Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Will Trump Order The Senate To Cancel Vacation And Gut Your Vote?
Donald Trump told Senate Majority Leader John Thune yesterday that the Senate shouldn’t leave town for August recess until it passes the Save America Act, or better yet, blows up the filibuster. On Truth Social, Trump said Democrats got lucky with this Senate leadership, then added, “Remember, stupidity always brings LOSING and DEATH.”
Here’s what the bill does. It forces every American to show documentary proof of citizenship, in person, to register to vote in a federal election. A passport. A birth certificate. And it adds a nationwide photo identification requirement. Experts say millions of eligible Americans don’t have those papers handy. Married women who changed their names. Poor folks. Elderly folks. Rural voters a hundred miles from a records office.
The House passed it in February by five votes. The Senate killed it in June. Thune keeps saying he doesn’t have the votes. So Trump’s answer is to keep the Senate locked in Washington until Republicans cave. It’s looking more like a hostage situation to me - and we’re the hostages - when a president locks Congress in session until it strips voting rights from citizens.
Did Trump Just Admit He’s Punishing States That Voted Against Him?
Something remarkable turned up in a federal court filing this month. The Trump administration confessed. In writing. Jeffrey Novak, the Energy Department’s principal deputy general counsel, told a federal judge that hundreds of grants were killed “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” Blue state or not. That was the whole test.
We’re talking about seven and a half billion dollars in clean energy money. The Energy Department handed budget officials a list of 600 grants, all from states Kamala Harris won with two Democratic senators. They killed 284 of them last October. Every awardee but one sat in a state Trump lost.
Now remember, Energy Secretary Chris Wright swore to the House Science Committee in June that no decisions were made on politics. He called that charge a vulgar name and promised to repeat that a million times. His own lawyers just contradicted him. Congressman Jamie Raskin calls it mass partisan retribution and an offense against the Republic and he’s right. Your tax dollars are now being used as a weapon aimed at you, based on how your neighbors voted.
Is Trump’s Iran War Handing The Future To China?
Five months into this war with Iran, here’s who’s winning, and it isn’t us. When the United States and Israel started bombing Iran in February, Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, choking off a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Prices spiked. The entire planet started shopping for a way off the oil treadmill.
Guess who was standing there with the merchandise. New figures show China’s Belt and Road spending hit a record for any first 6 months, $49.8 billion dollars in investment plus $76.5 billion in construction contracts. Energy deals alone hit $36 billion, nearly double any previous half-year. And for the first time ever, more than half of China’s overseas energy money went into green projects. Wind. Solar. Hydro.
The International Energy Agency now expects global oil demand to fall this year, the first drop since the pandemic. Britain’s energy secretary Ed Miliband summed it up. “The era of fossil fuel security is over.”
So a president who promised to drill, baby, drill started a war that’s killing oil demand and handing China the energy century. Every solar panel going up across Africa and Asia says made in China and not made in the USA.
Another Epstein Insider Turns Up Dead Before He Could Testify
Daniel Siad was a French modeling scout, 69 years old. His name appears nearly 2,000 times in the Epstein files the Justice Department released. French prosecutors had him under investigation for trafficking, and there were rape allegations too. He denied all of it and said he wanted his day in court.
He never got it. Siad was found dead at his home outside Paris last Monday. Prosecutors in Nanterre opened an investigation and ordered an autopsy. His lawyer believes it was a heart attack.
Here’s why people are talking. Siad worked on commission for Jean Luc Brunel, the other French modeling agent tied to Epstein. Brunel was found hanged in a Paris prison cell in 2022 while awaiting trial for raping minors. Epstein was found hanged in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, also awaiting trial. Three men in the same pipeline, and not one ever faced a jury. In one message in the files, Epstein asked Siad, “What about new girls?”
Maybe all of it is coincidence. But when men who know where the bodies are buried keep dying before they answer questions under oath, the victims never get their day in court either. And we the people are kept in the dark.
Mamdani Cuts Grocery Prices Thirty Percent Across All Five Boroughs
While Washington fights over who votes, New York’s mayor is doing something about what people pay for dinner. Zohran Mamdani announced yesterday that the city’s five publicly owned grocery stores will price a core basket of food 30% below typical retail. All fresh produce. All meat and seafood. Plus 20 more essentials like eggs, milk, chicken, cheese, bread, and rice.
No income test. No coupon. No loyalty card harvesting your data. Prices get set once a month and hold all month, so no surveillance pricing algorithm jacks up your ground beef because it figured out you’re hungry. Mamdani put it plainly. “No exceptions. No gimmicks. The savings will last for the entire month.”
City Hall figures that’s $96 a month for the average family, $1,000 a year. Seventy million in public money builds the stores. Private operators run them, and they won’t sell hot food, so corner bodegas keep their lunch business. The first store opens in the Bronx next year.
Food prices are up 30% since 2019. New York just decided groceries are public infrastructure, same as water and roads. Every other American city is watching.
Can Ten Minutes Of Birdsong Really Melt Your Stress Away?
Let’s end with something you can use, and it’s free. Researchers at North Carolina State took a 106 college students, handed each a camp chair and noise canceling headphones, and sat them in two spots. One was a restored patch of forest along a creek, thick with tree cover, no buildings in sight. The other was the concrete plaza outside the student union.
Then they played sounds. Either birdsong from a Florida refuge, Carolina wrens and gnatcatchers and vireos, or traffic noise from outside Paris. Ten minutes each. Then they asked how the students felt.
The forest with birdsong beat everything. Lowest stress. Fewest negative feelings. The most positive ones. Concrete and traffic noise lost on every single measure. And here’s the part city planners should tattoo on their foreheads. That forest wasn’t wilderness. It was a small urban patch somebody replanted in the early two thousands.
So trees and birds are a cheap public health investment. The catch is that thick tree canopy isn’t spread evenly across neighborhoods. Wealthy ones have it. Poor ones often don’t. Even birdsong, it appears, has a zip code.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, July 27, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
