Editorial: The New York Times

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New York’s Missing Civil Right

Published: April 16, 2009

New York State, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg observed on Thursday, is where Susan B. Anthony began her struggle for women’s suffrage. It is the state where the N.A.A.C.P. was founded. Now New York can finally honor its historic commitment to personal freedoms by becoming the next state to end discrimination against civil marriage for same-sex couples.

On Thursday, as he reintroduced a bill that will give same-sex couples the right to marry, New York’s governor, David Paterson, issued an appeal at once personal and universal. Mr. Paterson, the state’s first black governor, compared the fight for same-sex marriage to the battle to end slavery and discrimination. “Anyone who has ever faced intolerance of any kind,” he said, “knows the solemn importance of protecting the rights of all people.” And he reminded listeners that gay couples are often denied health benefits, the right to visit loved ones in the hospital and spousal rights to inherit property.

What could be even more important was his response to New York’s new archbishop, Timothy Dolan, who said Wednesday that he would speak out against same-sex marriage. “This is a civil government,” the governor — who is Catholic — said. He is right. Religious organizations can make rules for marriage, but the state is separate and must treat people equally under the law.

Mr. Paterson had plenty of supporters lined up with him at the announcement — Mayor Bloomberg, Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and other members of Congress, union representatives and gay rights advocates. It will take hard work from all — especially Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Schumer — to get this essential legislation passed. They need to press the State Senate hard, with Mr. Schumer coaxing fellow Democrats and the mayor convincing his Republican allies.

The Assembly is expected to pass the measure easily, but some advocates of same-sex marriage have said they want Albany’s legislators to make sure they can win before the Senate votes. Knowing the outcome in advance is the way law is usually made in Albany. But, as Mr. Bloomberg argued, “that is not democracy.” It’s time for Albany’s backroom specialists to allow full debates and real votes on whether thousands of New Yorkers should be allowed this basic right.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 17, 2009, on page A28 of the New York edition.

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Roxana Saberi

Published: April 16, 2009

There is nothing resembling justice in Iran’s prosecution of Roxana Saberi. The government’s accusations against Ms. Saberi, a journalist with dual American-Iranian citizenship, have fluctuated wildly — culminating only last week with charges that she spied for the United States government. Her one-day trial this week was held in secret, and state officials have not revealed any evidence against her.

Iran’s government needs to release Ms. Saberi and end this dangerous farce.

Ms. Saberi, whose father was born in Iran, grew up in North Dakota. She moved to Iran six years ago and worked as a freelance reporter, including for National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation, while also pursuing a master’s degree in Iranian studies.

When she was arrested in January, Ms. Saberi was first accused of buying wine (illegal in Iran but hardly meriting imprisonment) and then of working without press credentials. While the government revoked those credentials three years ago, it tolerated her filing of news stories for months afterward, according to NPR.

On March 6, in comments that seemed to suggest the case had been resolved, an Iranian prosecutor told the Iranian Student News Agency that Ms. Saberi would be released from custody “in the next few days.”

Then last week, the government suddenly charged Ms. Saberi with espionage.

Iran has played this absurd game before. In recent years, other Americans, including two scholars, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent and an American democracy activist, were unjustly detained. Thankfully all were eventually released but only after enduring months of deprivation under house arrest or in prison. In 2003, Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-born Canadian photojournalist charged with espionage, suffered an even worse fate: According to the Iranian doctor who treated her, she died after being beaten and tortured while in Evin prison, the notorious facility where Ms. Saberi is being held. A former F.B.I. agent who went missing in 2007 while on a business trip, Robert Levinson, is also believed to be imprisoned.

We do not know why the government decided to go after Ms. Saberi. One theory is that Tehran may want to try to “trade” her for three Iranian diplomats arrested in Iraq by United States troops in 2007 and charged in connection with attacks on Iraqi and American forces. Another is that government hard-liners may be trying to sabotage President Obama’s effort to engage Tehran after 30 years of mutual isolation.

The two countries have a lot they need to talk about, including their shared interest in controlling Afghanistan’s narcotics industry and ensuring that Iraq’s civil war does not again spin out of control as American troops begin to withdraw.

They also have many difficult areas of disagreement, starting with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Tehran has often demanded that Washington not interfere in its internal affairs. By using Ms. Saberi and many of its own citizens as political pawns, Iran is ensuring that its shockingly poor human rights record will remain a contentious issue between the two countries and make finding rapprochement even harder.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 17, 2009, on page A28 of the New York edition.

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A Clear, Clean Water Act

Published: April 16, 2009

Clean water policy is in a terrible muddle, and the country has the Supreme Court to thank for it.
The 1972 Clean Water Act was written to protect all the waters and wetlands of the United States. Two unfortunate Supreme Court decisions narrowed its scope, weakened its safeguards and thoroughly confused the federal agencies responsible for enforcing it. As a result, thousands of miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands have been exposed to development.

The remedy lies in a Senate bill called the Clean Water Restoration Act, which would reassert the broad reach of the 1972 law. Similar legislation has been languishing for years, and if this version has any hope, it will need a strong push from the White House.

The good news is that Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, cares about clean water issues and isn’t afraid of a fight. She has already moved to restrict pollution from coal mining operations in Appalachia and is promising to crack down on polluted runoff from animal feedlots.

Without endorsing any particular bill, Ms. Jackson agreed last week that the system that has long protected America’s waterways from unregulated development and pollution is paralyzed — and will remain paralyzed unless Congress fixes it. An internal E.P.A. report furnished to Congress last year revealed that the agency had dropped or delayed more than 400 cases involving suspected violations of the law — nearly half the agency’s entire docket. The reason in every instance was that regulators did not know whether the streams and wetlands in question were covered by the law.

Until the two Supreme Court rulings, the Clean Water Act had been broadly interpreted by courts and by federal regulators to shield all the waters of the United States — seasonal streams and remote wetlands as well as large navigable rivers and lakes — from pollution and unregulated development. The assumption was that even the smallest waters have some hydrological connection to larger watersheds and therefore deserve protection. The Supreme Court, however, exploiting ambiguities in the law, effectively decreed that only navigable, permanent water bodies deserve protection.

As a result, at least 20 million acres of wetlands and as much as 60 percent of the nation’s small streams have been left unprotected, while effectively shutting down enforcement actions against developers who have been disturbing or plan to disturb these waters without a permit.

The Clean Water Restoration Act would establish, once and for all, that federal protections apply to all waters, as Congress intended in 1972. Now a new Congress and a new White House must ensure that it becomes law.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 17, 2009, on page A28 of the New York edition.

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Mr. Obama’s Chance to Fix the F.E.C.

Published: April 16, 2009

President Obama will soon be able to deliver on his campaign promise to rescue the Federal Election Commission from the machinations of party hacks dedicated to foiling campaign laws. Three of the commission’s six seats come open on May 1, providing the president a not-to-be-missed opportunity to appoint independent experts truly dedicated to enforcement and reform.

The commission has never been energetic or fastidious. But in recent months it has become a model of repeated dysfunction as its three Republican members vote together to block major enforcement efforts affecting violators — from either party — producing 3-to-3 standoffs.

The tactic has scuttled important work by the commission’s staff’s experts: voiding a conciliation agreement already accepted by an accused funding group; dropping penalties on an admitted bilker of campaign donations; returning the penalty check of another violator. In the enforcement freeze, the Republican members even voted to drop a lawsuit against George Soros, the big-spending Democrat who used the guise of a book tour to attack former President Bush in the 2004 campaign. Clearly up is down at the F.E.C.

Political professionals speculate that the Republican three are determined to hobble the panel and invite free-for-all money abuses in the coming Congressional and presidential campaigns.

Of the three seats opening up, two are reserved for Democrats and one for a Republican. The Republican seat is now held by Donald McGahn, a poster boy for what has gone wrong with the F.E.C.: He is a onetime ethics adviser to Tom Delay, the former House Republican majority leader driven from Washington by campaign abuse scandals. As for the two Democrats, both are well-connected party stalwarts — unlikely to bring the “strong impartial leadership” that Mr. Obama promised to restock the agency with during the campaign.

That promise became more urgent, and dubious, when Mr. Obama decided to reject the limited public financing option for his campaign in order to reap larger private millions. To deliver now, he must stand up to congressional leaders who traditionally propose safe party loyalists, not independent nominees. The F.E.C. is foundering and with it any hope of removing tainted money from politics. Mr. Obama knows what he needs to do.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 17, 2009, on page A28 of the New York edition.

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A Danger to Public Health and Welfare

Published: April 18, 2009

In what could be a historic moment in the struggle against climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday confirmed what most people have long suspected but had never been declared as a matter of federal law: carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases constitute a danger to public health and welfare

The formal “endangerment finding” names carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases as pollutants subject to regulation under the federal Clean Air Act. This in turn sets the stage — after a 60-day comment period — for broad new rules touching major sectors of the American economy and profoundly influencing how Americans use and generate energy.

The finding is also likely to accelerate the progress of climate legislation in Congress and will give the United States the credibility it lost in international climate negotiations during the Bush administration. The next round of talks is scheduled for Copenhagen in December.

The decision has been a long time coming. Two years ago, the United States Supreme Court ordered the agency to determine whether greenhouse gases harmed the environment and public health and, if so, to regulate them. Scientists at former President George W. Bush’s E.P.A. largely agreed that greenhouse gases are harmful and should be regulated. In December 2007, the agency forwarded an endangerment finding to the White House, where senior officials promptly suppressed it, refusing even to open the e-mail to which it was attached.

Though they put greater emphasis on the health effects, the E.P.A.’s scientists came to much the same conclusions: that concentrations of greenhouse gases had reached unprecedented levels and had already contributed to increased drought, more frequent and intense heat waves, rising sea levels and damage to water resources, food supplies and ecosystems.

This time, fortunately, the findings were not ignored at the White House. Nor should they be ignored anywhere, most especially in Congress, which is where the solution may ultimately lie.
The E.P.A.’s new administrator, Lisa Jackson, is to be applauded for moving so quickly, and she should move as aggressively as she can to develop whatever rules she thinks are necessary. But as Ms. Jackson is the first to say, legislation addressing climate change would be more effective and inclusive than top-down regulation. It would require broad consensus in Congress and command a wider political consensus going forward. It would also be less vulnerable to legal challenge.

Whether Congress can rise to the challenge this year is an open question. Mr. Obama hopes it can, and so do we. In the House, Representatives Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts have crafted an ambitious, many-layered bill that would impose a price on older, dirtier fossil fuels while encouraging newer, cleaner fuels. Though it lacks many important details, the bill provides a plausible framework for the urgent discussion that Congress needs to have and the urgent action it needs to take.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2009, on page A22 of the New York edition.

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Mr. Obama and the Neighborhood

Published: April 18, 2009

President Obama wisely began trying to improve the United States’ extremely sour relations with Latin America this week. He slightly eased the counterproductive embargo on Cuba, and in a visit to Mexico, he vowed to help confront the drug cartels. He also promised leaders at a regional summit a “new day” of practical cooperation in place of former President George W. Bush’s ideologically constricted policies.

Mr. Obama tackled the most neuralgic issue in hemispheric relations when he abandoned longstanding restrictions on the ability of Cuban-Americans to visit family members in Cuba and send them money. Cuba’s people have paid a high enough price for nearly three decades of repression and isolation imposed on them by Fidel Castro and his cronies.

Mr. Obama also allowed telecommunications companies to pursue licensing agreements in Cuba. Such deals are needed to pierce the wall of silence at the heart of the Cuban system by expanding access to cellphones and satellite television.

But these steps do not go far enough. We believe the economic embargo should be completely lifted.

President Raúl Castro responded to Mr. Obama’s overtures with a call for talks about “everything.” We hope the administration follows up and that Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton continue to insist that Havana reciprocate by freeing political prisoners and respecting human rights.
Mr. Obama made a welcome commitment to help President Felipe Calderón of Mexico combat drug trafficking, which has caused a surge of attacks on both sides of the border. He acknowledged that America’s demand for illegal drugs fueled the trade and that its inability to stop the flow of weapons south fed the violence.

But he fell short on what’s required to fix the problem. During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama backed renewal of an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. On Thursday, it was discouraging to hear him suggest that that would be politically impossible now because of opposition from the gun lobby. If he’s that timid, we do not see how he will fulfill his promise to Mr. Calderón to urge the Senate to ratify a long-stalled treaty aimed at curbing illegal arms trafficking.

The Bush administration left so much turmoil and resentment around the world that Mr. Obama might have been tempted to defer dealing with Latin America. We are encouraged that he seems prepared to take on the full plate of issues, including trade, immigration reform, economic recovery, poverty and climate change.

Whether Mr. Obama will win over Washington’s fiercest critics, like President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, is unclear; the two men raised eyebrows on Friday by greeting each other warmly. But we suspect most Latin Americans will be willing to give him a chance. His challenge will be to stay seriously engaged — and to advance an even more effective agenda.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2009, on page A22 of the New York edition.

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Fraud Factor

Published: April 18, 2009
While Washington is spending billions to shore up the financial system, it is doing far too little to strengthen the federal government’s ability to investigate and prosecute the sort of corporate and mortgage frauds that helped cause the economic collapse.

Those efforts — never fully adequate — have suffered in recent years as money and people were shifted from white-collar fraud to anti-terrorist activities. Over time, the ranks of fraud investigators and prosecutors were dramatically thinned, leaving the F.B.I. and the larger Justice Department ill prepared to keep pace with a skyrocketing number of serious fraud allegations. Now they are ill equipped to police the vast infusion of federal money into the economy.

A bipartisan measure newly approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and now coming before the full Senate would begin to close the enforcement gap.
Sponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Edward Kaufman of Delaware, both Democrats, and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 would significantly expand the number of prosecutors, agents and analysts devoted to pursuing financial crimes.

It would strengthen existing federal fraud and money-laundering provisions, updating the definition of “financial institution” in federal fraud statutes to include largely unregulated mortgage businesses, for example, and reversing flawed court decisions that have undermined the effectiveness of the False Claims Act, one of the most potent weapons against government fraud.

The measure envisions spending $490 million over the next two fiscal years. Like a similar enforcement buildup in response to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, this one will contribute far more than it costs to the federal Treasury through restitutions and asset recoveries, according to the Congressional Budget Office forecast. Senators should not be asking if the expenditure is affordable, but whether it is enough

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2009, on page A22 of the New York edition.

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Is the House Swamp Drained Yet?

Published: April 18, 2009

The House investigation of Representative Charles Rangel’s ethical gaffes and misdeeds was supposed to be completed in January, by the initial estimate of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But the inquiry blithely rolls forward in secrecy — except for the recent disclosure that the ever feckless ethics committee has been without a chief counsel for the last eight months.

This glaring handicap, reported by Politico.com, is hardly a confidence builder for taxpayers as Mr. Rangel, a Democrat of New York, continues to wield the gavel on the Ways and Means Committee amid the nation’s economic trials. The congressman asked for the inquiry, which is reported to be in subcommittee, after news reports of assorted questionable dealings.

There was a violation of House standards in Mr. Rangel’s using an official letterhead to solicit outside donations for a public service center at City College of New York extolling “inspirational aspects” of his career. An oil executive who obliged with $1 million saw Mr. Rangel help protect an off-shore tax loophole worth tens of millions to the donor.

Mr. Rangel denies any quid-pro-quo violations, conceding a few irresponsible mistakes at most. But other serious issues are whether the House gift and ethics rules were violated by the congressman’s cut-rate use of rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem and his failure to disclose income and pay taxes on his Dominican villa.

Speaker Pelosi won her job with a convincing denunciation of the Republican Congress’s “culture of corruption,” plus a ringing promise to “drain the swamp” where House ethical standards festered. She deserves credit for forcing through the new quasi-independent Office of Congressional Ethics to vet and funnel complaints to the sitting ethics committee.

The office has begun work, though lacking critical subpoena power. It has 10 reviews of allegations under way, including one into the potential involvement of Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. in the alleged auction of President Obama’s vacated Senate seat by former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

It remains to be seen whether the new office results in greater transparency and public confidence in Congress — or more of the rope-a-dope ineffectiveness epitomized by the ethics committee. Speaker Pelosi should have had Mr. Rangel surrender his gavel during his ever lengthening ethics investigation. This failure will be compounded unless she prods the committee to fill its embarrassing absence of a chief counsel.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2009, on page A22 of the New York edition.

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The Torturers’ Manifesto

Published: April 19, 2009

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.
In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.
These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.
It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions.
But this cannot be the end of the scrutiny for these and other decisions by the Bush administration.
Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.
The abuses and the dangers do not end with the torture memos. Americans still know far too little about President Bush’s decision to illegally eavesdrop on Americans — a program that has since been given legal cover by the Congress.
Last week, The Times reported that the nation’s intelligence agencies have been collecting private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans on a scale that went beyond the broad limits established in legislation last year. The article quoted the Justice Department as saying there had been problems in the surveillance program that had been resolved. But Justice did not say what those problems were or what the resolution was.
That is the heart of the matter: nobody really knows what any of the rules were. Mr. Bush never offered the slightest explanation of what he found lacking in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he decided to ignore the law after 9/11 and ordered the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ overseas calls and e-mail. He said he was president and could do what he wanted.
The Bush administration also never explained how it interpreted laws that were later passed to expand the government’s powers to eavesdrop. And the Obama administration argued in a recent court filing that everything associated with electronic eavesdropping, including what is allowed and what is not, is a state secret.
We do not think Mr. Obama will violate Americans’ rights as Mr. Bush did. But if Americans do not know the rules, they cannot judge whether this government or any one that follows is abiding by the rules.
In the case of detainee abuse, Mr. Obama assured C.I.A. operatives that they would not be prosecuted for actions that their superiors told them were legal. We have never been comfortable with the “only following orders” excuse, especially because Americans still do not know what was actually done or who was giving the orders.
After all, as far as Mr. Bush’s lawyers were concerned, it was not really torture unless it involved breaking bones, burning flesh or pulling teeth. That, Mr. Bybee kept noting, was what the Libyan secret police did to one prisoner. The standard for American behavior should be a lot higher than that of the Libyan secret police.
At least Mr. Obama is not following Mr. Bush’s example of showy trials for the small fry — like Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety. But he has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners — in violation of international law and the Constitution.
That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.
These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.
After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.

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Perfectly Still

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: April 19, 2009

The sun went down half an hour ago, and there is a nearly perfect stillness in the evening. I stand outside and wonder how such a night is possible, how — in the great cycle of air masses thrusting and obtruding their way across the planet, boiling up from the oceans and scattering over the plains — this small-valley quiet comes to be.
The grass in the field is as thick as a woodchuck’s fur and just now giving up its green to darkness, which is settling like a cold dew. If there were leaves on the trees, they would show where the wind lies, turning slightly in the way I might quote a poet to describe. Instead, there are stiff blossoms, the buds of a spring that is about to happen. Every twig seems to end in a red knot. In the uplands, people are still dragging winter to the roadside — tangled hedgerows of ice-broken limbs. I got a glimpse today of the last snow slowly rotting on a ski slope. Winter has a stillness, but it’s nothing like the stillness of a spring evening, when it feels as though every living thing has stopped quivering with expectation just for the moment.
I passed a clump of deer on the roadside the other afternoon, and they looked as though they had been carved out of decaying wood. It was a trick of the light. A much more solid deer is walking along the high ridge-line that borders this property. It pauses and looks down over this house, or perhaps it’s looking to the sound of the river, which is nearly as quiet now as it will be at midsummer. The sound of the river takes over for the sound of the missing wind, which has been rattling the windows for the past few months.
I know what grows in the warmth and the expanding light of spring. But I wonder tonight what grows in this stillness. Perhaps it’s only the mosquitoes hunting for the first time this year, or the Diptera that will be rising and falling along the river’s edge tomorrow morning. But I think something human grows in the stillness of a night like this — fulfillment, if you like, or an untroubled hope. Soon the stars, and a late-rising moon, will add what they can to the calm outside.

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Suppressing the Vote in Florida

Published: April 19, 2009

Since 2000, Florida has been synonymous with badly run and undemocratic elections. This distinction has not come to it by chance. Many of the state’s election officials and legislators work hard to keep eligible voters from casting ballots. The Florida Legislature is at it again, threatening to pass new rules that would make it harder for eligible voters, especially those from minorities and those who are poor, to register and vote.
Republican state legislators, who are behind the latest bills, want to make it illegal for anyone to get within 100 feet of a line of voters. That provision would criminalize election protection programs, in which nonpartisan volunteers make themselves available outside of polling places on Election Day to ensure that eligible voters know their legal rights and are able to cast ballots.
The legislation would also impose onerous and unnecessary rules on voter registration drives, including a requirement that registration forms must be turned in within 48 hours. Grass-roots voter registration drives play an important role in getting poor and minority voters registered. If this legislation passes, however, many groups may stop registering voters rather than risk jail sentences or fines.
The elderly, a sizable voting bloc in Florida, would also be hard hit. They would no longer be able to use photo IDs issued by retirement centers or neighborhood associations at the polls. That would be a serious hardship for the many elderly people who do not have driver’s licenses.
Another provision would require election officials to purge voting rolls more frequently, a sore point in Florida, where an improper purge of the rolls before the 2000 election removed many eligible voters.
Republican leaders seem to be trying to push the legislation through quickly, with a minimum of public attention or comment. If they succeed, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida is already threatening to challenge parts of it in court. It is doubtful that significant parts of it, like the prohibition on giving legal advice to voters in line, could survive a constitutional challenge.
Florida legislators should not need a court to tell them not to interfere with the right to vote.

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Unreasonable Search

Published: April 20, 2009

The Supreme Court has long struggled to balance the privacy rights of students against schools’ need to keep campuses safe. On Tuesday, the court hears arguments in a suit brought on behalf of a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched based on a fellow student’s false report that she had possessed ibuprofen pain-relief pills.
The invasion of privacy was extreme and the security rationale weak. The court should rule, as a lower appellate court did, that the search was unconstitutional.
Savana Redding was an honors student at a middle school in Safford, Ariz., with a clean discipline record. A friend of Savana’s, who was found in possession of pain relievers, told school authorities that Savana had given her 400-milligram ibuprofen pills, a prescription-level dose of the pain reliever in over-the-counter Advil and Motrin, used to treat headaches and menstrual cramps.
Based on this information, a male assistant principal had Savana taken out of class and strip-searched by two female employees. Savana was told to pull her bra in a way that exposed her breasts, and to pull out her underwear to expose her pelvic area. Savana, who was too scared to refuse, later called the search “the most humiliating experience” in her life. No drugs were found.
Savana’s mother sued the school district, charging that her daughter’s Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.
The Supreme Court has held that to satisfy the Fourth Amendment, a search of a student by school officials must be reasonable at the start. The search of Savana was not. It was based entirely on the self-serving statement of a student who was trying to deflect blame from herself. The school did not corroborate the tip before acting and the student who gave it did not say that Savana currently had ibuprofen, or that she was hiding it in a place where a strip search would be needed to find it.
The Supreme Court has also said that a search of a student must be reasonable in scope, taking into account the circumstances.
Again, the search of Savana fell short. As the San Francisco-based United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit observed, it is “common sense” that telling a 13-year-old girl to disrobe to partially reveal her breasts and pelvis because she might possess ibuprofen — “an infraction that poses imminent danger to no one” — was unreasonable. The school could, the court pointed out, simply have kept Savana in the principal’s office until a parent arrived.
With many communities today worried about keeping drugs and other contraband out of schools, the Supreme Court may be tempted to focus on schools’ need to enforce their rules. The court may also be reluctant to hold schools liable for damages for improper searches, given how tight budgets are right now.
These are important concerns, but so — as the founders made clear in the Fourth Amendment — is the right of every American to be free from unreasonable searches. The strip-search of Savana was unnecessary, humiliating and clearly unreasonable.


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A Real Problem, Here

Published: April 20, 2009

The AIDS epidemic is spreading faster than previously thought, even as the American public’s concern about it declines. That dangerous disconnect underscores the urgency of a new campaign announced by the Obama administration to combat complacency about the disease and its potential to strike the unwary.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 2006, 56,000 people around the country were newly infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, a hefty boost from previous estimates of 40,000.
Meanwhile, surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation show a sharp drop in public interest or concern. The percentage of Americans who say they have seen, heard or read a lot about the problem of AIDS in this country fell from 34 percent five years ago to 14 percent today. The number deeming AIDS the most urgent health problem facing the nation dropped from 44 percent in 1995 to 6 percent today.
Such complacency may reflect a belief that AIDS is primarily a problem in Africa, or a feeling that AIDS has become treatable, so why worry about infection.
The administration’s new five-year, $45 million communications campaign will try to “put the H.I.V. crisis back on the national radar screen,” according to the White House. It will feature video, audio, print and online messages about the severity of the threat and where to get information about it and will reach out to the populations most severely affected, such as African-Americans and Latinos. It will also try to enlist community organizations, public health groups and media outlets in the campaign.
Mere awareness won’t be enough to curb the epidemic. More than a million people in this country are infected with the virus, and 20 percent of them don’t know it. Their ignorance jeopardizes their own health and increases the risk that they will spread the virus to others. It is imperative that testing for the virus become routine among all those likely to be at risk.
The Bush administration achieved notable success in boosting American support for the fight against AIDS overseas; it cut the death toll from AIDS by 10 percent in 12 African countries but did not prevent new cases. President Obama should build on that legacy abroad while also shrinking the size of this country’s epidemic.


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Nebraska’s Troubled Children

Published: April 20, 2009

Nebraska has failed to provide adequate counseling and mental health services for troubled children and their families. State legislators were rightly shamed and vowed to change that last year, after desperate parents used a loophole in the law to surrender three dozen children as old as 17 to the state.
With the loophole closed and the controversy gone from the headlines, state lawmakers may be tempted to back away from their promise to swiftly develop programs to help troubled families. That would be a tragedy for Nebraska families that are struggling with troubled children.
Even the desperate move of making a child a ward of the state is no guarantee that the child will get needed help. Indeed, a startling case now unfolding in juvenile court in Omaha shows that Nebraska’s mental health apparatus, such as it is, is hobbled by bureaucratic ineptitude.
Judge Christopher Kelly has held the state’s Department of Health and Human Services in contempt for repeatedly ignoring court orders requiring the provision of specific services for a profoundly disturbed teenager who had been made a ward of the state.
As portrayed in the court record, the department is an administrative quagmire where court orders are dismissed out of hand and case workers meet obstacle upon obstacle when seeking timely treatment for clients who often have profound psychological problems.
The Legislature needs to straighten out this mess. But lawmakers must first act on a package of bills aimed at helping families like the ones that came to wit’s end last year and abandoned their children.
A pending bill that would create a hotline for families to call is all to the good. But it will be meaningless unless lawmakers put significant new money into community-based mental health treatment for children and counseling services for families that are having trouble coping. Another bill would add thousands of children to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, with the federal government paying more than 70 percent of the cost.
Some lawmakers will want to use the economic downturn as an excuse to backpedal on these crucial reforms. But by helping children living with their families now, the state will be able to avoid the much higher costs of institutionalization or imprisonment later on.

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Time to Get on the Same Page

Published: April 20, 2009

The Obama administration inherited more than just a bunch of bad environmental regulations from the Bush administration, some of which still need fixing. It also inherited a strange anomaly: holdover court cases in which President Obama’s Justice Department finds itself at odds with positions that Mr. Obama espouses. This, too, needs prompt attention.
Most of the cases involve the Forest Service, which is part of the Agriculture Department. For eight years, egged on by its friends and campaign contributors in the oil, gas and timber industries, the Bush administration worked tirelessly to get rid of one of President Bill Clinton’s signature environmental achievements: the 2001 “roadless rule” that prohibited new commercial activity on 60 million largely undeveloped acres in the national forests.
In 2006, a California district court struck down a weak Bush substitute and reinstated the 2001 Clinton rule. Justice Department lawyers, at the direction of President George Bush’s Forest Service, promptly appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit. They’re still appealing it — even though their new boss, Mr. Obama, loves the roadless rule.
The simple answer here would be for someone in the White House to call the Justice Department and tell it to withdraw the appeal, and let the Clinton rule stand. This may not end the legal Ping-Pong over the roadless rule, but it would put the president and his lawyers on the same side of the issue.
A similarly odd drama is playing out in a district court in San Francisco, where the Justice Department is defending Mr. Bush’s misguided attempt to overhaul Clinton-era rules governing the management of the country’s national forests. Mr. Bush’s overhaul would have shredded protections for wildlife and limited public input. But here again, the Justice Department finds itself defending rules Mr. Obama clearly dislikes. The answer in this case is for the Forest Service to simply withdraw the offensive Bush rules.
Still a third case, in district court in Idaho, involves the proposed expansion of a phosphate mine in a roadless area in southeastern Idaho, near Yellowstone National Park. Environmental groups say the mine would poison local waters and has not been subjected to environmental review as required by law.
The Bush Justice Department argued otherwise, and so far the department has not changed its tune even though the mine represents exactly the sort of environmental trespass Mr. Obama pledged to avoid.