The Week - commentary on current events, politics - Column

-- In the spring, the editors of the Wall Street Journal cheered the BuBush administration for working to change the Republicans' anti- immigrant image. A program that gave a qualified amnesty to illegal immigrants had expired, and Bush wanted to revive it. Bush's maneuver has now backfired for two quite predictable reasons. First, most House Republicans have rightly balked at rewarding lawbreaking and weakening border security, and so -- by the terms of the narrative that Bush and the Journal accept -- remain "hostile to immigrants." Second, Dick Gephardt has outbid Bush by proposing a more expansive amnesty. Rather than rethink its position, however, the Journal stubbornly persists in misrepresenting the issues at stake. The old program, it editorializes, "applied only to immigrants who entered the country legally on a visa that had expired or was about to." The Journal made this claim in the spring as well. As we noted then, and note again now, it is not true. The program gave permanent residency status to people who entered the U.S. illegally, as did the bill to revive the program. The Journal's position, sad to say, rests on carelessness about both border security and the facts.

-- President Bush has called on Congress to reform medical-malpractice lalaws by capping "out of control" jury awards before it adjourns in the fall. In a spirited speech on the home court of North Carolina's junior senator, John Edwards, who bankrolled his successful campaign with out-of-control jury awards, Bush declared that malpractice reform "says what we want is quality health care, not rich trial lawyers." The president later told an audience in Mississippi that 17 insurance companies no longer offer medical-malpractice coverage to the state's doctors, who are taking down their shingles in alarming numbers. The American Medical Association has found that a dozen states face a similar crisis. The White House estimates that medical-liability abuses cost the federal government $30 billion a year. The House has already approved malpractice reform. Senate Democrats, upholding their oath to do no harm to the income of trial lawyers, unanimously opposed a recent effort by Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell to cap non-economic- damage awards. Bush's resolve to stop a costly abuse that denies Americans critical services presents Republicans with a winnable health-care issue.

-- New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to ban smoking in bars anand restaurants sticks a thumb in the eye of smokers, even as their ears are being bitten by an extortionate city cigarette tax -- $1.50 a pack, up from 8 cents. Retailers report that their sales have plummeted, though that does not mean that New Yorkers are smoking less. They are turning instead to Long Island, New Jersey, and the Internet sites of real or bogus Indian reservations to gratify their vice. They will also undoubtedly turn to smugglers. That will benefit the mob, and perhaps also our enemies: Remember that two of the terror-symps rounded up in the post-9/11 dragnet had been smuggling cigarettes from low- to high-tax states. As the Drug Enforcement Agency might put it in a commercial: When you raise a drug tax, you are helping terrorists.