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Editorial

Save Our Gas Stoves Act

Of all the urgent problems House Republicans could be tackling — gun violence, voting rights, climate change — they are using some of their power to fan the flames of a cultural war over gas stoves. Last month the GOP-controlled House passed legislation that would prevent the Consumer Product Safety Commission from using federal money to regulate or ban gas stoves and block the U.S. Energy Department from making gas ranges and ovens less wasteful by setting stricter energy efficiency standards. The Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Save Our Gas Stoves Act amount to ...

Long time coming

Search The Maui News archives for the word combination “long-awaited” and there’s a good chance of being swamped by articles about Kihei. The stories might be about the community’s “long-awaited high school” or “long-awaited gym” or “long-awaited alternate north-south collector road,” but all will illustrate Kihei’s track record of being passed over when it comes to funding for its projects. With that history in mind, it was impossible to blame south siders for their skepticism in March when new Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen promised to make the north-south ...

Working for foreign governments

A bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would close several loopholes identified by The Post in an investigative series published last fall about hundreds of retired U.S. military officers taking lucrative jobs advising foreign governments known for human rights atrocities and political repression. The Retired Officers Conflict of Interest Act would require public reporting about who is working on behalf of which foreign governments and for how much. The U.S. government battled The Post in court for two years to prevent the ...

Wealth tax may have consequences

Progressives have long dreamed of imposing a tax on wealth, and it looks as if an arcane corner of the 2017 tax reform might give them a legal opening. The Supreme Court can shut this constitutional door if it takes up a bad ruling on appeal from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Sixteenth Amendment revised the Constitution to allow “taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.” The Supreme Court has long held that income is defined as money that is realized from, say, wages or the sale of a property or financial asset. It has never been defined as unrealized income, such ...

Like a bad dream

Looking back on the last three years, the COVID-19 pandemic seems like an unsettling dream. Did all that crazy stuff really happen? Were there really masked police officers patrolling the beaches on all-terrain vehicles to make sure nobody was sitting still? Did Maui really have huge protests against government safety protocols? School closures, travel bans, mandatory quarantines, our hospital nearing capacity, memorials for fallen community members — there were a lot of things to wrap our heads around. The nightmare officially came to a close with the end of the federal COVID-19 ...

Trump and political violence

Like Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House, Donald Trump’s indictment for unlawfully holding classified documents and obstructing justice offers a partial answer to one great question of American politics: can the country’s institutions contain his excesses? The backlash that the indictment has prompted highlights another: what happens when they do? When the Democrat defeated him, Mr. Trump’s armed supporters stormed the Capitol to prevent the transfer of power, assaulting police officers and chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Within minutes of his indictment last week, threats ...