Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Aug. 4

The Washington Post says. despite the U.S. need for more electricity, the Trump Administration is stymieing wind and solar power

The U.S. economy desperately needs more electricity. Demand is projected to outstrip supply in the coming years, largely due to data centers powering artificial intelligence. That leaves the government no choice: To avoid an energy crisis, it needs to supersize the nation’s electrical grid.

The Trump administration, apparently, hasn’t gotten the memo. Instead, it’s allowing its opposition to clean energy sources, such as wind and solar, to stymie growth.

Case in point: The Energy Department’s cancellation last week of a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for a major transmission project in the Midwest. The line, known as the Grain Belt Express, would cross 800 miles of farmland to deliver wind energy generated in Kansas to power more than 3 million homes in the region. This is exactly the sort of development the country needs to strengthen the grid and make use of its natural wind resources.

Yet the administration sided with NIMBYs who have long opposed the project, which has been in the works for more than a decade. The Energy Department explained in its announcement that it was “not critical for the federal government to have a role” in the project. It also claimed that the project is “unlikely” to meet the conditions required for the loan guarantee — without clearly laying out those conditions.

Invenergy, the company behind the project, has said it will pursue private financing. Hopefully that materializes, and ideally such undertakings could happen without any government backing. But the loss of the loan guarantee poses a serious threat to both the transmission line and to the renewable energy projects that would have been built to supply it.

Such paralysis is now typical of the U.S. energy system. Despite ever-increasing demand for electricity, construction of the new transmission lines needed to deliver it has slowed to a glacial pace. That’s because building the infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions is expensive and comes with painful regulatory headaches. And far too often, politics gets in the way, especially when it requires construction on privately owned land.

In 2024, only 322 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines were completed, one of the slowest annual figures in the past 15 years. An Energy Department study last year projected that, to meet the nation’s energy needs most optimally, regional transmission capacity needs to double by 2050 and interregional capacity needs to rise by a factor of 3.5. That would require the nation to build more than 5,000 miles of transmission lines a year, according to Americans for a Clean Energy Grid.

Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to “unleash American energy,” his administration seems to be actively working against that lofty goal. This month, New York’s Public Service Commission halted a new transmission line that would bring the state’s offshore wind power to New York City. Why? Because Trump’s executive order to stop offshore wind developments makes the power lines risky for taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the administration seems to be trying to kill solar and wind projects by a thousand bureaucratic cuts. This month, the Interior Department issued a directive requiring virtually every aspect of such developments on federal lands — or those that pass through it via transmission lines — to receive personal approval from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum or his deputy. That policy change came shortly after Congress passed its reconciliation package, which restricted access to tax credits for any wind and solar project that does not begin construction by July 4, 2026. A bottleneck seems to be the goal.

The administration justifies its antisolar and wind posture by arguing that other forms of energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear, are more reliable. It also leans on national security concerns, since China controls much of the supply chain for those industries.

But these points don’t stand up to scrutiny. To start, building up the renewable energy sector would help alleviate climate change in the long term, which itself would make the energy sector more reliable and boost national security.

Moreover, many European countries rely heavily on solar and wind and have not experienced the “intermittency” problems that critics warn about. No energy source is 100-percent reliable, which only underscores the need to diversify the United States’ energy sector and modernize its electrical grid with more transmission lines. That would allow electricity from multiple sources to move around the country as needed.

And while China’s chokehold on the renewable energy supply chain is a genuine problem, it hardly justifies giving up on these industries. China’s investments in solar and wind already put the United States to shame. The answer is not to cede the technological advantage to America’s most powerful adversary. It is to compete so that the U.S. can regain its edge.

The great irony here is that, for years, Republicans decried subsidies for renewable energy as the government “picking winners and losers.” Now, they are embracing the same mindset they once opposed, but in the opposite direction. They are intent on making solar and wind losers; if they succeed, U.S. consumers will lose, too.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/04/trump-wind-solar-grainbelt-transmission/

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July 5

The New York Times says Gaza’s hunger is a moral crisis

The hunger in Gaza is an urgent moral crisis. Its two million people lack adequate food, and at least 16 children under 5 have died of hunger-related causes in the past couple of weeks. Israel’s often reckless administration of its war and occupation have helped create this emergency, and it has a unique power to alleviate it. It must do so.

How the situation has come to this is a matter of intense dispute, of course. It is certainly true that Hamas’s leaders could end the crisis by releasing the hostages they continue to hold and surrendering in a war they started and are losing. Yet the cease-fire talks between Hamas and Israel remain stalled, with each side insisting on conditions that remain unacceptable to the other. The best solution, for Palestinians and Israelis alike, includes a return of the hostages, an end to the war and a new Gaza government. While that outcome remains out of reach, Gazans need to eat.

Israel bears the greatest responsibility for the lack of food because its military controls so much of Gaza, including its borders. The excuses offered by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — that the aid organizations are incompetent and Hamas diverts the aid — are unpersuasive. Even some Israeli military officials have questioned this rationale.

The core problem instead stems from a push by far-right members of Mr. Netanyahu’s government to cut off aid from international groups. Israel did so early this year. In their place, Israel and the United States established the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and said it would handle the job. Mr. Netanyahu and his ministers claimed the switch was necessary because Hamas had corrupted the previous system by hoarding supplies for its fighters and selling aid at a profit, but that earlier system was clearly more effective than the new one.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has operated only four distribution centers for Gaza’s entire population, compared with more than 400 that the United Nations and other aid groups previously operated. Hundreds of Gazans have died during frantic melees at the four distribution sites, sometimes killed by gunfire from Israeli troops. The images of emaciated children and people desperately reaching out with empty bowls make clear that the new system has failed. Even President Trump, normally a close ally of Mr. Netanyahu, has acknowledged as much. On Monday the president said that there was “real starvation” in Gaza and that “we have to get the kids fed.”

If Mr. Netanyahu considered the previous aid system to present unacceptable security risks, he must create an alternative that allows Gazans to eat. And if he wants to prevent stolen aid from becoming a major source of Hamas revenue, he should allow food to be plentiful in Gaza and make it less of a scarce resource.

This conflict has left tens of thousands of civilians dead, turned much of Gaza to rubble, caused shortages of fuel and medicine and is now threatening to create a famine. A report from a United Nations-backed group published on Tuesday concluded that a third of Gazans were going days without eating. The humanitarian aid entering the strip is “barely a trickle” of what the population needs, the U.N. has said. Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, the head of the pediatric ward of a hospital in southern Gaza, recently told The Times, “There is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself.”

The attention on the crisis in recent days has increased the pressure to resolve it. Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have airdropped food into the territory. Israel’s military has paused fighting in heavily populated areas from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. to allow food convoys to reach distribution centers. Mr. Trump said he would seek to expand supplies reaching Gaza. Tom Fletcher, the U.N. under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said Israel’s recent steps were welcome but far from what is required.

He is correct. The world can do much more. Israel can allow far more aid organizations to enter Gaza and ensure their safety. The Trump administration can press for the return of international aid groups. Arab states can send more aid and increase pressure on Hamas to agree to a cease-fire.

Ultimately, ending the terrible suffering that Gazans have endured will require a cease-fire and a peace agreement that allows a new future in which neither Hamas nor Israel runs Gaza. Until that happens, people need food.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/opinion/gaza-hunger-war-israel-famine.html

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Aug. 3

The Wall Street Journal on SCOTUS and the re-drawing of Congressional districts

Get ready for what could be another landmark Supreme Court case. On Friday the Justices agreed to consider whether majority-minority Congressional districts drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act are compatible with the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.

In June the Court announced it would rehear a redistricting challenge (Louisiana v. Callais) in the term that begins in October. On Friday they broadened the case by asking parties to address the question of whether the state’s creation of a second majority-minority Congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments.

This is long overdue, as states are now caught in a vice. If they weigh race too heavily, they can run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. But if they ignore race, they can be sued for violating Section 2. Louisiana’s House map is a prime example.

Progressives first challenged the map under Section 2 because it included only one majority-minority district. The Court’s muddled Gingles (1986) precedent requires states to draw majority-minority districts if the minority populations are large, compact and politically cohesive and if whites vote “sufficiently as a group” to defeat a minority’s preferred candidate.

States and lower courts have struggled to discern what this means in practice. A district court ordered Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority district even though its minority population is widely dispersed. The nearby map of the district shows how it winds from the northwest of the state like a messy ink spill down into the suburbs of Baton Rouge. At points it is barely contiguous and it certainly isn’t compact.

The racial gerrymander pushed Republican Garret Graves out of Congress in favor of black Democrat Cleo Fields. White voters then challenged the new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and a different lower court ruled in their favor.

When the Court heard the case this spring, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that “the Court’s long said that race-based remedial action must have a logical end point.” He’s right. See its holding in Students for Fair Admissions (2023) and Shelby County (2013). The Court in the latter case struck down Section 4’s pre-clearance formula of the Voting Rights Act as an outdated vestige of the Jim Crow era.

But the Court has repeatedly shrunk from confronting whether Section 2 or Gingles runs afoul of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. In the June order in the Louisiana case, Justice Clarence Thomas pointedly called out the Court for this timidity. By taking on this question now, the Justices may have decided it’s time at last to extricate themselves from refereeing gerrymander fights between partisans who use the Voting Rights Act as cover for political gain.

Republicans in Texas last week redrew their House map after the Trump Justice Department warned that several districts appeared to be unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Progressives had also challenged the previous map. The new map could yield Republicans another five seats in the state, bringing their count to 30 of 38. Liberal groups say they’ll challenge the map under Section 2.

Partisan gerrymanders reduce electoral competition and make politics more polarized, but court-ordered racial gerrymanders aren’t the solution and arguably make matters worse by putting unelected judges in charge of what is inherently a political process.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/racial-gerrymanders-in-the-dock-31f93146?mod=editorials_article_pos1

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July 30

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Trump, deportations and rising grocery costs

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” So declared presidential candidate Donald Trump after descending the golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York and kicking off his first successful presidential campaign 10 years ago last month.

Through his ensuing first term as president, then four years as a civilian and now six months into his second term, Trump has consistently centered his political movement on what was always a toxic lie: That America is being overrun by violent migrant criminals. In last year’s campaign, he pledged at one point to deport 20 million undocumented migrants — almost twice as many as there actually are, by most serious estimates — while leaning deeper and deeper into the myth that illegal immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes than are native-born Americans. (Statistically, the opposite is true.)

It was only a matter of time before the math caught up with Trump and his immigration-obsessed adviser, Stephen Miller, in their quest to deport those many millions of putative criminals. It’s why the net has been widened to snare those who have committed no crime except being here without authorization. And those who aren’t even in hiding, but have openly worked with the system to get legal — only to be arrested by masked immigration officials outside the courtroom, in some cases, or even snatched off the street.

And now, inevitably, the administration is going after those who are here legally, on student visas or other programs, as it continues pursuing a policy agenda based largely on hateful xenophobia.

These attacks on legal immigration have included terminating work permits for more than a half-million immigrants who followed the rules to come here. A new study warns that the results will be felt by Americans in the form of significantly higher food prices because of expected labor shortages.

The federal program allowed immigrants from nations experiencing humanitarian crises to come to the U.S. and work legally, with the possibility of attaining full citizenship in the process. The program as operated under the Biden administration was the very epitome of what even immigration hawks tend to say they want, including background checks for the participants and a requirement that they have financial sponsors.

The Trump administration nonetheless ended the program by executive order on the first day of Trump’s current term. The result is that some 530,000 immigrants who came here legally under the auspices of a federal program could face (or in some cases already have faced) deportation back to Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti or Nicaragua.

The random, needless cruelty of decisions like this carry a cost to America’s principles as an open and welcoming nation. But in this case, the cost will be more literal.

The analysis by FWD.us, a bipartisan immigration advocacy group, found that the loss of those workers — including tens of thousands of farm workers, meat packers and others in food industries — could spur food price increases of almost 15% by 2028 (on top of regular inflation). And with food being such a fundamental part of the economy, ripple effects in other industries are inevitable.

Kicking out hardworking farm hands who were here legally to help produce America’s food — like kicking out hardworking students who bring tuition checks to American universities and brainpower to American research — is ultimately economic self-sabotage.

And to what end? To fulfill a dystopian campaign promise to embark on the biggest deportation binge in U.S. history — a promise that, it turns out, cannot be fulfilled without scooping up the law-abiding along with the criminals.

When the price of food and other goods skyrockets as a result, Americans should all remember that what they’re ultimately paying for is Trump’s performative cruelty.

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_9f80cc4a-e1c1-471a-a4a7-bc7bb54831dd.html

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July 31

The Guardian on the political and economic effects of Trump’s tariffs

Donald Trump’s 1 August tariffs deadline did what it was always intended to do. It kept the markets and the nations guessing amid last-minute uncertainty. It attempted to reassert the global heft of the United States economy to take on and master all comers. And it placed President Trump at the centre of the media story, where he always insists on being.

In the event, there were some last-minute agreements struck this week, few of them fair or rational in trade terms, most of them motivated by the desire to generate some commercial order. Some conflicts are still in the balance. There were 11th-hour court challenges too, disputing the president’s very right to play the trade war game in this way.

Even now, no one, probably including Mr Trump himself, knows whether this is his administration’s last word on US tariffs. Almost certainly not. That’s because Mr Trump’s love of tariffs is always more about the assertion of political clout rather than economic power. Mr Trump’s antipathy towards the European Union drives one example. The pact agreed by Ursula von der Leyen in Scotland last weekend underlines that the EU’s aspirations as a global economic superpower exceed its actual clout. The EU could not prevent Mr Trump making European goods 15% more expensive if they sell on US markets. Nor could it stop Mr Trump getting EU tariffs on US goods withdrawn.

Equally eloquent about the global balance of economic power is that Mr Trump has not been able to force China to bend the knee in the manner of the EU. China has responded aggressively to Trump’s tariff threats, retaliating with tariffs of its own and blocking the sale of commodities, including rare-earth minerals, that the US most covets. Unsurprisingly, this standoff has not produced one of Mr Trump’s so-called deals. Friday’s deadline has been reset for later in the month. It would be no surprise if it was eventually pushed back further.

Mr Trump is not imposing tariffs on the rest of the world in order to promote global trade or even to boost the US economy. He is doing it, in part, because Congress has delegated this power to him, allowing the president to impose or waive tariffs at will. He uses this power for many purposes. These include raising government income without congressional oversight and also, because tariffs are regressive, shifting the tax burden away from the very rich, like Mr Trump himself, on to the middle and working class.

But economics also comes way down the field in the list of reasons why Mr Trump is wielding the tariff weapon internationally. US talks with Brazil – with which the US runs a trade surplus, not a deficit – have been hijacked by Mr Trump’s grievance over the prosecution of its former president Jair Bolsonaro for trying to overturn his 2022 election defeat. Talks with India are deadlocked because Mr Trump wants to penalise Delhi for buying energy and weapons from Russia. Those with Canada have been hit by Mr Trump’s objections to Ottawa’s plan to recognise Palestine.

The ultimate test of the policy, however, will indeed be economic. For now, financial markets appear to have decided that Mr Trump’s tariffs are manageable. If tariffs now raise the cost of goods on US high streets, slowing growth and feeding inflation, as they may, the wider market response could change quickly. In that event, the mood among American voters might even shift too.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/31/the-guardian-view-on-trumps-tariffs-both-a-political-and-an-economic-threat

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By The Associated Press