Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did the Supreme Court Just Bless a White Supremacist Agenda?
Lawmakers and immigration advocates are furious this morning. On Thursday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump two enormous wins. In a six to three ruling written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court let the administration strip Temporary Protected Status from more than three hundred fifty thousand Haitians and over six thousand Syrians, people who were here legally. A second ruling makes it far harder for migrants at the border to even apply for asylum. Illinois Congresswoman Delia Ramirez didn’t mince words. She said Trump’s loyalists on the court joined him to “advance an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda at home.” Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Alito snapped back. When the highest court in the land green-lights mass deportation of people who built their lives here, that’s not law at all. That’s just cruelty dressed up in a robe.
Why Is Your Grocery Bill Still Climbing?
Here’s something Trump promised to fix on day one. The Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation gauge just hit a three-year high. Consumer prices rose four point one percent in May from a year earlier, the biggest jump since April of twenty twenty-three. That’s gas, that’s groceries, that’s the rent. And it’s driven partly by pricier computer chips feeding the artificial intelligence boom. The Fed had penciled in two rate cuts back in January. Now they’re frozen, even talking about hiking. And what did the President do? He refused to sign a housing bill meant to bring down home prices, then said he “loved the inflation.” He’s called the whole affordability crisis a hoax. Working families paying more at the pump and the checkout know it’s no hoax. They’re living it every single day, and no amount of spin from the White House changes the number on the receipt.
Is Putin About to Test Whether NATO Will Fight?
Two countries on NATO’s eastern flank are sounding the alarm. Intelligence sources warn that Russia may be preparing a military provocation against the Baltic states or Poland. Not a full invasion. Something smaller. A missile, a drone, a hybrid strike designed to send a message. Latvian intelligence put it plainly, saying they see indications “Russia is preparing military provocations against the Baltic countries or Poland.” The thinking is that Putin, squeezed by Ukrainian drones now hitting Moscow and St. Petersburg, wants to throw the dice and test whether America would really defend tiny Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania. And that worry isn’t coming from nowhere. This week Trump said he felt “let down” by European allies. When the President sows doubt about our commitments, Putin hears an invitation.
Fifty Years in Prison for a Protest?
Eight people who demonstrated outside a Texas immigration jail have been sentenced to decades behind bars. One former Marine reservist got one hundred years, the maximum. Others got fifty to seventy. Prosecutors called it terrorism. Now, this wasn’t only a protest. During the July Fourth demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center, an officer was shot in the neck and survived, and there was vandalism and gunfire. But this is the first case built on Trump’s order branding antifa a domestic terrorist organization, even though no such legal category exists and antifa isn’t even a real organization. First Amendment groups call the sentences chilling. As one legal expert warned, the goal is to “intimidate” and make people in other cities “think twice over protesting.” When the government stretches the word terrorist to cover dissent, every protester becomes a target.
Can a President Order the Post Office to Toss Your Ballot?
A federal judge just said no. On Thursday, District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts blocked major parts of Trump’s sweeping executive order attacking mail voting. That order would have let the Postal Service refuse to deliver mail ballots unless states handed over their voter lists, and it tried to build a national voter registration database through Homeland Security and Social Security. The judge called those parts legally void. She wrote that “the Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” States run elections. Period. Not the White House, not the Postmaster General. This is a real win for voters heading into the midterms, and a reminder that an independent judiciary is still the wall standing between one man’s ambition and your right to cast a ballot.
Crazy Alert. Did a FEMA Official Really Teleport to a Waffle House?
And finally this morning, the story we have all been waiting for. The head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, Gregg Phillips, has been beamed out of the agency. Why? Well, the man claimed, on a podcast no less, that he once teleported fifty miles across Georgia and materialized inside a Waffle House in Rome. One minute he’s with his boys, the next he’s ordering hash browns scattered, smothered, and quantum-tunneled. In his words, “Teleporting is no fun, it’s scary, but so real.” Folks, this is the person who was supposed to respond when a hurricane flattens your town. Reportedly the new bosses at Homeland Security grew weary of the embarrassment. You don’t say. Somewhere a Waffle House waitress is still holding a coffee pot, staring at an empty booth, whispering, “He was just here a second ago.” Beam him up. Beam him out. Just keep him away from the disaster response budget.
And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, June 26, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
