EDITORIAL : THE NEW YORK TIMES, USA

 

It’s Not Really About Spending

If the federal government shuts down at midnight on Friday — which seems likely unless negotiations take a sudden turn toward rationality — it will not be because of disagreements over spending. It will be because Republicans are refusing to budge on these ideological demands:

• No federal financing for Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions. Instead, state administration of federal family planning funds, which means that Republican governors and legislatures will not spend them.
• No local financing for abortion services in the District of Columbia.
• No foreign aid to countries that might use the money for abortion or family planning. And no aid to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports family-planning services.
• No regulation of greenhouse gases by the Environmental Protection Agency.
• No funds for health care reform or the new consumer protection bureau established in the wake of the financial collapse.
Abortion. Environmental protection. Health care. Nothing to do with jobs or the economy; instead, all the hoary greatest hits of the Republican Party, only this time it has the power to wreak national havoc: furloughing 800,000 federal workers, suspending paychecks for soldiers and punishing millions of Americans who will have to wait for tax refunds, Social Security applications, small-business loans, and even most city services in Washington. The damage to a brittle economy will be substantial.
Democrats have already gone much too far in giving in to the House demands for spending cuts. The $33 billion that they have agreed to cut will pull an enormous amount of money from the economy at exactly the wrong time, and will damage dozens of vital programs.
But it turns out that all those excessive cuts they volunteered were worth far less to the Republicans than the policy riders that are the real holdup to a deal. After President Obama appeared on television late Wednesday night to urge the two sides to keep talking, negotiators say, the issue of the spending cuts barely even came up. All the talk was about the abortion demands and the other issues.
Democrats in the White House and the Senate say they will not give in to this policy extortion, and we hope they do not weaken. These issues have no place in a stopgap spending bill a few minutes from midnight.
A measure to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions came up for a Senate vote on Wednesday and failed. If Republicans want to have yet another legislative debate about abortion and family planning, let them try to pass a separate bill containing their restrictions. But that bill would fail, too, and they know it, so they have chosen extortion.
The lack of seriousness in the House is reflected in the taunting bill it passed on Thursday to keep the government open for another week at an absurdly high cost of $12 billion in cuts and the ban on District of Columbia abortion financing. The Senate and the White House said it was a nonstarter. Many of the same House members who earlier had said they would refuse to approve another short-term spending bill voted for this one, clearly hoping they could use its inevitable failure in the Senate to blame the Democrats for the shutdown. What could be more cynical?
The public is not going to be fooled once it sees what the Republicans, pushed by Tea Party members, were really holding out for. There are a few hours left to stop this dangerous game, and for the Republicans to start doing their job, which, if they’ve forgotten, is to serve the American people.

Keeping Ahead of Qaddafi

Wars are messy business, and the international effort to keep Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces from slaughtering Libyan rebels and civilians is proving no exception. In recent days, the colonel has thwarted NATO airstrikes by regrouping his forces into densely populated areas. That has left NATO with a seemingly impossible choice: leave some of the regime’s most deadly weapons unmolested, or target them and risk possibly heavy civilian casualties.

There is a much better option: the American A-10 and AC-130 aircraft used earlier in the Libya fighting and still on standby status. President Obama should authorize these planes to fly again under NATO command. Unlike the highflying supersonic French and British jets now carrying the main burden of the air war, these American planes can fly slow enough and low enough to let them see and target Colonel Qaddafi’s weapons without unduly endangering nearby populations.

Mr. Obama was right to insist that other participating nations should step up and that the operation be quickly transferred to non-American NATO command. United States forces are already overstretched — and bearing much of the burden in Iraq and Afghanistan — and Libya’s uprising is unfolding on Europe’s doorstep.

European commanders are fully capable of running the show, and European jet fighters can certainly destroy military targets on desert roads and sparsely populated areas. But no other country has aircraft comparable to America’s A-10, which is known as the Warthog, designed to attack tanks and other armored vehicles, or to the AC-130 ground-attack gunship, which is ideally suited for carefully sorting out targets in populated areas.

In a war where rebel ground forces are struggling to train and organize themselves, and foreign ground forces are out of the question, these specialized American planes provide a unique and needed asset. Mr. Obama should make them available to NATO commanders now.

A Horror at Every Turn

Cleve Foster, a former Army recruiter convicted of murder, was scheduled to be executed earlier this week in Huntsville, Tex., when the Supreme Court rightly granted a stay pending a review of his case.

There are so many reasons why the death penalty should be repealed everywhere. It is barbaric, and a terrifyingly high number of innocent defendants have been placed on death row or executed. Mr. Foster’s petition makes a strong case that, but for his ineffective state-appointed trial lawyer, he would not have been sentenced to death and that the evidence against him leaves conspicuous room for doubt about his guilt. It also makes a strong case that, but for the weakness of a second state-appointed lawyer who filed a writ of habeas corpus, he would have been granted a new trial.

The Supreme Court must decide whether Texas violated Mr. Foster’s rights by providing an ineffective habeas lawyer. The answer must be, “Of course.” Otherwise, the state will be allowed to pretend to satisfy his right to be heard while callously denying it. “This is my Life,” Mr. Foster wrote the lawyer when he fired him. “I feel you treated me Like a Dog.”

The means for Mr. Foster’s planned execution are also tainted. Last month, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said it would use pentobarbital as the sedative in place of sodium thiopental in the state’s three-drug lethal injection protocol. (Spookily, in apparent violation of federal law, it was sent using a federal license number registered to the Huntsville Unit Hospital, which was shut down in 1983 because of its abysmal treatment of prisoners.)

Rick Thaler, director of the Correctional Institutions Division, made the switch to the new, unproven protocol without consulting any doctors or other medical professionals. Also in apparent violation of federal law, the prison system is not following prescribed steps to safeguard the drug to ensure there is no tampering.

The suffering of any inmate during execution is inexcusable. The execution of an innocent person is an even greater horror. The Supreme Court should give Mr. Foster the chance to prove his innocence.

The Mess at the Top of New York’s Schools

The New York City schools chancellor, Cathleen Black, acted in the best interest of the city’s schoolchildren on Thursday when she stepped down after 95 days on the job.

Ms. Black’s tenure was far too short to judge her ability to do one of the hardest jobs in the city, but she had been in political trouble from the day she started, partly because she had no professional experience in education. Facing suspicious parents and community groups, she had a tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Once, she joked at a public meeting that birth control was the solution to classroom overcrowding.

Missteps like that one, combined with growing discontent within the Education Department itself, made her position untenable. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg had himself to blame for this mess. He chose her through a process that was far too secretive and sudden and then overrode every objection to push her into the job.

On Thursday, Mayor Bloomberg made a sensible, solid choice by nominating Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott to succeed her. Mr. Walcott will need approval from the state education commissioner, David Steiner, but that should not be a problem since he has been extensively involved in education and has master’s degrees in education and social work.

He has overseen the city Education Department for the Bloomberg administration for nearly a decade. He began his career as a kindergarten teacher in the 1970s, served on the New York City Board of Education during the 1990s and worked extensively on schooling issues for at-risk children as chief executive officer of the New York Urban League. He knows his way around the City Council and the State Legislature.

He also faces enormous challenges. He must quickly rebuild the Education Department’s leadership, which has been devastated by high-profile resignations. He faces a huge budget shortfall that will almost certainly require layoffs. At the same time, he must prepare the school system for the higher standards and curriculum revisions that were recently embraced by the state Board of Regents.