In a rare move, Pennsylvania’s two senators have created a joint fundraising committeethat would allow them to split money from donors who want to give to both of their campaigns, despite being members of different parities.
As polls have shown him losing support among Democratic voters, he has also reported raising significantly fewer campaign funds on his own and has not said if he will run for a second term in 2028.
Common Ground PA, which filedpaperwork with the Federal Election CommissionMonday, lists four beneficiaries for the joint fund: Fetterman for PA; Friends of Dave McCormick; Every Vote PAC, which lists Fetterman as the PAC sponsor; and Pennsylvania Honor, which lists McCormick as the leadership PAC sponsor.
A joint fundraising committee, first enabled by the FEC in 1977, allows two or more candidates, PACs, or party committees to coordinate fundraising efforts to share donations and expenses.
A donor can abide by federal contribution limits while still giving one check that can be allocated to multiple campaigns. But since these groups typically involve party committees, it’s rare for these joint ventures to be bipartisan.
Mike DeVanney, a spokesperson for McCormick’s campaign, called the PAC a donor-driven effort.
“This group of donors value the collaboration exhibited by Senators McCormick and Fetterman for Pennsylvania and want to support both of them,” he said in a statement.
The joint fundraising committee was first reported by Politico.
The two senators have spoken often about their cross-aisle friendship since McCormick took office in 2025, and they have repeatedly teamed up in recent months.
They appeared alongside each other last week in Philadelphia to promote Trump Accounts, the new federally backed savings accounts for kids that became law with President Donald Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Fetterman has routinely criticized his own party, feuding with progressives on a range of issues, including Israel and immigration enforcement.
In a fundraising email sent in May, McCormick referred to Fetterman as one of his “closest working partners,” a realization that he said surprised even him.
In that drive, which asked donors to support his efforts to “work across the aisle to get results for the people of Pennsylvania,” McCormick praised his Democratic colleague.
“Senator John Fetterman and I couldn’t look more different. We don’t agree on everything. But we both grew up in Pennsylvania. We both know what it means to fight for working families who feel like Washington forgot them. And we both refuse to let politics get in the way of getting things done,” he wrote.
McCormick told reporters in May his friendship with Fetterman is the most frequent topic of conversation he hears, and he gets positive feedback from it.
“We look for ways to work together. I think people want that,” he said.
Individuals could donate to Fetterman or McCormick separately. But joint fundraising committees, which are used widely by both parties, pull in large checks from donors and split the money across multiple committees using a formula that adheres to federal contribution limits, according to an analysis from the watchdog group OpenSecrets.
Typically, though, campaigns joint fundraise with their party.
Common Ground PA is among the few coordinated efforts across the aisle. A former PAC, the Problem Solvers Patriots, fundraised for members of both parties in previous election cycles.
Former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, who lost the Senate primary to Fetterman in 2022 and has not ruled out a run in 2028, blasted the move online as “Another betrayal from Fetterman.”
U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Western Pennsylvania who has received “a lot of encouragement” to run for Fetterman’s seat, also questioned the creation of the PAC.
“Helping the Republicans raise money to spend against Democrats is bad, right?” Deluzio said on X.
However, Fetterman has been notching strong approval from Republicans, and Pennsylvania Republicans along with Trump himself said he could receive GOP support if he switched parties.
Fetterman’s Republican support has also been growing at the bank with contributions from prominent GOP donors, particularly through his other joint fundraising committee and leadership PAC. At the same time, his fundraising has plummeted overall, raising less than half his previous annual totals in 2025.
Staff writers Gillian McGoldrick and Sam Janesch contributed to this story.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke up at 5 a.m. Tuesday and started his day like almost every other one for the last 35 years since he came to Houston from Mexico and built his own American dream brick by brick — sending his three sons to top universities on the foundation he’d constructed through years of backbreaking labor.
His wife also got up to make him a hearty meal before he put on his work boots, fired up his van, and picked up three coworkers in Houston’s heavily Latino East End to build new homes on the city’s outskirts. But it proved to be Salgado’s last drive.
Just a short time later, the 52-year-old Salgado was lying face down outside of his van on a city sidewalk, surrounded by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as blood poured from a bullet wound on the right side of his stomach. He was recorded screaming in pain: “Help me! They shot me! … ¡Me están matando!”
Translation: “They are killing me!”
He died a short time later in a nearby hospital. ICE said the fatal shooting occurred after officers tried to arrest Salgado in what it called “a targeted enforcement operation” — even though Salgado apparently had no criminal record and for more than a year had been steadily making progress toward securinga work permit that would resolve his immigration status.
“We dotted every ‘i,’ crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment,” his tearful son, 29-year-old teacher Ronaldo Salgado, said in a news conference on Wednesday. Afterward, the younger Salgado told the Bulwark: “I love our dad; he worked hard. He always told us that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.”
Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, wipes away tears while speaking during a news conference Wednesday in Houston.
The killing of Salgado — family man, essential worker, and American dreamer who was doing everything the right way after joining the 1990s mass migration of undocumented Mexicans — is a crime against humanity that makes anyone who still has a functioning moral compass want to scream in outrage.
Still, what happened after Salgado was gunned down is deeply troubling in a different way. America seemed to mostly shrug at a killing no less senseless than this winter’s Minneapolis ICE fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, let alone other law enforcement murders like George Floyd in 2020, which sparked days of nationwide protest.
The implosion of now ex-Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner or Donald Trump’s inane prattle at a NATO summit took up most of the hour on cable-TV news, with reporting on yet another ICE killing squeezed in at the end. A fascist regime cutting down our law-abiding neighbors in the streets is becoming background noise.
Just how they want it.
To be sure, there are differences between what happened Tuesday in Texas and the Minneapolis killings that grabbed so much attention six months ago. A large activist community in the Twin Cities was out in the streets at the time of the Good and Pretti shootings, with whistles and cell phones, producing a flood of video evidence that exposed ICE’s lies and inspired massive demonstrations.
In contrast, Salgado was killed in a low-income neighborhood, and while there is video of the wounded laborer on the ground, there’s not yet been definitive footage revealing how or why he was shot. That doesn’t alleviate the nagging concern that the media and some corners of the public and the body politic care more when the victims are white U.S. citizens — which, if true, is morally unconscionable.
A makeshift memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer Tuesday, is shown Wednesday in Houston.
Americans should be alarmed at the bigger picture that’s slowly unfolding before us. After briefly pressing the pause button in the furor over the Good and Pretti killings — pulling back from its federal assault on Minnesota, firing the flamboyant and infuriating Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem, and drastically scaling back its plan for warehouse concentration camps — ICE is back, and more dangerous than ever.
After an era of waving a red flag before an activated, engaged, and angry citizenry it didn’t see coming, by naming operations like the “Catahoula Crunch” or “Charlotte’s Web,” and with Bovino mugging for the TV cameras, ICE has resumed working toward its inhumane target of one million deportations per year, but with a much lower profile.
There are thousands of new immigration agents on the streets, fueled by Congress giving two massive funding infusions totaling about $240 billion, and with Homeland Security and ICE under new management, they are hoping to terrorize immigrant communities without generating headlines or protests. “ICE is making record arrests right now,” Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News. “We turned the heat up …”
The New York Times reported last week that with no press releases or hoopla, daily immigration arrests had doubled over a five-day period to a total of roughly 10,000, or 2,000 per day, with immigrants arrested during required government check-ins, but also during traffic stops like the one in which Salgado was killed.
This is a human rights nightmare in the making. The stepped-up arrests are all but certain to lead to more dangerous and potentially fatal encounters like the one that occurred on Houston’s Canal Street, but the other impacts are equally pernicious.
Fear levels in big-city neighborhoods with large immigrant communities are spiking yet again — keeping countless kids home from school and essential workers off the job, crimping an already strained economy. The Trump regime’s squalid gulag archipelago of immigration detention centers — whose crisis of overcrowding had eased slightly with the spring enforcement slowdown — is seeing a surge again, and that will also lead to catastrophe.
Afghan national Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, who died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 14, is pictured in this undated family photo.
Detention deaths are soaring to record levels — more than 50 since Trump returned to office in January 2025. We are learning troubling details, for example, about the March death of an Afghan national who came to the United States after working with U.S. Special Forces and who died after just one day in ICE custody. Relatives of Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, said he was not allowed to bring his asthma inhaler into detention; officials say he died of an “adverse drug reaction” that brought on an attack.
In Houston, there’s no evidence to support ICE’s initial claim that Salgado was resisting arrest, but — given what we are learning about the horrors of detention — it’s not surprising that immigrants facing an arrest are terrified at what might happen next. Meanwhile, ICE and other agencies are going to extreme lengths to avoid accountability.
In California, ICE — overflowing with our tax dollars — is spending an astronomical $1.5 billion to buy two large privately run immigration prisons from the corporation CoreCivic, for the purpose of preventing state and local inspectors from monitoring what happens there. WIRED recently reported that ICE’s internal watchdog agency is focusing its attention not on agent misconduct but on tracking down outside critics.
What are they trying to hide?
In the killing of Salgado, we don’t know the answer — yet. ICE claims Salgado, whom it dehumanized as an “illegal alien,” “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over the agent who was arresting him, and that the agent then fired the fatal bullet.
We don’t know if there’s any truth here. But what we do know is that in every similar situation during the Trump regime — including Good and Pretti and others like Chicago nonfatal shooting victim Marimar Martinez — the initial ICE version of what happened proved to be a lie, and often a brazen one. It takes a willing moral blindness to automatically accept ICE’s story about what happened to Salgado.
And yet, we are seeing that not only from the local FBI — which is not investigating the officer’s action, but the alleged crime of resisting arrest — but also from Houston Mayor John Whitmire, who said he trusts the federal government to do a thorough investigation, as if he’d been living in a cave these last 15 months.
In their anguished news conference on Wednesday, family members and local Democratic officials called for the release of any ICE body-cam footage and an independent investigation into what really went down in Houston’s Magnolia Park section.
They need our help, though. ICE’s new summer assault on immigrant communities, and its ability to get away with its many crimes, is counting on an exhausted or apathetic American public to not demand action as so many of us did with Pretti or Good or Floyd.
Please say his name — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — and take to the streets and demand justice. His death is just as deserving of our time and our moral outrage, if not more so.
“This is the exact spot that Lorenzo took his final breath,” Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant rights group FIEL Houston, told the protest marchers. “And in the spirit of solidarity, I don’t know about you, but I say, if they come for one of us, they come for all of us.”
Let’s suppose you’re the kind of Democrat who — like me — derides Republicans for declaring war on expertise. From vaccines and climate change to tariffs and foreign aid, we say, the GOP has discarded professional knowledge in its quest for power.
Why, then, do we support candidates who lack expertise — and experience — themselves?
That’s the question we should be asking about Graham Platner, whose campaign for the Senate is on the ropes following a former girlfriend’s claim that he had sexually assaulted her. Platner has never held elected office; his only political experience was a stint on his town planning board.
How can we be OK with that? If we value expertise in government, we should want leaders who have demonstrated it. But Democratic voters seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
In the recent New York primary, they chose Darializa Avila Chevalier to replace five-term, 71-year-old Rep. Adriano Espaillat. The first Dominican American — and the first formerly undocumented immigrant — to be elected to Congress, Espaillat helped win measures protecting delivery drivers and home-based childcare providers. But he lost to a 32-year-old graduate student who has zero political experience.
Darializa Avila Chevalier (center), alongside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (left), greets supporters after winning the Democratic nomination for New York’s 13th Congressional District.
Neither does Melat Kiros, 29, who unseated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, in the Democratic primary in Colorado. She has worked as a lawyer and — more recently — as a barista. But when it comes to politics, she is a complete novice.
Then there’s Platner. A combat veteran and oyster farmer, he ran as an aw-shucks common man. That meant eschewing what he called “the establishment,” including experienced political consultants and pollsters.
But guess what? It turns out experience matters. The young Democratic operative who recruited Platner to run for Senate bypassed the standard background check, which usually takes a few weeks. He opted instead for a three-day “investigation” by a firm that didn’t even bother to interview Platner or solicit a questionnaire from him.
To its credit, the firm flagged some of Platner’s controversial Reddit posts. But a more thorough — and, yes, professional — background check would surely have uncovered his “unsettling” behavior around women, which former girlfriend Jenny Racicot described to reporters last month.
And earlier this week, Racicot said Platner had shown up drunk at her house — after she asked him to stay away — and forcibly had sex with her. Platner denied the charge, but he said he was “mindful of the political reality it would inflict” and that he was taking time to “reflect” on how to proceed.
Leading Democrats — including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — called on Platner to quit the race, and I agree with them. But I also think the party should reflect on why we continue to elevate candidates who lack any real political experience.
To defenders of these outsiders, their inexperience is a selling point. If you want to challenge the establishment, the argument goes, you need people who aren’t tainted by it — which was a major sentiment behind then-29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset in New York’s 14th Congressional District in 2018. Ever since, some have argued, that’s the only way to get progressives into power.
Nonsense. Here in Philadelphia, Chris Rabb scored a stunning victory in the May primary race to replace Rep. Dwight Evans. Like Chevalier and Kiros, Rabb calls himself a democratic socialist. But he also has significant experience in government.
Jonathan Zimmerman wonders how voters can be OK with supporting Graham Platner, a Senate candidate who has never held elected office.
Rabb served for five terms in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty and to promote restorative justice in criminal sentencing. He knows his way around Washington, too. Earlier in his career, he worked as an aide to Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman in the U.S. Senate.
Whatever you think of Rabb’s politics, he is qualified for the job. And we should care about that. Just like we shouldn’t make a housing official the director of national intelligence, we shouldn’t make an oysterman a member of Congress. To serve effectively in government — like any other professional role — you need knowledge and experience.
And if you think otherwise, just look at the guy in the White House. America elected 44 presidents before Donald Trump. Forty-one of them had held prior political office; the other three (Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower) were victorious U.S. war generals.
Experts don’t know everything, of course, and they can be wrong (see: COVID-19 lockdowns). But they do know more than the rest of us about what they do. In choosing candidates like Graham Platner, Democrats turned their backs on that principle. Let’s hope they rediscover it before it’s too late.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by American Philosophical Society Press.
It is past time for Division I colleges and universities to recognize that their student-athletes deserve both the right to bargain collectively and recognition that they are employees because of the compensation their institutions provide to them and the control those institutions have over them.
A deluge of media coverage has been aimed at other issues in big-time college sports, particularly football and basketball, but too little attention has been given to what should be center-stage — how student-athletes should be fairly treated by the institutions that benefit from their athletic prowess.
The Senate Commerce Committee recently held a hearing on the Protect College Sports Act of 2026, sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.), to “restore order” to college sports. This 111-page legislative effort is the latest in a series of approximately 40 bills aimed at reversing judicial rulings that oblige universities to share financial gains with their players.
Like their legislative predecessors, the 2026 bill limits or ignores existing player rights and immunizes universities from antitrust liability resulting from player-initiated litigation and substitutes Congress’ judgment for the courts, players, and universities.
Thus, the 2026 bill restricts the ability of players to transfer through a “portal” from one college to another and limits player eligibility to five years beyond the day of high school graduation. The bill would preclude awarding antitrust damages to players who seek to increase their mobility and earnings. It would also preempt state laws guaranteeing players compensation for their names, images, and likenesses used, for instance, on video games and athletic clothing (this has come to be called NIL money).
Until the last decade, the unchallenged position of the National Collegiate Athletic Association was that all college players are amateurs entitled to no more than athletic scholarships and frequently inadequate reimbursement for college expenses. Post-World War II football and basketball were dominated by the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten, and both were big businesses.
Notwithstanding this reality, the NCAA maintained that the players were amateurs who could not be paid until the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that the NCAA and its member campuses were liable for treble damages when they conspired to deny the players “educational” compensation beyond athletic scholarships and reimbursements.
Universities became involved in class-actions brought by their players about player transfers, eligibility, and related issues following that Supreme Court ruling. The ruling recognized that the universities have always treated athletes differently from other students, sometimes providing them with preferred admissions as well as under-the-table monies and other benefits, frequently in conjunction with wealthy alumni and “boosters.”
With California leading the way, many states enacted so-called NIL laws that allow players to be compensated for use of their names, images, and likenesses.
But the NCAA continued to insist the players were amateurs. As a result, outside “booster” groups or “collectives” were created to provide business deals to attract or retain college athletes from a source other than the universities.
Meanwhile, institutions of higher learning went to war to attract coaches with multimillion-dollar salaries, often exceeding those of any other employee, and — among state universities — any other state employee, including governors.
In the wake of these developments, an immediate response was the negotiation of financially lucrative media deals by the universities and a realignment of college conferences.
Stanford University, for example, left the Pac-12 Conference to join the Atlantic Coast Conference, requiring all its varsity athletes to travel regularly across the country, increasing the separation from their classrooms.
Further, NIL procedures have become a kind of Wild West, sometimes composed of shadowy characters and “agents” who operate without any regulation as is provided in the professional leagues.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump convened a meeting of business and university officials in connection with a new executive order to preempt state regulation. The 2026 Cruz-Cantwell bill is the most recent response. It consigns players to minority representation on an athletic “governing board” or “rulemaking committee.”
Deeply troubling, it avoids even a mention of collective bargaining or employee status for the players. The current National Labor Relations Board is unlikely to address these issues effectively. And this Congress is unlikely to act on the Cruz-Cantwell bill.
Some, we realize, claim we should go back to an earlier era when money was not center stage in every aspect of Division I college sports. But it is too late to return that genie to its bottle.
Rather than wait for voluntary recognition of the organizing power of college players, or for state legislatures to take action, Congress should amend the National Labor Relations Act to allow student-athletes to exercise their collective bargaining rights.
This step by a new Congress in 2027 could provide much-needed protections for college athletes in terms of adequate compensation, health and safety protections, as well as a reasonable measure of player mobility fashioned by both students and universities seeking a balance between freedom and a disruptive revolving door.
After all, the most appropriate forum for resolving the complex matters around modern-day college athletics isn’t through one-off legislation or the occasional court ruling, but rather at the collective bargaining table.
Thomas Ehrlich is the president emeritus of Indiana University, former provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and former dean of Stanford Law School. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. William B. Gould IV is the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, emeritus, at Stanford Law School. He is a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators and former chairman of both the National Labor Relations Board and the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board.
Over the last decade, I’ve grown used to waking up before dawn and writing about a soul-crushing defeat from the night before. Usually it’s on a Wednesday, but somehow Donald Trump is always involved. Monday’s 4-1 demolition of the U.S. men’s national soccer team by Belgium pretty much confirmed that I won’t live to see Americans win the World Cup in my lifetime, so it’s time for acceptance. But these last three weeks have been a blast, and the party isn’t over. Sometimes the tritest words are also the truest: Maybe the real World Cup was the friends we made along the way.
Future generations will remember America’s 250th for its state of denial
Visitors experiencing excessive heat sit on the ground at the National Mall in Washington during Independence Day events honoring the nation’s 250th anniversary on Saturday.
The long-awaited arrival of the 250th birthday of the United States inspired a lot of talk about everything that’s changed since July 4, 1776, especially as “the man on a hobby horse” sinks to the founders’ worst fears about democracy and demagoguery.
But historians of the future may dwell on another huge difference between the day the ink started drying on the American Declaration of Independence and July 4, 2026.
Thomas Jefferson — his work as chief author of the nation’s founding document wrapped up — bought a new thermometer that morning and recorded the temperature in Philadelphia three times in his diaries that day, including a temperate 1 p.m. reading of 76 degrees.
Jefferson’s thermometer might not have been up to the task of keeping up with Philadelphia’s climate 250 years later. On Saturday’s Semiquincentennial, temperatures maxed out at 101 degrees — the third straight day that the mercury reached that mark, which had never happened since records began in 1870. But with the fetid, humid air, it felt more like 110 degrees for anyone brave enough to celebrate America’s birthday outside.
Philly should have seen this train coming. I mean, literally. Two days earlier, officials just outside of Reading, nearly two hours northwest of America’s founding city, plowed ahead with a welcoming party for Union Pacific’s Big Boy No. 4014, the world’s largest operating steam locomotive — even as the railway relic ran an hour late, with some thermometers posting 106 degrees.
The result was what local officials called “a mass casualty event” — no one died, but rescue teams were summoned from neighboring counties to help revive more than 100 people suffering from heat exhaustion, in desperate need of water or an IV. Some 35 of the would-be train spotters were rushed to the hospital.
“It was a little bit chaotic,” an EMS director told the local TV station in Reading. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the weather or the volume of crowds.”
The scientific group World Weather Attribution, which tracks the impact of human-made global warming, said last week’s heat dome over the Eastern Seaboard was indeed a rare event, yet — without the contribution of burning fossil fuels to a warming planet — it “would have been so extreme as to be virtually impossible.”
Heat waves aren’t new. I was just 7 but still remember the July Fourth week of 1966 — exactly six decades ago — when it also topped 100 degrees. It’s one of the few things I remember from that grade-school time because it was so incredibly rare. Today, “once-in-a-century” heat waves are routine all over the planet. In June and looming again this week, Western Europe — where few homes are air-conditioned — has sweltered under temperatures that climate scientists weren’t expecting until around 2050.
This suffocating July Fourth could have been — to steal a phrase from the multiplex marquee — America’s “disclosure day,” exposing the truth of a threat to humankind that’s been hiding in plain sight. Instead, it was our “denial day,” led by our planet’s denier-in-chief, Donald Trump, whose 250th birthday card to America only read: “Don’t look up.”
The denial was immediate, as the president insisted — ignoring the experts who warned that the triple-digit temperatures and intense, gathering thunderstorms might spark a much bigger “mass casualty event” in Washington, D.C. — on going ahead with his bombastic and self-serving speech and a fireworks show that lasted well into the early morning hours of July 5.
Our modern-day seersucker-wearing mayor of Jaws might as well have told the broiled holiday weekend throng, “But, as you see, it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time” — as ominous John Williams music swelled in the background.
The denial was also metaphorical to the max — and not just when those predicted storms arrived and panicked MAGA Trump supporters were forced to take refuge at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the history and culture their movement is so eager to erase.
In New York Harbor, U.S. Coast Guard vessels forced the storied environmental sloop Clearwater — which took part in the historic Bicentennial tall ships parade back in 1976 — to leave the July 4 Parade of Ships because of two anodyne political banners taped to its sails: “Save the Clean Water Act” and “Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions.” Don’t look up, not even at a tall ship.
Hours later, during the fireworks show, the Brooklyn Bridge caught fire, which had nothing to do with climate change, yet felt like a coded message from the overheated planet nonetheless.
But maybe we shouldn’t wade too deeply into the metaphors when the worst denial is the all-too-real policy stuff. Every day, some nightmare headline about killer floods or disappearing glaciers is met with some nonsensical action from the U.S. government based on Earth 2, where none of this is happening.
As the climate-change-intensified heat dome settled in over the Eastern United States, Trump issued pardons for nine people — and you really can’t make this stuff up — who’d been convicted of felony violations of the Clean Air Act by selling or installing devices for diesel trucks that defeated their emissions controls, because polluting our spacious skies is no longer a crime in Trump’s America.
America continues to get a whopping 82% of its energy from polluting fossil fuels, and that’s unlikely to drop over the next 30 months, regardless of how many Trump voters can cheat death on looming “mass casualty events.” But POTUS 47 warned voters he planned to set the world on fire if he returned to the White House.
What’s harder to understand, frankly, is why the people who should be fighting Trump on climate change are running away from the front lines. Yes, I’m talking about Democratic Party leaders who’ve tossed climate action down the memory hole in the 2026 campaign — either terrified that any mention of climate will undercut their single-minded focus on affordability, or distract from fighting Trump’s brand of autocracy.
And ditto for newsroom leaders who seem to have decided that environmental journalists are the first people to lay off, not to mention the other world chieftains who ought to be challenging Trump’s destructive policies, but are meeting the moment with a shrug. Even Canada’s center-left prime minister, Mark Carney, is now backing away from the aggressive climate action he once supported, claiming, “It’s too expensive.”
That’s a lot of malarkey, as the president who just four years ago passed the largest climate action bill in U.S. history might say. Clean energy continues to rise elsewhere in the world because the alternatives, like wind and solar, are ultimately cheaper and also a source of desperately needed job creation. The fossil-fuel-boosted heat wave of July 4, 2026, proved that inaction is a threat not only to our lives and our liberty but also to the pursuit of happiness. It’s hard to celebrate 250 years of American democracy when climate denial is exposing that system as so badly broken.
Yo, do this!
Did I mention the World Cup isn’t over? If you are a true fan of the Beautiful Game, you’ll brush off the quadrennial disappointment of the U.S. men’s team and get excited to watch one of the greatest generations of international soccer superstars we’ve ever seen. One of the more intriguing of the four quarterfinal matchups this weekend will occur when Harry Kane and his English squad face Erling Haaland and his Norwegian upstarts in the Miami heat. The match kicks off at 5 p.m. Saturday on Fox.
The new movie scene for the July Fourth holiday was a disappointment, so the heat wave was a perfect opportunity for revisiting the classics of the 1970s and ’80s with the generation that had not been born yet. We went back to the late Rob Reiner’s first great serious film, the coming-of-age saga Stand By Me. It’s hard not to feel nostalgia today for a time when 12-year-olds had to entertain themselves without iPhones and could disappear into the woods overnight, which felt less strange in 1986 when the movie was first released. It felt truly like a faint signal from a lost planet.
Ask me anything
Question: Talk about Mitch McConnell’s demise. — Wendy (@wensilver.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Well, Wendy, that’s not exactly a question, and while the New York Times is reporting that the Kentucky senator and former majority leader was unconscious and in cardiac arrest when paramedics found him on June 14, his staff insists McConnell is still alive. That hasn’t stopped conspiracy theories that McConnell is on life support until August, when his replacement, named by GOP lawmakers, could avoid a messy November election. I don’t know about that, and I agree that it’s very poor form to speak ill of the dead. So the fact that he’s still alive is an ideal moment to remind everyone that his hijacking of the U.S. Supreme Court and his cowardice during Donald Trump’s second impeachment both started America on the path toward tyranny. So get well soon, senator. You still have a lot to answer for.
What you’re saying about …
Last week’s question about whether you are happy or concerned about progressive Democrats doing well in the 2026 primaries brought a mix of interesting responses that aren’t easy to categorize. Most of you want Dems who will fight harder than the current crew. “I have been voting since 1968, always for Democrats, but seldom with enthusiasm,” wrote Stephen Boone. “Finally, in my old age, there are a few decent politicians. I want more AOCs! More Zohran Mamdanis! …” Others felt more cautious. Wrote Thomas Desmond: “I think the progressive candidates are fine in deep blue seats, but may not be a great idea in purple or light-red seats that could prove winnable this year.”
📮 This week’s question: It may be water under the bridge next week, but Donald Trump’s personal role in overturning the arguably wrongly given red card to U.S. star Folarin Balogun has sparked a heated debate. Was the red card an injustice to be reversed by any means necessary? Or did Trump’s involvement ruin the World Cup? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Trump Balogun” in the subject line.
Backstory on Trump ruining the World Cup like everything else
President Donald Trump holds up a red card during a meeting with FIFA president Gianni Infantino in the Oval Office of the White House in August 2018.
If the big-screen tragedy of the U.S. men’s soccer team’s same-as-it-ever-was Round of 16 exit from the 2026 World Cup on Monday night had a theme song, it should have been John Lennon’s “Instant Karma.” For its first four (mostly) exhilarating matches, the USMNT gave a nation that was desperate for both an escape from relentless bad news — but also a connection to a wider world — the good vibes it desired. It truly felt like the Americans could go further than ever before (in modern times) in the planet’s greatest sporting event. TV ratings soared. Watch parties were packed. A broken land was coming together.
To longtime soccer fans, the red card handed out last Wednesday to the U.S.’s top goal scorer, Folarin Balogun, for stepping (seemingly unintentionally) on the ankle of a Bosnian player during a 2-0 victory — a harsh punishment that meant not only his ejection from the pitch but a suspension for the upcoming Belgium match — was the essence of our love/hate relationship with soccer. It may be a beautiful game, but it’s the ugly calls that we debate for decades. For a non-soccer fan and malignant narcissist like Trump, for whom anything that goes against his desired outcome is proof of the world’s unfairness toward him, the looming loss of America’s star striker was an opportunity to act like the strutting strongman of a personalist dictatorship.
There were too many ironies to bear — especially the fact that Trump had just gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight to strip U.S. citizenship from people like Balogun, who was born to British-Nigerian parents in 2001 during an American visit, and millions of other immigrants who aren’t as talented with their feet. But the other irony was that — like so many corrupt schemes, whether from the mafia or the Trump White House — the president’s soccer coup failed. It felt like Trump had attacked the positive zeitgeist around U.S. men’s soccer with a neutron bomb. Balogun rarely even touched the ball. We’ll never know how much of Belgium’s 4-1 rout of the mistake-prone U.S. was simply a European powerhouse outclassing the Americans, as has happened so many times before, and how much was Trump destroying the juju.
It did seem fitting that this sordid affair played out over the weekend of America’s 250th birthday, as it was more confirmation that Trump, in spite of what the hat says, actually has no clue what makes America great. If any one principle stood out from the founders’ 1776 and 1787 experiments, it is that the United States was to be based on fairness and following the rules, with no king imposing his will. The single greatest thing about America’s presidential elections was not who won, but the fact that the loser accepted the results, and there was a peaceful transfer of power — until Jan. 6, 2021. Likewise, nothing could ruin the often unbridled joy of the World Cup faster than a rigged competition.
I’m still looking forward to the next 12 days, to watching the pinpoint passing of Argentina’s Lionel Messi or the raw power of Norway’s Erling Haaland, and to seeing who can actually win the World Cup on the pitch, and not in a back room. We already know the tournament’s biggest loser: Donald Trump.
What I wrote on this date in 2014
Looking back on this Attytood blog post from 12 years ago today is a reminder of how debates can evolve over time. My short piece on July 7, 2014, was a riff on an op-ed that called newspapers’ online comment sections in those early internet years “a hate crime” that should be cordoned off because of the vitriol spewed at immigrants or others outside the traditional American hierarchies. Back then, I disagreed, taking the side of free speech absolutism. “These are people who shouldn’t be censored … just set straight,” I argued. “The one true powerful weapon against offensive free speech … is your free speech, and mine.” Time proved me wrong: The Inquirer now avoids comments on most articles, including my columns. It turned out that “the wisdom of the crowd” that newsroom reformers once hailed was fatally infected with racism, sexism, and other forms of hate.
Only one column last week, as I enjoyed the July Fourth holiday by spending time with family and watching countless hours of soccer. In that piece, I wrote about an American 250th birthday that should have been a meditation on what makes our nation great, and where we so desperately need to improve — but which Donald Trump used as an excuse to rob the cash register when no one was looking. The president’s staggering $2.2 billion-plus payday during his first full year back in office — accomplished with a mix of crypto flimflammery, informed stock trading, and dealings with foreign dictators — is a five-alarm fire for the rule of law.
One final thought about the 250th birthday of the United States as the moment recedes into the rearview mirror. It’s true that 2026 has been a lousy year, economically, for newsrooms, but you would never know that from reading The Inquirer’s remarkable coverage of such an eventful time. I’ve already praised our world-class World Cup coverage, but our overworked staff also went out and covered a July Fourth party that happened despite killer heat, biblical storms, and a plague of locusts (not really, but it felt that way). This included some real accountability journalism, such as the Trump regime’s efforts to twist the truth around George Washington and slavery, as well as questioning the cost of the big day for city taxpayers. It was also a reminder that Philadelphia has been a hotbed for journalism and the rugged practice of bringing the First Amendment to life since the early days of the republic. Help keep it going another 250 years by subscribing to The Inquirer.
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For years, I have summed up American politics in one sentence: Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine. Now, Democrats seem intent on proving they have no brains to go with that wobbly backbone. Following James Carville’s lead, some frightened Democrats appear determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Carville worked magic nearly 35 years ago, helping mastermind Bill Clinton’s 1992 win. He has since become the epitome of the conventional-wisdom consulting class. Only a split within the party could darken the Democrats’ bright electoral prospects this year and beyond. Yet, Carville seems determined to promote precisely that division.
Appointing himself the party’s membership czar, Carville openly advocates for an intraparty “schism,” pushing out the democratic socialists whom voters just elected in Democratic primaries. Sparing no expletives, he said, “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism.”
Even the word reeks of futility. Schism is most closely associated with the Great Church Schism, which culminated in 1054. The schism irreparably split the Christian Church into Eastern Orthodox and Western Roman Catholic, and weakened Christianity for centuries. It led to Western Crusaders sacking Constantinople in 1204, and left the Eastern Orthodox exposed to the rising Ottoman empire, which took the city in 1453.
The Democratic Party has always thrived on diversity. In the 1930s, Sen. “Cotton Ed” Smith and fellow conservatives held the party’s right flank while Sen. Robert Wagner and the liberals held its left. That coalition built the majorities that enabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt to enact the New Deal and to lead the nation through World War II.
One of FDR’s few political missteps was his attempt to purge conservatives in the 1938 primaries. The failed purge, which party chair James Farley called a “bust,” drove Southern Democrats into a conservative coalition with Republicans and shattered FDR’s aura of invincibility. Though not the primary cause, it contributed to staggering Democratic losses that November: 72 House seats and eight Senate seats.
Carville’s schism has no upside. A handful of democratic socialists will not turn America into Cuba. They sit much closer to the Democratic mainstream than Cotton Ed’s bloc sat to FDR’s. A September Gallup poll found that 66% of Democrats hold a positive view of socialism. And these are not hard-line socialists; they more closely resemble the social democrats of Scandinavia, who would regulate capitalist enterprise, rather than have the state seize it.
The downside, though, is immense. A divided party wins fewer elections. The most likely outcome of a Democratic schism is MAGA rule for the foreseeable future, posing grave danger to American democracy itself.
Carville’s promotional flair has won his idea wide coverage, and some Democrats have signed on. The Nation blared that “Establishment Democrats Are Embracing Loserdom.” The author warned that “Some centrists would rather have Trump triumph than forge an alliance with the left.”
Former Democratic Party chair Jaime Harrison told left-wing Democrats: “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure.”
Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey agreed. “Are we going to let them take over the party? Or are we going to stand up and fight back?” he said. “Many of us believe, as I do, that if you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat.”
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, although not explicitly endorsing Carville’s call for schism, blasted left-wing Democrats. He said that the victory of democratic socialists has “just been the dancing days of the dirtbag left. You know, some of these candidates are outrageous.”
Carville and his backers should remember the words made famous by football coach Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Stopping Donald Trump and his cronies from subverting our democracy is not the most important thing; it is the only thing.
A united Democratic Party, not a top-down purged one, holds the only hope of achieving that end.
Instead of panicking over left-wing candidates’ victories, mainstream Democrats should learn why those wins sparked such voter enthusiasm. Democrats should also reject Carville’s siren song and heed Sen. Cory Booker’s response to Fetterman’s slamming of the “dirtbag left.”
“If you want to heal a country, you can’t be picking fights,” he said. “Our party is not homogeneous. One of the things that makes the Democratic Party great is that it’s a big-tent party. We need to stay that way. The focus has got to be the November elections.”
Allan J. Lichtman is a distinguished professor of history at American University. He is also the author of “Great American Presidents: The Twelve Who Transformed the Nation,” out from Bancroft Press in September.
A Philadelphia-based federal appeals court gave President Donald Trump’s administration the final go-ahead to install its own exhibit at the President’s House.
The new panels, which historians have criticized for whitewashing George Washington’s role in enslaving nine people, have been manufactured and stand ready to install, the Justice Department told the court.
“The President’s House is an important national historical site, and the Government submits that the President’s House exhibits should be fully installed without further delay,” the government’s filing said.
Only two of 11 new panels mention the people enslaved at the President’s House, which was the exhibit’s original purpose. The exhibits are not factually wrong, historians said, but cast Washington in a more sympathetic light.
“Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets,” one panel reads.
The city quickly appealed and asked the Third Circuit court to recall the Friday-morning order, saying it didn’t have time to respond to the Justice Department’s Thursday request.
And while the federal government asked to install the exhibits “immediately,” the request did not identify a reason for the rush.
“That is not an emergency,” the city’s filing said, “it is a preference for speed.”
The court shouldn’t have issued its final approval for changes without waiting the 90 days Philadelphia had to appeal last month’s order, the filing said.
The city also repeated the argument, which has not found purchase with the appellate judges so far, that allowing the Trump administration to install its own exhibit would cause the city and public irreparable harm.
The city’s motion does not automatically pause the court’s order.
But in addition, the city filed a motion for a stay, while the Third Circuit considers the appeal, with District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, who issued the now-vacated injunction ordering the Trump administration to restore the exhibits it had removed.
The city and the Department of the Interior did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The President’s House has been subject to litigation in federal courts since the Trump administration dismantled the slavery exhibit in January.
It has been in legal limbo in recent weeks because of litigation in a Boston federal court, where conservation groups sued to stop the Interior Department’s implementation of Trump’s 2025 executive order requiring no national parks displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
At least 50 exhibits were removed from more than 30 sites nationwide, according to court records. Among them are also mentions of slavery at Independence Hall and the Second National Bank of the United States that the Trump administration quietly removed.
A federal judge in Boston last month ordered the National Park Service to restore all removed exhibits to parks across the nation. But the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit disagreed and stayed that order Thursday.
Hours later, Justice Department attorneys asked the Philadelphia-based federal court to clear the final procedural step — and the court obliged before noon Friday.
The biggest question remaining is whether the Trump administration will attempt to install the panel during this historic July 4 weekend marking the United States’ 250th anniversary.
Addressing a Philadelphia crowd live from the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV called for a “recommitment” to American ideals.
The first U.S.-born pope delivered remarks virtually at an interfaith ceremony inside Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center on the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday to accept the center’s prestigious Liberty Medal.
Facing a screen showing the live, cheering Philadelphia audience, the pontiff wore his Liberty Medal along with a cross around his neck.
Leo, who grew up in Chicago and attended Villanova University, quickly pointed out his American roots, calling himself “a son of this great country.”
“I join you in asking God’s blessings upon America’s future that the lofty ideals enshrined at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence may continue to guide the flourishing of the nation in unity, justice, and peace,” he said.
Leo, who was elected pope last year, spent years servingthe church in Peru and has been outspoken about calling for international peace. That’s landed him at odds with President Donald Trump’s administration on the issue of migrants, the war in Iran, and more.
The pope leaned into some of those themes in his speech, even though he did not refer to the president directly.
He nodded to his advocacy for humane treatment of immigrants and noted that the founders of the United States “made America a byword for freedom, as the country opened its doors to successive waves of immigrants, enabling them and their children to play their part in shaping the future of the nation.”
He said the “love of freedom” in the United States has inspired the country “to look beyond itself and at great sacrifice to champion the cause of freedom beyond its own borders.” But he acknowledged that mission hasn’t been straightforward, noting that building a society that embodies such ideals “was not always easy and, in many respects, is still a work in progress.”
The pontiff’s speech comes the day before he plans to visit Lampedusa, an Italian island known as a stop for migrants making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa to Europe. His predecessor Pope Francis made his first official visit outside of Rome in 2013 to the same island and condemned the “globalization of indifference” toward migrants.
Pope Leo XIV speaks at the Liberty Medal Ceremony at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Friday.
Julie Silverbrook, the chief content and learning officer for the National Constitution Center, emphasized in a Friday interview that Leo is a “global leader who has been uniquely shaped by American ideals.”
“He has brought together people of different faith traditions, and through his ministry really reflected his belief in the inherent dignity of all human beings,” she said.
Leo declined an invitation from Trump to the United States to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday on July Fourth, the New York Times reported. The first American-born pope opting to visit migrants instead sends a stark message as the president pursues his mission of mass deportations.
But the pontiff’s participation in the Philadelphia program highlights his connections to the region, which isn’t lost on the National Constitution Center.
The Philadelphia-based private nonprofit organization chose Leo for the award due to “his lifelong work promoting religious liberty and freedom of conscience and expression around the world — ideals enshrined by America’s founders in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” That, and also because he is the first pope born in the United States, and has connections to Philadelphia, Silverbrook said.
“He was shaped by those freedoms … in much the same way that the Declaration of Independence was shaped by the city of Philadelphia, and of course a reflection of American values that have been carried globally,” she said.
When a delegation from Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center met with Leo at the Vatican in April to present him with the medal in person, they also bore a few local goodies: a bundle of Villanova swag, a replica of George Washington’s Acts of Congress, and a Wawa tote bag filled with Tastykakes.
“I think he very much so feels a connection to Philadelphia, both having been educated here, and I think in this semiquincentennial moment, I think the eyes of the world are on Philadelphia, and we’re thinking about the ideals that have emanated from this place for 250 years,” Silverbrook said.
Leo, a 1977 Villanova alum, recently passed on a surprise message to graduates of his alma mater. Vince Stango, the interim president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, also went to the Augustinian university on the Main Line, which co-sponsored the NBC10 broadcast of the event along with the archdiocese and Malvern Prep.
(From left to right) Gov. Josh Shapiro, Rev. Nelson J. Pérez, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Interim President & CEO of National Constitutional Center Vince Stango, Rev. Carolyn C. Cavaness, Imam Quaiser D. Abdullah, Rev. Luis A. Cortés Jr., and Rabbi Jill L. Maderer, pose for a photo at the Liberty Medal Ceremony at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Friday.
Clashing with Trump
The pope has contended that it’s up to each country to determine how they want to accept migrants while also denouncing the Trump administration’s “extremely disrespectful” treatment of them.
He has also spoken out against Trump’s threats against Iran, and declined to participate in the president’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza’s reconstruction.
In an April social media rant, Trump complained that he doesn’t “want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States.” The president called the Catholic leader weak and accused him of “catering to the Radical Left.”
Leo told reporters that month that he has “no fear, neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message in the Gospel, and that’s what I believe I am called to do, what the church is called to do.”
In his Friday remarks, the pope made a call for unity but warned that a country should come together with “ideals that do not fade with the passing of time.”
He called on the United States to recognize its values of “peace and prosperity, a country characterized by generosity and nobility of heart,” and said the values of “shared human dignity, equality, and the rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence” can help unite and guide the nation.
The Liberty Medal
The Liberty Medal was created in 1988 and has been hosted by the National Constitution Center since 2006.
The award has gone to storytellers, philanthropists, civil rights leaders, and politicians on both sides of the aisle, such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Bushes, Malala Yousafzai, and Thurgood Marshall.
The center describes its recipients as individuals who “strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.”
The process of selecting Leo began about a year ago, Silverbrook said.
The speech was initially going to be projected on Independence Mall, but the event was moved indoors due to the extreme heat and livestreamed by the center online.
Rich Russo, 63, a Fishtown resident who attended the event in person, called the experience “once in a lifetime.”
“How many times do you get the pope talking to you?” said Russo, who works for a bank.
Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, and Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, a Baptist — bothDemocrats who have been outspoken about their own faiths — joined Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez and other religious leaders who made remarks on stage prior to the pope’s speech. Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, a Republican, rang a replica Liberty Bell outside.
“Philly is proud that the pope is a graduate of Villanova University who spent time living and working in our region,” Pérez said on stage. “Pope Leo knows us, and we feel like we know him, too.”
“His influence, however, extends beyond Philadelphia,” the archbishop added.
WASHINGTON — It was blisteringly hot when I showed up at President Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed Great American State Fair on the National Mall in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday.
As I headed off to check in as a member of themedia, a friend who’d accompanied me decided to wait at a lemonade stand.
At first, I was a little concerned, wondering how I was ever going to find her. A lemonade stand on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was bound to be mobbed on a scorcher of a day like the one we had on Monday.
I needn’t have worried. It wasn’t that kind of party. Crowds were so thin that I quickly spotted her standing alone and eating a snow cone that cost a whopping $8. “Even on a hot day, there was no line at the lemonade stand,” pointed out my friend, Pamela Thomas of Pathfinders Travel, who had taken the train from Philadelphia with me.
That should give you a pretty good idea of how it was at the so-called Great American State Fair, brought to us by Freedom 250, an organization created by President Donald Trump.
The Great American State Fair was downright boring.
Oh, there was an 110-foot Ferris wheel borrowed from the Smithsonian Institution. I watched people stand unsheltered under the blazing sun as they waited for their turn. But that’s the only carnival ride I saw.
This wasn’t like any state fair I’d ever attended. Where was the merry-go-round? Where was the roller coaster? The cotton candy? The local beauty queens? The fair could use a quilting demonstration and band performances. I saw only one cornhole game.
A mockup of President Donald Trump’s proposed Triumphal Arch stands at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall on June 29.
The so-called Great American State Fair needs a whole lot more fun and a whole lot less Trump.
There wasn’t much for children to do besides have souvenir replicas of their new Trump passports stamped.
I managed to findsome shade while sitting on a folding chair inside an area called David’s Tent. As I cooled off, I listened to a woman onstage sing religious songs. Behind me was an aboveground swimming pool set up, ostensibly, for on-the-spot baptisms. In the spirit of inclusivity, there was also a candle-filled menorah positioned in the front of the tent.
At one point, we made our way over to the Hawaii booth. Inside, all we saw was a large mural of the Aloha State that included a picture of former President Barack Obama that someone had defaced.
A smiling woman offered to stamp our “passports.” There was nothing else going on in that booth. Not a flowered lei or macadamia nut in sight. No hula dance demonstration. No ukulele performance.
Same thing with the neighboring Alaska booth.
I made a point of checking out the North Carolina booth, which had been criticized for having images of Confederate flags on display on TV monitors. This one was a bit more inviting, with its colorful NASCAR displays. I didn’t see anything resembling a rebel flag — but I did see a bale of cotton just sitting on the floor, which can be seen as offensive becauseof its slavery connotations. The setup had been organized by private donors. One company, Mt. Olive Pickles, has since pulled out of the fair.
The D.C. booth had some upbeat music playing, a fake cherry blossom tree, and a giant map of the mall that attendees stuck pins into to represent where they lived. “No go-go music?” I asked an attendant, who assured me that some was in the playlist.
Pennsylvania’s pavilion showcases state history and memorabilia at the Great American State Fair on June 30 in Washington, D.C.
Cape May County, a Republican stronghold, sponsored the New Jersey booth and brought in an impressive-looking eight-foot sand castle. But I noticed one small red plastic bucket of saltwater taffy that a kid was rummaging through. For an area as rich and diverse as the Garden State, the display felt incomplete.
Soon, I had had enough.
We stopped by the media table again on our way out and asked about what was on the schedule for later. The answer? A rodeo demonstration at 7 p.m. That was it.
I was stunned. America deserved more and better for its 250th birthday celebration.
So, if you decide to go experience the Great American State Fair before it is dismantled on July 10, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Two days before the American revolutionaries signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Second Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia to formally vote on the matter.
Standing in virtually the same spot 250 years later, their distant successors commemorated that historic moment while grappling, at times, with what it left out.
“The fact that we have you here together is a symbol of progress,” said U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, a retiring Democrat who’s spent more than four decades as one of Philadelphia’s central Black political leaders. “250 years ago, people like me were not fully included in the founders’ vision. … The struggle to live up to our founding ideals was hard fought.”
More than30 members of the 119th Congress attended the event at Independence Hall, one of many marking theSemiquincentennial in the city this week. U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, a Philadelphia Democrat whose district includes the historic site, had worked for years to bring his colleagues to the site to mark the nation’s founding.
A bust of Benjamin Franklin is above the door in the back of Congress Hall as U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Lancaster County signs a ceremonial document after the House of Representatives met at Independence Hall on Thursday.
As Boyle and others walked through that history in Congress Hall — the room where the legislative branch convened before relocating to Washington — they referenced both the uneven history of the country and the divided, polarized times that define modern America.
“America has indeed struggled at times, beginning with the horrors of chattel slavery and the oppression of Native Americans, to live up to our highest ideals,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.). “But the high–minded principles, upon which this great country was born, have served as an eternal lamp post for us to continue to strive and march toward a more perfect union.”
Jeffries’ remarks — from a high-profile lawmaker poised to become the first Black speaker of the U.S. House if his party wins control in the midterms later this year — came as President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to pull back the federal government’s references to the history of slavery, including on Independence Mall, most notably at the President’s House, a block from where the lawmakers gathered.
The Democratic leader was one of multiple speakers, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who made veiled references to Republicans’ ceding Congress’ role as a check on Trump. The members of Congress who served at Independence Hall believed the chamber “would be separate and coequal, never subservient or co-opted,” Jeffries said.
“Let us never forget that we don’t work for any other branch of government,” he said. “There are no kings in the United States of America. We work exclusively for the American people.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries addresses the Representatives meeting in Congress Hall. He said it was important to speak about the history of slavery in America. The gathering marked the 250th anniversary of the day the Second Continental Congress voted for independence.
U.S. Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Centre County Republican and dean of the Pennsylvania delegation, presided over the event. He said afterward that some of the remarks turned “a little political.”
“But it is an excellent observation,” Thompson said. “We don’t have a king. We can thank George Washington for that.”
Thompson was one of several Pennsylvania Republicans to attend the mostly Democratic event, but other top officials were noticeably absent.
Pennsylvania’s top-ranking Republican federal official, U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, did not attend. Neither did U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat who has increasingly aligned himself with Trump and Republicans.
U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.), who lives in nearby Burlington County, was the only senator to attend.
U.S. Senator Andy Kim (left) of New Jersey joins House members.
‘Let this sacred place awaken us’
Since 1800, Congress has met outside Washington, D.C., on only extremely rare occasions.
In 1987, a ceremonial joint session in Philadelphia marked the 200th anniversary of the Constitution, and in September 2002, more than 300 members met in New York City for the first anniversary of 9/11.
Thursday’s gathering in Philadelphia was considered a ceremonial event, not a formal joint session, so the lawmakers did not debate legislation or cast votes in the room where they conducted that kind of official business in the earliest days of the nation.
There weren’t defined political parties, all those years ago.
But the fissures that soon arose in the nation’s first capital — and that have only become more entrenched since then — were evident both in and around Thursday’s event.
The 45-minute ceremony was a bipartisan showing. A pair of Pennsylvania Republicans in particular, Thompson and U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks), kicked off the day with a call to order and invocation. Others like U.S. Reps. Ryan Mackenzie (R., Lehigh), Lloyd Smucker (R., Lancaster) and John Joyce (R., Blair) also attended.
Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican facing a tough reelection campaign this year, and Boyle, a moderate Democrat, were among several speakers who talked about the anniversary being a moment for Congress to recommit to its founding goals.
“Let this sacred place awaken us, a solemn charge that flows from what was proclaimed here 250 years ago,” Fitzpatrick said.
Among the over 30 lawmakers, though, Democrats outnumbered their colleagues across the aisle. Jeffries addressed the room, while no members of House Republican leadership, who control the chamber, made an appearance.
‘A great balancing act’
The day itself came after a chaotic few weeks in Washington, even during an unusually divisive two-year term.
The most significant bipartisan legislation produced during Trump’s second term, a comprehensive housing bill that includes a home-repair program that originated in Pennsylvania, was temporarily scuttled when the president refused to sign it. His demands for a controversial voter-ID and elections reform bill first was derided by members of both parties.
U.S. Rep. Brendan F. Boyle speaks as members of Congress gather for the ceremonial event.
Just 48 hours before Thursday’s gathering, that move was still causing turbulence on Capitol Hill as Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled the rest of the week’s agenda because of disagreements around the legislation, known as the SAVE America Act.
Johnson did not attend the event at Independence Hall.
“Two and a half centuries later, we continue to work to find that balance, work that each of you is charged with taking up every single day,” Shapiro said.
Even in the blocks around the lawmakers’ gathering, the tensions of the Trump era were evident.
A few blocks away at the historic Christ Church, local advocates and interfaith leaders gathered before the congressional event to call out the president’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics. One local member of Congress — U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Delaware County Democrat — stood with them before joining her colleagues at Independence Hall.
And just down the street at the President’s House, tourists saw an incomplete display after the Trump administration took down information that memorialized the nine people George Washington enslaved in Philadelphia during the nation’s founding.
Boyle pointed to fights by “generations of Americans who refused to accept that liberty and equality belonged only to some.”
“That struggle is not separate from the American story,” Boyle said. “It is the American story.”
