Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

Dec. 13

The Washington Post on the SCOTUS and Donald Trump

The essential moment in Jack Smith’s 2020 election obstruction case against Donald Trump might have arrived — and, oddly, the substance of the charges has nothing to do with it. The special counsel this week filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to speedily review the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, rather than allow an appeals court to do so first. The strategy is gutsy, but it might be necessary to get the case to trial before the general election — and that is a wholly legitimate goal for Mr. Trump’s prosecutor.

Mr. Smith has asked the justices to grant him what’s known as certiorari before judgment. This is an extraordinary request, but the special counsel is hardly summoning a legal theory out of thin air. The Supreme Court has embraced the procedure in many cases involving national crises, including in United States v. Nixon, when President Richard M. Nixon refused to turn over his infamous audiotapes. That’s because, as a long line of law recognizes, the public is as entitled to the fair administration of justice as anyone standing trial. Part of what makes this case extraordinary is Mr. Trump’s unique potential to force a halt to the prosecution. Even when defendants use delay as a courtroom tactic, they typically still have to face prosecutors at some point.

By ignoring that timing in a case with the peaceful transition of power at its heart, the courts would allow themselves to be manipulated by a politician using his status as a candidate to avoid accountability. The gambit to prevent District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan from meeting a March 4 trial date, by appealing her rejection of Mr. Trump’s immunity defense, is only the latest delay tactic by the Trump legal team. The former president’s allies and his lawyers appear to believe his surest route to escaping accountability is to win reelection before a jury manages to convict him, then instructing the Justice Department to drop its cases. The Supreme Court would show that the justice system won’t be tricked if, instead, the justices ensured the case is tried on the merits.

The merits, as it turns out, aren’t too difficult to assess. A D.C. Circuit panel has already decided that a president’s civil immunity for actions taken while in office is limited when those actions are taken not in the president’s role as president, but in his role as a reelection seeker — as when Mr. Trump gave his Jan. 6, 2021, speech urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. The argument that a president is free from criminal liability during his tenure, meanwhile, has next to nothing to support it in doctrine or in history. There’s a reason, after all, that Nixon required a pardon from Gerald Ford, and that Bill Clinton gave up his law license as part of a deal to avoid prosecution following his perjury scandal.

This makes sense: A president’s duties will never require him to break the law, much less to do so intentionally. What’s more, much of the conduct described in the indictment, such as pressuring electors to defect or urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “ find 11,780 votes ” cannot be construed to be inside the scope of the executive’s official duties.

Mr. Trump also argues that charging him based on the same violations for which he was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate would constitute double jeopardy. Yet the Constitution’s Impeachment Judgments clause says that if a president is convicted by the Senate, he can still be tried in a court of law. Reading this backward to suggest that if a president isn’t convicted by the Senate, he can’t be tried in a court of law defies common sense. The Framers clearly designed impeachment to serve a distinct purpose from prosecution.

The Supreme Court should grant the special counsel the speedy hearing he has asked for, because of the public interest in a decision that is quick, carefully considered and, crucially, final. If it does not the justices should at least instruct lower courts to move briskly, after which they should promptly choose once and for all whether to review the case. This procedural matter will swallow up the substance of the case unless the courts decide not to let it.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/13/jack-smith-motion-supreme-court-trump/

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Dec. 17

The Wall Street Journal on the IRA and rising drug costs

President Biden keeps trying to persuade Americans his policies are helping them, but voters aren’t buying it. The latest example is the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) Medicare drug rebates, which are raising the cost of medicines.

The White House on Thursday proclaimed that the IRA’s drug rebates are already saving seniors money: “President Biden’s prescription drug law cracks down on price gouging from Big Pharma.”

Under the IRA, drug makers must pay Medicare rebates if they raise list prices more than the rate of inflation. If a company increases the price of an immunotherapy by, say, 8% while inflation is increasing at 3%, it must pay Medicare the 5% difference. Co-insurance payments made by patients are then based on the inflation-adjusted price.

Rebates are deposited in the Medicare Supplementary Medical Insurance Fund, which is mainly financed by general tax revenue. In other words, politicians, not seniors, are the real beneficiary of the rebates.

According to the Administration, IRA drug rebates save seniors “as much as $618 per average dose on 47 prescription drugs” (our emphasis). This is deceptive marketing. It’s possible that Medicare co-insurance as a result of the IRA could be hundreds of dollars less on a cancer drug that costs tens of thousands of dollars per dose and whose list price increases by double digits. But most Medicare patients will see little benefit.

On the other hand, privately insured patients will likely pay much more for drugs owing to the rebates. Democrats tacitly conceded this when they drafted the law. They initially planned to apply the IRA inflation rebates to the private insurance market too. That’s because employers worried that drug makers would offset the cost of the Medicare rebates by raising prices for their workers.

This is what has happened in Medicare with hospital and physician fees. Because Medicare typically pays less than the cost of care, providers charge privately insured patients more to compensate. Private health plans paid hospitals 224% of Medicare rates in 2020, according to a Rand Corp. study. Between 2013 and 2018, prices paid to providers increased at double the rate for commercial insurers as for Medicare fee for service.

Medicaid’s mandatory rebates — 23.1% for brand drugs and 13% for generics off the average manufacturer price — save Medicaid tens of billions of dollars a year. But drug makers have raised prices that privately insured and Medicare patients pay to offset those Medicaid rebates, especially for drugs used mostly by low-income patients. Medicaid rebates have also reduced the already slim margins for making generic drugs, contributing to the current shortages.

Senate budget rules blocked Democrats from extending inflation rebates to private markets. So drug makers will invariably raise prices for privately insured patients and launch new drugs at higher prices. This may already be happening. Prescription drug prices have increased at a faster rate since the IRA passed, even as overall inflation has moderated.

Prescription drug prices increased by 2% during the Trump Presidency owing to greater generic competition, yet they’ve increased 5.5% so far under Mr. Biden. In November they rose at an annual rate of nearly 6%. Has the White House considered that the reason Americans don’t believe that the President’s policies have helped them is because they haven’t?

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-drug-price-boomerang-630d284d?mod=editorials_article_pos7

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Dec. 14

The Los Angeles Times says the U.S. should demand a Gaza cease-fire

Israel had broad support from the nations of the world after Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7 attack, its premeditated slaughter of innocent people and its unconscionable taking of civilian hostages. Accounts of sexual assault and horrors even more unspeakable help to explain the ferocity of the Israeli counterattack.

As President Biden has noted, though, Israel is now losing sympathy and global support due to its “indiscriminate bombing” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of any prospect of a future Palestinian state.

Hamas atrocities, no matter how evil, do not justify Israel’s casual conflation of legitimate militant targets and Palestinian civilians.

From the beginning of Israel’s response, governments and observers urged an end to the disproportionate civilian killings and warned of starvation and rampant spread of disease in the tiny, densely populated strip of land. They called then, and are properly calling now, for a cease-fire.

Early on, Netanyahu said there would be no let-up.

“Just as the United States would not agree to a cease-fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the terrorist attack of 9/11,” he said on Oct. 30, “Israel will not agree to the cessation of hostilities with Hamas after the horrific attack of Oct. 7.”

Yet less than a month later, Israel agreed to a cease-fire — of sorts.

The pause in military action that began Nov. 24 was set for four days, but talks mediated by Qatar resulted in two extensions. Hamas returned about 100 hostages and Israel released around 240 jailed Palestinians. Gaza civilians were given a respite for mourning their loved ones killed in the bombings and a chance to obtain water, food and medical supplies.

Hostilities resumed on Nov. 30. Since then, Israel’s bombing of Gaza has been — difficult as it is to fathom — even more brutal. Having warned Palestinian civilians to leave their homes in north Gaza, and then essentially destroying Gaza City, the Israeli military is now bringing the same destruction to the southern part of the strip. Several aid groups described the humanitarian situation in the territory as in “apocalyptic free fall.”

Horrified by the slaughter, most of the nations of the world have called for another, more-lasting cease-fire. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to that effect Tuesday, days after a Security Council vote was thwarted by a U.S. veto.

It’s important to remember that from the time Hamas won Gaza elections in 2006, it and Israel have been at war, punctuated by periodic truce, pause or cease-fire (the terminology matters little to civilians trying to live their lives and raise their children).

Full-scale fighting erupted in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, then in each case largely abated. Each pause of a year, two years, seven years, brought not only periods relatively free from horror but also hope that cease-fires might be extended and just maybe lead to talks and a sustainable period free from cross-border attacks. Or even an accord paving the way to lasting peace.

The recent history of the Middle East consists of two urgent struggles. The obvious one pits Israel against Hamas, a terrorist organization, as each vows to annihilate the other and refers to its enemy in subhuman terms.

The second contest is even more existential. It’s between the human aspiration to seek peace, despite real provocations and long-standing grievances, and the baser instinct to exterminate the enemy once and for all, notwithstanding the cost to innocent lives and gross violation of international laws of war.

In this struggle, the United States should choose a path that might make peace in the future still possible. It should reverse its position against a cease-fire.

Acknowledging its own mistakes in response to 9/11 — as President Biden noted at the start of the current war — the U.S. should use its stature as a powerful democracy and its loyalty to and support of Israel to demand another respite from horror. And then it should work to make that pause a lasting cessation of hostilities.

Israel, as a fellow industrialized democracy with state-of-the-art intelligence, technology and defense capability, has set high standards for its response to attack. It has in the past deployed precision operations, such as the 1976 Entebbe raid to free airline passengers held hostage in Uganda by Palestinian and German hijackers.

The current indiscriminate killing in Gaza, in which two-thirds of the dead are women and children, bears little resemblance to surgical strikes and reveals little apparent distinction by Israel between legitimate Hamas targets and innocent civilians.

Netanyahu’s comparison with 9/11 may be more apt than he realizes. After the al Qaeda attack, the U.S. enjoyed the world’s support against terrorism, then squandered it by its brutal tactics in the war. Today the Taliban again rule in Kabul. Al Qaeda is diminished, but Islamic extremism remains.

Even if Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas, Palestinian statelessness, hopelessness and dehumanization will persist and are likely to give rise to new hostilities. Hope for change in this seemingly intractable conflict can begin when wholesale killing ends.

ONLINE: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-14/gaza-ceasefire-israel-united-states-civilian-deaths

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Dec. 14

The Guardian on the suffering of Palestinians

The scale and sheer horror of the war in Gaza has rightly captured the world’s attention. But surging violence in the occupied West Bank should sound the alarm too. Last year was the bloodiest since 2005. This year is worse. Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, has called the situation “potentially explosive”, warning of the intensification of violence and severe discrimination against Palestinians. According to UN data, more than 450 have been killed by Israeli security forces or settlers this year, the majority following the Hamas massacre on 7 October. Twenty-eight Israelis in the West Bank have been killed by Palestinians in 2023.

Raids on the Jenin refugee camp continued on Thursday, with a densely packed population living in fear and with access to healthcare severely affected, according to charities. Such operations have repeatedly led to the deaths of civilians – including children and the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch warned of “systematic impunity” for the killing of Palestinian children. The new wave of armed resistance has emerged in recent years amid the failure of Palestinian political leadership, anger over security force abuses and settler violence, despair at the unending occupation and the shrinking prospect of a two-state solution as illegal settlements expand.

In the last two months, thousands of Palestinians have been arrested – including, on Thursday, two key members of the West Bank’s Freedom Theatre – with a record number held without charge or trial, and growing reports of humiliation and abuse of detainees. Meanwhile, settler violence has forced out multiple communities, and Palestinians face hunger as well as humiliation and danger. Hundreds of thousands have reportedly lost their jobs or had their wages frozen after Israel cancelled their work permits and severely restricted crossings. The Palestinian Authority is no longer receiving the import taxes on which it depends. Even the olive harvest is rotting on trees.

The announcement of UK and US sanctions on violent settlers is welcome. But the real issue is an extremist government that not only enables but encourages extremism. Benjamin Netanyahu handed significant powers over the West Bank to the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who seeks to lay the ground for a doubling of settlers, and who claimed that there is “no such thing” as a Palestinian people. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and a man with a conviction for racist incitement, has handed out firearms to settler “security squads”. (The Biden administration is reportedly now delaying a deal for 20,000 rifles.)

What is happening now in the West Bank is critical to the future of all Palestinians. What’s left of the Palestinian Authority’s credibility, already in tatters, would surely not survive economic collapse. The Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, said “absolutely no” to a two-state solution this week. The sentiment is no surprise – her boss has committed to annexing parts of the West Bank and reportedly told legislators last summer that Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state “must be eliminated” – but her blunt contempt for the question was shocking.

What does Mr Netanyahu’s government then envisage for Palestinians? It rejects claims that it wants to force them out of Gaza. The alternative would appear to be permanent second-class status within a single state. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a UN rapporteur have said that Palestinians are already subject to a form of apartheid. International talk of the two-state solution has long been vaguely aspirational at best and at worst a cover for inaction as it slipped further from view. It looks more hypothetical than ever now. Yet given the alternatives, it must become a spur to diplomatic action.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/14/the-guardian-view-on-the-west-bank-the-suffering-of-palestinians-extends-beyond-gaza

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Dec. 18

China Daily says the United States should leverage its influence over Israel

There are growing concerns that the military actions of Israel in the Gaza Strip may trigger a wider conflict in the Middle East.

Three commercial ships in the Red Sea were attacked with missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthi military organization on Sunday, while a US warship shot down three drones in self-defense during the hours-long assault.

A spokesperson for the Houthi military explicitly said that their armed forces will continue to prevent all ships heading to Israeli ports from navigating in the Red Sea until food and medicine is brought into the Gaza Strip for the Palestinian people there.

Four major shipping companies have already announced that they were suspending passage through a Red Sea strait vital for global trade because of the attacks on shipping.

Meanwhile, two military bases housing US troops in Iraq have been repeatedly attacked by rockets and drones since early October after Israel launched its military operation against Hamas in Gaza.

There is thus the possibility that the US warships will launch an attack against Houthi military targets.

The concerns that the military conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip may spill over and develop into a regional war involving more countries and forces are therefore justified, thus dealing a heavy blow to world peace and global economic recovery.

Even if such a military conflict does not take place right now, the Houthi military organization’s continued missile and drone attacks against commercial ships in the Red Sea will have an increasingly serious impact on the development of the world economy.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Friday that the Houthis were a “threat to the freedom of navigation of commercial shipping.” The United States is working with the international community, with partners from the region and from all over the world to deal with this threat, Sullivan told journalists.

So far the US has responded with limited airstrikes against Houthi targets. But the question is will the US exert its influence on Israel to pressure it to sit at the negotiating table with Hamas?

If there is a military conflict between the US and the Houthi military forces, the situation in the Middle East will become even more complicated, and more countries may possibly get involved, and as a result, a larger scale conflict may erupt in the Middle East. This should be the last thing the world wants to see.

Yet if the US uses its influence to exert pressure on Israel for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and pushes for mediation between Israel and Palestine for a peaceful settlement of the long-lasting conflict between the two sides, the situation in the Middle East will realize a turn in the direction of lasting peace. That is what the majority of countries hope the US will do.

ONLINE: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202312/18/WS65802e01a31040ac301a84ee.html