Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Who’s Paying For Trump’s Iran War?
The House just handed the Pentagon one point one five trillion dollars. That’s the biggest military authorization in American history, up from nine hundred billion last year, and it squeaked through two hundred sixteen to two hundred twelve. Seven Republicans voted no. Six Democrats voted yes. Then Republicans passed a budget blueprint opening the door to seventy three billion more, most of it for a war in Iran that Trump started without ever asking Congress. Pete Hegseth told senators the war’s already cost thirty seven and a half billion dollars. Meanwhile two thirds of Americans now say groceries are unaffordable, up from forty five percent before the bombs started falling. Congressman Jerry Nadler called it “a costly, bad bill that funds an illegal war.” When the money always finds its way to the war and never to your kitchen table, that’s not a budgeting problem. That’s a democracy problem.
Why Are We Selling Saudi Arabia the Very Thing We’re Bombing Iran Over?
Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed a nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that puts the kingdom on a path to enriching its own uranium. Read that again. We’re at war with Iran, and the stated reason is stopping Tehran from enriching uranium at home. Now we’re handing that same capability to a monarchy whose crown prince has said flat out he’ll build a bomb if Iran gets one. The deal skips conventional international inspections, so Trump had to sign a national security waiver to push it through. Senator Ed Markey warned it risks “igniting an arms race in the region.” The United Arab Emirates took American reactors and gave up enrichment. That was supposed to be the gold standard. Congress has ninety days to stop this one. Ask your senator what they intend to do with them.
Who’s Guarding the Voting Machines Now?
Trump went on primetime television on July sixteenth and said America must take urgent action to protect our voting systems from foreign attack. Here’s the thing. He’s the one who tore that protection apart. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, created during his own first term, has lost roughly a third of its workforce. Staffing dropped from about thirty four hundred to twenty five hundred. The election security advisers who worked hand in hand with state officials were cut loose. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was dissolved on Pam Bondi’s first day in office. The Foreign Malign Influence Center is gone too. Election officials in both parties say they’re scrambling to plug the holes before the midterms. Remember, Trump fired the last CISA director for saying the twenty twenty election was the most secure in American history. Now he wants credit for worrying about it.
Why Are ICE Officers Saying Morale Is Worse Than Under Biden?
This story broke in the Washington Examiner, a conservative outlet, so nobody gets to call it a hit piece. Current officers and retired ICE officials say morale has fallen lower than it was under Joe Biden. One officer who voted for Trump called the whole operation disorganized and chaotic. New recruits are getting pushed onto the streets before their background checks clear, while experienced officers get shielded from making arrests. About six thousand officers are working enforcement right now, with ten thousand more in training. Time off gets denied. Days off get canceled. One Texas office doesn’t even have a bathroom, so agents walk past protesters to find one. Officers called the agency “a powder keg ready to blow.” Two men have already been shot dead by immigration officers in Texas and Maine. Chaos at the top always lands hardest on somebody else’s family.
Is a Stock Trading Ban Really a Voter Suppression Bill?
The House passed what Republicans are calling a congressional stock trading ban, two hundred thirty two to one hundred ninety eight, with thirteen Democrats joining every Republican. Except it doesn’t ban owning stocks. It only blocks new purchases, and the penalty is two thousand dollars or ten percent of the trade. Not one member of Congress has ever been prosecuted under the existing law. Then Speaker Mike Johnson stapled voter identification requirements onto it, the same restrictions that have stalled out in the Senate. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal called it “a fake stock trading ban.” A real one is sitting right there, the bipartisan Restore Trust in Congress Act, which would force members to sell off their individual stocks within one hundred eighty days. Republicans won’t bring it to the floor. They’d rather have the press release and the voter ID than the reform.
Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage
Susan Baur is eighty six years old and she runs a diving crew. Back in twenty seventeen she got tired of finding beer cans in the Cape Cod ponds where she swims, so she grabbed two swimmers and a kayaker and told them to start cleaning. They named themselves Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. Today several dozen women between sixty five and eighty five clean around twenty ponds a year, and they’ve hauled up at least six thousand pounds of trash. Car batteries. Spent fireworks leaking perchlorates. An eighty pound toilet. The back end of a Corvette. Every diver has to swim half a mile in under thirty minutes to qualify. Member Maggie Megaw said “This is so tangible and immediate.” No committee, no federal grant, just old ladies in wetsuits doing the work nobody in power bothered to do.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, July twenty third, twenty twenty six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
