Editorial: An opinionated look at 2025

Published 1:30 am Saturday, December 27, 2025

By The Herald Editorial Board

On whichever stage we focused our attention — international, national, state and local — 2025 was an eventful year.

Here’s a selection of the editorial board’s opinions from the past year that offer one prism of review:

Jan. 18: The celebration of both Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the second presidential inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20, offered this reflection: “There may not be a more fitting example of the nation’s current political and societal divisions than in how Americans will choose to spend their time on Monday.” The editorial, wondered what King might do, then quoted from a 1966 King essay: “Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”

“Mark Monday as you see fit in honoring the American experience,” we wrote, “but perhaps with King’s ‘beloved community’ in mind. What, now, will we do?”

Feb. 13: President Trump’s statements regarding his plans to make Canada “the 51st state,” prompted a few thoughts on how that might go: Canada, “eschewing the U.S. two-party system, has three major parties and two smaller parties in Parliament, among them the Parti Québécois, which for decades has led ambitions for that province to cede from Canada. Parti Québécois also has been protective of Canada’s bilingual tradition, making French a national language, equal to English, and requiring government employees to have knowledge of both and requiring the ability to speak both for select positions.”

“How’s your French, Mr. President?”

March 5: The editorial board supported legislation in the state Senate that sought to add clergy to an extensive list of professions and others who are required to report child abuse or neglect to law enforcement, noting the objections from some regarding the rite of confession: “As important as the rite … is to the spiritual lives of believers, the welfare of children should be recognized as having greater consequence because of the generational trauma that often results from abuse and neglect. Silence — after being confronted with a child’s plea for help — is cruelty.”

Update: The legislation was adopted and signed into law, but under threat of a federal lawsuit, the state Attorney General’s Office filed stipulations that kept clergy as a mandatory reporter but said the state would not enforce reporting requirements for information learned through confession.

April 15: Increases in rent in Washington state in recent years, prompted successful legislation to cap rent at 10 percent, 3 percentage points higher than the bills original language. The editorial board supported conference negotiations to reset the rate at 7 percent as a reasonable level: “After three years of the ‘Year of Housing,’ a bill that looks out for tenants — at the lowest reasonable cap — is overdue.

Update: The law’s cap was set at 7 percent plus the Consumer Price Index, and at 10 percent for the remainder of 2025, but will be adjusted to 9.683 for 2026. In August, eight landlords were each fined $2,000 for violating the cap. All rescinded the rent increases.

May 13: Having noted the state Legislature’s recent accomplishments, the editorial board sought reconsideration in 2026 of four bills that did not advance: A pilot program to begin a per-mile fee to eventually replace the state’s gas tax; a ban on the sale and advertisement of flavored tobacco and vape products; restrictions on smart phones in public schools; and a bill to establish a grant program to support local journalism outlets.

Update: The Legislature’s 60-day session begins Jan. 12.

June 12: With “No Kings” protests, in opposition to the actions and policy of the Trump administration planned for June 14, the editorial board backed the plans for peaceful protest as a necessary response: “The vast number of us would vehemently object to the injury of others or the vandalizing of property at such gatherings. We want our voices heard and our concerns taken seriously; we’re not out for mayhem. Instances of violence, destruction of property and opportunistic theft are easy to point to and are can be inflated beyond context by visual and social media. … That’s clear in how the Trump administration and pundits have painted the protests in Los Angeles, in an attempt to delegitimize those opposed to heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency raids.”

Update: The June 14 nationwide protests, and even-larger protests on Oct. 18, featured record crowds and no significant reports of violence or vandalism.

June 21: The editorial board criticized the move by the Trump administration to scuttle a landmark agreement — the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement — negotiated by the Biden administration, the state governments of Washington and Oregon and four regional Native American tribes to suspend lawsuits and work toward survival of the basin’s salmon stocks and the growth of clean energy sources: “At heart, the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, was a commitment to respect the treaty rights of the region’s tribal nations and pursue solutions to the survival of salmon and more. Under a different administration in coming years, there might be hope for restoration of the agreement and a recommitment to its provisions, but with lost momentum and with a hastening approach of extinction for at least some wild salmon stocks.”

Update: A resumption of lawsuits by tribes and environmental groups is now expected.

July 1: As the U.S. Senate began voting on the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which included significant tax cuts but also deep cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and green energy programs, the editorial board echoed the criticisms of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in the social media style of the president: “GOP’s Big Ugly Bill kicks people off health care and food assistance. Hospitals will close. Kids with disabilities will lose caregivers. Big winners? Billionaires. Total fraud! It polls like garbage, because it is. GOP should drop it!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” The editorial noted that even 23 fellow Republicans in the state Legislature decried the cuts to Medicaid funding, and warned of the consequences for congressional Republicans in the upcoming midterms.

Update: Having passed the tax and spending cuts bill, Congressional Republicans, following a 42-day government shutdown, rejected Democratic proposals to extend tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, which will significantly increase health care premiums for more than 20 million Americans. The 2026 general election is Nov. 3.

July 5: Describing it as another unkind cut, the editorial board criticized an announcement by the Trump administration to cut specific funding for national 988 Suicide and Crisis Line services for LGBTQ+ youths and young adults. Since, 2023, the Everett-based Volunteers of America Western Washington’s Behavioral Health Crisis Care Center has been one of seven centers in the nation that serves LGBTQ+ youths and young adults since the program was expanded. The loss of the dedicated line is expected to reduce use of its services by that community. While hopeful for reinstatement of the funding someday, “The pessimist in me,” VOAWW’s Rena Fitzgerald said, “says we can’t get back the people who will die from all of this.”

July 12: Noting comments by President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to vastly curtail if not end the Federal Emergency Management Agency as well as its grant program for climate resilience work, the editorial board backed legislation sought by U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., to streamline the federal disaster assistance agency and strengthen its work, noting the 2014 Oso landslide, and the deadly flooding that month in Texas. ” Even at the dear cost of 43 lives, the Oso disaster helped galvanize a response that is now making communities safer from landslides. If the tragic Texas Hill Country floods can result in long-needed reforms to FEMA, the lives lost there won’t have been in vain.”

Update: The future of FEMA during the Trump administration remains uncertain. And the editorial board, following December’s flooding in Western Washington, renewed its calls for reforms and continued support of FEMA: “The back-to-back atmospheric rivers we just experienced are likely no longer an infrequent event. Climate scientists are warning that these steams of precipitation are growing more powerful, more frequent and because of warmer temperatures are carrying more water. Floods hitting once-in-a-century marks in flood plains may increase to once in every quarter-century. Plans have to be made now not just for how we pay to rebuild after the last flood, but how we limit the damage from the next.

Sept. 13: Following the decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to throw out scientifically supported Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on childhood and covid vaccines, the editorial board supported the move by several western states to establish a West Coast Health Alliance that would publish its own guidance on vaccines: “While Washington and other states have successfully raised a shield that preserves access to vaccines and information for their residents and some protection for the nation’s public health, none of this is ideal; that shield is most effective when the policy is nationwide and provides vetted and shared guidance on vaccines, infectious diseases and broader health concerns that instill trust in the public health system.”

Update: The need for the states’ alliance was reaffirmed in December when the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to end the agency’s 34-year recommendation for parents to inoculate newborns against hepatitis B, a virus that attacks the liver and risks liver failure, liver cancer and cirrhosis. The editorial board repeated its message: “Until such time as Kennedy resigns or is forced out of office and the CDC and Food and Drug Administration are again set on science-based paths, parents and others concerned about infections diseases should seek out more trusted sources for guidance, such as the West Coast Health Alliance, professional medical and public health associations and their own physicians.”

Sept. 26: At the height of the Seattle Mariners’ playoff run, the editorial board noted the deep foundation of home-grown players on the Seattle club who started their careers with the Everett AquaSox High-A farm club, including four-fifths of its starting rotation and MVP candidate Cal Raleigh. Considering the value provided by the Mariner’s minor league teams, the board encouraged the assistance of the MLB team with Everett’s effort to build a new outdoor stadium that will provide a home for the AquaSox as well as professional soccer and other events: “All of this is not only to croak loudly for the Frogs’ role in the Mariners’ success this year — OK, maybe a bit — but to make the case for the team’s continued presence in Everett and the need for the Seattle Mariners and its owners, the Baseball Club of Seattle, to aid the construction of a new outdoor multi-sport stadium in downtown Everett.”

Dec. 12: After an off-campus religious instruction program called LifeWise Academy, which once a week picks up students at Emerson Elementary School in south Everett at midday during lunch and recess periods for voluntary Bible-based instruction, threatened to sue Everett Public Schools over district rules that require a weekly parental permission slip and require students to keep the program’s handouts in their backpacks during class time, the editorial board called on the program to respect the district’s attempts to honor the First Amendment freedoms of all students and the separation of church and state: “That wall serves as protection for the religious beliefs and philosophical convictions of all Americans of all faiths and belief systems; in schools it protects young minds still under development.”

Update: LifeWise and its attorneys filed suit Dec. 18 in federal district court.