Feb 26, 2016 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:

In a letter Tuesday, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee declared in one voice they will hold no hearings on any nominee by President Barack Obama to succeed the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

It’s a scandalous decision, unnecessary and without reasonable grounds.

None dispute that 11 months is plenty of time for a nominee to be vetted, scrutinized and finally either approved or rejected. A typical nomination takes three or four months to complete.

That election-year vacancies are rare in our history provides little guidance for what to do when they occur. Justices have been confirmed, and some have been defeated, in such years. But these senators say that we live in special times. The nation is divided. The future of the court hangs in the balance. They say that the people should be given a vote on who will sit on the court.

These are specious arguments.

In Tuesday’s letter, the senators shrouded their promise to reject, sight unseen, any nominee put forth in a see-through shroud of constitutional fealty. “Because our decision is based on constitutional principle and born of a necessity to protect the will of the American people, this committee will not hold hearings” on any nominee until next year, said the letter.

There is no principle on display, constitutional or otherwise. No one denies that the Senate, led by a Republican majority, has the right to reject a nominee. But the letter’s pious reference to giving the American people a say in the future of the court is mere distraction. Voters have already had their choice, many times – twice electing the current president by easy margins and, most recently, putting Republicans in charge of what is supposed to be the world’s most august deliberative body.

But instead of exercising that right, and shouldering the responsibility that comes with it, these senators have instead refused to do what any ordinary citizen would conclude their job requires: To sit in judgment, and in inquiry, on the merits of any nominee put forth by a president to serve on the Supreme Court.

It’s hard to believe that real slaves, people forced to work long hours through threats of violence or coercion, are living in our midst.

Yet they are, as shown by the recent guilty plea of a Guatemalan human trafficker and some of his accomplices for smuggling eight teenagers and two adults into the United States in 2014 to work at several egg farms in Ohio.

Government officials, businesses, landlords and neighbors must be far more vigilant when it comes to human trafficking and forced labor. Such enslavement still lurks underground even though the United States outlawed slavery more than 150 years ago, notes Steven Dettelbach, the former U.S. attorney based in Cleveland, who prosecuted the egg-farm case.

We would all like to believe that slavery in the United States doesn’t exist any longer, but it does. It’s up to all Americans to root it out, tree and branch.

Twice recently, Minot churches have been targeted for robberies, leading many to openly ponder, “How desperate must someone be to rob a church?”

The reality is that in Minot and other small towns and cities, residents must come to grips with the idea that this is a sign of the times in which we now live.

Some who idealize the past might believe that in previous decades, only the worst, the hardest-core criminal would stoop to breaking into a church or victimizing people who are in a house of worship. Our world today is very different. People in small towns and cities aren’t safe from crime anymore. Identifying what the “criminal element” consists of is virtually impossible. Living in a remote location doesn’t isolate anyone from the ravages of drugs, mental illness, despair and the general decline in civility that infects culture today.

Recognizing this unfortunate reality will empower people to be more safety conscious. It will also, hopefully, prompt a broader discussion about crime in the nation, its roots and ways to combat it.