A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Fuel tax
‘vacation’ no
panacea, but
worth a look
W
hen you’re watching the dollar fi gure on
the gas pump display rise with dizzying
speed, as it does these days, the prospect
of slowing that mounting tab has a certain attraction.
Th is is the idea behind President Joe Biden’s pro-
posal that Congress suspend federal gasoline and
diesel tax — 18 cents per gallon — for three months.
Th e president is also urging states to enact a similar
“vacation” from their state fuel taxes.
Oregon’s state fuel tax is 38 cents a gallon.
Th ese are not insignifi cant amounts when regular
unleaded is averaging $5.43 a gallon, as it was Friday,
June 24, in Baker County, according to AAA.
Suspending fuel taxes can have negative eff ects.
Much of the tax revenue pays to improve high-
ways, roads and city streets, so a temporary reprieve
now could mean bumpier roads later.
But trimming 56 cents from the price per gallon —
if both the federal and Oregon state taxes went away
for a few months — might well result in more gas
being sold, which would partially off set the loss of
tax revenue.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s reaction to Biden’s pro-
posal was disappointing.
A statement from her offi ce states in part that
“with gas prices having jumped by several dollars
per gallon over the last several months, it’s unlikely
that Oregonians would see signifi cant savings at the
pump under this latest proposal.”
Notwithstanding the exaggerated “several dollars
per gallon over the last several months” reference —
in reality Oregon’s average price for regular unleaded
is up by about $2.01 compared with a year ago —
Brown’s blithe dismissal of Biden’s suggestion shows
little sympathy for the plight of her constituents.
Although Oregon’s fuel tax accounts for about 7%
of the current price, and the combined state and
federal tax is about 10%, saving 56 cents per mile
amounts to about $22 for every 1,000 miles driven
at an average of 25 mpg. Th at’s not likely to make the
diff erence for someone struggling to pay a mortgage,
to be sure. But at a time when infl ation has elevat-
ed the cost for pretty much everything, including
necessities such as food and fuel, Brown’s skepticism
suggests she doesn’t appreciate the cumulative eff ects
of infl ation or the value of even modest relief on the
cost of one product.
Th e reaction of Brown’s counterpart in neighbor-
ing Washington state, Jay Inslee, was much more
galling.
A spokesperson for Inslee, Jamie Smith, trotted out
the tired, much-refuted claim that oil companies are
to blame, saying that if Washington suspended its
gas tax — which is 49 cents per gallon, third-high-
est among states — “the oil companies would be
the ones to benefi t from yet another opportunity to
pocket more profi t at the expense of our ability to
put people to work fi xing our roads and bridges.”
Oil companies have been making billions in
profi ts this year, to be sure. But to imply that this is
directly related to prices we’re paying at the pump
betrays at best an oversimplifi cation, and at worst an
ignorance, of economics and the global petroleum
market.
As global economic matters tend to be, this one is
much more complicated. Economics and industry
experts say many factors have contributed to rises in
oil prices and the record-high fuel prices, including
supply chain delays and worker shortages that have
reduced oil production, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
and rising demand for fuel as the eff ects of the pan-
demic have eased.
Th e market works both ways. When oil prices
plummeted early in the pandemic, corporate balance
sheets refl ected the trend. Exxon lost $22.4 billion in
2020.
Moreover, the Federal Trade Commission has
investigated allegations of price gouging in the
industry many times, most recently late last year, and
invariably fi nds no legitimate evidence for it.
Ultimately, fuel tax “vacations” won’t be a panacea
for drivers. But the savings are no less real just
because they’re modest.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
COLUMN
Tyranny of the majority wins the day
BY NOAH FELDMAN
M
odern constitutional law as we
have known it ended Friday, June
24.
When the Supreme Court overturned
Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parent-
hood, it repudiated the very idea that Amer-
ica’s highest court exists to protect people’s
fundamental liberties from legislative ma-
jorities that would infringe on them.
What the dissent aptly called a “cata-
strophic” decision is not only a catastro-
phe for women, who now can be forced to
carry unwanted pregnancies to term. It is
a catastrophe for all Americans — and for
people all over the world who have built
their own modern constitutional courts on
the U.S. model. The tyranny of the majority
won the day.
The right to an abortion was based on
the principle of a living Constitution that
evolves to expand liberty and equality.
That same master principle of modern
constitutional law provided the grounding
for Brown v. Board of Education, ending
segregation. It was the basis for Oberge-
fell v. Hodges, finding a right to same-sex
marriage. It is the same principle that un-
dergirds dozens of other decisions estab-
lishing rights we today consider funda-
mental, from sexual freedom to stop and
seizure, that were not considered similarly
basic in 1791 when the Bill of Rights was
ratified or in 1868 when the 14th Amend-
ment was.
In place of the living Constitution that
protects liberty and equality from the tyr-
anny of the majority, the court in Dobbs v.
Jackson Women’s Health Organization an-
nounced a Constitution that only protects
rights that already existed in the distant
past. The majority considered it irrelevant
that the people who ratified the original
constitutional provisions did not include
women, whose rights are at issue in Dobbs
and whose equality is derogated by the de-
cision. According to the majority, the dead
hand of the past rules our constitutional
future.
It is no exaggeration to say that the
Dobbs decision, written by Justice Samuel
Alito and joined by four other conserva-
tives, is an act of institutional suicide for
the Supreme Court. The legitimacy of the
modern court depends on its capacity to
protect the vulnerable by limiting how the
majority can infringe on basic rights to lib-
erty and equality.
The Dobbs majority not only takes the
court out of that business. It holds that
the court should never have expanded the
protection of liberty and equality in the
first place.
The most basic argument of the Dobbs
decision is that, in 1868, states did not
consider abortion a fundamental right.
That is accurate, as the magisterial dissent,
co-authored by Justices Stephen Breyer,
Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, ac-
knowledges.
But in 1868, there was also no clearly
established right to contraception. There
were no Miranda rights to protect arrest-
ees. There was no right to choose your
own sexual partner, let alone to marry the
person you love. And there is no definitive
historical evidence that the people who
ratified the 14th Amendment thought that
doing so prohibited segregation. If you
take Dobbs’s logic seriously, all the land-
mark decisions establishing these rights
are wrong.
Will the court now undertake a major
effort to revisit these core rights?
Alito’s majority opinion, which is not
significantly different from his leaked
draft, tries to suggest the court will not do
that. Its only basis for that suggestion is
to say that abortion is “unique” because it
involves life. Justice Clarence Thomas, in
a separate concurrence, called openly for
revisiting rights to sexual freedom and gay
marriage. The dissenters argued cogently
that it is now open season on those and
similar basic rights.
It is hard for me to imagine that the rest
of the conservative justices actually plan to
roll back many of our most fundamental
rights. Unfortunately, that hardly matters.
State legislatures can and will now pass
laws that violate or eliminate those rights.
The lower courts will have to adjudicate
them. Ultimately the Supreme Court will
have to weigh in again.
The reason all this will happen is that
the court didn’t just overturn Roe. By
overturning Casey, it called into ques-
tion the core idea that the justices follow
precedent. Casey stood for the idea that
the court would uphold its past decisions
absent a major, transformative reason to
do so. Under Casey, lower courts would
leave precedent in place. That norm is now
gone. It’s open season on fundamental
rights.
Finally, a dead, non-living Constitution
is a catastrophe because history doesn’t
actually limit the justices’ discretion. Orig-
inalism was supposed to deliver judicial
restraint. It doesn’t. The majority can read
history however it wants — and does. A
conservative majority with no respect for
precedent could easily be the most activist
court we have ever had.
In short, the modern Constitution will
never be the same. Neither will the Su-
preme Court. Dobbs will go down as one
of the worst decisions in the court’s his-
tory. Dobbs reverses rights on which the
whole country has relied for half a century.
The court has never done that before. The
consequences will be disastrous — and
far-reaching.
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A
professor of law at Harvard University, he is author,
most recently, of “The Broken Constitution: Lincoln,
Slavery and the Refounding of America.”
OTHER VIEWS
Masks can stem COVID wave in Idaho
EDITORIAL FROM THE IDAHO STATESMAN:
J
ust when we had gotten used to that
feeling of not having a mask on our
face, the debate over whether to mask
in public has resurfaced with a resurgence
of COVID-19.
The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention this month determined that
Idaho’s Ada, Elmore, Valley and Lewis
counties are at high community risk, be-
cause of an increase in new hospital ad-
missions per 100,000 people in the past
seven days, the percent of beds occupied
by COVID-19 patients, and the number
of new COVID-19 cases per capita in the
past seven days.
Based on those numbers, the CDC rec-
ommends all residents in those counties
wear a well-fitting mask in public indoor
settings, regardless of vaccination status.
That raises the debate once again
whether to institute a mask mandate.
Boise city officials already discussed the
possibility last week but chose to hold off
on making any changes.
We all know where the Central District
Health board stands. Led by Raúl Labra-
dor and Ryan Cole, that board last month
voted to remove any language about wear-
ing a mask from its website and literature,
referring instead to the CDC and letting
people make up their own minds about
whether they should wear a mask.
When it comes to wearing a mask, peo-
ple are tired. When it comes to mandates,
it’s clear some people won’t listen, and be-
cause Idaho’s public health laws provide
for only a misdemeanor for violations —
rather than a citation and a ticket, like for
speeding — enforcement is untenable.
We still don’t know if this latest wave of
COVID-19 will be as severe as previous
waves, which at times put Idaho in a state
of emergency standards of care.
We hope that doesn’t happen again, as
predominantly unvaccinated COVID-19
patients took up so many resources in
Idaho’s our health care system, it limited
the delivery of health care to non-COVID
patients. That’s why your decision not to
mask and not to get vaccinated affects oth-
ers, not just yourself.
Issuing a mask mandate in high-trans-
mission areas is the right thing to do, but
it’s likely a waste of time, effort and angst.
We hate to let the bullies win, but the
blowback and temper tantrums that mask
mandates would set off wouldn’t be worth
the trouble. And a mandate without en-
forcement wouldn’t compel scofflaws to
do the right thing, anyway.
That leaves the rest of us reasonable
people to do the right thing.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it
again: Wearing a mask works in slowing
the spread of coronavirus.
Study after study has shown masks
work.
A large, randomized trial led by re-
searchers at Stanford Medicine and Yale
University found that wearing a surgical
face mask over the mouth and nose is an
effective way to reduce the occurrence of
COVID-19 in community settings.
The researchers enrolled nearly 350,000
people from 600 villages in rural Bangla-
desh. Those living in villages randomly as-
signed to a series of interventions promot-
ing the use of surgical masks were about
11% less likely than those living in control
villages to develop COVID-19, and the
protective effect increased to nearly 35%
for people over 60 years old, according to
the study, published in September.
Yes, it would be better if everyone wore
a mask, but barring that, the more of us
who wear a mask, the better off we’ll all be.
Unfortunately, in the absence of a mask
mandate, it will be left once again to busi-
nesses to encourage mask wearing in-
doors, at concert halls, shops and grocery
stores.
In the meantime, let’s all do our part
for the benefit of all. Wear a mask indoors
around others, and let’s stem the next wave
of COVID-19 before it gets out of control.
YOUR VIEWS
Loss of birth control access will will now be the business of the pub-
be next target for conservatives lic. So much for privacy. So much for
Abortion now, but what about
birth control next?
Conservatives may feel vindi-
cated about the overturning of Roe
v. Wade, but now the reproductive
health of all women in various states
freedom.
Oregon will maintain its access,
but for those choosing Idaho, just
wait until all birth control will be
eventually outlawed.
Tom Nash
Halfway
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