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.
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.
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.
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.”
This is the birthplace of democracy, and with it, comes the responsibilities that America’s founders left behind.
“The founders made clear that we have a real responsibility to do the work to constantly perfect our union,” Shapiro said in an interview this week, ahead of his speech before the ceremonial meeting of Congress, marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed in that same building. “And that the Congress of the United States has a unique responsibility in that to be a check on the executive branch.”
Those words come at a critical inflection point in America’s history, amid a tumultuous presidency, and as Shapiro is rumored to have aspirations of a White House bid in 2028. The first-term Democratic governor will appear before approximately 40 bipartisan members of Congress in Old City at the event convened by U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Pa.), speaking to the lawmakers from across the country about their collective duty to the public. Shapiro will attend numerous other 250th celebrations across Philadelphia in the coming days, during which he said he plans to share his optimism for America’s future and deep concerns that President Donald Trump has led the nation astray from its founders’ design.
“I don’t think patriotism belongs to one party. I don’t think it should ever be partisan,” Shapiro said. “Unfortunately, Donald Trump routinely divides us, routinely injects partisanship into his definition of patriotism, and his actions, in many ways, are the opposite of patriotism.”
Assembly Room in Independence Hall (Pennsylvania State House) Monday, June 15, 2026. This is the exact space where the Second Continental Congress met and the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
As Trump plans to spend America’s 250th birthday hosting a politicalrally on the National Mall — with no plans to visit Philadelphia, the city where the nation was founded — Shapiro sees his own role as a unifier, and in direct contrast to Trump. As attention shifts to Philadelphia this weekend, he’ll appear on the national stage from sunup to sundown at events and on frequent TV hits — all with a home-turf advantage for his 2028 presidential prospects, as the governor of the nation’s quintessential swing state and also most important to the country’s founding.
“[Celebrating the 250th] allow the spotlight to shine on Shapiro, even though it’s not entirely about him,” said Alison Dagnes, a political-science professor at Shippensburg University. “Do I think that helps his ambitions? Sure.”
‘Direct contrast’
Sitting with Shapiro in his Harrisburg office earlier this week, it’s undeniable that he’s a history nerd — another reason why he was built for the moment.
He casually quotes segments of The Federalist Papers, and references his favorite story about Benjamin Franklin‘s fixation on a half-sun on the back of George Washington’s chair during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which Franklin remarked during the U.S. Constitution signing that “it is a rising and not setting sun.” Without having to look for its location, he points to his right to a portrait of Franklin, one of his predecessors as governor of Pennsylvania, hanging on his office wall. He notes lesser-known Pennsylvanians who played an important role inthe nation’s founding whom he plans to highlight over the coming days.
“You know, I hate to quote a guy not from Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said, returning to The Federalist Papers to recite James Madison’s concerns about giving an executive too much power.
Gov. Josh Shapiro in the Capitol in Harrisburg Feb. 21, 2023.
“If Madison were here today, he’d be really concerned about how one man has accumulated so much power and is wielding it in really dangerous ways, and I hope that at this 250-year mark we find our way back to that balance and back to the constraints on the people who lead our government,” he said.
Shapiro sees his leadership style as a “direct contrast” to Trump’s, especially at this moment.
“[Trump] restricts peoples’ freedom and liberties,” the governor added. “He whitewashes our history. That doesn’t further a sense of community, that doesn’t further patriotism. All that does is divide us, and I refuse to participate in that.”
But for the next few days, Shapiro said his approach to the 250th celebrations is to: “Celebrate America, find ways to bring people together, and to have some fun in the process.”
Fair games
Despite his overtures of political unity, Shapiro has faced accusations from Republicans in recent days for playing partisan games over Pennsylvania’s participation in Trump’s 16-day Great American State Fair. Shapiro, in addition to several other Democratic governors last week, announced that Pennsylvania would not take part in the fair due to his administration being unable to secure any state businesses to sponsor the exhibit. Staffing and sponsoring the exhibit on the state’s dime would have cost $700,000 that would be better spent on in-state 250th events, he said this week.
In the weekend that followed, Pennsylvania’s U.S. senators, Republican Dave McCormick and Democrat John Fetterman, made a push to fill the state’s empty exhibit. By Tuesday, it was filled with antique flags lent by a York County man, bags of potato chips from Snyder County, and a Christmas tree display from Fayette County, among other Pennsylvania-centric items.
Pennsylvania’s pavilion showcases state history and memorabilia at the Great American State Fair on June 30, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
Some of the businesses originally told Shapiro’s office they didn’t have enough time to participate. But when McCormick and Fetterman approached them with the idea to fill the empty pavilion, they joined in.
“They obviously had a change of heart at the last minute. That’s fine,” Shapiro said about the revived Pennsylvania pavilion.
State Treasurer Stacy Garrity — Shapiro’s Republican challenger for governor, who has aligned herself with Trump — in a statement called Shapiro the “only career politician who has politicized America 250.”
“Josh Shapiro put his political ambitions above his commonwealth and his nation when he pulled Pennsylvania out of the national celebration of our 250th birthday in a pitiful attempt to score cheap political points with the liberal wing of his party,” Garrity said.
Beyond the 250th
Shapiro’s strength as a politician has always been his ability to appear “harmonizing” and bringing people together, dating back to his days as a Montgomery County commissioner, Dagnes said.
A careful politician, Shapiro is known to stick to his message and has faced criticism from some fellow Democrats for his well-rehearsed statements.
When Shapiro delivers his messages of unity and freedom to a broader audience in the coming days, voters are likely toview them as authentic — one of the most important qualities to any presidential hopeful, she added.
“If [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom is the guy who’s gonna punch Trump in the face, then Shapiro is going to be the guy who’s like, ‘No, let me offer you an alternative,’” Dagnes said.
“It’s what he should be doing right now, because this is what America is about,” she added.
HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania enters the new fiscal year on Wednesday without a state budget in place for a fifth consecutive year, while top leaders in the politically split legislature publicly disagreed over whether a deal was near.
Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-led House have known for months that Pennsylvania faces fiscal straits, as the state is on a path to spend more than it brings in in revenue in fiscal 2027. Top negotiators have spent weeks meeting behind closed doors about how the state should spend more than $50 billion in taxpayer dollars, in hopes of avoiding another drawn-out budget impasse.
Under first-term Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposed $53.2 billion budget, Pennsylvania would spend $4.8 billion more than its $48.6 billion in projected revenue and would require lawmakers to create new revenue streams, cut spending, or raise taxes — or dip into the state’s reserves.
Senate Republicans on Tuesday recessed until legislators have a final budget deal to vote on, with Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) saying that there is “no reason we cannot conclude our work early next week” and that lawmakers “have a very good trajectory in front of us.”
Pittman — a top negotiator in the closed-door talks — made those remarks just one day after a Senate committee voted to gut the main spending bill in Shapiro’s budget proposal, which was approved by the House in April, from $53.1 billion to $25 million.
State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) during a press conference at the Capitol in Harrisburg in February.
In a news conference Tuesday, House and Senate Democratic leaders offered a different picture: Despitelawmakers traditionally staying in Harrisburg in the days leading up to July Fourth in hopes of hashing out a deal, Senate Republicans are already packing up for the holiday weekend, the Democrats said, and are politically motivated to hold up the state budget. (House Democrats later canceled their scheduled legislative session on Thursday.)
“[Senate Republicans are] going to tell you that progress is being made, and that it’s important that we allow time for members to go home for the weekend. And by the way, it’s Tuesday,” said Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny).
“The bottom line is they’re not serious about getting a budget done, they’re slow-walking this process for weeks and weeks, and we’re calling them on it,” Costa said.
Shapiro echoed the same frustration with Senate Republicans in an interview Tuesday, adding that the Senate “decided to go home on vacation” when lawmakers are due to deliver a budget bill to him for his signature.
“I think it’s disrespectful to the people of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said, noting that Pennsylvania has a revenue surplus. “They should be here, and they should be working. And instead, they ran away.”
Speaker of the House Joanna McClinton (left) and Lt. Gov. Austin Davis are seated behind Gov. Josh Shapiro as he delivers his third budget address to a joint session of the state House and Senate at the state Capitol on Feb. 4.
Senate GOP leaders, in a statement following their recess Tuesday, said they believe they are “well on our way to effectuating a full budget agreement in the days.”
House Minority Leader Jesse Topper (R., Bedford) told reporters that legislative leaders have been constantly in contact “over the past month” no matter if members are in the building.
“At the end of the day, the talks continue,” Topper said. “This kind of stunt feels a lot like politics.”
Top legislative leaders have been tight-lipped about what the remaining sticking points are in budget talks.
Pennsylvania is constitutionally required to deliver a balanced budget by the start of the new fiscal year on July 1, releasing state funds which are then sent to school districts, county governments, and nonprofit organizations that offer critical services to residents.
The true impact of the missed deadline won’t be felt by local governments and schools for weeks. However, these entities are often required by law to submit their own budgetsdespite inaction by the state, often leaving them unable to predict how much state money to budget. State employees and lawmakers continue to receive pay during a state budget impasse.
Last year, a nearly five-month budget impasse required schools, counties, and service providers to cut jobs, take out high-interest loans, or stop services altogether. The School District of Philadelphia, the state’s largest school district, borrowed $1.5 billion to pay its bills, resulting in $30 million in interest and borrowing costs that weren’t repaid when the state approved its annual spending plan.
Lawmakers were at a bitter standstill about whether to allocate a new, reliable funding stream for public transit, reviving the state’s long-held rural-urban divide. Members also couldn’t agree on how much to spend, until ultimately reaching a $50.1 billion budget deal in November 2025.
This year, both chambers have slim margins for budget votes: House Democrats hold a one-seat majority, while Senate Republicans have a three-seat majority with several conservative members who rarely support spending increases. This often means legislative leaders must work with the minority parties to come to a final deal.
On Monday, Senate Republicans leaders did not show up to a scheduled meeting with Shapiro and Democratic leaders, Costa said, signaling potential discord.
Legislators still need to reach agreements on a number of issues, including whether to tax and regulate so-called skill games differently from slot machines and whether the state should overhaul existing school choice programs.
Democrats have wholly backed Shapiro’s budget proposal, which included legalizing recreational marijuana and raising the state minimum wage. Republicans have emphasized a need to slow down spending, citing the state’s structural deficit.
The leaders will also trade a number of legislative priorities in closed-door meetings unrelated to state spending as part of an overall deal, such as data center oversight proposals.
In Pennsylvania, the state budget topped $50 billion for the first time last year. It had increased by 25% — about $10 billion — over a five-year period.
WASHINGTON — A replica Liberty Bell, a Knoebels amusement park bench, hundreds of bags of potato chips, and dozens of sweating tourists packed into Pennsylvania’s location at President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair on Tuesday — a stark turnaround from when the signature 250th anniversary event opened in Washington last week without a Keystone State presence.
Pennsylvania was one of the few Democratic-led states that — describing the two-week fair as too partisan — had either decided not to participate or failed to find another host to showcase local history and memorabilia.
The interest, Gov. Josh Shapiro said at the time, was just not there.
But after a weekend-long sprint initiated by U.S. Sens. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) and John Fetterman (D., Pa.) to dredge up that interest, Pennsylvania’s pavilion opened Tuesday with nearly every inch of the space filled.
The walls were covered by antique flags and signs lent by York County’s Jeff R. Bridgman Antiques. Children stood in line for a U.S. Steel penny-press machine, grabbed bags of Middleswarth chips made in Snyder County, and Crayola crayons from Easton. (Additional chip donations from Utz and Martin’s will be arriving soon.)
Tourists collected pamphlets about Gettysburg and the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. They took pictures of anthracite coal and a drill bit used for fracking, both of which were on loan from U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R., Luzerne).
Pennsylvania’s pavilion showcases a natural gas drill bit and Middleswarth chips at the Great American State Fair on June 30, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
“I always look for an opportunity to highlight our industry,” Beth Ann Bossio, a Christmas tree farmer from Fayette County, said after driving three and a half hours to drop off a tree to display in the center of the space.
Pennsylvania is one of the largest producers of Christmas trees, and Bossio said it was important to her that both the state and its farmers were represented at the fair.
Beth Ann Bossio (front center), a Christmas tree farmer from Fayette County, helps staff from U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick’s office set up a tree she brought for Pennsylvania’s pavilion at the Great American State Fair on June 30, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
“That was my vision to come here, to make sure that Pa. is being reflected of what we are, and what we represent,” she said before tying an American flag-themed bow on the tree. “Farmers are very proud of that. We’re patriotic. We take pride in our land and how we steward it.”
The packed room on the National Mall came together in a rush in recent days, after Shapiro joined Democratic governors from other states in declining to use state resources to create and staff a pavilion, which his office said would have run a tab of “hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.”
He also said his administration’s search for another Pennsylvania host came up short. No companies or other kinds of groups were interested, he said, even as businesses and local governments stepped up to fill the spaces in other states.
While Shapiro last week blamed the lack of interest on the president’s polarizing impact on the 250th celebrations, he said in an interview Tuesday with The Inquirer that it “was never a political exercise. This was an exercise in practicality.”
Shapiro said Pennsylvania’s pavilion would have cost the state $700,000, all of which was money he saw better spent on the major events happening in Pennsylvania this year, including the NFL Draft, PGA Championship, MLB All-Star Game, the ongoing World Cup games, and a number of events across the state for the nation’s 250th birthday.
“My focus is on spending the taxpayer dollars here,” he said.
His administration spent two or three weeks reaching out to businesses and to the Pennsylvania Chamber asking them if they wanted to participate. None of them did, Shapiro said.
“They obviously had a change of heart at the last minute. That’s fine,” Shapiro said about the revived Pennsylvania pavilion.
Organizing the booth in Shapiro’s place were the state’s two senators, a bipartisan duo who have often worked together.
McCormick said he understood Shapiro’s desire not to spend taxpayer money, but when he found out there would be nothing to represent the state that is “the center of America’s history,” he sprang into action.
The freshman Republican said he and Fetterman spoke Saturday morning and quickly made calls to the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, and individual businesses to donate time and resources.
“It’s just inconceivable that we wouldn’t have a booth that would represent all that Pennsylvania had to offer,” said McCormick, whose staff greeted guests at the pavilion all day Tuesday.
Fetterman, who has said Pennsylvania’s role as a purple state means he should consistently work across the aisle, said he was proud to work with McCormick on the effort.
“America’s turning 250 years old,” Fetterman said alongside McCormick during an appearance in Philadelphia on Monday. “Can’t we all just celebrate that and not just find new ways to fight about the politics and the dynamic right now?”
McCormick’s office listed 23 companies or groups that signed up to help, though only a few corporate sponsors were front and center in the space.
Two large signs showcase the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a natural gas advocacy group that has a significant lobbying presence in Harrisburg. And U.S. Steel, the Pittsburgh-based company that benefited from a Trump-approved takeover by a Japanese-owned company last year, offered the penny press and colorful wristbands reading “forging the future.” Hats and signage commemorating Yuengling and Mack Trucks were lent from the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association.
Tourists use a U.S. Steel penny-press machine on display at Pennsylvania’s pavilion at the Great American State Fair on June 30, 2026, in Washington, D.C.Pennsylvania’s pavilion showcases state history and memorabilia at the Great American State Fair on June 30, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
Some organizations have acknowledged earlier conversations with Shapiro’s office to participate that didn’t go anywhere.
A report from The New Republic that Pennsylvania would not be participating in the affair “caught us off guard because that was not our experience at all, nor was it what we had communicated to the [the governor’s] office,” said Jon Anzur, the senior vice president of public affairs for the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry. “It’s unfortunate that it occurred that way.”
He said the governor’s office approached the chamber less than two weeks out from the start of the fair to help get companies involved.
“It just seems odd that we were approached at the eleventh hour and now it sounds like the governor’s office is trying to point fingers when there was ample time to get ducks in a row,” he said.
The Hershey Co. is among the Pennsylvania-based companies that declined to participate.
“We were asked by Gov. Shapiro’s office in mid June and then again over the weekend by Sen. McCormick’s office,” said Todd Scott, a spokesperson for the chocolate business.
Both were told that the size of the ask and the limited amount of time to make it happen was not possible.
“We were asked so late in the game that logistically we couldn’t make that happen. We just cannot provide on a moment’s notice that amount of product that they would have been asking for,” he said.
But the summer weather was also a factor.
“There’s no refrigeration on the mall, and with extreme heat, chocolate doesn’t do well in 100-degree temperatures,” he said. “We always want to make sure that people have the best experience with our products that they can.”
But another candy company, Asher’s Chocolate Co. in Souderton, decided to join.
“Asher’s was asked to participate by the Chamber of Commerce [Monday] and agreed to donate prepackaged bite-size pieces of fudge, which were on hand,” said David Neff, who represents Asher’s. “Asher’s is deeply committed to America and celebrating America’s 250.”
“SAP is committed to the communities where our customers, employees, and partners live and work. SAP’s support of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations reflects our long‑standing commitment to supporting innovation, economic strength, and workforce development,“ SAP spokesperson Bridget Carroll said in a statement.
SAP software is used by the U.S. military and its NATO allies to track troop deployments, military supply chains, and equipment maintenance.
The military aircraft producer Lockheed Martin, which has engineering centers in King of Prussia and in Moorestown, N.J., is the top donor to Trump’s initiative, giving nearly $20 million.
This story has been updated to clarify Bob Asher’s role in Asher’s Chocolate Co.
Staff writer Joseph N. DiStefano contributed to this article.
This story was updated to clarify that Bob Asher is no longer involved in Asher’s Chocolate Co.
The Supreme Court upheld the principle of birthright citizenship in a ruling for the ages on Tuesday, affirming amid rancorous national debate that people born in this country are American citizens.
The decision handed a key loss to President Donald Trump in a case that represented a major goal of his administration ― the denial of citizenship for children born on American soil to undocumented parents.
Instead, the court upheld what has been recognized as the law of the land for nearly 160 years, enshrined in the Constitution by ratification of the 14th Amendment shortly after the Civil War.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. “We keep that promise today.”
The court ruled 6-3, with three conservative justices voting to let Trump’s proposed restrictions take effect.
Reaction flooded in immediately, with Cathryn Miller-Wilson, executive director at HIAS Pennsylvania, the immigrant-support organization, saying the decision fell “on the right side of history.”
“It shouldn’t be a surprise because birthright citizenship is enshrined in our Constitution,” she said of the decision. “But unfortunately there are many other things that have been enshrined that the Supreme Court has ignored. So it was a point of anxiety, I think, for all of us.”
Trump’s planned restrictions had been blocked by lower courts and had not taken effect.
The Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, an advocacy organization based in Philadelphia, called the decision “a victory for families, for immigrant communities, and for the shared values that should guide our country: belonging, safety, and unity.”
“Today’s decision affirms what our communities have always known: no child’s belonging should be up for debate,” said Jasmine Rivera, the coalition executive director.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said on social media that Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship was cruel and “goes against centuries of hard work to advance American freedom.”
Days before the nation’s 250th birthday, Shapiro said, the court affirmed “that the fundamental promise of America still rings true — that this is a land of freedom and opportunity for all.”
In New Jersey, one of the first states to sue over the issue, Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said she was thrilled by the decision.
“The president cannot change our citizenship laws with the stroke of a pen. We stood up for the rule of law, we stood up for our residents, and we won,” said Davenport, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said that he was “very disappointed” by the ruling, that it will subject the country to “serious challenges going forward and we’ll have to deal with that.”
Johnson, who has worked as a constitutional lawyer primarily on religious issues, said the 14th Amendment is being abused by people who are coming to the U.S. to have children in a practice called birth tourism.
U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a York County Republican, railed against the court, saying that it had “failed the American people,” and that justices Roberts and Amy Barrett were joining an effort to protect birthright citizenship specifically for the children of undocumented immigrants.
“Now, more than ever, we must ensure the security of our borders and to prevent those who wish to do us harm by exploiting our immigration system are unable to do so; which means closing EVERY. SINGLE. LOOPHOLE,” Perry said in a statement.
U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Chester County Democrat, mentioned the path trod by her father, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the U.S. as a child.
“I’m deeply grateful for the Supreme Court’s protection of the 14th Amendment, and for all of the first-generation Americans who make our community stronger,” she said on social media.
On April 1 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on one of the most important cases of the time, one that had been expected to define who gets to be a citizen of the United States. Trump traveled to the court to hear the arguments in person, departing after government lawyers wrapped up their presentation.
There was no indication at the time of how the justices might rule, though several of the justices seemed skeptical of the administration’s arguments and peppered government attorneys with sharp questions.
When Solicitor General John Sauer argued that “we’re in a new world now,” Roberts responded, “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”
On Tuesday, the longest-serving justice, Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, offered a 91-page dissent, saying the ruling added “to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed Blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
On the day he was inaugurated for a second term in 2025, Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born in this country to undocumented immigrants. That marked an attempt to reverse legal and Constitutional precedent, which has long held that people born in the United States are U.S. citizens.
The ACLU sued within hours, and New Jersey officials went to court the next day, with then-Attorney General Matt Platkin saying, “Presidents in this country have broad powers, but they are not kings.”
Automatic citizenship also extends to children who are born abroad to U.S. citizens.
Birthright citizenship is guaranteed in the Constitution by the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the end of the Civil War. It says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
Trump and other opponents argue that the practice encourages people to enter the country illegally, so that children who are born here will automatically gain American citizenship. Those citizens, at age 21, can sponsor close family members to live permanently in the United States.
The Trump administration contended that birthright citizenship had limited intent, meant only to ensure that formerly enslaved people and their children were U.S. citizens.
The administration focused on the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” saying that excludes people with temporary or unlawful presence. The president’s order would have denied citizenship to babies born in the U.S. unless at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the birth.
Trump’s opponents said reliance on those five words makes no sense, that of course people who live in the United States without permission are subject to its jurisdiction ― its laws, orders, and government regulations ― the same as everyone else.
The administration also invoked the practice of birth tourism as a main argument for revocation, elevating what was a side issue to a central cause.
It’s relatively rare, the high estimate at 26,000 births a year, from the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for low immigration. That’s a fraction of the roughly 3.6 million children born annually in the United States.
In Pennsylvania, all eight Democratic federal lawmakers who represent the state opposed Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.
Along with 208 other Democrats in Congress, they signed an amicus brief in February arguing that the 14th Amendment set a “constitutional minimum — a floor — for birthright citizenship” and that the administration’s arguments were incoherent.
The Democrats who signed were U.S. Sen. John Fetterman and U.S. Reps. Houlahan, Brendan Boyle, Dwight Evans, Madeleine Dean, Mary Gay Scanlon, Summer Lee, and Chris Deluzio.
Some Republicans in Congress filed amicus briefs supporting Trump’s case, though none of the 11 Republicans representing Pennsylvania signed on to them.
The Republicans argued that within the 14th Amendment, the words “subject to the jurisdiction” were key.
“The Framers would have recoiled at the present debasement of citizenship, understanding that ‘jurisdiction’ requires more than mere physical presence,” they wrote. “It demands total allegiance to the sovereign. To hold otherwise places sovereignty, citizenship, and our nation’s survival in jeopardy.”
Staff writers Andrea Padilla, Sam Janesch, and the Associated Press contributed to this article.
U.S. Rep. Tom Kean Jr., who had not been seen since March in Congress orin his competitive New Jersey district, said Tuesday that he had been hospitalized to treat depression.
“I believe I owe an explanation to the people of New Jersey’s 7th District,” Kean, a Union County Republican, said in a five-minute speech in the House chamberon his first appearance on Capitol Hill in more than 100 days.
“I was given the diagnosis of depression. … It is physical, it is emotional, and until you experience it yourself, it’s difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be.”
Kean’s district could determine control of the U.S. House next year. The two-term Republican and son of a former governor is widely seen as New Jersey’s most vulnerable incumbent as he faces Democratic nominee Rebecca Bennett.
Addressing his nearly four-month absence from public life, Kean said he hadn’t believed treatment would result in a long-term hospital stay. But, he added, “there is no timeline for recovery, only the work of getting better one day at a time.”
He said that during his treatment, he began to understand how long “depression had been affecting my life.” Kean added that when he initially told people, he had hoped to return in a matter of weeks, “I believed it.”
Kean, 57, has not voted on a bill since March 5. Throughout that time, his office cited vague health issues without any specificity, even though Kean was facing a tough election in a swing district that includes parts of North and Central Jersey.
Kean flipped his district in 2022, ousting then-Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski by roughly 3 points after redistricting pushed the seat toward the GOP. Kean won reelection by roughly 5 points in 2024 in a strong year for Republicans.
But now, with President Donald Trump polling poorly in the wake of high gas prices and an unpopular war, Republicans realize that keeping their majority in the midterm elections will be a challenging fightand that Kean’s absence had become a campaign trail issue.
In attacks during Kean’s long absence, his Democratic challenger, Bennett, called him a “coward” for missing votes while accepting his House salary. “You are failing us, and you do not deserve to represent us in Washington,” she said.
Bennett said in a statement she was “relieved” that Kean is well and wished him good health. But, she added, Kean was “failing our community long before this absence,” citing his support for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which made cuts to Medicaid.
In a statement congratulating Kean for his “courage” while excoriating Bennett for her “reprehensible” remarks during Kean’s absence, New Jersey GOP state committee chair Christine Giordano Hanlon said Tuesday that Kean’s “strength is measured by the willingness to face adversity.”
Kean, who previously served 19 years in the stateSenate, including 14 as the Republican Party’s leader, returned home last week.
Kean is not the first lawmaker to seek treatment for depression.In a very similar personal battle, Sen. John Fetterman(D., Pa.) was absent from the Capitol after a six-week hospitalization for clinical depression in 2023 — though unlike Kean, Fetterman’s office at the time disclosed the reason for his hospitalization.
Fetterman, whose treatment for depression followed a 2022 stroke, details the experience in his memoir, Unfettered, which was released last year. In the book, Fetterman says he should have quit the Senate race he won that year.
“Because of the way the brain works in depression — you are always searching for a way to hate yourself — I began to wonder if some of my opponents’ insults were true,” Fetterman wrote in the memoir.
Staff writer Aliya Schneider contributed to this article
What amazes me about the fact that America turns 250 on Saturday is that I’ve been alive now for 27% of U.S. history. When I was 17 and watched the Bicentennial parade of tall ships down the Hudson River from my dad’s conveniently located Manhattan skyscraper office on July 4, 1976, I thought I was celebrating ancient history. I was wrong. In a big, diverse world, the United States remains a young adult among nations. Like most young adults, we have a lot of issues.
Trump thinks anything besides stealing the election is ‘a big yawn’
Voting booths are set up at a polling place in Newtown in 2024.
Donald Trump gets a lot of flak, and deservedly so, for telling so many lies. On Monday, he held an Oval Office press availability, and much of what he said — false claims that other nations don’t have birthright citizenship or mail-in voting — was flat-out untrue.
But nothing is scarier than when the 47th president speaks the truth about what’s really on his mind. Because the only thing that’s in Trump’s brain right now is stealing the November midterm election by changing the rules in his favor … or worse. If Trump’s vocal cords were not so weak and diminished, he’d have been screaming the quiet part out loud.
“Here’s what I would like to say,” Trump said of the still-unsigned housing bill, which passed in the House by a 396-13 vote. “It’s a yawn. Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
In quainter times, Trump’s disrespect for the housing bill — a grab bag of measures all geared toward encouraging contractors to build more units, which would lower both purchase prices and rents — might be the political gaffe of the year. Currently, only 29% of Americans think it’s a good time to buy a house, and nearly two-thirds are more likely to vote for a Congress member who helped lower prices. Republicans who voted for the bill are desperate for a win.
Trump doesn’t care. He’s forgotten his “forgotten Americans” who think the rent is too damn high, not to mention the GOP members of Congress who’ve followed him off the cliff. But that’s not even close to the most alarming thing about Trump’s Oval Office moment of truth.
The president says the only thing he cares about — even with his conflict in Iran becoming another “forever war,” and with the economy down the toilet for everyone who’s not a tech trillionaire — is a bill that critics say would be a disaster for free and fair U.S. elections. One report found that some 12 million people who fairly and successfully voted in the 2020 presidential election don’t have the documentation — such as a birth certificate or passport — that the bill requires.
We don’t know how such a massive drop in turnout would change the election results, or whether a weakened Trump can pressure theGOP to find a way to pass a bill with zero Democratic support. But we do know this: The president’s maneuvers are not even the worst thing Trump has done this month on the steal-this-election front. Not by a long shot.
The Trump regime has been signaling for months that it sees the U.S. intelligence community — spy agencies like the CIA — not as a tool for finding out what comes next in the Persian Gulf, or if or when China is invading Taiwan, or when Vladimir Putin’s Russian empire will fall. No, Trump wants secret agents who can creatively invent theories of foreign-born election fraud that would demand a strongman response.
We saw this coming back in January, when the regime dispatched Trump 47’s first director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to Fulton County, Ga., to oversee an FBI raid of voting materials from the 2020 election that Trump, with no evidence, continues to dispute. That link made it clear the regime is looking to create links to foreign actors.
When Gabbard left the administration this spring, Trump named a temporary replacement who can serve through the November election: Bill Pulte, who also continues to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte lacks a key prerequisite for his new job — any experience in intelligence whatsoever — but has the only quality that matters to Trump: undying loyalty. Pulte’s main focus in the housing job has been combing through the mortgage records of the president’s political enemies, looking for undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s that could be used to manufacture criminal charges from nothing.
In just a few days at intelligence, Pulte has not disappointed his boss. He showed up Monday and immediately began firing current staffers, with a rumored list of hundreds. The steep reduction in eyeballs on the world’s trouble spots is disturbing, but what’s even more alarming is the one person Pulte has hired.
The newsletter SpyTalk described Pulte’s new chief of staff, Christina Norton, as “a party-loving MAGA activist with no background in national security issues but who last year boasted of running ‘the largest election integrity operation the Republican Party has ever seen’ …”
The pairing of Pulte and Norton is an alarm bell that the national intelligence team under Trump will have one job: investigating fantastical “foreign election plots” that will be cited to justify radical measures like sending troops to polling places, seizing voting machines, or worse.
SpyTalk noted that Norton, in her active Instagram feed, “talks about supervising more than 200,000 Republican poll watchers ‘standing guard’ at polling booths and vote-counting stations across the country” during her 2024 stint at the Republican National Committee.
Yet, intelligence is just one of many tools in the federal government that the obsessive Trump is working to activate ahead of a November election that polls suggest will be a “blue wave” for Democrats hoping to retake Capitol Hill. Trump has issued several executive orders seeking to assert federal control over voting, which has been a state and local function throughout 250 years of American history.
That effort suffered a bit of a setback Monday, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can continue to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive after the polls have closed. But that will not stop the Trump regime from politicizing the U.S. Postal Service ahead of November.
Last week, Postmaster General David Steiner told Congress that USPS plans not to deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t turn their voter rolls over to the Trump regime, a demand many governors have resisted so far. “President Trump does not believe that elections he loses are valid,” Democratic Michigan Sen. Elisa Slotkin said after the hearing. “It’s all part of his authoritarian playbook.”
This all feels very familiar. In the lame-duck days after Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, the 45th president — instead of packing up to return to Mar-a-Lago — got busy putting in a new team at the Pentagon, ordering the U.S. Department of Justice to probe alleged voter fraud, challenging vote count certifications in court, and urging state lawmakers to seat rival slates of electors. Most pundits laughed this off, but I wrote a column — “So, is President Trump staging a coup, or what?” — that ran on Nov. 10, 2020, nearly two months before the actual attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021.
Now Trump is not only staging another coup, but he is yelling about it, in your face. There is nothing he won’t try over the next five months to prevent a Democratic Congress from investigating how he and his family have made billions of dollars off the American presidency.
When Trump says anything that’s not election meddling is a “big yawn,” this should be our wake-up call. The time for a full-court press — lawsuits, public hearings, and investigative journalism — can’t wait until after the election. The new putsch has already begun.
Yo, do this!
If you didn’t think I raced to download the new audiobook of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s tale of growing up in the radical Weather Underground in the 1970s and ’80s — Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground — then you must be new around these parts. Dohrn had already used his unique access to his parents — Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, revolutionary royalty — and their friends to tell a history of that era’s far left in 2022’s award-winning podcast, Mother Country Radicals. His new book aims to go deeper into the psychology of what it was like to be raised as a toddler on the run from the FBI, or whether bombings and bank robberies can change the world. That’s a question — also explored in this viral essay — with new resonance in the Trump era.
A few weeks ago, I suggested that folks see the new movie The Sheep Detectives. The film is already streaming on Amazon Prime (which produced it), and Sunday’s rare night off for the World Cup offered the excuse to finally watch. I can now highly recommend it. The movie — with an adapted script by the acclaimed showrunner of HBO’s Chernobyl, Craig Mazin — manages to merge police procedural cliches with moving thoughts about prejudice, existentialism, and what it means to belong to a flock. Even a flock of talking sheep.
Ask me anything
Question: Is Markwayne [Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary and former Oklahoma senator] the least qualified cabinet level official in American history? — Richard McGovern (@richardmcgovern.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Good question from Richard, a fellow long-suffering Philadelphia Union fan. Not because I know the answer, when there are rivals for the title like Donald Trump’s war-losing “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, to name just one. But Mullin is now behind a move so outlandish that it showed me I haven’t lost my capacity for shock after all. This weekend, Trump nominated a previously unknown former Oklahoma state trooper named Lance Schroyer to run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a powerful agency with 22,000 agents and a budget of around $30 billion a year. It turns out that just recently, Schroyer was heading a security detail for Mullin in Washington, D.C., and has become a close enough friend that he is an occasional dinner guest. Yes, he hired his bodyguard to run the equivalent of a large corporation. Stay tuned for all of this to unravel.
What you’re saying about …
I guess we’re not as close as we thought, as very few of you were eager to share your July Fourth plans with me or discuss what America’s 250th birthday means at such a dark moment. The ones who did reply are looking forward to spending time with family and friends, but all that patriotic jazz, not so much. “Probably, we will have our usual picnic and take the grandkids to see the local fireworks, but I have no intention to watch any special programming or parades, etc.” Marianne Zollers wrote. “It will just make me sad. Such a different feeling compared with the Bicentennial which was such a joyous and happy occasion for my entire family.”
📮 This week’s question: One of the big stories of 2026 that’s finally getting a lot of attention is the success of more progressive Democrats, including democratic socialists, in key primary races against party moderates. Is this a good thing, lifting up candidates who’ll fight against Trump and for the working class? Or do you worry Republicans will capitalize against their opponents with more left-wing views? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “2026 progressive Democrats” in the subject line.
Backstory on crossing the World Cup off my bucket list
The Ivory Coast team celebrates their win in the middle of the field against Curaçao with a score of 2-0 for the FIFA World Cup at the Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia on Thursday.
I can’t say exactly when, but at some point during my first-ever in-person World Cup match between Côte d’Ivoire and Curaçao, watching from the thin air of the top deck of the temporarily renamed Philadelphia Stadium, it struck me: My decades-long dream of being there for the world’s greatest sporting event was not like what I’d imagined.
And yet, in some weird, quasi-religious acid test kind of way, it was even better.
I’ve been to countless sporting events going back to 1968, but never one where the vibe was basically: So happy to be here. I’ve certainly never been to a game where the PA announcer uttered something before the match about giving a big hand to both teams — and the sold-out crowd obliged. Fans would have burned down Section 220, Row 27, where I was sitting, if this had happened during an Eagles-Cowboys game. During a tense match with a place in the Round of 32 on the line, the gathering repeatedly did the wave and threw their vocal cords more behind the halftime singalong of the Bruce Channel 1961 oldie “Hey! Baby” than either of the two decisive goals by Côte d’Ivoire’s Les Éléphants.
Up in nosebleed country, many of the fans repped soccer jerseys, but they were for club teams like Liverpool or Christian Pulisic’s USA No. 10, joined by me in my Philadelphia Union T-shirt. We were Philly’s soccer aficionados, desperate to be a part of maybe the only time in our lives the World Cup would take place in the City of Brotherly Love. A match pitting the smallest nation to ever qualify for the FIFA tourney (Curaçao, population 158,000) and an African underdog was pretty much the only way to crash the party without a bank loan. (Full disclosure: I paid about $280 apiece for two seats on StubHub — much like buying a stock, it could have been more or less, depending on how one timed it.)
No, this wasn’t much like the Eagles games played here, where excitement merges with pins and needles of anxiety. On a picture-perfect late afternoon in June, bookended by the Philadelphia skyline and a lazy Delaware River, it felt more like a rock concert. It wouldn’t have seemed out of place if folks had started batting a beachball around at this soccer Woodstock. There was a mind-meld of the faithful, who saw FIFA and its commercialization as the devil, with the loudest boos for the TV-ad-laden “hydration breaks,” but with — I swear to God — a loud roar for the announcement of the attendance: 68,324. In a city where a 1976 Bicentennial match of some of the world’s best players took place in a mostly empty stadium, soccer is indisputably here to stay.
Fans walked out of Philadelphia Stadium beaming less over the final score and more about the instant karma of the afternoon. After years of tavern taunts and ridicule from sports-talk radio, localsoccer die-hards lived long enough to see America’s founding city become the world’s co-capital of the sport that, for its true believers, passes all understanding. It was all too beautiful. If I can somehow make it to Spain or Portugal or Morocco in 2030 (because, hey, I need a new bucket list now), I will be sure to wear some flowers in my hair. Soccer time will be a love-in there.
What I wrote on this date in 2019
I’ve been writing about the topic of journalism reform since the mid-2000s, or around the time it became clear to me and a lot of other folks that newsrooms needed to change or die. My fear, circa 2006 or so, was that we’d start seeing entire communities without newspapers or the accountability journalism that flows from that — which is exactly what happened in Youngstown, Ohio, when its paper closed seven years ago. I wrote: “The loss of the Youngstown Vindicator every morning doesn’t mean that the region’s 200,000 people will no longer be getting information. It just increases the likelihood they’ll be getting bad information — intentionally manipulated, and sometimes out-and-out fakery.”
Only one column this week, as I took a well-deserved day off to attend the World Cup. In that piece, I looked at the sorry state of justice in America on the eve of its 250th birthday, with an emphasis on the outrageous sentences — ranging from 30 to 100 years — handed down to left-wing anti-ICE protesters convicted of rioting in North Texas. The U.S. Department of Justice that pushed these virtual life sentences is also pardoning the right-wing rioters of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as billionaire fraudsters who donate money to MAGA players and causes. They’ve made a mockery of liberty and justice for all.
Let’s be honest: People — not to mention sheep (see above) — can’t get enough of a murder mystery, especially a real-life true crime. It’s been a while since a crime saga has riveted Philadelphia readers as much asthe stench of possible foul play that is growing at a home on West Chew Avenue in the city’s Olney section that police have branded a crime scene as they search for clues in the disappearance of two local women. Since the case broke open last week, nearly a dozen Inquirer reporters have produced riveting articles about the discovery of drugs, chemicals, and “a significant amount of blood” at the Horsch family residence, profiles of the two missing women — Amy McHale and Blair Tonzelli — and interviews with neighbors who talked about living next door to “a house from a scary movie.” The backstory here is that — whatever you may have heard about AI — it still takes a lot of human shoe-leather to get to the bottom of a story like this. Subscribing to The Inquirer is a twofer: You get to hurdle the paywall to read compelling journalism and feel good about being a supporter.
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