Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Trump Holding Your Safety Hostage To Steal Your Vote?
Donald Trump keeps losing in court when he tries to seize control of how states run elections, so now he’s reaching for your wallet. The administration is threatening to yank twenty percent of Homeland Security grant money from any state that won’t bend the knee. That’s money meant to fight terrorism, protect infrastructure, and prepare for disasters. To keep it, states would have to run their voters through the error-riddled SAVE database, the same one that wrongly flagged citizens in Texas and Missouri as noncitizens. A federal judge just blocked that database, finding the government “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans.” The Constitution gives the president no role in elections. None. He’s losing on the law, so he’s resorting to extortion, dangling our safety money to bully states into rigging the vote his way. That isn’t governing. That’s a shakedown of our democracy.
Did Congress Just Kick Wall Street Out Of Your Neighborhood?
Something rare happened in Washington. The Senate passed a real housing bill, eighty-five to five, and it actually helps regular people. The twenty-first Century ROAD to Housing Act would ban big corporate investors from buying up single-family homes, the private equity giants that have been outbidding families and turning starter homes into rental empires. It also cuts red tape to build more housing and sends money to towns that actually do it. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it the most significant housing bill since nineteen ninety, all about “stopping private equity from buying up homes.” America is short ten million homes, and existing-home sales just hit a three-decade low. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who helped write it, called it a huge step toward fixing the housing and homelessness crisis. The bill heads to the House this week, then to Trump’s desk. For once, both parties agreed that homes are for families, not hedge funds.
Trillionaire Elon Musk Wants This Congressman Thrown In Prison
Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire, and he’s using that fortune to threaten a sitting member of Congress. After Representative Ro Khanna pointed to a peer-reviewed study showing Musk’s DOGE cuts to USAID could cause four and a half million child deaths by twenty thirty, Musk fired back on X with three words. “Time to sue this liar.” He went further, calling for Khanna to be locked up. Khanna didn’t blink. He challenged Musk to a debate and reminded everyone he helped force out the Epstein files and stood up to billionaires in his own district. Think about what’s happening here. The richest man alive wants to jail a lawmaker for citing a medical journal. When a trillionaire can threaten prison over a study, that’s not free speech. That’s raw oligarchy flexing its muscle.
Trump Craters To Thirty Percent As His Own Base Bails
The bottom is falling out. A new American Research Group poll puts Trump’s approval at just thirty percent, with sixty-six percent disapproving. That’s his worst number yet in that survey. On the economy he’s even weaker, twenty-six percent approve, seventy percent disapprove. Here’s the part that should terrify Republicans. His support among his own party dropped to sixty-seven percent, a twelve-point collapse in a single year, as voters feel the squeeze from the Iran war and rising prices. The White House waved it off, insisting “this is just the beginning.” It sure is. Now, this poll runs lower than the averages, which sit in the mid-thirties, but every tracker points the same direction. A president underwater heading into the midterms usually means his party gets wiped out. The American people are sending a message, and they’re shouting it.
Why Are Young Americans Flocking To Socialism In Record Numbers?
Even the conservative National Review is sounding the alarm. It just called the Democratic Socialists of America the fastest-growing political force in the country, warning socialism could become “the secular religion of many voters.” Here’s why. The DSA has exploded from about six thousand members in twenty sixteen to more than a hundred thousand today, nearly doubling during Zohran Mamdani’s run for New York mayor. Mamdani won. So did Janeese Lewis George, the democratic socialist who just took the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington, D.C. These young people aren’t chasing ideology. They’re drowning in rent, medical debt, and student loans, and they’re done waiting for a system that stopped delivering. When a whole generation looks at billionaires and shrinking paychecks and says enough, that’s not a fad. That’s a reckoning.
Can A Flamingo Revolution Stop Jared Kushner’s Billion Dollar Land Grab?
For twenty-two straight days, tens of thousands of Albanians have flooded the streets. They’re fighting a luxury resort tied to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, planned for a protected stretch of Adriatic coast and an island full of flamingos, seals, and sea turtles. The project is worth billions, with plans for eight hundred rooms, a golf course, a casino, and a water park on land that’s home to rare wildlife. Protesters carry inflatable flamingos and signs reading “Albania is not for sale.” They call it the flamingo revolution. Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors have opened an investigation into the land deals, and documents reviewed by reporters show the developer hiding behind a web of shell companies in Amsterdam. Kushner’s firm is suddenly distancing itself. The people want the prime minister gone. This is what it looks like when ordinary folks stare down a billionaire dynasty and refuse to blink. The whole world should be watching.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, June twenty-third, two thousand twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
