President Obama and the Peace Process
President Obama began his presidency vowing to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace. He backed off in the face of both sides’ obstinacy and after a series of diplomatic missteps. Since then, the stalemate, and the mistrust, have only deepened, and it is clear that nothing good will happen until the United States fully engages.
It is time for Mr. Obama — alone or, better yet, in concert with Europe, Russia and the United Nations — to put a map and a deal on the table.
The outlines of a deal are no secret. They were first proposed by President Bill Clinton in 2000. But neither side has been willing to make the necessary concessions — on land swaps, how Jerusalem can be shared and how many displaced Palestinians can go home, or not. The Israelis need to know that their closest ally won’t enable more inaction. The Palestinians need to know they will have American support so long as their demands are realistic. Mr. Obama needs to speak up before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel pre-empts the debate with what is certain to be an inferior proposal when he addresses a joint meeting of Congress next month.
Mr. Netanyahu has made some concessions, most notably giving Palestinians more control over their own security in the West Bank. But he has long insisted that the Palestinians aren’t serious about negotiating a final deal, and he is now hinting that he will unilaterally offer them an interim, step-by-step arrangement that will put off statehood to some undefined future.
He also has used the upheavals in the Middle East as one more excuse not to act, rather than a reason to reinforce Israel’s security with a durable peace deal.
Mr. Netanyahu — who is coming to speak at the invitation of Representative John Boehner, the House speaker — seems to think that the Republicans’ new power means he has carte blanche in Washington. So long as Mr. Obama sits on the sidelines, he will surely continue to believe that.
The address to Congress isn’t the only deadline Mr. Obama has to worry about. The Palestinians are threatening to ask the United Nations General Assembly — which admitted the state of Israel in 1949 — to declare a Palestinian state when it meets in September. Israel and the United States dismiss this as theater. But it is certain to pass, further isolating Israel. If Washington votes against it, as it inevitably will, it would further isolate this country.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and his aides have been building their capacity to govern in the West Bank. But Mr. Abbas isn’t helping his cause by refusing to return to the negotiating table. He suspended talks last fall after Israel refused to extend a moratorium on settlement construction. Holding to his position only gives Mr. Netanyahu an excuse not to seriously engage.
The status quo is not sustainable, as a recent surge of violence should make clear. And the options on the ground for creating a territorially coherent Palestinian state keep narrowing as Israel steps up settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel could oust the settlers — and will have to in certain areas. But the more settlers they let in, the harder it will be politically for any Israeli leader to cut a deal.
Last month, Robert Gates made the first visit to the West Bank by an American defense secretary to reinforce Washington’s commitment to a Palestinian state. But President Obama’s peace envoy, George Mitchell, who is supposed to move the process forward, hasn’t been to the region since December.
Mr. Gates was absolutely correct when he declared in Israel that despite the uncertainty caused by the upheaval in the Arab world, “there is a need and an opportunity for bold action to move toward a two-state solution.” He was talking to the Israelis and the Palestinians. We hope President Obama was listening closely, too.
Multiple Inequities
For a generation, in one of the law’s gross inequities that has fallen unduly on African-Americans, 1 gram of crack cocaine was treated the same as 100 grams of powder cocaine in federal courts. It didn’t matter that the theory behind the law that crack — cocaine cooked in baking powder — was somehow more addictive and led to more violent crime soon proved false.
Congress moderated, but unfortunately didn’t eliminate, that disparity last year by passing the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, reducing the ratio to 18 to 1. For anyone, that is, who committed a crack offense after the law went into effect last August. For those who committed crack-related crimes before then but have yet to be sentenced, it doesn’t. They are subject to the old mandatory minimum sentences — 5 years for 5 grams, 10 years for 50 grams.
As Adam Liptak reported in The Times, federal judges have expressed outrage about being forced to impose the harsher treatment with no discretion. While courts decide if the new law can be applied retroactively, the Justice Department has the discretion to do something now, building on a policy Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. began last May.
He called for the “reasoned exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” authorizing a tough but flexible approach. He asked prosecutors to take into account the kind of gross unfairness that results from applying the Fair Sentencing Act to someone who committed a crack offense in August 2010 but not to someone who did so the month before.
By statute, judges must give the mandatory minimum sentences to offenders subject to the old law. Even under the old law, however, prosecutors have considerable discretion. Through plea bargaining, they can also ask for sentences of five years rather than 10. If they decide not to prosecute in federal court, they can let a state prosecute with more flexibility in sentencing.
Under the Holder approach, they can still recommend that dangerous offenders serve the maximum sentence.
Prosecutors often fret about upsetting a judge when they don’t press for the maximum sentence. The judges who say they don’t want to perpetuate what Judge Michael Ponsor called “a Congressionally recognized injustice” are apt to be just fine with prosecutorial discretion. Meanwhile, Congress needs to try again and equalize the penalties for possession of crack and powder cocaine.
The House Strikes, and Wins, Again
In another House-engineered setback for the environment, the compromise budget approved by Congress and the White House prohibits the Interior Department from spending any money to carry out a policy protecting unspoiled federal lands.
Under the 1976 Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, the secretary of interior has the power to inventory, identify and protect such lands. President George W. Bush’s secretary, Gale Norton, who was more interested in development than conservation, renounced that authority. Ken Salazar, the current secretary, reaffirmed it in December only to have House Republicans strike back.
The amendment, like much from the House, was based on demagoguery. Western Republicans claimed the policy would pre-empt Congress’s right to designate permanent wilderness on federal lands. That isn’t true. What the Interior Department does, and has done until Ms. Norton came along, is identify lands with “wilderness characteristics” and manage them carefully — preventing rampant motorized vehicle use, for instance — until Congress can decide whether they deserve permanent protection.
The same Republicans also said the policy would lock up valuable oil and gas reserves. If the department does its job, some lands would, indeed, be declared off-limits. But the policy does not prevent drilling altogether. And, as government figures show, the oil and gas industry already has access to most of the known oil and gas reserves in the Rocky Mountain West, as well as about 7,200 approved permits to drill that it has yet to use.
We don’t know if there is a way around the restriction. We do know that Mr. Salazar and the White House should begin pressing now to ensure that the next budget lifts the ban and provides the Interior Department the money to set aside fragile lands for future generations.
Follow the Really Big Money
Things are going well for the wealthy. The top income tax rate is lower than at nearly any time since the 1930s. President Obama, who promised to repeal Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, agreed to extend them for another two years. And Republicans are pushing to slash trillions in public programs in order to cut the top rate more.
Amid these bountiful breaks, the Obama administration is at least trying to ensure that the beneficiaries of this largess pay the taxes they owe. The Internal Revenue Service has opened a Global High Wealth Industry office to investigate the tax compliance of monumentally rich Americans. It is following up on its victory against the Swiss bank UBS — which handed over data on 4,450 Americans with secret offshore accounts — by opening investigation offices in Panama, China and elsewhere.
The numbers attest to this new vigilance. The I.R.S. last year audited the tax returns of 2,458 taxpayers who earned $10 million or more, up from 1,553 in 2008. Audits of taxpayers making $1 million to $10 million jumped by half over the period, to 21,660. If you made more than $1 million, your chances of being audited in 2008 were about 1 in 23. Last year, they were about 1 in 13. The odds of the average taxpayer being audited are about 1 in 100.
Most estimates put the tax gap — the difference between what should be paid and what is paid — at more than $400 billion. Academics say most of the cheats are in the top tax bracket, so it is good to see the I.R.S. investigators focusing there. The country would be in even better fiscal shape if Congress and the White House stopped giving the rich so many tax breaks.
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