Editorials of The Times

The Pentagon and the Trump administration apparently have misled Americans about growing military involvement in a war in Yemen that we should have nothing to do with.

In the latest expansion of America’s secret wars, about a dozen Army commandos have been on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen since late last year, according to an exclusive report by The Times. The commandos are helping to locate and destroy missiles and launch sites used by indigenous Houthi rebels in Yemen to attack Saudi cities.

This involvement puts the lie to Pentagon statements that U.S. military aid to the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is limited to aircraft refueling, logistics and intelligence, and is not related to combat.

When senators at a hearing in March demanded to know whether American troops were at risk of entering hostilities with the Houthis, Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Central Command, assured them, “We’re not parties to this conflict.”

In at least 14 countries, American troops are fighting extremist groups that are professed enemies of the United States or are connected, sometimes quite tenuously, to such militants. The Houthis pose no such threat to the United States. But they are backed by Iran, so the commandos’ deployment increases the risk that the United States could come into direct conflict with that country, a target of increasing ire from the administration, the Saudis and Israelis.

Such significant military decisions require public debate to force presidents and their generals to justify their decisions and be held accountable for the consequences. But checks and balances have eroded since Sept. 11, 2001, as ordinary Americans became indifferent to the country’s endless wars against terrorists and Congress largely abdicated its constitutional role to share responsibility with the president for sending troops into battle.

The United States initially deployed troops to Yemen to fight al-Qaida’s forces there, under post-Sept. 11 congressional authorization measures. But Congress never specifically approved military involvement in the Saudi-Houthi civil war.

President Donald Trump, who has broadened the authority of commanders to make some war-fighting decisions independent of the White House, rarely speaks about military operations publicly and has not articulated an overarching strategy for what the worldwide anti-terrorism campaign is intended to achieve and how long it will last.

The Saudis’ brutal campaign in Yemen has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with at least 8 million people on the brink of famine, 1 million suspected of being infected with cholera and 2 million displaced from their homes. Legal and human rights experts say the killing of thousands of civilians and the humanitarian aid deprivations, most blamed on Saudi Arabia, could be war crimes in which the United States would be complicit.

The war began in 2014 when Houthi rebels and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh took control of the capital, Sanaa, and much of the rest of the country. In 2015, a Saudi-led coalition, with President Barack Obama’s backing, launched blistering attacks, including thousands of airstrikes, against the Houthi-Saleh forces in support of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

While the war is effectively stalemated, Saudi Arabia’s rising new leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, seems committed to a military victory despite the horrors caused by the fighting. He has been emboldened by Trump, who has been willing to sell the kingdom almost any new military hardware it wants.

As the Houthi missiles attest, Saudi Arabia is less secure now than when it began its air campaign three years ago. Only a peace agreement is likely to bring the fighting and the killings to an end.

Although neither Crown Prince Mohammed nor Trump seems seriously interested, the United Nations is planning to put forward a proposal to restart peace negotiations. Congress could improve the chance of success by cutting off military aid to Saudi Arabia and voting to bar the use of American troops against the Houthis in Yemen.

It is a matter of obvious irritation and concern to older members of the European Union that some of the new members in Central Europe are blatantly flouting the Western democratic values they purportedly signed on for when they joined. It grates all the more when Poland and Hungary, the two most visible violators, are among the biggest recipients of the union’s aid.

Not surprisingly, as Steven Erlanger reports in The Times, this has led to talk in the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucracy, of linking aid in the next seven-year budget, which takes effect in 2021, to the status of the courts in member nations. The idea is that focusing on an independent judiciary as a prerequisite for sound financial management would avoid the impression of Brussels imposing its values on independent states.

It’s a tempting notion. The bloc’s funding is important to Central European countries. It accounts for 61 percent of infrastructure spending in Poland and 55 percent in Hungary; EU-fueled economic growth has been a major factor in the popularity of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban.

But it’s not a very good idea. Financial sanctions have a poor track record in altering regime behavior. Russia has been under ever tighter sanctions since March 2014, but Vladimir Putin hasn’t changed his behavior one whit.

And however the sanctions are advertised, they would inevitably reinforce the sense among many in the former Soviet bloc countries of being second-class citizens in the union. Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Hungary’s Orban both thrive on claiming that their history, identity and traditional values are under attack from a liberal, dissolute and know-it-all West — and, more specifically, from a faceless Brussels bureaucracy. They would no doubt use any sanctions as evidence to further entrench their rule. Any attempt to determine which judicial systems are inadequate would quickly turn into a political tussle over differing standards and definitions.

None of this means that leaders in Central Europe or anywhere else are free to do as they will. The European Union is obligated and within its rights to demand that all member countries adhere to its democratic standards, no matter their history.

But that must be done by persuading citizens of the new members that their rights, dignity and status as full-fledged fellow Europeans are being trampled when populist demagogues curtail their freedoms or the rule of law. The existing EU mechanism for punishing countries that stray too far from the fold may lack real teeth, but the European Parliament’s vote in November to trigger the process against Poland offered support for opponents of Kaczynski’s illiberal policies. The European bloc has also had some success with a cooperation and verification mechanism created to monitor and support efforts in Bulgaria and Romania to battle endemic corruption. Such efforts need to be expanded and strengthened.

The transfer of wealth from rich to poor in the union was never meant as charity or reward, but as a way of raising the economic level of new members for the benefit of the entire bloc. Setting political conditions on aid would risk achieving the opposite — slowing development, alienating people, entrenching populist rulers and further deepening the fissures in the union.

President Donald Trump, his aides and Republicans in Congress tried their best last year to mislead the public about legislation that would cripple the Affordable Care Act and cut taxes for corporations while doing little to help workers. Now, a few of these Republicans have come clean — at least momentarily.

Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida and former presidential candidate, told The Economist recently that the big corporate tax cut that he voted for late last year was passed under the false pretense that businesses would use their tax windfall on their employees. As Rubio accurately said in the interview, “There’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.” Rubio later walked back his assessment of the tax bill, writing in National Review that he thinks it “has been good for Americans.” But it was refreshing to see him clearly acknowledge, even once, what many economists and voters have long known. Sure enough, what we have seen so far is that companies are buying back stock, which benefits a small group of well-heeled investors, while giving their workers modest bonuses at best.

Then there’s Tom Price, Trump’s first health and human services secretary, who was ousted from the administration for blowing tax dollars on private plane trips. Last year he said, contrary to available evidence, that the provision in the ACA that requires people to be insured was driving up the cost of health insurance. On Tuesday, Price did a 180 in a speech at a health care conference in Washington, noting correctly that, in fact, it was Congress’ decision to eliminate the health insurance mandate that “drives up the cost” of insurance. This is hardly a bold statement — most experts agree — but it was newsworthy coming from Price, who was a key supporter of Trump’s efforts to repeal the ACA. What was less surprising was that Price reverted to the party line a day later, saying that getting rid of the mandate "was exactly the right thing to do.”

Of course, the on-the-level statements from Rubio and Price represent stray comments in an ocean of lies, fibs and falsehoods about these pieces of legislation. The vast majority of GOP leaders insist that down is up and up is down when it comes to the effects of their policies, especially in the area of health care.

While Congress failed to fully repeal the ACA last year, the Trump administration has been busily whittling away health care benefits, disingenuously arguing that these changes will help working-class families by lowering health care costs. Under one administration proposal that’s in the final stages of approval, insurance companies will be able to sell yearlong junk health plans that don’t have to cover unexpected medical costs or pre-existing conditions. Earlier, the administration slashed spending on advertising and outreach to get people to sign up for policies on the health insurance marketplaces created by the ACA. And the president ended payments to insurance companies that were authorized by the law to help lower deductibles for low-income families.

The administration’s health care sabotage efforts have already had a big impact — but not the kind of impact officials promised. Insurance companies raised average premiums for 2018 ACA policies by 30 percent. This has mostly hurt middle-class families who have to pay full freight for health insurance because they make too much money to qualify for subsidies and don’t get coverage through their employer. Few experts were surprised when the Commonwealth Fund found that the percentage of American adults who did not have health insurance jumped to 15.5 percent this year, from 12.7 percent before Trump took office. Experts say those numbers could climb higher still when the penalty for not having insurance goes away next year.

Yet conservatives are pushing for even more far-reaching changes. A group led by a former Republican senator, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, is working on a last-ditch effort to repeal the ACA before the November midterm elections, with the backing of the White House. Hopefully, this effort will not succeed — the already slim Republican majority in the Senate has narrowed after the special election last year in Alabama.

These continued efforts to erode the well-being of the middle class should remind all Americans, in this election year, to beware the promises of politicians who have a long record of lying to the public. With their recent comments, Rubio and Price unwittingly highlighted the yawning gap between what Republicans say they want to achieve and what their proposals actually do.