Mike Levin

You have got to be kidding me. The State Department is putting Donald Trump’s scowling face on the U.S. passport. His signature in gold. Superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, a document literally written to get away from this exact behavior. No sitting president has ever done this. Coins, park passes, battleships, and now your passport. The man cannot find a surface he will not slap his name or face on. This is not patriotism. It is vanity.

Donald Trump promised for months that his White House ballroom would not cost taxpayers a dime. Now Lindsey Graham has introduced a bill to spend $400 million in taxpayer money on the project. So much for private donors footing the bill. Compare that to how Trump treated Jerome Powell. Trump spent months accusing the Fed Chair of fraud over a $2.5 billion renovation of Fed buildings. He demanded a criminal probe. A federal judge threw it out, finding “essentially zero evidence” of any crime. The Justice Department dropped the case last week. Powell renovated Fed buildings with Fed money, every dollar accounted for in public.  Trump bulldozed the East Wing and is building his ballroom through a secret contract that hides donors and shields the White House from any conflict-of-interest review. One known donor is ArcelorMittal, a foreign company which donated $37 million in steel. Two days after Trump praised the gift, his administration cut in half the tariffs on automotive steel from ArcelorMittal’s Canadian plant.  Powell got prosecuted for transparent spending. Trump gets a blank check, anonymous donors, foreign steel, tariff favors, and now your tax dollars too. washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/…

Today would be a great day for Mike Johnson to bring the bipartisan Homeland Security bill to the floor and reopen the government. It passed the Senate without a single no vote. It has been sitting on his desk for weeks. He still refuses to hold the vote.  Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. They don’t get to blame Democrats for a mess they are making themselves. We have been ready to reopen the government for more than 70 days. House Republicans need to get on the same page or get new jobs this November.

60 days. That is how long American forces have been at war with Iran without authorization from the United States Congress. Today, the clock written into the 1973 War Powers Resolution runs out. Tomorrow, this war becomes flatly illegal. The Constitution is not subtle on this point. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress, and only Congress, the power to declare war. The Founders put that pen in our hands on purpose. They had just fought a revolution against a king who decided on his own when his subjects would bleed. They were not about to hand that power to one man in Washington. President Trump has done exactly what the Founders feared. He launched a major military campaign with no authorization for use of military force and no honest case made to the American people. We will fight this on every front. Legislatively, I will keep voting for every War Powers Resolution that comes to the floor and pressing Republican colleagues who once claimed to care about executive overreach. In the courts, members of Congress have standing to sue when the executive nullifies our constitutional role, and that option must be on the table the moment this deadline passes. This is not about whether Iran is a bad actor. This is about whether one man gets to start a war on his own. The answer, in America, has always been no. nytimes.com/2026/04/22/us/…

The Supreme Court just made it easier for politicians to choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. In a 6-3 decision today, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the law that for 60 years has protected every American’s right to a fair vote. The ruling effectively lets states draw district maps that break apart minority communities and drown out their voices, as long as the state claims it was done for political reasons. This is not a left or right issue. The Voting Rights Act was signed by a Democratic president, strengthened under a Republican president, and renewed by the Senate 98 to 0 as recently as 2006. Ronald Reagan called the right to vote “the crown jewel of American liberties.” Today that jewel was cracked. Districts that have given millions of Americans a real voice for decades are now at risk. The result will be a Congress that looks less like the country it serves. Congress must pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Court has spoken. Now the people’s representatives must answer. wapo.st/3OBjqhc

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is a bully and a thug. Now he’s threatening the broadcast licenses of ABC stations in eight cities, because the Trumps don’t like Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes. The First Amendment was written precisely to stop this. The government does not get to decide which jokes are allowed on television. The last time the FCC pulled a broadcast license over content was 1969, against a station defending segregation. That is the company Carr has chosen to keep. The President of the United States, supposedly the toughest guy in any room, apparently can’t handle a late night comedian making fun of him. nytimes.com/2026/04/28/bus…

The border can be secure. Families can be treated humanely. These are not opposites. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something. That is why I am an original cosponsor of the bipartisan Dignity Act. What is happening today is something different. ICE is detaining longtime residents with no criminal record, separating parents from American children, and sweeping up legal residents and US citizens in the process. None of that secures the border. It just terrorizes communities. And the economic case for cruelty falls apart on contact with the evidence. According to the conservative Cato Institute, immigrants pay 17 percent more in taxes per capita than the average American and have reduced federal deficits by $14.5 trillion over the last 30 years. Undocumented immigrants are part of that surplus. Their paychecks get taxed every two weeks, but they cannot collect Social Security, they cannot collect Medicare, and they cannot collect food stamps. So the real choice is not between open borders and cruelty. The real choice is whether Congress finally does its job: secure the border, fix a broken system, and treat people with dignity. Pass the Dignity Act. cato.org/blog/immigrant…

Someone using the name “Magamyman” made $515,000 in a single day on Polymarket by betting on the first U.S. strike on Iran, just over an hour before the news was public. Since then, people have been placing bets on future strikes, terrorism, and even assassinations in this war. It is sick. People are making money off death. You might ask why the government has not shut this down. The agency in charge has not cracked down on Polymarket. Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board. That is a huge conflict of interest, and it makes passing a bipartisan fix in Congress really difficult. But we’re not waiting. We’re building support for the DEATH BETS Act right now. It would ban these kinds of bets on war, terrorism, and death. Americans should never be able to get rich off the killing of our troops or innocent civilians. Period.

The President’s sons are cashing in on Pentagon contracts while their father wages a war he never asked Congress to authorize. Eric Trump just bragged on Fox about landing a $24 million Defense Department deal. Don Jr. sits on the board of a drone company with $15 million in military-linked orders, and another company in his portfolio just secured a $620 million Pentagon loan. Democrats need to take back the House and do the job the Constitution requires: check the executive, follow the money, and put real guardrails in place.

A safety net for the most vulnerable Americans is being quietly dismantled, and not enough people know about it. The Trump administration is finalizing a rule that would gut SSI, the program that provides a basic check to severely disabled Americans.  According to reporting by ProPublica, the rule would penalize disabled adults simply for living at home. If a relative they live with receives SNAP, the value of their bedroom and any household income would be deducted from their SSI check, cutting benefits by up to a third or ending them entirely.  As many as 400,000 disabled adults and low-income seniors could be affected. These are not people gaming the system. SSI serves 7.5 million Americans, and fewer than one in three applicants is approved. The process takes years and requires medical and vocational evaluations. The average household supporting an SSI recipient on SNAP earns just $17,000 a year. The administration calls this rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. It is not.  One 22-year-old with intellectual disabilities profiled by ProPublica would lose about $330 a month, saving taxpayers $11 a day. If her father can no longer afford to keep her at home, taxpayers will pay hundreds of dollars a day to institutionalize her instead. This policy costs more, helps no one, and punishes families for taking care of their own. propublica.org/article/trump-…

You have got to be kidding me. The State Department is putting Donald Trump’s scowling face on the U.S. passport. His signature in gold. Superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, a document literally written to get away from this exact behavior. No sitting president has ever done this. Coins, park passes, battleships, and now your passport. The man cannot find a surface he will not slap his name or face on. This is not patriotism. It is vanity.

TSA agents, Coast Guard members, FEMA workers, and Secret Service agents are about to miss their paychecks because House Republicans refuse to end the shutdown. The Senate has already passed a bipartisan bill with unanimous support to reopen the Department of Homeland Security. Speaker Johnson could end this today by putting the bipartisan Senate bill on the floor. Why won’t he do it?

Republicans run the House, the Senate, and the White House. So far, this week is a case study in what happens when the people in charge cannot do the job. Start with Homeland Security. The shutdown is now 73 days old, the longest partial shutdown in American history. Last month the Senate passed a bipartisan bill to reopen most of the department, supported by every Senate Republican and Democrat. It funds TSA officers, the Coast Guard, FEMA, the Secret Service, and the cybersecurity teams that protect us from foreign attacks. We are ready to pass it in the House. But it has been sitting on Mike Johnson’s desk for weeks. He will not put it on the floor. On Monday he said he wants to rewrite it instead, without providing further details. Then there is FISA, the surveillance law that intelligence officials say keeps the country safe. It expires Thursday. House Republicans cannot agree on how to extend it. The Rules Committee canceled its meeting this morning with no idea when it will reconvene. Even the Farm Bill, which sets food and agriculture policy and was supposed to be the easy win of the week, is stuck. Republicans are fighting each other over the details. Three must pass items. Three meltdowns. A total failure to govern. And it’s only Tuesday!

This should be a much bigger story. American farmers are getting crushed, and Washington is making it worse. 60% of U.S. farmers cannot afford the fertilizer they need for this year’s growing season.  Costs for essential fertilizer and nitrogen supplies have spiked more than 55%, driven in large part by the conflict in Iran disrupting global supply chains.  When wars start in regions that produce the world’s fertilizer, the bill lands on a family farm. This crisis comes on the heels of more than 15,000 American farms shutting down in 2025. The American Farm Bureau warned that rising costs, falling margins, and policy decisions in Washington were pushing family farms to the brink. Instead of relief, Republicans in Congress cut more than $1 billion from programs that helped schools and food banks buy food directly from local farmers. Those programs were a lifeline on both ends, supporting farmers and feeding kids. American farmers are the heroes who keep food on our tables and power a huge share of our economy. They deserve a Congress that has their back, not one that pulls the rug out from under them while global instability drives their costs through the roof. cnbc.com/2026/04/15/us-…

Every American should be able to stand behind the same principle: political violence is never the answer. And if we mean it, we have to mean it every time. The principle does not bend to the politics of the victim. We are a nation of more than 340 million people. We disagree on many things. Yet for 250 years, the American experiment has survived because we generally chose to settle those disagreements with voices and votes rather than violence. That tradition is what makes this country possible, and it is one thing we must all protect. Our political opponents are not our enemies. They are our fellow citizens. Let us remember that we are neighbors first.

RFK Jr.’s CDC is hiding a report that proves the COVID vaccine works, and the Washington Post just exposed it. The report found that last winter’s COVID vaccine cut emergency room visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults roughly in half. It cleared the CDC’s full scientific review. It was scheduled for publication on March 19. Then it got killed. The administration’s official excuse is that the methodology was flawed. One problem with that: a flu vaccine study using the exact same methodology was published in the same CDC journal one week earlier. Nobody flagged that one. Current and former officials told the Washington Post the real issue was political. The finding was too pro-vaccine for a Health Secretary who has spent years attacking vaccines. So now ask yourself. Why would America’s Secretary of Health rather bury lifesaving information than let American families see it? If that’s the reason the CDC is keeping this report hidden, we cannot stand for it. Help me spread the word. washingtonpost.com/health/2026/04…

Trump’s own words last week: “We can’t take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” This week, he says he’s ready to bail out the United Arab Emirates. The man who ran on America First is telling American families they’re on their own while offering a financial lifeline to a wealthy Gulf state whose sovereign wealth fund has poured billions into his family’s businesses. Can’t afford day care. Can’t afford healthcare. Can’t afford to help families keep the heat on. Can afford a bailout for the UAE. Tell me again who America First was supposed to be for. nytimes.com/2026/04/22/us/…