Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Bessent Scrambles As The National Debt Smashes Past $40 Trillion
Treasury confirmed it Wednesday. The national debt hit $40 trillion, and it got there faster than anybody expected. The Congressional Budget Office didn’t expect this until 2027. We beat the forecast by a year. We crossed $39 trillion just five months ago. We crossed $20 trillion less than 10 years ago. That’s roughly $117,000 for every person in this country. Bond markets noticed. The 30-year Treasury yield touched 5.34%, the highest since 2007, so Scott Bessent stepped in Wednesday and announced he’d at least double the size of the government’s long-bond buybacks. Yields dropped for a few hours. Then they bounced right back and wiped out the whole gain. Here’s what nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. We didn’t borrow this money for schools or bridges. We borrowed it to hand tax cuts to billionaires, and now working people pay the interest in their mortgages, car loans, and credit cards.
Democrats Have Flipped 31 Seats. Is The House Next?
Tuesday night in Butler County, Pennsylvania, Democrat Brandon Dukes flipped a state House seat in a district Trump won by 18 points. He beat Kamala Harris’s margin there by 19 points. That was the 31st legislative flip of this cycle, and Democrats won every single one of them. Across 110 special elections since January of 2025, Democrats have overperformed Harris by an average of 12.5 points and Joe Biden by 8.4 points. The Downballot’s Daniel Donner says that adds up to a political environment where Democrats would be favored by about 12 points, slightly better than the same data showed in 2018. Special election voters skew more educated and more Democratic, so the real number in November will probably be smaller. But the trend hasn’t wavered in 20 months.
Democratic Attorneys General Are Quietly Beating Trump In Court
While cable news chases the outrage of the hour, Democratic state attorneys general are winning. Arizona’s Kris Mayes, who won her office by fewer than 300 votes, is suing a real estate outfit over a predatory title scheme that trapped about 1,500 Arizona homeowners in contracts running up to 40 years. She and 23 other states just beat back a Trump executive order that would have let the Post Office decide who gets to vote by mail. California’s Rob Bonta won a ruling protecting gender affirming care under the Affordable Care Act. Colorado’s Phil Weiser joined 25 states suing over illegal tariffs and helped land a $400 million generic drug price fixing settlement. Connecticut’s William Tong is suing to stop big banks from pocketing interest on homeowners’ escrow accounts. And Delaware’s Kathy Jennings helped block HUD funding changes that threatened housing for more than 600 people. Elections have consequences, and so do down-ballot elections.
Is Trump’s New Crypto Bank Just A Bribery Machine?
This month the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave conditional approval to something called World Liberty Trust Company. An entity tied to Donald Trump and his family owns about 38% of it. The comptroller’s office is run by a Trump appointee. This isn’t a bank in any normal sense. It won’t make loans, won’t issue mortgages, won’t carry federal deposit insurance. What it will do is issue the Trump family’s stablecoin, USD1, which can’t legally pay depositors a dime of interest. So why would anyone put money in? Georgetown professor James Angel put it plainly. It’s “a very efficient way to buy influence with the Trump gang.” Never in American history has a president owned a piece of a bank his own regulators approved. Now one does.
Why Is Trump Handing The FDA To An Abortion Foe?
Trump announced Wednesday he’s nominating Dr. Heidi Overton to run the Food and Drug Administration. She’s his deputy assistant for domestic policy, she has no regulatory experience, and she’d take over the agency that controls mifepristone, the abortion pill. She’d replace Marty Makary, who quit in May after fighting the White House over abortion pills. Overton called the fall of Roe a huge victory for life. She’s written that abortion pills are far more dangerous to women, which decades of research flatly contradict. Senator Patty Murray says she’s a “far-right, anti-abortion extremist who has no business leading the FDA.” And Bill Cassidy, the Republican who chairs the Senate health committee, said her role in last week’s vaccine executive order is almost disqualifying. When the doctor policing your medicine cabinet answers to ideology instead of evidence, everybody’s prescriptions get less safe.
Judge Blocks Trump And RFK’s Plan To Get More Teens Pregnant
A federal judge stopped it. Judge Christopher Cooper ruled Wednesday that the administration’s overhaul of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program was likely arbitrary and capricious. In June, HHS canceled 53 of 66 active grants to universities, health departments, and nonprofits, then tried to force what’s left into abstinence-only curricula. Trump’s 2027 budget calls the old programs radical leftist ideology. Cooper noted the agency cited public health studies that appear not to exist, which he called a hallmark of AI generated citations. Public Citizen called the ruling “a win for young Americans’ well-being.” Congress created this program in 2009 with bipartisan support and teen pregnancy has fallen sharply ever since. Cooper didn’t restore the canceled money. Millions of American teenagers have sex, he wrote. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make them safer.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, August 20, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
