Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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July 1
The Washington Post says 52 House Republicans asked Donald Trump for higher energy prices
Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and 50 other House Republicans just signed a letter asking President Donald Trump to allow the ongoing waiver of the Jones Act, a protectionist shipping law, to expire as scheduled on Aug. 16.
They are effectively calling for higher energy prices.
The Jones Act, passed in 1920, requires that ships transporting goods between U.S. ports be U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-owned and U.S.-crewed. Given that the modern maritime industry is highly globalized, few ships meet those conditions, and the ones that do are very expensive. The law severely constrains U.S. coastwise trade.
That especially harms the U.S. energy industry, which needs to transport fuel feedstocks and finished products between different regions of the country. That’s why Trump waived the Jones Act on March 17, amid the Iran war, to help alleviate price pressures caused by the conflict.
The Jones Act is frequently waived during natural disasters when it would hinder the transportation of relief supplies, but the ongoing 150-day waiver is the longest in recent history. In this real-life experiment of what life would be like without the Jones Act, the results have been excellent.
The Cato Institute counts 136 voyages of foreign ships between U.S. ports under the waiver, as of June 25. The most common good transported has been gasoline, nearly 10 million barrels, according to government data.
Some regions are seeing especially strong benefits. “In the waiver’s first 70 days, more gasoline and jet fuel were moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast than in the entirety of 2020–2025,” Cato found. Puerto Rico has been able to buy U.S. propane, which it normally cannot, because no liquefied petroleum gas tankers comply with the Jones Act.
These voyages have not replaced any demand for domestic ships. The Jones Act-compliant fleet remains fully booked. These are all extra voyages, connecting American suppliers with American buyers, that are normally prohibited by federal law.
Contrary to fearmongering about a Chinese takeover of shipping without the Jones Act, only one of the 136 voyages was by a Chinese-flagged vessel. The most common flags sailing under the waiver are the Marshall Islands, Liberia and Singapore.
Yet the 52 House Republicans say the law must come back into force because the waiver “has become a loophole exploited by adversarial countries to erode America’s maritime dominance.”
Such dominance does not exist despite — or perhaps because of — over a century of protectionism.
Why any politician would want to sign their name to something that would raise fuel costs right now is hard to imagine. A December 2023 paper estimated that repealing the Jones Act would reduce East Coast gasoline prices by 63 cents per barrel and diesel prices by 82 cents per barrel, saving consumers $769 million per year.
It’s revealing that only 52 out of 218 House Republicans have reportedly joined a letter that both the speaker and majority leader signed. Other Republicans, including Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Tom McClintock (California), have introduced legislation to repeal the Jones Act.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright called the waiver “enormously helpful” last month. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has called it “incredibly effective.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said it would “reduce price volatility for American families.”
Letting the waiver expire will only be good for the country if it happens because the law has been repealed.
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July 4
The New York Times on the next 50 years of the United States
On this Fourth of July, the United States turns 250. A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee. They pledged their lives, fortunes and honor precisely because the outcome was in doubt. Two and a half centuries later, the wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it. That is the truth worth celebrating this summer — America is still being made.
None of this should obscure how much the wager has won. In two and a half centuries the experiment of self-government has drawn strangers into citizenship, lifted people into security and comfort and put power in the hands of ordinary men and women more than any nation before it. The American example has emboldened people far beyond its borders to demand the same. At its best, this country has been a friend to the cause of human freedom. The ledger is not clean, but any fair accounting shows a nation that has turned its enormous strength toward the good far more often than not.
Americans can be tempted to treat the country’s founding as either a flawless act of genius or an irredeemable original sin. It was neither. It was a revolutionary moral claim issued by imperfect people who did not fully live up to it. “All men are created equal” was written by a man who enslaved his fellow human beings; the promise and the betrayal arrived in the same sentence. Yet the promise, once written, could not be undone.
This foundational promise was followed by three others — for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The nation’s early fights were mostly over whom would be granted life and liberty. More recent arguments are often over the pursuit of happiness. They turn on the rules of the game: not who is admitted to the common life but what that life owes its members, and what all of us owe the people not yet born. It is the question of whether a free people, through self-government, can build a society in which everyone has a real chance to flourish.
Benjamin Franklin described the founding with a phrase so familiar that many Americans today can recite the line. Asked what kind of government the framers had produced, he is said to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The conditional part of that sentence — the if — comes fresh to every generation, and it is now the work in front of us.
In the decades ahead, the work will most likely come down to a handful of questions whose answers are genuinely uncertain.
The first question is whether self-governing people still share a common reality. Democracy rests on something we rarely notice — a rough agreement about what is true and what happened. That ground is cracking, as trust erodes in the institutions that once settled fact, and artificial intelligence can fabricate convincing lies in seconds. A citizenry that cannot agree on what is real cannot deliberate. It can only split into camps. When people retreat to tribal enclaves, it can foster a sense of self-righteousness and victimization.
The second is whether we can still bear to lose. Self-government is, in part, a system for handling disagreement without bloodshed, and its indispensable habit is the willingness of the defeated to accept defeat, surrender power and live to argue another day. This habit asks something difficult: that we value the rules of the contest more than the outcome we wanted. Today, Americans increasingly regard their neighbors across the political divide not as fellow citizens with whom they disagree but as enemies to be defeated. A politics organized around enmity and catastrophization has little use for patient, unglamorous compromise and for granting that the other side might be arguing in good faith. The question is whether we can recover the conviction that a fairly counted loss is not a disaster but the price of a system worth keeping.
The third is whether the country can still keep its central material promise that those who work can rise and that their children can rise further. Today’s levels of inequality have little precedent, and living standards for large parts of American society have stagnated in recent years. The country’s promise was never only about economic outcomes, either. It was also about fairness and who has the opportunity to forge a better life. By these measures, the last 50 years have been dismaying.
The fourth is the oldest American question in its newest form: whether the most pluralist nation in history can remain one people. No country has tried what this one tries — to bind people of every origin, faith and tongue into a citizenry by assent to a set of ideas rather than by blood or soil. Past generations have heroically expanded the definition of we the people: the abolitionist invoking the Declaration against the slaveholder, the suffragist against the men who would not let her vote, the marcher at Selma against the troopers waiting at the end of the bridge, the patron at the Stonewall Inn against the raiding officers. The same fundamental questions confront us: Do all Americans count as “the people,” and will we welcome more strangers into our community?
The fifth question is about the future, about whether we can pass tests that unfold slowly and yet ask for sacrifice now. A dangerously changing climate presents one of those tests. Another involves debts handed to people who never voted on them.
America has answered questions this large before and some even larger, and we should not despair because we must again. The country did not fail even when it split in two and buried more than 750,000 of its people. It did not fail in the bread lines of the Depression, in the existential war against fascism that followed or in the smoke of burning cities in the 1960s. The country did not fail during the Cold War, when a rival nation vowed to bury us. Each time the Republic proved more durable than its mourners predicted, not because of any magic in the system, but because enough people decided the alternative was unacceptable and went to work. Democracy is not a sheltered structure we live inside. It is a habit we must practice — or lose.
So let the anniversary be more than fireworks and flags, though we should have those, too, gladly. Let it be a renewal of the work, a reminder that the right to govern ourselves is also the obligation to govern ourselves well: to show up, to listen, to tell the truth and to extend to one another the basic decency a shared citizenship demands.
The next 50 years are not a prophecy to be read. They are another wager to be placed. The founders handed us a promise they could not keep alone. We can’t, either. But we can answer their questions a little better than our forebears did, keep the Republic a little better than we found it and hand it on. That is the American project, and it is enough.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/opinion/america-at-250.html
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July 5
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says we have a democracy, if we can keep it
“A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin famously responded when asked by a Philadelphia socialite what it was that he and the other Founders had wrought.
Her question, and his answer, in the 1787 conversation framed the choice for the emerging new country as being between republic and monarchy. Today, in some quarters, the choice is presented differently: We’re a republic, not a democracy, goes a politically fashionable trope that happens to be both factually inaccurate and philosophically ominous.
America’s 250th birthday is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that we are in fact both: a (small “d”) democratic republic. Both halves are necessary to the health of our continuing national experiment.
A republic is a form of government that is structured around the rule of law rather than autocracy or heredity; democracy is the process by which citizens choose those who will lead the republic.
The two principles aren’t remotely in conflict with each other. In fact, in America, they are reliant upon one another.
But the democracy half of that composite is the one that has most nurtured what Lincoln called our “better angels.” Democracy, more than the (small “r”) republican aspect of our government, is what has enabled us to somewhat grow into what the Founders, in their historically limited way, expressed as their ideal: a nation where “all men are created equal.”
Even setting aside its specified disenfranchisement of the female half of the population, the phrase today is jarring for its unspecified disenfranchisement of millions more who were at that time, through their enslavement, denied those “certain unalienable Rights” that were otherwise “endowed by their Creator.”
The Founders were hypocrites, then? Well, yes. Clearly. But perhaps also, they were visionaries — men who recognized the value of expressing ideals that, by any sober accounting, didn’t reflect the reality of their time. Ideals that, to some extent, future times would grow into.
As (to some extent) we have.
Slavery is gone; women’s enfranchisement is a century-old norm. That these have become universally embraced developments speaks to the beauty of the Founders’ ideals.
Other belatedly realized ideals include today’s widely accepted premise that poverty shouldn’t be a barrier to citizenship (once upon a time, only property owners could vote); that government has a duty to its citizens beyond merely enforcing borders (thank you, New Deal); that who we love is no one else’s business and certainly not the business of lawmakers.
Yet the democracy half of that composite has taken a beating lately, as evidenced by the willingness of even some putatively serious elected officials these days to troll against the very word.
Breathless declarations that we’re more divided today than at any time since the Civil War are plainly ahistorical (1960s, anyone?). But divided we are. The Pew Research Center last year reported that more than 80% of both Democrats and Republicans viewed the opposing party in personally negative ways; as recently as 10 years ago, both numbers were well below 50%.
No one is suggesting all that animus, in both directions, is completely unjustified.
Some of our leaders are trying to make it harder to vote, invoking nonexistent vote fraud and other red herrings to undermine Americans’ most precious right for the sake of consolidating power.
At the same time, some of our up-and-coming politicians are embracing a polar opposite but also dangerous worldview that diminishes the importance of free enterprise — a concept that, as we all learned (or should have) during the Cold War, is inseparable from the concept of political freedom.
It’s random but appropriate that our 250th national birthday should come during a midterm election year. The November elections are an opportunity for Americans of all political stripes to exercise that most precious of our rights — the right to democracy. Which in turn directs our republic.
We are a republic. And we are a democracy. The motives of any politician who suggests otherwise should be viewed as suspect.
Republic, or democracy? It’s a phony choice. Franklin’s conditional “if you can keep it” is the more important point here. This democratic republic of ours doesn’t run on autopilot. If, in our 250th year, we fail to keep both hands on the wheel — fail out of fear, frustration or plain old laziness — we risk running it off the road.
ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_9a5e039e-c59d-4c95-96eb-3ad24928d814.html
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July 3
The Philadelphia Inquirer says as the U.S. turns 250, its soul is in the balance
The Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia 250 years ago and formally adopted the Declaration of Independence, which proudly proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and endowed with certain inalienable rights, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Great Experiment’s Semiquincentennial should be cause for celebration. Instead, a great malaise hangs over the United States.
While America has an abundance of exceptional qualities, for many, the dream has never matched the declaration. Even worse, the nonstop chaos, corruption, and incompetence coming out of Washington make it feel like the founders’ belief in the fundamental rights of humanity is under attack.
The country is deeply divided, and the outcome of the battle against illiberalism has never been more uncertain. That has tempered the excitement for this July Fourth.
While many Americans, including members of this Editorial Board, celebrate the freedoms, strengths, and highest ideals of the United States, we, like the author James Baldwin, love this country more than any other but reserve the right to criticize its current leadership and what’s been done in our name.
In fact, it is not only our First Amendment right but our duty to the founders, who raised their voices against the injustices of their era, stood up to a king, and crafted an imperfect declaration of the importance of individual freedoms that has inspired generations of democracies around the world.
Their ghosts walk the streets of Philadelphia, which might explain the intensity of the ambivalence many of us feel about how best to honor America as it celebrates what was started here 250 years ago.
A recent poll found only 33% of U.S. adults are “extremely proud” to be American — the lowest rating since Gallup began asking a quarter century ago.
Those feelings are understandable. It is not unpatriotic to express concerns about the direction of the country.
After all, it is difficult to be proud when masked federal agents kill U.S. citizens in broad daylight.
It is difficult to be proud when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents round up migrants while they work on farms in California, repair a roof in Louisiana, or wash cars in North Philadelphia.
It is difficult to be proud when a hapless defense secretary celebrates the killing — in violation of international law — of more than 200 civilians in tiny boats, who may be transporting drugs or just fishing.
It is difficult to be proud when a nation founded by immigrants sends migrants with no criminal record to maximum-security prisons in foreign lands without any due process.
Pride does not come easily when you live in a country whose leader dismantles higher education, shakes down law firms, slashes scientific research, tramples the rule of law, and cuts off health insurance for the most vulnerable citizens.
Where is the pride in watching the world’s richest man parade across a stage with a chain saw to celebrate the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers? Or when he ends foreign aid for the poorest lands, leading to mass deaths?
Who was proud to lose another senseless and illegal war that cost billions and sent gas prices above $5 a gallon?
Who is proud to have a convicted criminal in the White House, pocketing $2 billion on side hustles that blur the line between policy and personal business?
How did lies, anger, and cruelty replace life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Life expectancy in the U.S. declined to its lowest level since 1996, in part from the pandemic, but also from the growing inequality in education and healthcare.
Child poverty has tripled in recent years while the rich keep getting richer.
The top 1% of American households own more stock than the bottom 90%, according to the Federal Reserve.
A booming stock market has helped to fuel a surge in wealth inequality. The number of U.S. billionaires reportedly jumped by 50% from 2017 to 2025.
Elon Musk, who recently became the first trillionaire, makes $3.6 million an hour, while more than 42,000 Pennsylvanians make the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Billionaire tech oligarchs are reshaping American politics, civic discourse, media, and the economy for the worse. We have seen the enemy, and it is not trans athletes or day laborers outside Home Depot.
Much of the anger, division, and disillusionment stems from the fact that for most of the country, the American dream is out of reach.
Stagnant wages, rising healthcare costs, and attacks on unions explain, in part, why fewer than 40% of U.S. households can afford to buy a starter home priced at $200,000.
Forget pursuit of happiness; most Americans can’t afford basic necessities like groceries, utilities, and gasoline, let alone go on vacation, a recent poll found.
Turns out you can’t build a strong middle class on a gig economy, dollar stores, and legalized gambling.
Many Americans are so fed up that they are voting with their feet. For the first time since the Great Depression, more people moved out of the country than moved in, with many citizens packing up and looking for a better life elsewhere.
Then there is the long-ignored elephant in the room.
While there has been great progress over two-and-a-half centuries, the United States has failed to live up to the promise Thomas Jefferson penned while living on the corner of Seventh and Market Streets: After 250 years, all still are not equal.
The country continues to live in the shadow of slavery.
There have been efforts to right the wrong. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1864. The landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education prohibited segregation in public schools in 1954.
Passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 dismantled institutional segregation, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 barred racial discrimination in voting, eventually paving the way for the election of the first Black president in 2008.
But one truth remains self-evident: Systemic racism continues to create disparities in the quality of housing, education, employment, wealth accumulation, law enforcement, and health outcomes for many Black and brown citizens.
For a lot of Americans, the reality has never matched our nation’s founding principles. Yet, every day, millions of people do their part to help the United States become a better version of itself, a more perfect union.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of citizens met in Philadelphia and changed the world. Keeping the republic requires all of us to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution from the current attacks coming from within.
Still, the question remains: Should we raise the American flag? Or fly it upside down in a sign of distress? Or lower it to half-staff in mourning or remembrance of things past?
Like any assessment of the state of the American Experiment, there is no easy answer. Perhaps, on the Semiquincentennial Fourth of July, the most appropriate response might be to simply sit briefly with the discomfort of the nation’s dichotomies — the contradictory truths that coexist.
And after taking a moment to acknowledge the grand vision that birthed a nation where all men are created equal — a vision yet to be fulfilled — let’s continue the work to see it realized.
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July 1
The Guardian on Donald Trump’s wealth and power
Donald Trump is not known for his reverence for the US constitution. But in his second term, he is doubling down on his claim from the first: that the text grants him “the right to do whatever I want as president”.
This is, to put it mildly, an extremely unusual interpretation of article 2. But it is the thread that draws together the headlines dominating recent days: a spate of supreme court rulings, mostly to his benefit, and the revelation that he has raked in $2bn since returning to office, half of it from cryptocurrencies.
The 927-page document released on Tuesday by the US Office of Government Ethics sets out a dizzying array of income – not only from golf courses and Trump-branded bibles, but also from crypto, which he has relentlessly promoted, and lucrative overseas deals. Tribute flows from foreign nations. On Wednesday he took his first flight on the Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar.
The White House claim that there’s no conflict of interest over his enrichment is the corollary of his belief that there is no significant distinction between Trump the 47th president and Trump the man. Max Weber wrote that the bureaucracy of the modern state “segregates official activity … from the sphere of private life”, with relationships administered according to rules rather than “individual privileges and bestowal of favour”, while “office holding is not a source to be exploited for rents or emoluments, as was normally the case during the Middle Ages”. Mr Trump has turned the clock back, reinventing the modern executive as a feudal court.
The supreme court sometimes rejects his maximalism, but far too rarely, and often when it affects Wall Street – as with tariffs or, this week, in rebuffing Mr Trump’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve governor without cause. Its rejection of his challenge to birthright citizenship was necessary and welcome, but a very low bar to clear.
The court was right to defend the Fed; that makes it all the harder to justify giving the president sweeping control to fire the heads of formerly independent agencies at will, overturning a 1935 ruling. Authorising the administration’s ending of temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants is a terrible blow to tens of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, and beyond them, the 1.3 million people who could face deportation to countries that the US recognises as unsafe. But the broader implications are also alarming. The question for the supreme court was not whether the executive can ever terminate TPS, but whether it can be challenged when it fails to do so as required in law. The majority found against the right to recourse to the courts when the executive overreaches.
Carefully separated powers are being reintegrated, as legislation is ignored and the judiciary falls in line. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote last year of the court’s recent tendencies: “This Administration always wins.” The case for supreme court reform is growing – thanks primarily to the actions of the court itself. These arguments deserve to be heard.
What really distinguishes Mr Trump’s court of fiat and favourites from its historical precedents is its sheer reach and impact, as evinced by the illegal Iran war. Important constraints of course remain, and must be defended. But as the US celebrates 250 years of independence under a president who wields more power than any monarch, it must ask itself how to reassert the checks he has destroyed.
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