How a Democracy Works
President Obama, who has spent two and a half years not delivering on his promise to fix immigration, gave a speech in El Paso last month and cloaked his failure in tough statistics — this many new border agents, that much fencing, these thousands of deportations.
As for the other parts of reform — where millions of immigrants get right with the law and get on with becoming Americans, where workers are better protected — he threw up his hands. He said immigration advocates “wish I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. But that’s not how a democracy works.”
O.K., so maybe it isn’t. But there is a lot President Obama can and should do, using the discretion and authority granted to the executive branch and its agencies to make the system work better:
¶Mr. Obama can bolster public safety by pulling the plug on Secure Communities, a program that sends fingerprints of everyone booked by state or local police to Department of Homeland Security databases to be checked for immigration violations. It was supposed to focus on dangerous felons, but the heavy majority of those it catches are noncriminals or minor offenders — more than 30 percent have no convictions for anything.
The president should listen to the many law enforcement professionals and local officials, like the governors of New York and Illinois, who want nothing to do with Secure Communities. They say it endangers the public by catching the wrong people and stifling community cooperation with law enforcement.
¶The president can push much harder against the noxious anti-immigrant laws proliferating in the national free-for-all. The administration sued to stop Arizona’s radical scheme. But Utah, Alabama, Indiana and Georgia are trying to do the same thing.
¶He can grant relief from deportation to young people who would have qualified for the Dream Act, a filibustered bill that grants legal status to the innocent undocumented who enter college or the military. He can do the same for workers who would qualify for the Power Act, a stalled bill that seeks to prevent employers from using the threat of deportation and immigration raids to retaliate against employees who press for their rights on the job.
¶He can resist Republican lawmakers who want mandatory nationwide use of E-Verify, a flawed hiring database, which would likely lead to thousands of Americans losing their job because of data errors. A December report by the Government Accountability Office warned that E-Verify is plagued by inaccurate records and vulnerable to identity theft and employer fraud.
¶He can order the citizenship agency to keep families intact by making it easier for illegal immigrants who are immediate relatives of American citizens to fix their status without having to leave the country. Many already qualify for green cards but are afraid to risk getting stuck abroad under too-strict laws that could bar their re-entry.
¶He can bolster the civil rights division of the Department of Justice and give the Department of Labor more tools to strengthen protections for all workers and the authority to combat labor trafficking. Such authority now lies with Homeland Security, which means many immigrants are too frightened to speak up when their rights are abused.
As President Obama said in El Paso, the United States needs to address “the real human toll of a broken immigration system.” There’s work to do, Mr. President.
President Assad’s Bloody Hands
Syrians have shown extraordinary courage, standing up to President Bashar al-Assad’s reign of terror. We wish we could say that about the international community. So long as Mr. Assad escapes strong condemnation and real punishment, he will keep turning his tanks and troops on his people.
Human rights groups believe that more than 1,000 protesters have been killed in a three-month crackdown and that 10,000 more have been arrested. Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, the 13-year-old boy whose tortured body was shown in an online video, has become a heartbreaking symbol of the regime’s brutality. According to activists, he was arrested at a protest on April 29 and not seen again until his broken body was delivered to his family almost a month later.
His murder and that of at least 30 other children who joined the protests show the depths to which Mr. Assad and his thugs have sunk.
On Friday, in some of the biggest demonstrations yet, thousands of people again returned to the streets to demand political freedoms. Activists said dozens of protesters were killed in Hama after troops and regime loyalists opened fire. Independent journalists are barred from the country, so the full extent of the violence is unclear. What we do know is that the Syrian government has unleashed a wave of repression, perhaps the most vicious counterattack of the Arab spring.
After the killing began, the United States and Europe imposed sanctions — mostly travel bans and asset freezes — on certain key regime officials while exempting Mr. Assad. Only later did they add his name to the list. The rhetoric is stiffening. On Thursday Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that Mr. Assad’s legitimacy is “if not gone, nearly run out.” But some American and European officials still buy the fantasy that Mr. Assad could yet implement reforms.
Most appalling, the United Nations Security Council is unable to muster the votes to condemn the bloodshed much less impose sanctions. Russia, cynically protecting longstanding ties with Damascus, is blocking meaningful action and China has fallen in lockstep. India is also reluctant to act — a shameful stance for a democracy that has been bidding for a permanent seat on the Council.
If Russia and China, which have veto power, can’t be won over, the United States and Europe must push a robust sanctions resolution and dare Moscow and the others to side with Mr. Assad over the Syrian people.
We do not know how this will turn out. But arguments that Mr. Assad is the best guarantor of stability and the best way to avoid extremism have lost all credibility.
Give Me the Permits, or Else
It sounded like a simple bit of noncontroversial Senate routine: raising the salary of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to the level of his cabinet peers. Then, with all the finesse of a shakedown artist, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, declared that he will keep a legislative hold on the $19,600-a-year raise until Mr. Salazar has his department approve more deepwater drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I cannot possibly give my assent,” the senator wrote to Mr. Salazar. Far from any concern about laws against quid pro quo Washington deals, Mr. Vitter vowed in a press release to keep his “boot on the neck” of the department until his drilling demands are met.
In the wake of the gulf oil spill disaster, the senator wants to regenerate industry jobs, and he is demanding an approval rate of at least six drilling permits per month. Most of the 15 approved since the oil spill, he contends, amount to reissuings.
The administration rightly argues that tighter post-spill standards require closer examination of permit requests. The secretary rightly dismissed the senator’s boot as an “attempted coercion of public acts” and told the Senate to forget about the raise. Mr. Salazar was in the Senate when Congress approved cabinet raises and required special legislation to reach the current salary of $199,700.
Senator Vitter is basking in the controversy. His office told Politico a court fight with the Obama administration would be most welcome: “Make my boss a Louisiana folk hero,” a spokesman fairly pleaded.
Mr. Vitter can’t really hold a candle to Huey Long, even if his tactics smack of the Kingfish’s statehouse thuggery. The last thing either Louisiana or the nation’s capital needs is still another politician strutting imperiously. But there goes Senator Vitter, trumpeting his demands.
What Do You See on Your Plate Today?
Let’s face it, if the food on your plate forms a pyramid, you’re probably eating too much. And yet the symbol meant to guide Americans’ eating choices has long been the food pyramid, one that has grown more abstract and harder to understand over the years even as the nutritional guidelines have improved. On Thursday, the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, and the first lady, Michelle Obama, abandoned the pyramid and unveiled its replacement: a dinner plate known as MyPlate.
That may not sound like a radical departure, but it is. The new icon captures what you see when you look down to eat (assuming you’re not eating from a takeout carton, which would be far worse), and it turns that view into a simple, comprehensible reminder of what should be there. The plate is half full of vegetables and fruit — actually, labeled color blocks — half full of protein and grains, with a glass of dairy on the side.
The plate is based on new dietary guidelines released by the government last January, which encouraged Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer processed foods, especially ones containing added sugar. It is part of a concerted effort by the Department of Agriculture and the first lady to improve nutrition, especially childhood nutrition. One in three American children is overweight or obese, which means long-term chronic health problems.
How we became obese is spelled out in a U.S.D.A. list of the current main calorie sources for children age 2 to 18. The top three are grain-based desserts; pizza; and soda and energy or sports drinks. We hope Americans take the new dinner-plate icon seriously. And we hope it helps bring about healthy changes in the foods offered in supermarkets, restaurants and schools.
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