Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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May 9

The Washington Post says Donald Trump is destroying programs that help prepare for natural disasters

President Donald Trump’s administration is on a crusade against efforts to grapple with climate change. From the start of Trump’s second term, officials have halted clean energy projects or attempted to claw back funding for them, and, at the same time, they have fast-tracked permitting for fossil fuels.

The administration has also been tearing down federal programs that protect Americans against the kind of extreme weather that climate change brings, making it harder for communities to prepare for and recover from natural disasters. These decisions will weaken the economy and — more important — could cost lives.

Start with the administration’s gutting of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, monitors weather, conducts climate research and maintains intricate forecast models that are essential to much of the economy. Farmers use the models to decide which crops to plant and when, and the shipping and aviation industries use them to steer around hazardous weather.

Nevertheless, many people in the administration see the agency as a source of “climate alarmism,” as Russell Vought, who is now director of the Office of Management and Budget, put it in a proposal for Project 2025. Commerce officials slashed hundreds of employees from NOAA’s workforce. The administration’s budget framework released this month also proposed cutting $1.3 billion from the agency by targeting “climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs, which are not aligned with Administration policy-ending ‘Green New Deal’ initiatives.”

A NOAA spokesperson said it is “actively enhancing disaster readiness and lifesaving capabilities” through “transformation and strategic investments in advanced technology.” But the layoffs alone will make it difficult to maintain the agency’s vast network of weather radars. Thirty of the National Weather Service’s 122 local forecast offices now operate without a chief meteorologist, CNN has reported. As extreme weather events become more common — and more expensive — this could prove disastrous.

Then there’s the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the president and many of his advisers repeatedly have threatened to eliminate. In 2023, the Government Accountability Office determined that understaffing at FEMA was impeding disaster responses. Yet Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has reduced its workforce by 20 percent through layoffs and voluntary buyouts. Trump this week also fired the acting head of the agency a day after the administrator told Congress that he didn’t believe FEMA should be eliminated.

Meanwhile, the administration has repeatedly denied federal aid to disaster-stricken regions, arguing that states should lead response efforts. This earned a rebuke from Republicans in Arkansas, who pushed the administration to reconsider its denial of funding after deadly storms in March. “Given the cumulative impact and sheer magnitude of destruction from these severe weather events, federal assistance is vital to ensure that state and local communities have the capabilities needed to rebuild,” a group of Republican lawmakers from the state wrote in a letter to Trump.

The administration’s aversion to FEMA stems partly from misinformation, amplified by the president. He has claimed that the agency intentionally withheld aid to Republican residents in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene last year. This falsehood has undermined the agency’s difficult work and led to threats against relief workers.

Last month, the administration also announced it would end FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which was created during the first Trump administration and expanded under President Joe Biden to help communities harden themselves against disasters, such as by raising roads prone to flooding. The White House has also been scaling back FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance program, which awards post-disaster grants to help communities rebuild in ways that make them more resilient.

Also in April, the administration dismissed all the scientists working on the next National Climate Assessment. The congressionally mandated report, which is due to be released by 2028, is meant to synthesize the latest climate research to help state and local governments respond to climate change. Contributors to the report said it would place a new emphasis on adaptation strategies.

Each of these decisions has been reckless. Taken together, they reveal a basic disregard for the scientific programs and government infrastructure that have kept Americans safe for decades. The president almost seems to be daring Mother Nature to strike while the country’s defenses are down.

Lawmakers — especially Republicans, who are no doubt nervous about their party’s political future — need to speak up for their constituents and press for climate mitigation programs to continue. So should business leaders who rely on government data to protect their investments. Americans need a government that cares about their safety.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/11/trump-disasters-noaa-fema-climate-change/

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May 9

The Wall Street Journal on the shrinking of the GOP tax cut

The House Ways and Means Committee will soon release the GOP’s first draft of the party’s tax proposals, and the irony is that the bill may be getting worse even as a good bill becomes more urgent. President Trump has pitched a tax-rate increase that even Democrats failed to pass, and parochial demands are shrinking the pro-growth value of the bill.

Republicans seem to have forgotten the principles of sound tax policy, even the lessons of the successful 2017 reform. Most of the 26 GOP Members of Ways and Means weren’t in Congress in 2017. The intellectual capital of previous tax-writing leaders Kevin Brady, Paul Ryan and Dave Camp is missing. The Senate is somewhat better but will miss Pat Toomey.

Can a good bill be salvaged? Perhaps, but to do so Republicans will have to relearn the good and bad lessons of the first Trump tax cut, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s, the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s, and even the Mellon cuts that kicked off the Roaring ’20s.

• Permanent. People and businesses like certainty so they can have more confidence making plans. The 2017 bill showed the benefit of making tax law permanent, or not. The corporate reform was made permanent, for the most part, while the individual tax cuts weren’t.

Republicans are now scrambling to renew the individual cuts before they expire at the end of this year. The Bush tax cut of 2003 made a similar mistake and gave Barack Obama the leverage to raise taxes in 2012.

A successful reform will make tax changes permanent, rather than end in four, six or eight years. This will make the tax bill more economically potent and politically durable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been hitting this point, but other Republicans seem to define permanent as lasting through 2028.

• Immediate. One lesson of the Reagan tax cuts is that phasing them in is counterproductive. It can lead businesses to postpone investment until the full cut kicks in. The Reagan boom didn’t begin until the tax cuts that passed in 1981 finally took full force in 1983. Republicans aren’t talking about phase-ins this time around, but it’s always possible this idea pops up amid deficit fears.

• Marginal rates matter most. One lesson to relearn is the difference between the marginal and average tax rate. The average rate is the tax share of total income. The marginal rate is the tax paid on the next dollar of income. Economists know that the marginal rate matters most for growth because it most affects the incentive to work, invest, or take risks.

The most successful tax cuts of the last 100 years—the Mellon, Kennedy and Reagan cuts—all focused on cutting rates at the margin. The least successful—the Bush cut of 2001—handed out rebates that boosted consumption for a short period but did little for growth.

Mr. Trump has floated raising the top marginal rate to 39.6% from 37% for filers making more than $2.5 million. The Tax Foundation says this would affect about 175,000 filers, the most likely to invest and take risks in new ventures. Small businesses that pay at the individual rate would pay more than corporations.

More damaging would be the GOP surrender to left-wing soak-the-rich economics. If marginal rates don’t matter, why not 50%, or 70%? As the nearby chart shows, in 2022 the top 1% paid 40.4% of income-tax revenue on 22.4% of reported earnings. The point of low marginal rates isn’t to help the already rich, but to offer incentives to those who want to become rich.

• Lower rates, broader base. As long as the U.S. has an income tax—no thanks, 16th Amendment—the best tax code has low tax rates spread over a broad base of income. This does the least economic damage as it raises revenue, and it reduces the incentive for carve-outs for the politically connected.

The 2017 reform did this well on the corporate side, cutting the corporate rate to 21% from 35% and closing corporate tax loopholes. The individual reform did it less well. Its rate cuts were good and at the margin, but the rate cuts were modest.

Mr. Trump now wants to shrink the tax base with costly deductions: no tax on tips, Social Security benefits or overtime, plus a write-off for interest on car loans. These help specific groups, but they lose hundreds of billions in revenue, which raises the pressure to keep tax rates higher. This is tax reform in reverse.

• Growth, not income redistribution. Democrats these days view the tax code as they do spending—a goodie bag to parcel out favors to special interests. Credits for EVs, or carbon capture, or housing. These credits are a form of income distribution through the tax code. They promote investment based on political preferences rather than market returns. This inevitably leads to misallocated capital and slower economic growth.

This wasn’t always the case for Democrats, by the way. Kennedy’s Treasury spurred his tax-rate cuts that led to the 1960s boom, while Bill Bradley and Dan Rostenkowski played vital roles in Reagan’s 1986 tax reform that cut the top income tax rate to 28%.

But too many Republicans these days now also view the tax code as a form of social spending. Instead of EVs, they want tax credits for families with children or low-income housing. The $2,000 per child credit is hugely expensive—$690 billion over 10 years—and does little to spur growth, as numerous studies have shown.

The best pro-family tax policy is one that helps the economy grow and raises everyone’s incomes. That’s especially true this year, as Mr. Trump’s tariffs hammer the economy with the largest tax increase in decades. One problem for Republicans is that merely extending the 2017 reform, while crucial, doesn’t provide new growth incentives.

Restoring 100% expensing for business investment is an essential growth provision. But if Republicans really want to offset the tariff taxes, they should consider further cuts in corporate and individual tax rates. Short of that, indexing capital gains for inflation would help. The trade-offs would be fewer tax deductions such as for family foundations, mortgage interest or municipal bonds.

The shame is that all signs point to a Republican Party that no longer understands the difference between good and bad tax policy. It’s all the more unfortunate because this is a rare moment of unified GOP government that is likely to end in 2026 and may not return for years. If Republicans are merely going to pile on tax credits and deductions and raise taxes on entrepreneurs, we could have elected Kamala Harris.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gop-tax-policy-house-republicans-ways-and-means-bill-economic-growth-dc21fecc?mod=editorials_article_pos5

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May 11

The Guardian says Trump can stop the “horror” in Gaza and the alternative is “unthinkable”

Donald Trump would like a big foreign policy win as he embarks on his tour of the Middle East this week. He could secure one – and save lives – by demanding that Israel agree to a lasting ceasefire in exchange for the release of all hostages held in Gaza. He might prefer to avoid the issue, but no other leader has the leverage to force its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to end this war. If Mr Trump instead backs Israel’s current proposals, he will put the US imprimatur on what looks like a plan of total destruction.

Israel’s attacks have already killed more than 52,000 people in Gaza, according to local health authorities – the vast majority of them civilians, many of them children. Bakeries, hospitals and schools have been obliterated. Aid has been blocked for two months. Gaza faces famine. Last week, Israeli officials briefed that if no deal to free the hostages seized in the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 is reached, its forces would flatten Gaza, forcing Palestinians to crush into a single “humanitarian area” or flee abroad. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said that Gaza would be “entirely destroyed”, and “totally despairing” Palestinians would realise “there is no hope”. He has said that freeing hostages is “ not the most important thing ”.

“Seldom have I heard the leader of a state so clearly outline a plan that fits the legal definition of genocide,” said Josep Borrell, the former EU foreign affairs chief. The international court of justice ruled in January last year that there was a “plausible risk” of genocide. Amnesty International, a UN special committee and leading scholars, including within Israel, have concluded that genocide is taking place.

Many inside Israel, including people critical of the government, are outraged at the charge. The UN genocide convention defines the crime as acts committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. It includes killing and inflicting life-threatening conditions. Openly envisioning the total destruction of Gaza, pursuing the removal of its population as a goal rather than a battlefield consequence, and destroying the means by which life is sustained, looks not merely like brutality but a deliberate project of elimination. Egypt and Jordan have refused to accept refugees, saying that they would otherwise be complicit in war crimes. The legal bar for proving genocide is exceptionally high. Washington has declared genocides four times in the last decade – in Iraq and Syria, Myanmar, Xinjiang in China and Sudan – without waiting for judges. International law moves slowly, and signatories to the convention, including the US and UK, are required not only to punish but to prevent genocide. The court of public opinion is reaching its own conclusion. Supporters of Israel often argue that it is held to an unfair standard. But Israel has international protection not only because of the history of the Holocaust, but also as a democracy and a western ally. Its actions are enabled by vast US military aid and political cover. Now it plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?

Mr Trump’s indifference to Palestinian lives and interest in relocating them to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” have emboldened the Israeli government’s worst instincts. But he could still use the power only he holds to stop the annihilation. This is his chance to make history in the Middle East for the right reasons.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/11/the-guardian-view-on-israel-and-gaza-trump-can-stop-this-horror-the-alternative-is-unthinkable

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May 9

The Boston Globe on the first American pope

No sooner had the first American pope been selected Thursday than a modern tradition unfolded: the scrubbing of Robert Francis Prevost’s X feed.

Previously a little-known cardinal from the Chicago area, Prevost was selected by his brother cardinals after several rounds of voting to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. He took the name of Leo XIV (thus forgoing the chance to be history’s first Pope Bob).

His selection in the pomp of a Vatican conclave was a surprise not only because it was unprecedented. It had also been widely assumed that due to the global unpopularity of President Trump and the United States in general, no American would be elevated to the papacy to succeed the Argentinian Pope Francis, who died last month.

Leo’s election is an incredible milestone for American Catholics, whose history in this country began as an oppressed minority. And the Catholic Church, which thinks globally and across centuries, probably did not factor the politics of his home country into his appointment.

Still, when the news broke, Americans scrambled for clues as to where this US citizen stood on Trump — and, by implication, how he might use the world’s ultimate bully pulpit to influence his home country and its leadership.

Nobody should be expecting the pope to lead the resistance to Trump. For that matter, we wouldn’t want a religious leader, of any stripe, playing that role in a diverse country like the United States.

Still, it will matter what Leo says. It will matter how and when an American pope talks about America‘s politics, policies, and inevitably important role in the world. It will matter where, when, and how forcefully he deploys the church’s moral authority.

And it will matter how he responds to the Trump administration’s courtship of Catholic voters and attempts to co-opt Catholic doctrine to justify its immigration policies.

When the president harasses or scapegoats immigrants, Leo can push back, as Francis did. And there is nobody with more authority to object when Vice President JD Vance attempts to use Catholic teachings as a justification for anti-immigrant posturing.

An early sampling of his X posts suggests he would do just that.

Just a few weeks ago, then Archbishop Prevost called Vance “wrong” in an X post after the vice president suggest that a theological concept called “ordo amoris” justified the mass deportation campaign threatened by the Trump administration.

He also made or circulated posts in favor of immigration reform, gun control, and COVID-19 vaccines, and called on the church “to reject racism” after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

Those digital breadcrumbs might seem to place him on the American left, but that would almost certainly be wrong. Leo is very unlikely to be a progressive, in the modern American political sense of the word. He can be expected to maintain the church’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage, for instance. In a 2012 speech, he decried the “homosexual lifestyle.”

But hopefully, as an American, he understands the gravity of the moment in his home country and won’t allow areas where the church agrees with Trump to become excuses to ignore the rest. And simply by sticking to its own principles — the ones conservatives hate, and the ones liberals hate — the pope can demonstrate to other Americans how to remain independent at a time when so much of politics has descended into tribalism.

Though we’ll never know what happened inside the Sistine Chapel before the white smoke billowed out of the chimney, perhaps the cardinals chose Leo chosen because he was an American, not despite it. Maybe the logic behind his selection was that no one was better poised to handle the church’s response to an off-the-rails American administration than a fellow American.

If so, it’s another reason to wish for Leo’s success.

ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/09/opinion/pope-leo-xiv-robert-prevost/

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May 7

The Houston Chronicle says a Texas judge reminded Donald Trump that the Constitution prevails

Tren de Aragua is a notorious gang. Its members traffic in people and drugs. They torture and kill with impunity in countries where they operate. They are despicable and dangerous criminals.

But they’re not what the White House makes them out to be: an invading military force. An invading military force looks like the Russian army, invading Ukraine. Or Allied soldiers, storming the beaches of Normandy.

Listen to someone like White House advisor Stephen Miller, and you’d expect Tren de Aragua soldiers to be scrambling onto Padre Island beaches in their own version of D-Day.

So how are we meeting this supposedly clear and present danger? Are Miller and company urging the president at least to call out the Civil Air Patrol, the U.S. Air Force’s civilian auxiliary? Armed with high-powered binoculars, Civilian Air Patrol members and young cadets could rush to the shores of the Gulf of — Mexico? America? — and scan sea and sky for jets flying in formation from the south, for submarine conning towers on the horizon.

Of course, the White House crew doesn’t actually believe we face a military tanks-and-commandos invasion. When they use the word “invasion,” they mean something different. Usually, they’re talking about the huge number of people who either presented themselves at the border or crossed illegally during the first years of the Biden administration.

Those people look nothing like an organized army, or even a rag-tag militia, bent on some military objective. They’re a mix of individuals. Some are legitimate asylum seekers fleeing persecution; some are people simply seeking better jobs; and yes, some may be dangerous criminals.

The dangerous criminals should be deported; that’s a no-brainer. And that’s regular old law enforcement, not warfare. But rather than sort through these people, to do the hard, slow work of separating the vicious from the well-meaning, the Trump administration is whipping up an emergency to justify acting in bad faith. The president has effectively closed paths to asylum and terrified would-be migrants by sending immigrants to a Salvadoran prison known for its cruelty, and without so much as a charge, trial or sentence.

It took a federal judge from Texas — a Trump appointee, in fact — to call the administration on its absurd and blatantly unconstitutional misuse of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It’s a wartime authority enacted during the presidency of John Adams. The act allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation with whom we’re at war. Presidents have invoked the act three times: The War of 1812, World War I and World War II. It’s probably best known as the dubious rationale for the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., a 2018 Trump appointee, issued a permanent injunction last week against the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador without any semblance of due process — a right guaranteed by the Constitution. A former partner with the Houston law firm Baker Botts, the judge wrote that Trump’s reliance on the act “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”

Doing his own research, Rodriguez found that the words of the Alien Enemies Act in their original sense referred to armed forces. “(Trump’s proclamation) makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation,” he wrote in a 36-page ruling.

“Plain, ordinary meaning.” The judge’s words could have tripped off the tongues of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, perhaps the two most fervent constitutional “originalists” on the Supreme Court. The OG of “originalists” himself, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, would have concurred. Whether Rodriguez is an originalist, we can’t say. What we can say is that he respects the Constitution, a claim we cannot make for this president or his anti-immigration henchmen.

On Sunday, Trump admitted that. During an interview on “Meet the Press,” he was asked whether he believes he needs to uphold the Constitution. The president responded, “I don’t know.” Never mind that upholding the Constitution is literally the president’s job. When Trump took the oath of office — which is all of one sentence — he swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He’s not supposed to stress-test the Constitution, bend it to his will or look for loopholes.

But that’s not how Trump sees it. “I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said,” he said during the NBC interview. His “brilliant” lawyers are trying to twist plain language and subvert American values. Trump is treating the Constitution like pliable taffy — not like the rock of American government and values.

Rodriguez is merely the latest of numerous federal judges attempting to remind the president that the rule of law still prevails, however threatened it might be.

The Venezuelan migrants the administration accused of “invading” the U.S. remain confined to a detention center near the Rio Grande Valley town of Raymondville. They may or may not even be gang members. Rodriguez, adhering to the law, did not say they have to be released immediately. He did not say they couldn’t, at some point, be deported. But he did side with the migrants on something fundamentally American: their constitutional right to “due process.”

“Due process.” Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment shorthand for justice, equality and fairness under the law, the phrase is fast becoming a mantra during these early months of Trump’s second term because of his willingness to circumvent laws and procedures. Whether it’s his effort to peremptorily end birthright citizenship or fire government employees without cause or cyclone through federal agencies, leaving wreckage and hardship in his wake, he’s likely violating the law and then daring judges to stop him. More and more are taking the dare on behalf of the American people.

Rodriguez’s order applies only to Venezuelan migrants held in the Southern District of Texas — which includes Houston — although judges in other jurisdictions where migrants are being held are likely to reach the same conclusion. Nor is Rodriguez’s order the final word. The government is likely to seek relief from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, whose ultra-conservative judges could very well reverse Rodriguez. The case is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s due process at work.

Earlier, facetiously, we mentioned the Civil Air Patrol. But it’s worth noting that during World War II, members of the venerable organization were credited with spotting 173 Nazi subs off the Atlantic coast and officially sinking two. Today, we too are volunteers on guard — not against Nazi invaders or Venezuelan gangs, but against a White House willing to subvert the Constitution.

Using our voices and our votes, working in alliance with honorable jurists like Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., we’re in a fight for the future of our constitutional republic.

ONLINE: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/trump-immigration-due-process-texas-judge-20313480.php

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