Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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July 3 – The Washington Post on One Big Beautiful Bill and a potential debt crisis
The odds of a federal debt crisis just got more daunting.
On Thursday, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping piece of legislation that threatens to leave the government with one big not-so-beautiful pile of debt.
Even before the bill, several warning signs pointed to trouble. Since January, the value of the dollar has dropped, suggesting that fewer foreign investors want to hold U.S. assets. Separately, unpredictable movements in U.S. Treasury markets indicate that investors are concerned about America’s long-term fiscal stability.
Now, Republicans have passed a bill that would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The best-case scenario is that economic conditions suddenly and sharply improve, ameliorating the effects of even Republicans’ monumental degree of irresponsibility. If, say, artificial intelligence drives an efficiency boom that raises incomes and tax receipts without boosting federal spending – growth and federal outlays often rise in tandem – America’s fiscal picture would look better. Markets, though, don’t appear to be counting on this.
In the worst case, rising debt could trigger a downward spiral. As investors grow nervous about the United States’ ability to cover its obligations, they demand higher interest rates when lending to the government to offset that extra risk. But those higher rates in turn increase interest payments, which make the debt even harder to service, deepening anxiety and driving rates higher still.
When interest payments consume a larger share of the federal budget, there’s less room for everything else – from Social Security to defense to infrastructure. Higher Treasury rates mean household borrowing becomes costlier, too. Mortgage rates climb, and businesses have a tougher time securing bank loans.
For now, America benefits from the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, which means global central banks and investors continue to demand dollars to conduct trade and, as such, hold reserves. That privilege gives the U.S. more leeway to borrow than other countries.
If neither the best nor the worst case occurs, more debt would still make government borrowing costlier, which would add stress to an already vulnerable Treasury market. The next time there’s a shock to the economy, jittery investors could sell Treasurys faster than the market could absorb, forcing the Federal Reserve to step in and buy them up.
That’s what happened in March 2020. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, foreign central banks, hedge funds and other large investors rushed to sell Treasurys to raise cash, overwhelming the dealer banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, that would typically absorb those sales. The Fed, attempting to contain the damage, ended up purchasing billions of dollars in Treasurys to restore market functioning. If the Fed hadn’t done this, the Treasury market could have frozen entirely, cutting off the flow of credit across the economy and potentially triggering mass foreclosures, defaults and bank failures.
The Fed appears worried that this scenario could repeat itself. Last week, it unveiled a proposal that would relax the ” supplementary leverage ratio,” which dictates how much of a cash buffer banks must hold. By easing the capital rule, the Fed hopes to encourage dealer banks to hold more Treasurys on their balance sheets – so that if investors rush to sell again, the market has more capacity to handle the shock without immediate intervention from the Fed.
The Fed is right to be worried about Congress’s fiscal irresponsibility. If the Treasury market goes haywire again, the Fed will have a tougher time stepping in than it did in 2020. Then, the emergency bond purchases also happened to align with monetary policy goals: The economy was in free fall, so, in addition to stabilizing markets, buying bonds helped lower interest rates and stimulate demand.
Today, inflation risks are much higher than they were, so buying large amounts of government debt, pushing out cash, risks overheating the economy. Separately, emergency bond purchases – particularly after the bill’s passage – could give the impression that the Fed is stepping in to help finance the government’s spending. That could kick-start a full-blown crisis if investors fear the government is deliberately encouraging inflation to reduce the real value of the debt, eroding the value of the dollar and wiping out household savings and retirement accounts.
The Fed can do some other things to keep the financial system resilient when stress hits. For one, strengthening Treasury market infrastructure – by quickly setting up a central clearinghouse, for example – would make it easier to match buyers and sellers during moments of panic. In addition, regulators should ensure that large banks hold ample capital in normal times, so they have more capacity when markets go bad.
But Congress is at fault for pushing America’s long-term financial health to the edge. The Fed can’t fix that.
Keep an eye on the bond market. The fuse has been lit. The Fed can’t stop an explosion, even if it might soften the potential blast.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/03/debt-crisis-congress-budget-federal-reserve/
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July 5 – The New York Times says politicization of F.B.I. is making Americans less safe
Only 11 days after President Trump was inaugurated for a second term, his administration began a purge of the F.B.I. that now threatens some of the bureau’s most important missions. His appointees ousted eight of its most experienced managers, including the division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity and criminal investigations. Several had worked on prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters or had assisted in the various investigations of Mr. Trump, and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.
That was just the beginning. Over the past five months, many F.B.I. agents, including other top managers and national security experts, have been fired, pressured to leave or transferred to lesser roles. Hundreds have resigned on their own, unwilling to follow the demands of the Trump administration. Their absence has left a vacuum in divisions that are supposed to protect the public. These losses have “obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the F.B.I.,” Adam Goldman of The Times wrote.
Mr. Trump’s playbook for the F.B.I. is plain to see. He is turning it into an enforcement agency for MAGA’s priorities. He is chasing out agents who might refuse to play along and installing loyalists in their place. He is seeking to remove the threat of investigation for his friends and allies. And he is trying to instill fear in his critics and political opponents. Among his many efforts to weaken American democracy and amass more power for himself, his politicization of the F.B.I. is one of the most blatant.
These developments should unsettle all Americans, regardless of party. As one former Justice Department official told NBC News, the decimation of the bureau’s senior ranks has left it “completely unprepared to respond to a crisis, including the fallout from the current conflict in the Middle East.” Mr. Trump’s politicization of the F.B.I. has left it less able to combat terrorism, foreign espionage, biosecurity threats, organized crime, online scams, white-collar crime, drug trafficking and more.
The F.B.I. has a flawed history, of course. J. Edgar Hoover abused his power as the bureau’s director for decades, and Richard Nixon used it to conduct surveillance of political opponents. Yet after the Watergate scandal forced Mr. Nixon’s resignation, the F.B.I., like the rest of the Justice Department, reformed itself to become more independent from the president.
Every president since the 1970s has at times chafed against that independence, wishing that the Justice Department would be more loyal to the White House’s political interests. But those presidents, from Gerald Ford through Joe Biden, largely respected the bureau’s autonomy. As a result, Americans – from the political left, center and right – tended to trust the F.B.I.
Mr. Trump has taken a radically different approach. He has made clear that he considers the F.B.I.’s first priority to be loyalty. Consider the Signal scandal from this spring, when senior officials disclosed sensitive information in a group chat. In any other administration, the F.B.I. probably would have investigated. Under Mr. Trump, the bureau looked the other way.
To carry out this agenda, he chose as its director Kash Patel, whose main qualification is his unquestioning fealty to Mr. Trump. In 2022, Mr. Patel published a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which a wizard named Kash saves the day by exposing a conspiracy against King Donald. The next year, Mr. Patel published a book titled “Government Gangsters.”
His mission at the F.B.I. is to politicize it. He is dismantling key operations and reshaping the bureau into an instrument of Mr. Trump’s political will. Mr. Trump spent years baselessly accusing the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of being weaponized against him; now he is turning federal law enforcement into the very thing he claimed it was: a political enforcer. Under Mr. Patel, the bureau has assigned agents to pursue long-running MAGA grievances. One example: Mr. Patel had his agents dig through documents searching for evidence to support one of Mr. Trump’s and the online right’s favorite conspiracy theories, that China somehow helped manipulate the results of the 2020 election.
Among the people whom Mr. Patel has scapegoated are the agents he now oversees, which damages the bureau’s morale and its effectiveness. Before taking office, he called the bureau “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He has described its employees as “political jackals” who tried to “suffocate the truth” in order to rig the 2020 election for Mr. Biden. Mr. Patel has promoted theories that the F.B.I. paid Twitter to censor conservatives and that it used confidential informants to stir up the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. There is no evidence to support any of this.
For his deputy director, Mr. Patel hired Dan Bongino, a longtime right-wing podcaster. Mr. Bongino has called the bureau “the single most corrupt law enforcement institution” in America and a “full-blown leftist political action committee.” Together they began singling out agents who had worked on prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters or the federal indictment of Mr. Trump for improperly removing documents from the White House. Many of these agents were fired, pushed to resign or transferred.
Several of the bureau’s most experienced managers have been driven out simply because they angered members of Mr. Trump’s coalition. Bureau leaders ordered the transfer of Spencer Evans, who ran the F.B.I.’s field office in Las Vegas, after Mr. Trump’s supporters accused him of denying religious exemptions for the Covid vaccine within the bureau. Michael Feinberg, a longtime counterintelligence agent who served as a deputy in the Norfolk, Va., field office, resigned after being threatened with demotion simply because he was a friend of a counterintelligence agent who had sent a text message disparaging Mr. Trump.
The resulting loss of expertise and experience is chilling. The bureau today has fewer people with the skills to prevent crime, political corruption and foreign espionage.
Under Mr. Patel, the F.B.I. has also reassigned agents from valuable work to showy efforts that bolster Mr. Trump’s political interests. This pattern is clearest with immigration. We acknowledge that an increased focus on border security and deportations is a legitimate change for Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. He won election last year partly because of public dissatisfaction with Mr. Biden’s loose border policies, which contributed to the most rapid surge of immigration in American history, much of it illegal.
Presidents rightly have the authority to shape the bureau’s priorities. But the approach of the Trump F.B.I. is nonetheless alarming because of its extremity. The administration is pulling agents away from areas that present true risks to the country and assigning them instead to search for undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record. The effort is part of a governmentwide effort to meet Mr. Trump’s arbitrary quota of 3,000 arrests a day. “They have cannibalized field offices to create these immigration squads,” one former agent told us in an interview. “They’re taking highly trained agents, many with advanced degrees and military experience, and using them for perimeter security on ICE roundups. And that means fewer people working to prevent foreign influence or public corruption.”
The Trump administration has gone so far as to brag about its decision to deprioritize corporate corruption and white-collar crime. The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Matthew Galeotti, has said that a crackdown on corporate crime burdens U.S. businesses. This shift is another example of Mr. Trump’s effort to protect people he considers his allies – namely, corporate executives. He has been particularly aggressive about reducing investigations into cryptocurrency scams while he has ignored decades of White House precedent by using his office for the profit of his businesses, especially in crypto.
Understandably, the combination seems to be undermining bureau morale. More than 650 bureau employees recently filed for early retirement.
All law enforcement agencies require foundations of public trust, but because of its troubled history and the ease of political manipulation from Washington, the F.B.I. has a particular need to demonstrate that it deserves the nation’s confidence. Agents, for their part, need to know that their managers and civilian leaders have their backs and don’t consider them to be jackals. They need to know that they are enforcing the law fairly, not being used for a personal or ideological agenda. The public – on which the bureau relies for tips and cooperation – has to trust that agents operate without political bias.
By abusing that trust, Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have put the reputation and effectiveness of the F.B.I. at risk. In doing so, they are risking the safety of the American public.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/opinion/trump-fbi-politics-safety.html
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July 7 – The Wall Street Journal on the Epstein conspiracy
These are boom times for conspiracy theorists, and one problem is they’re never satisfied. There’s always another coverup to unravel, or another hidden file somewhere that the evil establishment is hiding. That’s what Trump Justice Department officials are learning to their dismay now that they’re trying to close the books on the prosecution and death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Government investigators ruled years ago that the sex offender killed himself in prison, but many on the political right don’t want to believe it. The skeptics included Kash Patel and Dan Bongino before President Trump chose them to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But after what DOJ calls an “exhaustive review,” they turned up no evidence of murder or a coverup to protect Epstein’s clients.
“There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,” the Justice Department and FBI wrote in a memo released Monday. “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Fair enough, except this isn’t good enough for the social-media fever swamps. Laura Loomer, Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists think Messrs. Patel and Bongino, as well as Attorney General Pam Bondi, must be lying, or have been co-opted, or who knows what. Ms. Bondi “needs to resign,” said Ms. Loomer, who is a pal of President Trump.
There’s a lesson here for partisans who think they can ride conspiracies to power. They can easily boomerang on you once you’re in a position to see the real evidence and then have to convince a public that doesn’t trust anyone in power. Welcome to the rotten establishment, Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino.
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July 6 – The Boston Globe says Congress must give judges tool to fight autocracy
The Supreme Court’s ruling last month that all but blocked lower courts’ ability to temporarily halt obviously illegal or unconstitutional presidential policies has set our nation back centuries. Literally.
You don’t have to be a critic of the Trump administration to see the huge problems caused by Trump v. CASA Inc., which the court issued on the last day of its term. Just imagine any plainly illegal presidential order – to take away citizens’ firearms, for instance.
Courts should be empowered to put a quick, comprehensive stop to such an action through an injunction.
But now they can’t. Based on the Supreme Court’s reading of a 1789 law, lower courts can now only take such action on specific cases before them, meaning that even clear-cut violations of the law could continue against those without the wherewithal to go to court.
Congress can and must correct this mistake. Lawmakers should pass legislation that protects judges’ ability to provide robust equitable remedies when people’s rights are threatened by legally or constitutionally dubious administration actions.
Now, it’s true that there have been problems with universal injunctions, and judges have sometimes misused them. But the court’s ruling took a sledgehammer to a system that should have been fixed by Congress with a scalpel.
And in the case of Trump, the ruling opens the door for him to strip birthright citizenship from American-born babies, continue whisking migrants to countries foreign to them with little notice and without due process, and engage in other actions that threaten people’s rights and freedoms.
The court’s 6-3 ideologically split opinion, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was based on the majority’s interpretation of the Judiciary Act of 1789. The justices considered if the statute authorizes broad preliminary injunctions like that issued by Boston-based US District Court Justice Brian Murphy, which paused Trump’s executive order to deny birthright citizenship to children born to some migrants.
“The answer is no,” Barrett wrote for the majority.
Instead, the court held, challengers of the policy who have standing to bring suit can only obtain such preliminary relief for themselves.
“(P)rohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship,” Barrett wrote. “And extending the injunction to cover everyone similarly situated would not render her relief any more complete.”
This is untenable, and will only lead to a cruel game of judicial whack-a-mole that fails to provide adequate protection to those most imperiled by these policies. The onus should not fall on those who are targeted by these policies to fend for themselves. It should fall on the administration to show that it is acting in a lawful way. The court did just the opposite, holding that it is the administration that will likely suffer irreparable harm if courts dare to exercise their authority as a check on the executive.
The overuse of universal injunctions has been an issue of increasing bipartisan concern, particularly since the Obama administration. In the last two decades, both the number of executive orders issued and the number of temporary injections blocking them have steadily ballooned.
But the number of executive orders Trump has issued in his second term is without historical precedent, even exceeding Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who issued a flurry of edicts in an effort to implement his New Deal agenda.
And many of Trump’s orders are based on strained legal or constitutional arguments, such as the administration’s claim that the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship protection only extended to children of enslaved people, that the Alien Enemies Act allows migrants to be deported without due process, or that the Immigration and Nationality Act allows the government to send migrants to countries where they’ve never been and to which they have no connection.
Judges must have the ability to decide when relief extending beyond named plaintiffs is warranted. Should there be limits on that power? Yes, and Congress can include them in its bill. It can also underscore that states can still seek statewide relief from policies they can demonstrate harm all of their residents, and ease the process for class actions to be formed at the earliest stages of litigation to give relief to groups of people who demonstrate a need for protection. Judges handling the flurry of Trump-related litigation need more tools, not fewer. It’s lawmakers’ duty to give those tools to them.
The Supreme Court must also swiftly take up and decide the constitutional and legal questions presented by Trump’s orders. The justices could have rejected the Trump administration’s erroneously limited reading of the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship protections, but opted instead to leave that question for another day. But given the risks of the order, there is no time like the present.
And in the meantime, federal judges must do all they can to help challengers who will be harmed by Trump’s policies. The Supreme Court did not tie judges’ hands completely when it comes to equitable relief. Quick certification of class actions and swiftly granting relief to states that demonstrate the peril to their residents are among the arrows still in judges’ quivers. They must use them.
We are not as bound or doomed by history as the Supreme Court’s justices believe. The public needs to demand that members of the legislative and judiciary branches stand up and reclaim their powers to check a president who believes he is above the law and the Constitution.
ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/06/opinion/scotus-injunctions-ruling/
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July 4 – The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says the concept of patriotism shouldn’t be divisive
Here’s one thumbnail assessment of how this deeply divided country clashes on the concept of patriotism: Today’s political right enthusiastically defines it by the combative standards of nationalism – a different and far less noble thing – while the political left increasingly rejects it altogether.
Both mindsets merit rethinking as America celebrates its national birthday Friday.
A new Gallup poll confirms what other polls have shown for some years now: Americans are becoming, by their own definition, a less-patriotic population – but the trend is being driven entirely by recent, deep declines in self-described patriotism on the political left and middle.
At the start of the current century, polls showed that between 80% and 90% each of Republicans, Democrats and independents all described themselves as patriotic. The new Gallup poll, in contrast, finds that today, while 92% of Republicans still say they are “extremely” proud to be Americans, just 53% of independents and a meager 36% of Democrats say the same.
The Trump effect is undoubtedly a factor. The nosedive in self-described patriotism by Democrats coincides with Donald Trump’s emergence on the national stage a decade ago, and has hit its lowest point during his second term.
But there’s more at play here than just partisan backlash to losing the White House. Republicans never dipped below 90% in their professed patriotism throughout the eight years of the Obama administration. They did (for the first time) during the Biden administration, but even then never dropped below 84%.
Are conservatives just more patriotic? If the results of this poll and the many others like it are to be believed, that appears to be the consensus across the political spectrum.
And, yes, that’s a problem.
It’s easy to see how progressives, watching a presidential administration systematically bulldoze what they consider to be bedrock American values with the support of almost half their fellow citizens, could conclude that their nation is not currently worthy of their patriotism.
But if that’s the standard – if agreement with whomever is in the White House is the determining factor for one’s love of country – then patriotism stops being a core aspect of citizenship and becomes just another partisan marker in a deeply divided country.
It is also a capitulation. The constructive response to the feeling that the country is off course is to work toward putting it back on course, not to throw up your arms and retreat to political nihilism.
On the other side of the equation is the question of how to define patriotism in the first place.
Trump and his most enthusiastic supporters have frequently demonstrated that their definition is power-based: tanks on the streets of Washington; federal troops on the streets of L.A.; rhetorical, legal and even physical aggression toward perceived domestic enemies, from low-level government workers to journalists to opposing politicians to, well, pretty much anyone who disagrees with them.
Consider Trump’s all-caps Memorial Day message that savaged the tens of millions of Americans who voted against him as “scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country.” The entire message was couched in the language of patriotism – but a belligerent, us-versus-them version of it. No wonder many citizens are rejecting the concept of patriotism, if that’s how it’s being defined.
But why accept that definition? Here are some others to consider:
Patriotism means respecting the principle that we are a nation of laws and of constitutional process. That means accepting the validity of election results we don’t like and court rulings we don’t agree with. That’s not to say those outcomes cannot be challenged, but they must be challenged within those electoral and legal systems, in adherence to the U.S. Constitution.
Patriotism means respecting the constitutional rights of speech and peaceful protest (any other kind invalidates itself) even when we disagree with the sentiments being expressed.
As such, neither the right’s tendency toward suppression of protest (as in L.A. last month) nor the left’s tendency toward “cancellation” of opposing opinions (as in shouting down academic conservatives) is patriotic.
Patriotism means welcoming people from around the world to America, via a system of legal immigration. But it also means extending compassion and due process to those who run afoul of that system out of desperation or through no fault of their own – as with immigrants brought here as children.
Patriotism means promoting and defending democracies around the world as only the world’s sole remaining superpower can do. By that definition, blocking Iran’s development of nuclear weapons was patriotic – and so is defending Ukraine from Russian aggression.
Of course, all those definitions are subjective. Recognizing the right to disagree on what it means to be an American is the most patriotic principle of all.
If our divided country can agree upon nothing else on our national birthday, let’s agree upon that.
ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_20965a3f-13cf-476e-8b49-60ccc92ba86b.html
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