Editorials of The Times

Saudi Arabia’s powerful heir apparent, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is visiting Washington and other American cities this week promoting his image as an enlightened reformer out to modernize his conservative country and encourage foreign investment.

That image is stained by his chief foreign policy initiative, the humanitarian catastrophe that is the war in Yemen, in which at least 10,000 civilians have been killed, many as a result of indiscriminate airstrikes by the Saudis and their Persian Gulf partners. The United States has been Saudi Arabia’s main enabler, supplying weapons and other military aid.

There was no immediate sign that President Donald Trump used his meeting with the crown prince at the White House on Tuesday to try to persuade him to halt the war.

Some members of Congress, understanding their constitutional responsibilities over how and when the United States wages war, proposed a bipartisan resolution to end American military involvement in Yemen within 30 days unless Congress formally authorizes it. Tragically, it was effectively defeated Tuesday when the Senate voted 55-44 to table the measure. Other legislative efforts yet to be considered would block military aid to Saudi Arabia, including millions of dollars in arms sales.

These are sensible ways to help end the attacks, as the need for a political solution in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, grows more urgent by the day.

It has been wracked by civil war since 2014, when Houthi rebels allied with Iran, and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, took control of the capital, Sanaa, and much of the rest of the country.

In all, at least 8 million people are on the brink of famine, 1 million are suspected of being infected with cholera, and 2 million have been displaced from their homes. Legal and human rights experts say the killing of civilians and humanitarian aid deprivations could well be war crimes.

In 2015, the Saudi-led coalition, with President Barack Obama’s backing, launched a military campaign, including thousands of airstrikes, against the Houthi-Saleh forces in support of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The war is now stalemated.

While the Houthis have fired artillery indiscriminately into cities, launched rockets into Saudi Arabia and impeded the delivery of humanitarian aid, the Saudi-led coalition, a vastly more powerful force, is the main driver of the misery with its air bombardments against civilian areas, and a land, air and sea blockade that is keeping large quantities of food, fuel and medicine from reaching millions of people.

The Pentagon has argued its military aid is noncombat assistance, like advising the Saudi Air Force on how to drop bombs so they kill fewer civilians. But while the Saudis pledged in 2017 to reduce civilian deaths, Human Rights Watch said six attacks since then killed 55 civilians.

Meanwhile, Gen. Joseph Votel, head of Central Command, told Congress, “We’re not parties to this conflict.” That isn’t credible. The Saudi-led coalition would have a hard time continuing the onslaught without American assistance, which has included air-to-air refueling, arms, intelligence assessments and other military advice.

Apart from the humanitarian disaster, members of Congress who have supported the resolution are concerned about the legal basis for American involvement. The United States initially deployed forces to combat al-Qaida in Yemen under post-Sept. 11 congressional authorization measures. But Congress never specifically approved military involvement in the Saudi-Houthi war even though the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act give lawmakers a role.

Three senators, Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Chris Murphy, D-Conn.; and Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced the resolution to end America’s involvement in Yemen and curtail what they view as unchecked presidential war-making powers. The administration and some lawmakers worked feverishly against the measure in part because its 30-day deadline would force them to end a military operation they want to continue, and they fear it will ruin relations with Saudi Arabia, whose crown prince Trump is courting.

For too long, Congress has abdicated its role as America prolonged its stay in some wars and expanded into others, like Yemen. And presidents have been too reluctant to share these crucial decisions with lawmakers.

Resolutions like this can and must still be pursued to force serious debate and accountability.

President Donald Trump has declared that his administration is getting serious about the opioid epidemic several times since taking office. But he has repeatedly failed to offer a substantive plan — and he has floated at least a few truly absurd ideas. He did it again this week.

Trump gave a rambling speech on opioids Monday in which he offered few details about how he would increase access to substance abuse treatment and prevention to help the millions of Americans suffering from this disease. Some 64,000 people in the United States died of drug overdoses in 2016, including 481 in New Hampshire, one of the hardest hit states in the country, where Trump gave his speech.

The president went on at length about his preposterous proposal to fight the scourge of drugs by executing drug dealers — an idea that many experts say would not stand up in court and would do little to end this epidemic. He also reprised his cockamamie idea to build a wall along the nation’s southern border, arguing that it would “keep the damn drugs out,” and accused sanctuary cities of releasing “illegal immigrants and drug dealers, traffickers and gang members back into our communities.”

It was Trump playing his greatest “law and order” hits — as usual, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

Trump seems so enamored with autocrats and strongmen that he wants the United States to imitate governments like China and the Philippines by executing drug dealers, claiming such countries “don’t have a drug problem” because of their brutality. This is patently absurd. While it is hard to analyze the experience of many of these countries because they do not collect and publish reliable data about substance use, experts say it is clear that they have not eliminated drug abuse or the crime that often accompanies it. More broadly speaking, many scholars have concluded that there is no good evidence that capital punishment deters crime.

But we do have convincing evidence that ratcheting up the war on drugs, as Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, want to do, would not work. Since the early 1980s, the federal government and states have imposed increasingly harsh criminal penalties on drug dealers and users. Not only did they fail to stem drug use or the availability of illicit substances, but they may have contributed to their spread by taking resources away from treatment and prevention efforts. It is no wonder, then, that the per-gram retail price of heroin fell by about 85 percent between 1981 and 2012, according to a report published in 2016 by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Further, legal experts say it is unlikely that a law authorizing capital punishment for drug dealers would be considered constitutional, because the Supreme Court has previously struck down laws that allowed the use of the death penalty for crimes other than murder.

Trump’s other get-tough policies are also unlikely to help. The wall will not stop drugs — most imported illicit substances like heroin and methamphetamines already come in through legal border crossings. And his plans to penalize sanctuary cities, which choose not to participate in federal deportation crackdowns, would be counterproductive. That’s because law-abiding immigrants are less likely to identify and testify against drug dealers and gang members if they fear that helping law enforcement agencies could put them or their relatives at risk of being detained or deported.

Trump’s New Hampshire speech did contain a few good ideas — but only a few. He said the administration would seek to reduce opioid prescriptions and expand access to medication-assisted treatment for those suffering from addiction. Experts, including a commission appointed by Trump last year, identified these and other solutions months ago, but the administration has taken little action and provided few details about how it would carry out these ideas.

There are a number of other good ideas that Trump and his team have done little to advance, like getting health insurance companies to cover mental health and substance abuse treatments as well as they cover other medical treatments, something required by federal law. He could also encourage 18 states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to do so. This would make addiction treatment available to millions of additional people. Not only has he not sought to expand that program, but Trump and Republicans in Congress have proposed deep cuts to Medicaid, which covers about 38 percent of people with an opioid addiction, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Trump might be sincere in his concern for people suffering from this epidemic. But more than a year into his presidency, he is miserably failing them.