Texas power outage, Trump, COVID, and Britney Spears: Top columns
In today’s fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we’ve started in-case-you-missed-it compilations of some of the week’s top USA TODAY Opinion pieces. As always, thanks for reading, and for your feedback.
— USA TODAY Opinion editors
By Jason Hayes
“The immediate cause for the power outages in Texas this week was extreme cold and insufficient winterization of the state’s energy systems. But there’s still no escaping the fact that, for years, Texas regulators have favored the construction of heavily subsidized renewable energy sources over more reliable electricity generation. These policies have pushed the state away from nuclear and coal and now millions in Texas and the Great Plains states are learning just how badly exposed they are when extreme weather hits.”
By The Editorial Board
“The three top security officials at the U.S. Capitol when insurrectional rioters breached the building Jan. 6, halting the counting of electoral ballots by Congress, have since come under intense criticism. And they didn’t do anything to help themselves Tuesday during testimony before joint Senate committees investigating what went wrong. All three men — former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving and former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger — resigned or were asked to quit shortly after the riot.”
By Steven A. Sund testimony:
“The events on January 6, 2021, constituted the worst attack on law enforcement that I have seen in my entire career. This was an attack that we are learning was pre-planned, and involved participants from a number of states who came well equipped, coordinated, and prepared to carry out a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol. I witnessed insurgents beating police officers with fists, pipes, sticks, bats, metal barricades, and flag poles. These criminals came prepared for war.”
By Jason Sattler
“How can we honor the more than half-million Americans who lost their lives to COVID-19 while marking former President Donald Trump’s shameless failure to “preserve, protect and defend” this country and its Constitution? Easy. Let’s bury the dead at Mar-a-Lago.”
By Norm Eisen, Lizzie Ulmer and Katherine Reisner
“The 2020 election is long over, but the Big Lie that it was illegitimate appears to be on a comeback tour — with federal, state and local leaders, including ex-President Donald Trump, perpetuating this falsehood over the past week. This lie fueled the events of Jan. 6; as such we must treat its repetition as nothing short of an ongoing incitement. We must use criminal, civil and regulatory tools to quash it before there is another eruption of anti-democratic violence.”
By Mark Udall and Tom Udall
“After four years of unbalanced development of our public lands, President Joe Biden has nominated Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico to lead the Department of the Interior to restore its mission of conserving the country’s ‘natural resources and cultural heritage for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people.’ Haaland, through her life’s journey and her record in Congress, has shown that she understands we don’t inherit the earth from our parents — we borrow it from our children and the yet unborn. She knows the damage that unbalanced energy development can levy not only on our air, land and water, but also on the profound health and cultural costs that front-line and Native American communities are forced to endure.”
By Hans Johnson
“My father started listening to Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, about the time he retired as a scientist, while living in Cincinnati. I lived in Washington, D.C., working as a field organizer for national organizations that supported civil rights and sought to count and punish hate crimes against what we then called the gay community. By coincidence, Cincinnati was a hot spot for efforts by religious conservative organizations to stop the movement for…
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