Opinion: In today’s pages: Tuition for illegal immigrants, presidential war powers and the Bush doctrine
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Tom Toles/ Washington Post / Universal Press Syndicate
Hard to believe, but the most controversial thing coming out of the Opinion Manufacturing Division today isn’t writer John Kenney‘s giddy riff on Sarah Palin. Inspired by her deer-in-the-headlights response when asked about the Bush doctrine by ABC’s Charles Gibson, Kenney imagines how he might have tried to bluff his way out of the jam. Even Palin partisans should find it chuckleworthy, assuming it’s possible to be a partisan and have a sense of humor. That’s an open question, given the behavior on both sides of the political divide. No, the piece most likely to send readers hair on fire is the editorial lamenting a recent California appeals court ruling that the University of California system violated federal law by giving in-state tuition discounts to illegal immigrants. The board doesn’t quibble with the ruling on legal grounds -- the federal prohibition against states providing educational preferences to illegals is pretty clear. But in the board’s view, denying discounted tuition to the children of undocumented California residents is bad policy:
Studies show that investing in education for immigrants pays off. Assuming they remain in California, their economic contributions more than make up for the cost of subsidized college tuition within a few years. Forcing them to wallow in permanent poverty, by contrast, is a drain on taxpayers -- as well as being flat-out immoral.
Also in the editorial stack, the board endorses a Virginia Supreme Court ruling that protected spam from political parties, churches and other non-commercial sources -- another popular stance! -- and it backs a Bush administration proposal to let the Federal Railroad Administration limit the hours worked by train engineers:
Yes, it will cost more money to hire workers for both the morning and evening rush hours, and those costs will be passed on to passengers. Perhaps, as Metrolink executives have predicted in the past, that will reduce ridership -- but not nearly as much as a perception that trains are dangerous and that Metrolink is doing nothing to make them safer.
Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, Kelly Candaele, a trustee of the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System, calls for more regulation of the exotic financial instruments that helped create the current crisis on Wall Street. And former U.S. Reps. Paul Findley (R-Ill.) and Don Fraser (D-Minn.) urge Congress not to heed the call by two former secretaries of state, James Baker and Warren Christopher, to scrap the War Powers Act:
The proposed legislation has loopholes big enough to allow major military operations by the president alone. Among these loopholes we find that ‘limited acts of reprisal against terrorists or states that sponsor terrorism’ are exempt from reference to Congress. But who identifies ‘terrorists’? Who defines ‘terrorism’? Who determines which are ‘states that sponsor terrorism’? Who defines ‘limited’? The president alone. Congress is consigned to the role of an uninformed, unconsulted bystander.