Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
What’s Trump Really Announcing Thursday Night?
Donald Trump is teasing a primetime address to the nation this Thursday, and he’s promising, in his words, “really, really big news.” Speaking from the Oval Office with Iraq’s prime minister at his side, Trump confirmed the speech will focus on election machines and what he calls election integrity. MS NOW reports he’ll claim newly declassified intelligence shows a foreign plot to interfere in the twenty twenty election. The Washington Reporter says he’ll go further and declare the victories of Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock illegitimate. Both senators fired back hard. Ossoff said the failed president is afraid to lose the midterms, so he’s reheating debunked conspiracy theories to attack voting rights. Warnock declared that Trump is at war with our democracy and Georgia is ground zero. Understand what’s happening here. A sitting president is preparing to tell the nation that duly elected senators don’t belong in office. That’s not politics. That’s laying the groundwork to overturn elections he doesn’t like.
Three Hundred Fifty Billion More for the Pentagon?
House Republicans are heading to the Pentagon tonight for a briefing from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as they weigh the White House demand for a three hundred fifty billion dollar defense funding boost amid the deeply unpopular war in Iran. Speaker Mike Johnson wants to jam it through a third budget reconciliation bill, the trick that lets Republicans bypass a Democratic filibuster entirely. The bill would also bribe states with grants to adopt voter ID restrictions under Trump’s so-called SAVE America Act. All of this sits on top of a budget request that already boosts Pentagon spending forty percent in a single year, driving toward Trump’s one point five trillion dollar military wish list. Johnson defended it by saying “we live in dangerous times.” Meanwhile, they’re paying for it with cuts to health research, heating aid for the poor, and other domestic programs. Working families lose their heating assistance so defense contractors can cash in. That’s the trade they’re making with your money.
Will Susan Collins Answer for Funding ICE’s Rampage?
The political earthquake in Maine keeps rumbling. After ICE agents shot and killed twenty-six-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford Monday morning, Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson pointed straight at Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. Jackson said Collins “must be held accountable for funding this terror,” noting she voted to hand ICE another seventy billion dollars with no reforms attached. He’d abolish the agency altogether. Guerrero was a young father driving to work. His three-year-old daughter was reportedly in the car. He wasn’t even the target of the operation. Mainers flooded the streets outside Collins’ Biddeford office in protest. Fellow candidates Nirav Shah and Jordan Wood joined the pile-on, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said ICE is killing our neighbors and cannot be reformed. Collins, suddenly facing the consequences of her own votes, is now calling for a full and impartial investigation. When the senator who writes the checks acts shocked at what the money bought, remember who signed those checks.
ICE Halts Vehicle Stops. Why Did Two Men Have to Die First?
ICE has ordered its deportation officers nationwide to stop pulling over vehicles in most cases. The order came down after agents killed two men in less than a week. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a fifty-two-year-old construction worker in Houston with no criminal record, was shot on July seventh. Guerrero was killed in Maine six days later. Neither man was the target of the operation that ended his life. Neither shooting was captured on body cameras, because the agents weren’t wearing any. Witnesses in Houston say Salgado Araujo was still buckled in his seat belt when the agent fired, contradicting the government’s claim that he tried to ram anyone. The Harris County District Attorney says the federal government won’t even identify the agents involved. Maine’s attorney general, the FBI, and the DHS inspector general have all launched investigations, and families in two states are demanding independent ones. An agency that only pauses its tactics after killing innocent people isn’t enforcing the law. It’s terrorizing communities with your tax dollars.
Republicans Love Paid Sick Leave, Just Not for You
Here’s some world-class hypocrisy from Daily Kos. The Republican Party has fought paid sick leave for decades, keeping America the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee it. But two Republicans just took months of it themselves. Mitch McConnell has been absent from the Senate since June fourteenth, pocketing more than fourteen thousand dollars in salary while casting zero votes, after a fall and a bout of pneumonia he hid from the public for weeks. Congressman Thomas Kean Junior of New Jersey missed one hundred seventeen days, roughly forty-three thousand dollars in paid leave, before revealing he’d been in inpatient mental health treatment. McConnell voted against the Family and Medical Leave Act back in nineteen ninety-three. Kean voted against New Jersey’s paid sick leave law as a state senator. Nobody begrudges a sick man his recovery. That’s the whole point. Every worker in America deserves the same grace these two senators and congressmen granted themselves. They just keep voting to make sure you never get it.
Trump Finally Pays the Woman He Abused
After exhausting every appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump has finally paid E. Jean Carroll. Court records show five point six million dollars was disbursed to her legal team Monday, the judgment from the twenty twenty-three verdict in which a New York jury found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump fought the payment to the bitter end, filing yet another motion on July eighth to block the money. Judge Lewis Kaplan swatted it down the same day, calling it a “wrongheaded claim” and admonishing Trump for stalling the case for years. The judge wrote that it was time for Trump to do equity and pay up. And remember, this is the smaller judgment. A second jury hit Trump with eighty-three million dollars more for continuing to defame Carroll. A jury of ordinary Americans held the most powerful man in the country accountable when almost no one else would. That’s what courts are for, and it’s exactly why he keeps attacking them.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, July fourteenth, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
