of Framingham (Mass.), March 28, 2017

Not “even a scintilla of evidence.” That was the judgment of a federal judge last month in Texas about allegations of wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood. He was not alone in finding that the health-care organization did not illegally profit from fetal-tissue donation: Three Republican-led congressional investigations, 13 states and a Texas grand jury all could find no substance to claims about the alleged sale of “baby body parts,” which gained currency through videos released by anti-abortion activists.

It is important to point out these facts in light of an advertising campaign that uses misleading data and half-truths in a bid to whip up support in Congress for a cutoff of federal support to Planned Parenthood.

While the would-be cutters suffered a setback with last week’s collapse of the Republicans’ attempted overhaul of health care, which also targeted Planned Parenthood, it is clear the threat remains and that misinformation will continue to be a key weapon.

“What is Planned Parenthood really about?” is the title of the slick ad that’s the work of the anti- abortion group Susan B. Anthony List.

The ad is effective in delivering its message - but then, it is easy to make a point if you cherry-pick information and don’t worry about staying true to the facts.

For example, in making the claim that Planned Parenthood has faced federal investigation for “selling baby body parts,” the ad doesn’t mention that the group was cleared repeatedly or that the videos that sparked the inquiries have been completely discredited. There are other distortions about breast-cancer screenings and vital health services offered at Planned Parenthood health centers. That’s not to mention the omissions, such as the fact that abortions, which constitute a small part of the organization’s services, are not paid for (with rare exceptions) with federal funds.

The ad’s most pernicious distortion centers on the argument that Congress should redirect the federal dollars that go to Planned Parenthood to “real health-care centers for women.” Studies and real-life practice have established that there simply are not enough community health centers to fill the gap that would be created if Planned Parenthood lost Medicaid funds. The truth is that a cutoff would tear a huge hole in the safety net for the 2.5 million patients - the majority of them low-income - who each year go to Planned Parenthood centers for basic medical needs. Congress should reject it.

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Online:

https://bit.ly/2nP85v0

The Concord Monitor (N.H.), March 29, 2017

It’s time to pay Uncle again. All over the nation people are searching for mislaid W2 forms, bank statements, receipts from charitable giving and other proofs demanded by the IRS in order to meet the April 15 tax deadline.

Some will make mistakes. Some will cheat, minimizing income or inflating deductions. But the odds of catching the cheats aren’t good and, with his call to cut the IRS budget by $239 million, President Donald Trump promises to make matters worse.

Who pays when taxpayers get away with paying less than their fair share? Honest people, especially working stiffs whose tax payments come off the top, and future generations, who will inherit a national debt that’s bigger than it needs to be.

It’s no surprise that Trump considers the IRS a mortal enemy. Historically, Republican officeholders, in Washington and in Concord, have favored fewer rather than more tax collectors.

In 2010, during the reign of House Speaker Bill O’Brien, Republicans slashed the budget of the Department of Revenue Administration, a move that cost the state tens of millions of dollars. The same will happen on a grand scale if the IRS’s battered budget is further reduced.

According to Trump’s own Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, the IRS has 30 percent fewer employees than it did less than a decade ago. Audit rates for large corporations fell by nearly half in the last six years, from 17.8 percent to 9.5 percent. Less than 1 percent of all individual returns were audited last year, according to the Washington Post.

Funding for IRS enforcement operations also suffered deep cuts. The shortfall between what the Treasury was owed and what it was able to collect tops $450 billion per year, a sum that law school professor Dennis Ventry, writing in the New York Times, said equaled 80 percent of last year’s budget deficit.

Collectively, taxpayers will spend more than 6 billion hours to comply with the federal tax code, reason enough, one would think, to simplify the code and make it fairer. That effort is once again underway in Washington but, given the chaos in Congress and the inexperience of Trump and his team, real progress seems unlikely.

More than two-thirds of all taxpayers (68.5 percent, according to the IRS) take the standard deduction. As a result, they have little opportunity, short of earning off-the-books money, to cheat. Less than one-third of all households, 30.1 percent, itemize deductions. They tend to have higher incomes.

In 2013, the agency said, 93.5 percent of filers with incomes of $200,000 or more itemized.

In his confirmation hearings, Mnuchin said that he wanted to increase, not decrease, IRS funding and staff levels. “We add people, we make money,” he said.

As a businessman, the president should understand that. He wants more money for defense. He wants to build his border wall. He promised a $1 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. Firing tax collectors will make it harder to achieve any of those goals, and it will make the nation’s tax collection system less fair.

The IRS collects $6 for every $1 spent on auditors and enforcement. The president should listen to his treasury secretary and add to - not cut - the IRS budget.

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Online:

https://bit.ly/2nz6gjT

The Providence Journal (R.I.), March 27, 2017

Republicans asked for trouble last year when they flat-out refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of the eminently qualified Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court after the death of Antonin Scalia. They were wrong to effectively steal the seat from the Democrats, on the spurious grounds that it was an election year and voters should first have their say in November.

Even so, it is sad to see so many Democratic senators this year - including Rhode Island’s own Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse - choosing to turn the Senate’s duty of weighing Supreme Court nominations into a purely partisan exercise.

One of the reasons voters choose a president is to make appointments to the Supreme Court. It has traditionally been the job of the Senate to vet nominations for the court not for politics, but to ensure the candidate is qualified and basically honest. This is one of the checks on executive power the Founders put into the Constitution. For many years, senators from both parties took this responsibility seriously.

Unfortunately, the Senate has devolved into intensely politicizing every choice. That does not serve the public well.

It is painfully obvious that President Trump’s nomination for the open seat, Neil Gorsuch, is qualified for the job. Unanimously supported for the federal bench by the Senate, he holds a law degree from Harvard and a doctorate in jurisprudence from Oxford. As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit for the past 10 years, he has established himself as a fair-minded jurist who focuses on the law rather than flex his personal preferences. The American Bar Association deemed him “well-qualified” for the Supreme Court, its highest rating.

Mr. Gorsuch seems to be scrupulously honest and non-political. A fierce advocate of judicial independence, he criticized the very man who nominated him - Donald Trump - for blasting judges who ruled against some recent executive orders.

Over 20 grueling hours of hearings last week, he sounded thoughtful and moderate. “His performance was skilled and schooled. He looked the part of a distinguished, white-haired but youthful, judge, and projected an image of dispassionate judicial neutrality to the point of chilliness,” NPR’s Nina Totenberg, hardly a conservative, wrote.

Yet Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer announced March 23 that he would oppose Mr. Gorsuch, threatening to lead a filibuster against him. In the early going, 16 Democratic senators - including Rhode Island’s pair - came out against Judge Gorsuch.

The approach seems designed to play to the base, and all-important campaign contributors, rather than to serve the nation. It is fraught with peril. Republicans have already threatened that if Democrats reflexively filibuster Mr. Gorsuch, they will extend the “nuclear option” on other judicial nominations to the Supreme Court - meaning a simple majority vote is all it would take to confirm.

This would be taking the Senate down the wrong path. The filibuster, which effectively requires 60 votes to confirm, should be saved for nominees who are extreme or unqualified. If it is used to threaten any nominee chosen by an opposing party, no matter how highly qualified or neutral he or she is, it will cease to fulfill its important function and quickly end up on the scrap heap. That could invite presidents to nominate more overtly political justices.

We do not want to see the day come when no Democratic president can get a nominee confirmed if Republicans hold the Senate, or vice versa. There was a reason for the Senate’s traditions. Today’s politicians should start behaving in a more responsible manner.

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Online:

https://bit.ly/2nJWqgP

The Rutland Herald (Vt.), March 29, 2017

Todd Stern, chief negotiator for the United States at the Paris climate conference, has a question for climate change deniers in the Trump administration: “What if you’re wrong?”

Stern was speaking March 24 at an environmental conference in Burlington, where he described the arduous process that led to the Paris climate accord. He called the climate pact a “paradigm shift” in the global effort to curb the carbon emissions that are causing climate change. At the same time he warned of the dangers to the international effort if President Trump carries out promised actions to reverse progress on climate change achieved by the Obama administration.

Trump took one of those actions March 28, signing an executive order to roll back one of President Barack Obama’s most important climate change initiatives - the Clean Power Plan. It was the rule requiring coal-burning power plants to employ technology curbing carbon emissions or shut down. Trump wants to end that mandate, freeing plants to burn coal with impunity and without regard to carbon emissions. It’s part of his plan to bring jobs back to coal country.

But even leaders of the coal industry say that the Trump changes are unlikely to bring back coal jobs. Coal has fallen into disfavor among power companies because of the abundance of natural gas, which is cheaper.

The Clean Power Plan, together with more stringent mileage standards for U.S. cars and trucks, formed an essential part of the climate change strategy that the United States had adopted to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord. Stern warned that for the United States to abandon its goals would cause “huge collateral damage with respect to other foreign policy goals.” More than 190 nations have signed on to the Paris accord. Significantly, these include China, the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. For the United States to back out threatens to unravel the entire international effort and alienate Western allies, as well as nations such as China, with whom we had made significant progress on the climate challenge. Trump has filled his administration with climate change deniers, such as Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, whom Stern described as “untethered to reality.” That description would also apply to Trump, who has referred to climate change as a “hoax.”

The U. S. military, on the other hand, has described climate change as a serious threat to national security because upheavals likely to be caused by drought and other climate disasters are likely to lead to international conflict and war. In fact, they have already done so in Syria.

Stern was preaching to the choir last Friday - to a gathering of Vermonters at the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain for whom the need to protect the environment and meet the challenges of climate change appeared to be a given. The damage that Trump promises to do could have been cause for despair among this group, except for some of the positive developments that Stern outlined. He pointed to the heightened activism occurring throughout the nation on energy issues. California has the sixth-largest economy among the nations of the world, and it has taken a leadership role in developing clean energy and in resisting Trump.

“The states matter,” Stern said. That would include small states like Vermont.

Cities also matter, he said. Seventy-five percent of U.S. emissions come from urban areas, he said, and the cities are showing “enormous dynamism,” he said. Further, the clean energy industry has shown rapid growth - the wind industry growing by three times and the solar industry by 23 times since 2009. The renewable energy industry already employs more people than the oil, gas and coal industry combined.

Trump’s action Tuesday is likely to ignite a new round of grassroots fury as Americans across the land find new ways to resist his efforts to trash the planet in order to further the agenda of the plutocrats who are his only true constituency. Trump may be weak politically, but he is already doing major damage. That is why the opposition must redouble its efforts to resist him at every turn.

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Online:

https://bit.ly/2okJ5cK