Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Why Is Trump’s Justice Department Threatening To Arrest Election Officials?
The Justice Department sent letters this week to the top election official in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, warning them they could face criminal prosecution if noncitizens end up on their voter rolls. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon gave them five days to comply. Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, said she got another love letter from the DOJ sprinkled with threats of prosecution. “This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency,” she wrote. Noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare, and the administration knows it. The Justice Department has sued thirty states trying to grab private voter data and has lost eleven times in federal court. So now they’re skipping the courts and going straight to intimidation. That’s not law enforcement. That’s a shakedown of the people who count your ballots.
Trump Denies Disaster Aid To Blue States That Didn’t Vote For Him
Last Friday, Trump rejected federal disaster declarations for New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Those four states had asked for two hundred twenty-seven million dollars to dig out from February’s blizzard, and all of them cleared the damage threshold that triggers help. Two days earlier, he’d approved requests from six red states, then bragged on Truth Social about handing out eight hundred forty-six million dollars. Governor Kathy Hochul said New Yorkers have “a President who is turning his back on his home state.” He’s done this before, to Vermont, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, and California. Disaster relief isn’t a party favor. It’s an insurance policy every American pays into, and Trump treats it like a slush fund for people who voted the right way.
Who Pays When Republicans Gut Health Care?
You do. Insurers on the Affordable Care Act marketplace are asking for a median premium hike of fourteen percent next year. That’s the second straight year of double-digit increases, on top of the twenty percent jump that hit this year. Twenty insurers want more than twenty percent. Premiums have climbed more than a third in two years. Why? Because Republicans let the enhanced tax credits expire at the end of last year. Healthy people fled, the risk pool got sicker, and prices exploded. More than five million Americans have already lost coverage. One campaigner called it “a deliberate choice by Republicans” who traded your health insurance for tax breaks for billionaires. They didn’t stumble into this. They voted for it.
Is Trump Turning Social Security Into A Political Billboard?
Alex Lawson of Social Security Works says yes. Last week Trump’s Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, emailed the country to celebrate America’s two hundred fiftieth birthday and used it to brag about Trump’s tax bill, the one that cuts a trillion dollars from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Now every baby born between July second and the end of the year gets a Social Security card stamped with the logo of Freedom two fifty, a semi-private outfit Trump created. A House oversight report found Freedom two fifty quietly diverted money meant for the bipartisan America two fifty commission and misled its own donors. Meanwhile Bisignano has driven out more than eight thousand experienced workers. Lawson says “Social Security is a sacred American institution that Trump is abusing.” Your retirement isn’t his billboard.
Chemical Plants Are Killing More Americans While Trump Guts The Rules
A new report from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility counted one hundred thirty-one industrial chemical accidents last year, up from eighty-three in twenty twenty-one. That’s a fifty percent jump. Accidents that hurt or killed somebody rose from sixty to eighty-nine. Eleven workers died at a paper mill in Longview, Washington, in May. Fifty thousand people evacuated in Garden Grove, California, the same week. Trump’s EPA is trying to repeal the twenty twenty-four safety rule and zero out the Chemical Safety Board. PEER director Tim Whitehouse says “the Trump administration’s disinvestment in chemical safety is simply appalling.” About one hundred twenty-four million of us live within three miles of a high-risk chemical facility. That’s forty percent of this country, downwind of somebody’s profit margin.
What Happened On This Date In Eighteen Sixty-Eight?
On this day, South Carolina became the twenty-eighth state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, putting it into our Constitution. Congress had passed it two years earlier to bury the Dred Scott decision forever. It said if you’re born here, you’re a citizen. Nobody gets to take that away. It promised equal protection and due process, and it barred insurrectionists from holding office. But powerful men found ways to twist it. Railroads and corporations claimed they were persons too. Justice Hugo Black noted that in the amendment’s first fifty years, less than one half of one percent of cases at the Supreme Court used it to protect Black Americans, while more than half of them were brought by corporations. And on his first day back in office, Trump signed an order trying to end birthright citizenship. Ten days ago the Supreme Court struck it down. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that those children “are citizens at birth.” Republicans are now drafting constitutional amendments to undo it. One hundred fifty-eight years later, they’re still coming for the Fourteenth.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, July ninth, two thousand twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
