Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
What Did The Fourteenth Amendment Promise America?
158 years ago today, on July 28, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment became part of our Constitution. It granted citizenship to everyone born or naturalized in the United States, including formerly enslaved Black Americans. It wiped out the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which had declared that Black people could never be citizens. That one amendment gave us birthright citizenship and due process, the two ideas that make everything else in American law possible. It also bars any federal or state official who engages in insurrection or rebellion from holding office. Sound familiar? Donald Trump has spent his second term attacking every one of those provisions. Birthright citizenship. Due process. The insurrection clause. Here’s the thing about a constitutional guarantee. It only works if somebody’s willing to enforce it.
Why Is Trump Rushing The Supreme Court Before The Midterms?
The Justice Department went to the Supreme Court on Monday, asking the justices to unleash Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting, 99 days before the November third midterms. Back in March, Trump ordered the government to build a federal citizenship list and told the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people whose names appear on it. Democratic officials in 23 states and the District of Columbia sued. The Constitution hands election rules to the states and to Congress, not to the president. A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the order, and the First Circuit left that block in place over the weekend, two to one. The administration now calls its own order “general policy guidance.” The federal citizenship database is riddled with false positives. Real voters get purged from the rolls. That’s not a bug, folks. That’s the design.
Trump Turns Bigotry Into Official Government Policy
More than 300,000 Haitians lost their legal status this week after the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump to end Temporary Protected Status. Internal federal documents obtained by CBS News show ICE preparing mass arrests, starting in Ohio, including Springfield, the town where Trump falsely claimed Haitians were eating people’s pets. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council says ICE has been ordered to round up “nurses, home health aides, factory workers, teachers, students” who’ve done nothing wrong. A federal judge found the decision was rooted in racial animus. These families pay $1.3 billion in taxes every year. And on Monday the administration published a new rule letting officers reject asylum applications without ever interviewing anybody. More than 1.4 million cases are pending. Most of those people will never get to tell their story.
Who’s Really Behind The Mask On An Oregon Highway?
On Friday, July 17, a driver on Highway 211 east of Woodburn, Oregon saw red and blue emergency lights and pulled over, like anybody would. Two men got out. One carried a rifle. They said they were ICE, told the driver they were being detained, dragged them out of the car, searched them, and shoved them into the back of an unmarked SUV. A third man inside assaulted the victim. Fifteen or twenty minutes later they let them go. The victim ended up in the hospital. Oregon State Police checked with the federal agencies. None of these men were federal officers. They wore tactical vests stamped POLICE and carried fake badges. This is what happens when real agents get to hide behind masks and refuse to give their names. Criminals notice. And the rest of us can’t tell the difference anymore.
How Do You Hide Discrimination? You Stop Counting It.
Since 1966, American companies with 100 or more workers have had to tell the federal government who they employ, broken down by job category, by race, and by sex. It’s called the EEO one report. It’s how we know whether women and people of color are stuck at the bottom while white men run the executive suite. On July 21, the Republican majority at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted two to one to throw it out. Chair Andrea Lucas claims collecting that data “raises constitutional concerns.” The agency handled more than 88,000 discrimination complaints last fiscal year. Plaintiffs use these numbers. So do defendants, and judges, and reporters. Now they’re going away. You can’t prove a pattern you’re not allowed to measure. That’s the whole point.
Is Your Salad Making America Sick?
Michigan health officials reported 9,253 cases of cyclosporiasis on Monday. That’s more than 1,000 new cases in three days. 160 people have landed in the hospital. No deaths so far. Cyclospora is a parasite that spreads through food and water contaminated with feces, and it causes days of misery that doctors describe in language we won’t repeat this early in the morning. Nationwide, more than 4,000 cases are lab-confirmed, with another 7,400 waiting on tests. At least 41 states have seen it this year. Investigators traced the outbreak to shredded iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico, supplied by Taylor Farms, and served at Taco Bell. Congressman Robert Garcia has now opened an inquiry. A country that can’t keep a parasite out of its lettuce doesn’t have a lettuce problem. It has a regulator problem.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, July 28th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
