Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Why is John Roberts Creating Chaos with the Vote?
Back in September 2005, John Roberts promised the Senate Judiciary Committee he’d be an umpire, calling “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Seventy-eight senators bought it. Ted Kennedy asked him point blank about the Voting Rights Act, and Roberts said he had no problem with it. That was a flat lie. As a 26-year-old lawyer in Reagan’s Justice Department, he’d written more than 25 memos trying to gut that law. Then came the lifetime seat. Shelby County in 2013 killed preclearance. Rucho in 2019 shut federal courts out of gerrymandering. And this past April, Louisiana v. Callais finished the Voting Rights Act off, with election experts warning as many as 19 seats across the old Confederacy could disappear. Now look at yesterday. Roberts and his conservative majority cleared the way for Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, pausing a judge’s ruling that had protected 23 states and Washington DC. The order came down unsigned. All three liberal justices dissented. Ketanji Brown Jackson said the Court just dumped chaos and uncertainty into the midterms. Writer Bill Blum calls it the long con. Twenty-one years in, the umpire’s rigging the game that he swore he’d only call.
Sergey Brin Spends $102 Million to Crush a Tax on Billionaires
California’s Proposition 40 would put a one-time 5% tax on people worth more than a billion dollars. Ninety percent of the money goes to healthcare, the rest to education and food assistance. Backers say it could raise around $100 billion. It’d hit roughly 200 billionaires in a state of 39 million people. And those billionaires are spending like their lives depend on it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has poured $102 million into a group called Building a Better California, which he started with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Its first TV ad ran Tuesday, leaning on union and politician opposition while never once mentioning the billionaires paying for it. Peter Thiel’s group ran an online ad calling this billionaire levy “an everyone tax,” complete with an AI-generated caricature of Bernie Sanders seizing people’s boats and a kid’s scooter. The union behind Prop 40, SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, isn’t even trying to match them on broadcast television. They’re going with text messages, door-knocking and mailers. Brin could owe $13 billion if this passes. So that’s the fight. Two hundred men can outspend 39 million people, and right now they’re doing it. That’s what oligarchy looks like on your television screen.
Why Is Violent Crime Falling Faster Than at Any Time in 90 Years?
America’s violent crime rate dropped 9.7% in 2025. That’s the steepest annual decline since the FBI began national estimates in 1936. The murder rate fell 18.5% to 4.1 per 100,000 people, tying 1955 for the lowest ever recorded. And it kept falling through the first half of this year. Nobody’s certain why. Criminologists point to a pile of overlapping causes. Pandemic-era spikes in drinking, drug use and gun buying have receded. Jobs and daily routines stabilized. Police departments are using AI tools and Palantir software to map hotspots. The country’s aging, shrinking the young population most tied to street crime. There’s even research linking Ozempic and similar drugs to less drinking and better impulse control. Former Justice Department statistician Leonard Sipes says there’s “no doubt” less alcohol played a real role. Insha Rahman of the Vera Institute credits cities that invested in youth jobs, mental health treatment and violence interruption crews. Trump credits National Guard deployments. But crime fell just as hard in cities that never saw a single Guard troop. Here’s what nobody’s talking about. Pandemic money for local crime prevention runs out in December, and short-staffed departments will feel it fast. This drop was paid for, and now the bill’s coming due.
Measles Kills Two Pennsylvanians in the State’s First Deaths From the Virus in 35 Years
Two unvaccinated people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania are dead from measles. They’re the first measles deaths in the Commonwealth in 35 years and the first anywhere in America this year. Pennsylvania has confirmed 393 cases across 28 counties in 2026. Lancaster County alone accounts for 185 of them. Last year the entire state reported 16 cases. Not one person diagnosed this year was fully vaccinated. Health Secretary Debra Bogen said the MMR vaccine “is safe and provides the best protection we have against measles.” Two doses give 97% lifetime protection. But MMR coverage among Lancaster County kids slid from 95.5% in 2017 to 87.6% last year. Nationally, there have been 2,777 measles cases this year, the most in 35 years, with 193 people hospitalized. Robert Kennedy Jr. runs Health and Human Services. Trump signed an executive order this month aimed at state vaccine mandates. Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said these deaths were entirely preventable. He’s right. Measles hangs in the air for two hours and infects nine out of ten unvaccinated people exposed to it. Spend years telling parents a safe vaccine is dangerous and this is what you get.
Why Did John Ratcliffe Fly in a Military Cargo Plane to Moscow?
This morning we told you about a mystery U.S. Air Force C-17 that landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. Now we know who was on it. CBS News reports CIA Director John Ratcliffe was aboard for a day of meetings with senior Russian officials. The plane left Joint Base Andrews Sunday afternoon, stopped in Riga, Latvia, then flew straight into Russian airspace. A US diplomatic motorcade turned up in Moscow after it landed. The Kremlin claimed it knew nothing. Here’s the part that should stop you cold. A source told the Kyiv Independent that Washington asked Ukraine to hold off striking Moscow and St. Petersburg while Ratcliffe was in town, because American officials “don’t believe in the strength of Putin’s air defenses.” Kyiv agreed to pause. This is Ratcliffe’s first known trip to Russia. The last CIA director who made it was William Burns in 2021, warning Putin not to invade. Steve Witkoff has been to Moscow eight times. Neither he nor Jared Kushner has ever set foot in Kyiv. On Ukraine’s Independence Day Monday, European leaders showed up in the capital. Nobody from this administration did. What is Ratcliffe doing in Moscow?
Racist Alert. Marco Rubio’s State Department Moves to Sell Off a Black Artist’s Painting
Marco Rubio’s State Department is asking lawyers whether it can sell off a painting the government commissioned itself. The artist is Kehinde Wiley. The work is called “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” and it shows four young Dominican art students in front of a floral backdrop. It hung in the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo. Earlier this month, Ambassador Leah Campos posted video of the painting coming down and said she wanted to move away from woke ideologies. Erin Scavino, who runs the Art in Embassies program, called the piece very woke and “aesthetically terrifying,” and admitted her team worked to get it removed. The State Department now says it’s talking with legal representatives about whether the art can be sold, and that selling it is the goal. Remember who Wiley is. He painted Barack Obama’s official portrait. The State Department gave him its Medal of Arts in 2015 and then hired him to make this exact painting. Its own website praises him for reframing a genre long reserved for elite White subjects. Four Black and brown kids on an embassy wall. That’s the whole offense. So let’s call this what it is. It’s racism with a budget line.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday August 25, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
