Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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May 6

The New York Times on Trump’s comments about a possible third presidential term

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, they were still angry that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had won a fourth term in 1944, and they set out to pass a constitutional amendment to limit future presidents to two terms. John Jennings, Republican of Tennessee, stood on the House floor and said a 22nd Amendment was necessary to prevent a dictator from taking over the country.

“Without such a limit on the number of terms a man may serve in the presidency, the time may come when a man of vaulting ambition becomes president,” Mr. Jennings said on Feb. 6, 1947. Such a man, backed by a “subservient Congress” and a compliant Supreme Court, could “sweep aside and overthrow the safeguards of the Constitution,” he said. Without such a law, a president could use the office’s great powers to tilt the political system in his favor and win repeated re-election. Eventually, that president could come to resemble a king, effectively unbound by the Constitution’s checks and balances.

In the decades after the country ratified the 22nd Amendment in 1951, members of both parties occasionally chafed against its restrictions, but no sitting president openly talked about evading it — until recently. Mr. Jennings’s warning on the House floor now looks prophetic: President Trump is a man of vaulting ambition. Congress is largely subservient to his agenda. And he keeps mentioning the idea of a third term.

“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out,’” he said shortly after being re-elected last November. Though Republicans in the room chuckled at the time, he said in March that he was “not joking” and that “there are methods which you could do it.”

This past weekend, he seemed to both step back from the idea and reiterate it. “It’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to do,” Mr. Trump told NBC News. But then he once again claimed that the decision was his to make. “Well, there are ways of doing it,” he said. All the while, his website continues to sell “Trump 2028” merchandise, including baseball caps for $50 apiece and $36 T-shirts that proclaim, “Rewrite the rules.”

It may be that this talk is mostly a tactical attempt to ward off the stigma of being a lame duck. Congressional Republicans have responded partly by gently disagreeing and partly by downplaying the idea as a joke. “Not without a change in the Constitution,” Senator John Thune, the majority leader, told reporters in March. He added, “I think that you guys keep asking the question, and I think he’s probably having some fun with it, probably messing with you.”

But Mr. Trump’s third-term fantasizing is more dangerous than this response suggests, and it deserves more forceful pushback. He has a history, after all, of using seemingly outlandish speculation to push ideas he genuinely favors — such as overturning an election result — into mainstream discourse. He tests boundaries to see which limits are actually enforced. Even when he backs away from a provocation, he often succeeds in raising doubts about those limits. His behavior is consistent with a president who indeed wants to serve a third term, if not more, and who keeps raising the idea in the hope of getting Americans comfortable with it.

More broadly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his disdain for constitutional checks on a president’s power. He has ignored parts of judges’ rulings, deported immigrants without due process and tried to eliminate the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship through an executive order. All of this behavior suggests that he would prefer to wield power without limits.

The appropriate response from the rest of the political system — especially from Republican members of Congress, governors and others — is not to laugh off his musings. It is to assert the clarity of the law: Mr. Trump is barred from serving a third term, period.

The 22nd Amendment, to be specific, says no person shall be “elected” to the office of president more than twice, but it doesn’t say that no president shall serve more than twice. This has long led to an academic parlor game: Could a term-limited president run as a vice president and then be handed the Oval Office when his running mate resigns? Mr. Trump has said that is one method by which he might return as president.

But another amendment — the 12th — appears to rule out that possibility. Its final sentence declares that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president of the United States.” Together, the two amendments make clear that Mr. Trump’s time in office cannot extend beyond his current term.

Republican politicians and conservative legal scholars often talk about the original intent of the Constitution’s authors, and that intent is crystal clear in this case. The goal of the 22nd Amendment was to restrict presidents to two terms. As Representative Edward McCowen, Republican of Ohio, said during the House debate in 1947, “Eight years is long enough for a good president, and four years is too long for a bad one.”

In the decades since 1951, politicians from both parties occasionally called for the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, including Harry Truman and Mitch McConnell. But they did not argue that the amendment was unclear or could simply be evaded. They recognized that somebody who disagrees with a law should follow a legal process to change it. If Mr. Trump and his acolytes believe they have Congress and the states on their side, they are free to start a repeal campaign. What they should not do is pretend that any part of the Constitution is merely a suggestion. It’s the law.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/opinion/trump-third-term.html

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May 4

The Wall Street Journal says the politics around EVs have changed

The times they are a changin’, especially on progressive climate dogma. On Thursday the House voted in strong bipartisan fashion to overturn the EV mandate the Biden Administration let California impose on the rest of America.

The vote was 246-164 for a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to repeal the waiver that the Environmental Protection Agency granted California for its EV mandate. The waiver provision was written to let California address smog. But Sacramento Democrats lobbied the Biden EPA to let it apply to carbon emissions.

The mandate is ludicrously impossible to meet. It says zero-emissions vehicles would have to account for 43% of an auto maker’s sales by 2027 in California and the dozen other states that have signed up for its rules. It rises to 68% by 2030.

Major car makers other than Tesla are nowhere near those sales targets. It also amounts to another case of California’s regulatory imperialism on the rest of the U.S. since car makers would have to adjust their assembly lines to meet the Golden State’s standards.

The House vote is especially striking because of the 35 Democratic ayes. That included three of six Democrats from Michigan, three of five from Ohio, four of 12 from Texas, and even two from the High Climate Church of California (Luis Correa and George Whitesides). Let’s hope they’re not excommunicated by Pope Gavin (Newsom) I.

The vote underscores that one salutary effect of the 2024 election is the introduction of at least some economic realism into the climate policy debate. Pressed by big environmental donors, Democrats have been willing to genuflect at whatever demands the climate lobby makes—never mind if they will have no effect on global temperatures. President Trump’s willingness to challenge this orthodoxy has shown Democrats that the political risks aren’t all on one side.

Next up is what we hope will be a Senate vote to repeal the waiver. The CRA says the resolution needs only a simple majority to pass, and Republicans who are skittish can take comfort in the bipartisan House majority. The Democratic roll call will be instructive—especially those are up for re-election in 2026 such as Georgia’s Jon Ossoff and Virginia’s Mark Warner.

The New York Times tried to spin the Senate vote over the weekend by calling the CRA an “obscure law” that threatens the filibuster. Yet Bill Clinton signed the CRA knowing about its provision requiring only 51 Senate votes. It’s especially amusing to see the Times, which claims Mr. Trump is a dictator, criticizing an attempt by Congress to rein in the executive. Reporter Maya Miller never mentions the 35 Democratic votes to repeal the California waiver.

If the resolution passes the Senate, Mr. Trump is expected to sign it after he campaigned explicitly against such mandates last year, notably in car-making states like Michigan. Repealing the waiver would be a good deed for the car companies, auto workers, car buyers and the U.S. economy.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-politics-of-evs-has-changed-house-vote-california-waiver-1f951a68?mod=editorials_article_pos10

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May 5

The Washington Post says the trade war endangers national security

Each F-35 Lightning II aircraft contains more than 900 pounds of rare earth elements. Each Virginia-class submarine has 9,200 pounds. Permanent magnets made from these materials are used to make Tomahawk missiles, Predator drones and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs.

Almost all of this material comes from China. The country accounts for nearly all of the world’s processing of heavy rare earths — whose critical magnetic and optical properties are vital for defense systems. It also produces about 90 percent of rare earth magnets, used in everything from electric motors to turbines and electronics, for civilian and military use.

After President Donald Trump raised a wall of tariffs against Chinese imports on April 2, China used this formidable source of leverage to retaliate: It suspended exports of six heavy rare earth elements as well as rare earth magnets. Thus, Trump’s trade war against China has come to endanger America’s national security.

Trump seems to have miscalculated the balance of forces in his trade war. When China is America’s only source for so many things — iPhones and minerals are only two examples — it can retaliate against tariffs in ways that hurt. This is probably why Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has not petitioned Trump for relief. Xi apparently would prefer that the U.S. president come to him.

But the miscalculation over rare earths is particularly problematic because it puts America’s military’s edge at risk. The White House must either ratchet down its hostility toward Beijing or quickly find an alternative supply. Given China’s control over the industry and the Trump administration’s evident distaste for stepping back when it comes to China, both options look to be long shots.

This quandary is not entirely of Trump’s making. The supply risk became obvious nearly 15 years ago, when Beijing imposed a seven-week embargo on exports of rare earth elements to Japan in a dispute over a Chinese fishing trawler caught in contested waters. Since 2023, China has restricted exports of strategic materials such as gallium, germanium and graphite to the United States.

Despite official warnings about the danger of depending on China for such critical materials and the need to diversify supplies, there has been limited U.S. government support for the rare earths industry.

Market forces alone won’t solve this problem. Investments in domestic mining and refining have made little sense because rare earths and magnets were always available from China at low cost. After China’s 2010 embargo on exports to Japan, the Obama administration encouraged Hitachi Metals to build a rare earths magnet factory in North Carolina. But the plant closed in 2015, after less than two years in operation.

Domestic capacity to produce rare earths is extremely limited. One mine in California is active. And the company that runs it, MP Materials, plans to ramp up domestic refining and has a magnet production facility coming online in Texas. But the trade war with China has put it in a bind, as it shipped most of its concentrates to China for processing. Another firm, Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths, is building a refinery for heavy rare earths in Texas, but it is struggling under high costs. USA Rare Earth has big plans but still nothing in production.

It’s hard to predict how China will play its hand. Its shipments of rare earths and magnets have been suspended while it puts in place an export licensing system for the materials. It is unclear how long this will take or how the licensing will operate.

The United States has few options. The Trump administration is investigating the risks of relying on imported minerals and their derivatives. But what Trump might do about the problem is unknown.

Tactics he has tried to obtain other critical minerals — shaking down Ukraine, threatening to take over Canada and Greenland, and inviting companies to mine the deep seabed in breach of international law — will not build the kind of goodwill needed to put together an international effort to find alternatives to China’s supply.

Tariffs seem especially counterproductive in this situation. Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs against the United States have already stopped exports of rare earths for processing in China.

Then there is the question of time. Various countries, including Australia, Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam, are looking into mining and refining rare earths and producing magnets. But capacity outside China remains small. In the best of cases, it will take years, perhaps more than a decade, to build out an alternative rare earths supply chain.

The urgent question is how to manage until then. Given the circumstances, maybe launching a trade war against China, foreclosing on the possibility of cooperation and coexistence, was not such a good idea. Rare earths and magnets alone should motivate the president to reduce hostilities with China and start talking.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/05/china-trade-rare-earths/

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May 4

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the Trump administration and the courts

An ironic side-note to Donald Trump’s status as the most demonstrably dishonest president America has ever had (more than 30,000 verifiable lies during his first term, reports The Washington Post, with the pile now growing ever-larger in his second term ) is his penchant for occasionally blurting the quiet part out loud.

That’s apparently what happened when Trump told an interviewer this week that “I could” return a migrant who was wrongly shipped to a Salvadoran prison, despite the administration’s repeated claims in court that it is powerless in the matter.

Some Trump fans might cheer this rare outburst of honesty. But anyone not dwelling in the MAGA rabbit hole should see it for what it is: Trump is arrogantly telling off a court system that he and his people increasingly view as an irrelevant annoyance rather than a co-equal branch of government. This is the very definition of a constitutional crisis in the making.

The facts in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia have been so blatantly misrepresented by Trump and his administration that it’s necessary to lay them out yet again:

Abrego Garcia was sent to the U.S. from El Salvador as a teenager by his family to escape recruitment by that country’s violent gangs. He was undocumented but has worked with immigration officials for years, checking in with the courts, finding employment as a sheet metal worker, marrying an American woman and raising a son. He has never been charged with any crime in the U.S. or El Salvador.

Evidence was once introduced in a court hearing suggesting gang involvement, but it was disputed as unreliable, based on nothing but the fact that Abrego Garcia was seen wearing a Chicago Bulls cap. Another court explicitly ordered that Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador because of danger to his life from the gangs there.

None of this is in dispute. Nor is the fact that the administration erred in shipping Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison in March on the unproven claim he was a member of the violent MS-13 gang. He was deported with no hearing or other form of due process. The administration has since admitted in court that his deportation was an “administrative error.”

Yet when a federal judge and then the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S. — a reasonable order, given the admitted mistake — the administration claimed it was powerless to do so because he was in the custody of a foreign government.

That was always nonsense; Trump has touted his close working relationship with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has obediently toed the White House line on the issue. But at least, for a time, the obvious lie served to let the administration ignore the courts’ orders while pretending that’s not what it was doing.

That all changed on Tuesday when, during an interview with ABC News, Trump admitted the obvious.

“You could get him back, there’s a phone on this desk,” interviewer Terry Moran suggested.

“ I could,” Mr. Trump replied.

He went on to claim — again, in defiance of any evidence — that Abrego Garcia is a violent gang member and that that’s the reason he won’t bring him back: Not because he can’t, but because he won’t. Court orders be damned, apparently.

Now that the president has admitted on national television that his administration is willfully defying the Supreme Court, will he or his legal team be held in contempt? Will congressional Republicans who are always waxing about law and order actually demand that this president adhere to it? Will there be any consequences at all?

Don’t count on it. The current Republican-controlled Congress has displayed all the backbone of a mollusk when it comes to holding Trump to constitutional standards.

We predicted on this page months ago that Trump would eventually dispense completely with even the pretense of legal arguments and plainly say what he clearly believes: That he has the right and the authority to ignore the courts, thus shattering more than two centuries of constitutional balance of power.

His blithe “I could” this week was within a hair’s width of that level of defiance. When he gets away with it, he’ll inevitably be encouraged toward even more brazen defiance next time. Make no mistake: This is what sliding toward a constitutional crisis looks like.

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_7aacdcd8-7040-4e2c-8bda-1f2bf2b7f758.html

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May 4

The Guardian on Israel’s aid blockade of Gaza

Shameful. That was the word that Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s foreign minister, used to describe proceedings at the international court of justice (ICJ) last Monday. The United Nations asked the court to determine whether Israel must allow aid to enter Gaza, two months after it cut it off again just before the ceasefire deal collapsed. Supplies are running out. Unicef says that thousands of children have already experienced acute malnutrition.

Mr Sa’ar’s complaint is that Israel is unfairly targeted. The separate international criminal court case against Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Yoav Gallant, the former defence minister, also focuses on the alleged starvation of civilians. It is true that withholding food is a common weapon in war, yet has rarely been the focus of international legal cases, in part because intent is hard to prove. It is the rhetoric of Israeli officials, suggests Dr Boyd van Dijk, an expert on the Geneva conventions, which has changed that.

Last summer, Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, remarked that it might be “justified and moral” to starve people if it brought home Israeli hostages seized in the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, but that “no one in the world will allow us”. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said last month that its “policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza”. The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, insisted that “there is no reason for a single gram of food or any aid to enter” until hostages were freed. An aid ship destined for Gaza was attacked by drones and disabled on Friday. More than 52,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to its health authorities. Unicef says they include 15,000 children, with hundreds of deaths since the new Israeli offensive began in March. But withholding food kills just as bombs do. Farmland is devastated. Flour is said to cost 30 times more than before the war. Aid warehouses are empty. UN World Food Programme bakeries closed a month ago when supplies ran out; essential community kitchens are now following.

Israeli officials have said they need to stop Hamas getting their hands on aid. It’s obvious that men with guns will secure food long after others have starved. Donald Trump says that he has told Mr Netanyahu to allow aid in. Yet the US told the ICJ that Israel’s security needs override its obligation to do so. The strong legal consensus is that occupying powers have an absolute duty under the Geneva conventions to permit food to be given to a population in need.

Israel is reportedly planning to resume aid delivery “in the coming weeks”, but via a radically new mechanism. It claims the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, essential to humanitarian efforts, has been mass-infiltrated by Hamas – an allegation strongly disputed by the UN and others. The proposed alternative, of international organisations and private security contractors handing out food to individual families, looks both unworkable and dangerous for civilians.

As Israel and the US attack international courts, other nations – including the UK – must do all they can to defend and bolster them. They must also press harder for the immediate resumption of aid. What is shameful about this ICJ case is the need to bring it. What is shameful is that almost half the children in Gaza questioned in a study said that they wished to die. What is shameful is that so many civilians have been killed, and so many more pushed to the brink of starvation. What is shameful is that this has, indeed, been allowed to happen.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/04/the-guardian-view-on-israels-aid-blockade-of-gaza-hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war

By The Associated Press