President Trump wants to soften one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. propublica.org/article/401k-…

Jeffrey Sachs: a president stood at the UN and claimed the right to annihilate a civilization. Congress said nothing. That is the constitutional order collapsing in public. “I shuddered then, and I shudder now that a president of the United States can stand at the podium of the UN General Assembly speaking to world leaders in a language of annihilation of other countries and of sending them to hell. It was ghastly, unprecedented, totally disgusting, disgraceful for the United States. But I would also say a measure of how broken the constitutional order of the United States is. Trump basically said, like a madman, which I think arguably he is, that he and he alone will decide the survival of Iran. He said that he has a big, big choice to make. Maybe Iran will be a great country. Maybe Iran will be annihilated. Maybe Trump will send it to hell. And not only was the language vulgar in a way that I certainly could never in my lifetime have imagined coming from a president of the United States or anybody standing at the UN podium—because what Trump said was odious and completely in violation of every religious, moral, ethical, and legal standard that we have in this world—it was also a measure of the brazen collapse of our Constitution. Is there a political system where one man decides the fate of another civilization? Is that how the American system works? Of course the answer is no. The founding fathers who rebelled against a mad King George III were very explicit in the Declaration of Independence, celebrated this year 250 years after its issuance. We’re in the 250th anniversary, one that Trump says is about our freedom. It was explicitly that King George arrogated, took on the authority to put the military above civil rule. And when the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, they assigned specifically the power to declare war not to the commander-in-chief, but solely and exclusively—and not by choice, not if they care about it or want to or want to delegate it or not, but solely—to the United States Congress. And Trump said yesterday he doesn’t care what the public thinks. He doesn’t care what the vote is. He says it doesn’t even cross my mind. And he said earlier this year, when he was asked, well, are there any limits on your power? He thought about it. He said Yes, my morality, but it’s my will. It’s what I want to do. Otherwise, no, there are no other limits. What did our Congress do on that occasion? I can tell you, as we know, that the majority party in both houses simply remained silent. That is a violation of their sacred oath of office, which is to uphold the Constitution. Trump yesterday said he’s going to have the difficult choice of whether to annihilate, by the way, one of the most ancient civilizations in the world, 5,000 years old, twenty times older than the United States of America. And what did our Speaker of the House say? Well, he said nothing, of course. What did our Senate majority leader say? He said, of course, nothing. What did all of the party of the president of the United States say, the members of Congress? They said, of course, nothing. This is worse than the Roman Empire. There was a Senate that actually still said something. Our Senate says nothing. We are so broken that not only do we have a madman in power, but there is no respect for our constitutional order. And the president can make statements as he made yesterday, unprecedented in the chamber of the General Assembly in front of the world leaders, speaking like the worst tyrant or gangster imaginable, and not a murmur from the Republican Party which dominates the House and the Senate. You know, I am not partisan. And a Democratic president who dared to be as absolutely mad and deranged as this president would probably find subservience in that party too. So I’m not even making a partisan point. I’m making a point about the collapse of our constitutional order. Have we come to a point where one man, who I happen to think is utterly incompetent, utterly sociopathic, actually—when people are killed under his order, not a moment of reflection or remorse when 150 schoolgirls are murdered, and he knows the truth. He says, yeah, the Iranians probably did it. We’ll find out. No, not any control at all in our system of government. So for me, you asked how I feel. I shudder at the last 24 hours, both at what the president said. It made my skin crawl. I was sitting there in the chamber listening to this madness. I mean it really, psychopathic madness, speaking in this way, with a vulgarity that is unimaginable. But then I’ve shuddered since then at the lack of response by the leaders, the majority leader of the US Senate, the Speaker of the House, Supreme Court justices, anybody to say no. In our system of government, it’s not one person who decides on the fate of another civilization. We are a country, we say, first of all, of representation, and the American people are aghast at this. They oppose it overwhelmingly. They do not support this war of Netanyahu and Trump, which is a two-person war of murder and destruction and assassination of leaders of another country. They do not support it. And the constitutional order is that we are a representative government, and our representatives have an oath of office that only they can declare war. So where are they standing up to say No, you don’t have a penny to spend on this? We control the power of the purse. The tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that Trump has wasted of American income in this flagrant war of whim. Where is Congress to say you have no authority whatsoever to spend that because only we can decide on the spending and only we can declare war. So this is the grim fact. It wasn’t just the awful statements. That was my first reaction. But then I thought, what have we come to when one person can make a statement like this and then remain essentially unchallenged in the United States system of government?” Annihilation is not diplomacy. Congressional silence is not restraint. A constitutional republic cannot survive if one man claims the power to decide whether another civilization lives or dies.

Incredible. First @SecMullinDHS claimed that @DHSgov identified 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter roll. Then DHS officials said, no no no, that’s just people we flagged, here’s the names of 185 people we KNOW aren’t citizens. All 185 were citizens. DHS got 100% wrong.

JD Vance Rips Health Care Away From Hundreds of Thousands of People trib.al/jtUdWmx

Democrats should see Trump’s failed presidency as a cautionary tale not something to emulate. slowboring.com/p/the-republi…

What could go wrong? nytimes.com/2026/09/20/scien…

The New York Times reports the White House is drafting a rule, a years long priority for Vance, letting married couples with one stay at home parent draw childcare subsidies from the federal Child Care and Development Fund. The fund holds 12 billion dollars a year and is not growing to cover the new category. Four out of five current recipients are single mothers, most on poverty wages, drawing an average near 700 dollars a month to help pay for care while they work. Nothing about this plan adds money. It adds eligible applicants to a pot that already denies five out of six qualifying families every month, by HHS's own count. A single mom working a shift job keeps her voucher only as long as the money holds out, and her new competition for it comes from married households that can clear 80,000 dollars a year combined and still qualify. That is the actual mechanism sitting underneath the family values framing. Somebody's voucher funds somebody else's stay at home.

Phony Elon Musk claims he’s “saved” free speech, but he’s using algorithms to torque exposure of ideas. On X, posters have to pay for bogus “verification” and “boosting.”

Federal Employees Were Paid $9.5 Billion Not to Work in 2025 Under #DOGE Effort nytimes.com/2026/09/15/us/po… via @NYTimes

The Justice Department’s gutted Civil Rights Division is rebuilding with lawyers steeped in conservative advocacy and Republican politics with a new mission to wage partisan fights and defend gun rights, a Bloomberg Law analysis found. news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law…

That is an 'estimate' from 2020-2024 The real estimate is over 70M

Trump's own Kennedy Center board filed a 57-page presentation Monday warning of "certain fiscal collapse" unless his name returns to a building a judge already ordered removed. The $23 million deficit driving that crisis traces largely to his own takeover's boycott.

Trump’s plan to halve FEMA workforce illegal, judge rules thehill.com/regulation/court…

"There’s simply no legitimate use for crypto. Its only practical uses are tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, speculation, and crime." robertreich.substack.com/p/n…

Must-read! wapo.st/4h3hdVH

"...During his 2nd term, Trump & his sons have invested heavily in companies tied to the AI boom. Trump has called AI data centers “the oil of the next 50 years...” On 1/20/25, he revoked Biden's EO #14110 establishing fed AI oversight. heathercoxrichardson.substac…

New: Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses at Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding, including renting out a private island and paying for the fireworks show. propub.li/4xTBcxt