Sports Betting Giants Join Unprecedented Corporate Efforts to Buy 2026 Midterms

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Kansas City Prepares to Host FIFA World Cup 2026

A close-up view of a billboard advertising DraftKings ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2026 on June 10, 2026, in Kansas City, Missouri.

 (Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)

Democratic Rep. Summer Lee said the new spending was yet another reason “it’s time to get money out of politics.”

Stephen Prager

Jul 29, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

As corporations spend record sums to influence this November’s elections, new campaign finance data shows a powerful new interest fueling the trend: sports gambling companies.

FanDuel, DraftKings, and others in the sports betting industry have spent $72 million seeking to influence the upcoming election cycle, according to a report from Reuters on Tuesday.

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The industry’s historic spending blitz faces growing scrutiny from state and federal lawmakers, and seeks to protect its turf against rising competitors in the prediction market business, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, which are financially tied to the Trump administration.

Sports gambling companies have become the third-largest corporate election donor in the country during this cycle behind just the technology and cryptocurrency sectors, according to a June report by the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen. These two industries have spent over $100 million promoting their interests in the upcoming midterms.

That same report found that the 2026 election cycle has been influenced by more corporate money than any since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for companies to spend unlimited sums promoting their preferred candidates via super political action committees (PACs).

These groups are not legally allowed to coordinate with candidates or give them money directly, but are allowed to advocate on their behalf, sometimes spending tens of millions of dollars to run ads aimed at influencing a single race.

As of last month, the report found that corporations have spent $517 million, mainly through super PACs, to influence the 2026 election, accounting for nearly one-third of all corporate election spending since 2010.

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According to Reuters, major sportsbooks have channeled their money into the super PAC Win For America, which launched last year, and distributed it to affiliated PACs: the Republican-focused American Conservative Fund and the Democrat-focused American Future.

DraftKings has given at least $34 million to Win for America, FanDuel has given at least $27 million, and Fanatics and the UK-based bet365 have given $5.5 million apiece.

Separately, DraftKings, FanDuel, Fanatics, and BetMGM created the Sports Betting Alliance in 2021 to lobby Congress and state legislatures.

Since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal law barring sports betting in most states, at least 39 states, as well as the District of Columbia, have legalized it in some form.

While crypto and tech have directed more attention to federal races, the battles over sports betting are raging mostly at the state level, and that’s where most of Win for America’s focus is going.

According to Reuters:

The money’s impact is already evident in some state races.

Win for America spent more than $12 million in Georgia state races through two smaller PACs—Republican-focused American Conservative Fund and Democrat-focused American Future—as the legislature there weighs bills that would legalize gambling, state campaign finance records show.

The money went into 34 legislative races ahead of the primary. All but two of the candidates supported by the industry won, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in May…

Win for America is also spending heavily on races in Pennsylvania, where there was a push to raise taxes on the online sports betting industry to boost state aid for public transportation, election records show.

Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who introduced legislation in May that would apply the same contribution limits to super PACs that already apply to direct donations, argued that the huge sums spent by the sports betting industry were yet another reason that “it’s time to get money out of politics.”

“Crypto. Big tech. Now big sports betting,” she wrote on social media Wednesday. “Another industry pouring tens of millions into our elections to protect its profits. Democracy shouldn’t be auctioned off to the highest bidder.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Stephen Prager

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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‘Disgusting’: Dem Senator Says ICE Threatened to Beat Seattle Business Owner Unless He Signed Deportation Form

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'Disgusting': Dem Senator Says ICE Threatened to Beat Seattle Business Owner Unless He Signed Deportation Form

A masked US Customs and Border Protection agent is seen as residents confront law enforcement in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, on on October 4, 2025.

 (Photo by Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

“What ICE is doing is illegal and disturbing.”

Brad Reed

Jul 29, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Sen. Patty Murray on Wednesday accused federal immigration enforcement officials of attempting to coerce a longtime Seattle resident to sign a voluntary deportation form using threats of violence.

In a video posted on social media, Murray (D-Wash.) delivered an update on Eduardo Aguirre Esparza, who was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last week.

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The senator said that Aguirre Esparza, whom she described as “a local Seattle small business owner with no criminal history” and the husband of a US citizen, was taken to an ICE office in Tukwila, Washington, where he was held in a room for 10 hours.

“He was surrounded by 20 ICE agents, who were pressuring him to sign a voluntary departure,” said Murray. “They physically pushed him and threatened to beat him up if he didn’t sign it. This is disgusting.”

Murray said that she has learned that there are security cameras in the room where Aguirre Esparza was being held, and she demanded that ICE hand over any footage in its possession.

“What ICE is doing is illegal and disturbing,” Murray emphasized. “Eduardo is now being held in Texas, away from his family and his lawyers. I am demanding that [the US Department of Homeland Security] return Eduardo to Washington state now so he can get the due process everyone should expect in America.”

In a separate statement, Murray said that Aguirre Esparza has “deep ties to our local community” and “was working hard to pursue a legal pathway to lawful permanent residence.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, commented that Murray’s account of Aguirre Esparza’s detention “is a good reminder that some ‘voluntary’ departures people sign while detained by ICE are the product of coercion.”

“The worst incidents I’ve heard of over the years involve agents grabbing a person’s hands and forcing them to sign a piece of paper they can’t read,” Reichlin-Melnick added. “It’s a ‘voluntary’ removal.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Brad Reed

Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Is SF’s Mission District Still Gentrified?

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by Randy Shaw on July 27, 2026 (BeyondChron.org)

A 16th & Mission Miracle

New Affordable Housing Reopens the Mission

Since the late 1970’s a major San Francisco story line has been the Mission’s gentrification. It’s a classic case of the working and middle-class displaced by more affluent residents. Valencia Street’s upscale restaurants, new condos on closed industrial spaces, and tenants facing speculator evictions symbolized the Mission’s transformation.

But today’s Mission offers a different story. While rents on private market rental units and home sales still price out the working and middle-class, a massive amount of new affordable housing has re-opened the Mission to the non-rich. And this expansion of affordable housing is likely to continue.

Which raises the question: can the Mission’s pre-1980 social and economic diversity return?

Three Gentrifying Waves

When I moved to San Francisco in 1979 young activists were congregating in the Haight-Ashbury and Mission. We realized we couldn’t get an apartment in the Haight when a manager asked us if we had nice furniture. He said the owner wanted to rent to tenants with quality furnishings because he was planning on selling the place. The Haight-Asbury’s gentrification was in full swing. This occurred without any new, “luxury” housing promoting this trend.

The Mission’s post-1979 gentrification transformed Dolores Street and much of Guerrero. Guerrero became the Mission’s new western border.

The next big gentrification wave that hit the Mission came with the 1995 dot com boom. Because the Mission was located near highways leading to Silicon Valley, it became a popular choice for affluent tech workers.  Its two BART stations also made the Mission a convenient home for downtown workers. Rents skyrocketed on vacant units. Bad faith speculator evictions were rampant.

The dot com boom priced out a countless number of Latino families who sought to live in the Mission.  Latino families could not afford Mission rents even when they pooled incomes for overcrowded units. Many moved to the Tenderloin. This brought the neighborhood a major influx of immigrant Latinos for the first time. In 2005 the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which I head, launched the La Voz Latina organization to serve their needs.

The second tech boom of 2011-2019 seemed to finalize the Mission’s gentrification. It appeared that available apartments and houses would be limited to the affluent. But activists convinced Mayor Lee to target most the city’s affordable housing funds to the Mission. This huge victory was obscured by the area’s ongoing transformation.

Massive Affordable Housing

Mayor Ed Lee’s Mission Action Plan 2020, approved by the Planning Commission in 2017, projected roughly 1000 new affordable units in the neighborhood. Many were skeptical the city could reach that goal. But Mission Housing has since built 385 units in the Mission. It has another 136 are under construction and work will begin on another 225 next year. That’s 746 units from one nonprofit builder.

When you add units built by MEDA, inclusionary units, and those acquired through the Small Sites program (also adopted by Mayor Lee), the number of affordable units in the Mission since 2017 easily exceeds the 1000 goal.  Meanwhile, new market rate housing in the neighborhood has largely stopped as builders cannot get financing.

Affordable projects have their own financing pools, and continue to get built.

The Mission also has several SRO hotels leased or owned by nonprofits. The Tenderloin Housing Clinic alone leases roughly 450 units in four hotels. The city’s master-leasing program enables very low-income residents to live in the Mission. In addition to its apartments Mission Housing owns over 170 SRO units in the neighborhood.

Defeating the Monster

The dramatic reversal in the Mission’s fortunes is perhaps best captured by the fate of the proposed “Monster in the Mission” on the northeast corner of 16th and Mission. Our story on the October 4, 2014 march and protest against the project lays out what was happening to the community’s affordability.

Our 2015 story reported on the project’s collapse. As reporter Carl Finamore put it, “A political earthquake just hit San Francisco when, amid much controversy, plans for construction of 331 high-end rentals and deluxe condos in the heart of San Francisco’s working-class Mission District collapsed.”

But the project was revived in 2017.We then wrote about a rally by the over 100 groups in the Plaza 16 coalition opposing the project. The opposition prevailed.

Now the site will be nonprofit affordable housing. Construction is underway on a nine story permanent supportive housing project named “La Maravilla.” A joint project of Mission Housing and Mission Economic Development Agency, the 100+ unit project is a testament to activists demands to preserve the Mission’s affordability. There are few more stark examples of the reversal of the gentrification process. This affordable project will hopefully become the Mission’s new story line.

Translated, “La Maravilla” means the wonder or marvel. The conversion of the 16th and Mission site to affordable housing is truly amazing.

The Mission’s Other Challenges

The Mission has always been atypical of other gentrified neighborhoods. Drug activities and illegal vending at 16th and Mission BART station have long occurred. But they have gotten much worse. Drug activities have also expanded to neighborhood parks. Mission Street between 16th and 20th has a lot more vacant storefronts than before Covid.

The Mission’s sidewalk vendors used to be primarily women selling tacos and used clothing. Today, the 16th Street BART station offers the city’s biggest market for stolen goods. The new state law that was supposed to help crackdown on illegal vending is not working in San Francisco.

Valencia Street has rebounded from its Covid-era downturn. But the media has long misused Valencia to “prove” the Mission’s gentrification while ignoring downscale Mission Street. Valencia Street has always been an outlier.

Activist tenant and community resistance have fueled the Mission’s reopening. Their success sends a message to those in other neighborhoods not to give up the affordability fight.

Randy Shaw offers a more complete account of San Francisco gentrification in Generation Priced Out.

Randy Shaw

Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.

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FEMA’s New Mission: Domestic Terrorism

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The disaster response agency forgets the weather, embraces pre-crime

Ken Klippenstein Jul 28, 2026

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, often criticized for its inadequate response to natural disasters like wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, has been assigned a new mission: “domestic terrorism.”

Now FEMA is shelling out grant money to state and local authorities to build up capacity to carry out pre-crime operations against “organized political violence,” as one FEMA information bulletin I obtained says.

The bulletin, dated July 9, instructs local authorities to prioritize “domestic terrorism” in their grant applications. Titled “Implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7…,” the document echoes President Trump’s emphasis on rooting out suspected domestic terrorists before an attack takes place.

To head off these attacks, the bulletin tells states what to buy: training to spot “social media-based indicators,” analysts to monitor “online behaviors and digital footprints,” and teams for “managing persons of concern whose behavior indicates a potential trajectory toward domestic terrorism.”

FEMA Information Bulletin273KB ∙ PDF file
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Some form of the word indicator — indicators, indicative, indicates — appears ten times in the eight-page FEMA bulletin. It is a favorite euphemism of law enforcement because it obscures what’s really happening: pre-crime. Indicators are something a person said or did that an officer has been trained to read as a sign of a crime that hasn’t happened and may never happen. Under this approach, the old requirement that evidence of a crime come first before any investigation is replaced by a forecast. It’s vibes-based law enforcement, divination but with the imprimatur of national security respectability. And while it’s mostly only been used against real, organized foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS, it’s now being deployed against Americans.

To give you a sense of just how central pre-crime is to this approach, consider the following grant proposals the FEMA bulletin calls for:

  • Learn “the latest tactics and trends used by domestic terrorism actors in order to recognize indicators prior to an attack.”
  • “Prepare and train communities to identify and report threatening or concerning behaviors that may be indicative of larger threat plotting and/or activity.”
  • Conduct “Surveillance and counter-surveillance training to detect pre-operational casing and hostile surveillance of domestic targets.”

As for why any state or local government would entangle itself in such fraught activities, a second document I obtained — from FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security — explains why. It contains a not-so-subtle warning to authorities that don’t adhere to the new domestic terrorism priority, saying:

“Failure to meet NPA [National Priority Areas] spending requirements will result in a hold on affected funds until compliance issues are resolved.”

Screenshot of Homeland Security Grant Program Notice

Homeland Security Grant Program Notice1.29MB ∙ PDF file
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That second document, a Department of Homeland Security grant program notice, is a $1 billion shopping list of available federal money. But there’s a catch: thirty-five percent, it says, must go to terrorism prevention. Another thirty percent is allocated for five designated Department of Homeland Security priorities:

  1. “Supporting Border Crisis Response,”
  2. “Enhancing Election Security”
  3. “Supporting Homeland Security Task Forces and Fusion Centers”
  4. “Enhancing the Protection of Soft Targets/Crowded Places”
  5. “Enhancing Cybersecurity”

The priorities track the president’s own preoccupations. Just this month, Trump gave a primetime address claiming China had compromised the 2020 election. The “border crisis response” priority, meanwhile, points states straight at ICE’s 287(g) program — which, as I’ve reported, turns local law enforcement into bounty hunters by paying them to do immigration enforcement, including bonuses tied to how many people they find. The “Homeland Security Task Forces” priority refers the new federal-local strike forces Trump created by executive order on his first day back in office to hunt cartels and enforce immigration laws.

And the “crowded places” priority has its own ghost: the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, shot in front of a crowd at a university event last September.

That murder is what precipitated all of this. Three days after signing an executive order declaring “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, Trump issued NSPM-7 on September 25, 2025 — a national security order that opens with a reference to Kirk’s murder and builds a counterterrorism program meant to prevent the next one.

NSPM-7 asserts that political violence in America “does not emerge organically” but is the product of “sophisticated, organized campaigns.” It identifies the common threads it wants investigated: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Until now, NSPM-7 has largely pointed at federal machinery, like the FBI and IRS. But a brief section toward the bottom of NSPM-7 reaches down to your county sheriff. It orders the homeland security secretary to develop grant programs to pay local law enforcement to go after domestic terrorism.

Screenshot of NSPM-7 order

Washington knew this would happen, long before Trump entered the White House.

FEMA was created in 1979 as an independent agency. But after the 9/11 attacks, in 2003 it was folded into the new counterterrorism-focused Department of Homeland Security. FEMA’s preparedness functions and grant programs were pulled out and scattered across the department.

That September, the undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response sent Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge a seven-page memo warning that the reorganization would cripple America’s ability to respond to disasters. He was overruled. Two years later came Katrina.

By October 2012, a bipartisan congressional investigation reported that the Department of Homeland Security could not say how much it had spent on fusion centers (the state and regional intelligence hubs, built after 9/11, where local police, federal agents and analysts pool information). DHS’s own estimates ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The intelligence coming out of them was “of uneven quality,” the Senate concluded, finding it “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties.”

Reviewing thirteen months of fusion center reporting, investigators found nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat and no contribution to disrupting an active plot. Of 610 reports, 188 were never published, many because they lacked useful information or risked violating civil liberties protections. Among the reports flagged: a Muslim community group’s book recommendations, parenting advice, and a motorcycle club’s pamphlet advising members to be polite to police during traffic stops.

Fourteen years later, the machine is being handed a mandate to watch digital footprints for indicators of anti-American sentiment.

FEMA, meanwhile, has absorbed roughly a 14 percent workforce reduction since January 2025 while managing more than 300,000 projects across more than 600 open disaster declarations.

Even in my little corner of the world, in Wisconsin, I can see how desperately the country needs a functioning disaster response agency. Yesterday afternoon a tornado came through the Fox Valley, about a hundred miles northeast of where I live. The National Weather Service issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation warning, a designation it saves for the worst of them. Video of what it left behind is heartbreaking and all over social media today: homes torn open, everything inside gone.

I’m sure the people who lost their homes will be relieved to know that they’re safe from domestic terrorism.

What is needed now is the thing FEMA was actually created to do, done by a civil agency neither militarized nor given over to an anti-political terrorism agenda. Instead we see a climate-change denying, domestic terrorism-obsessed administration creating its own disaster, with a do-nothing Congress standing idly by.

It’s insane how little media coverage stories like these get. Help me do more of them by becoming a paid subscriber (or chipping in via my GoFundMe here).

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Book: “Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy”

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Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy

Randi Weingarten

America’s most influential teacher’s union leader tells the anti-fascist history of public education, warning that American teachers today are under a new fascist assault–from book bans to culture wars and organized groups of “concerned” parents dictating what can be taught.

In 1940, as Hitler was gaining power and territory across Europe, a Nazi puppet government was put in power in Norway.  Teachers were among the first to publicly resist their rule—and they were winning. Frustrated that their attempts to recruit teachers into the party failed, the Nazis barged into Norway’s schools, beating teachers and students. When they still refused to submit, the Nazis closed the schools.  But the teachers figured out how to teach in private.  Increasingly incensed, the fascist government sent 1,300 teachers to concentration camps and 500 others to forced labor camps.  Even there, teachers kept teaching–and students kept learning how to think for themselves.  

As the head of one of the largest teacher’s union in the country, Randi Weingarten sees firsthand how today’s teachers are guarding American democracy against the threat of fascism. Drawing on history and decades of experience in the American public school system, she argues that teaching students to think critically is the key to defeating would-be dictators. She encourages teachers to continue promoting difference and healthy debate in their classrooms, and warns against censorship and complacency, looking to history to warn us all about what can happen if we devalue teachers and public schools.

Part history and part call to arms, Why Fascists Fear Teachers is a manifesto for American teachers from the author that Trump-appointed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once called “the most dangerous person in the world.” This deeply researched, urgent book from teachers’ greatest champion is necessary reading for our times.

(Goodreads.com)

By 22-Point Margin, Americans Think Netanyahu Should Be Arrested on US Soil

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Trump-Netanyahu meeting in Washington DC

US President Donald Trump meets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at White House in Washington DC on July 28, 2026. 

(Photo by Maâayan Toaf GPO/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“Prime Minister Netanyahu has a warrant out for his arrest for committing war crimes,” said one Democratic senator. “He should be nowhere close to the Oval Office of the president of the United States.”

Julia Conley

Jul 28, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

As with his proposals for government-run grocery stores and a tax on the second homes owned by rich New Yorkers, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an accused war criminal, to be arrested on US soil sparked outrage among Trump administration officials and others on the right.

And just like his other proposals, despite the claims that the mayor’s comments displayed “extreme views” and were dangerous and divisive, Mamdani’s demand that the US execute the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Netanyahu is broadly supported by the public.

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A poll taken by The Economist/YouGov between July 25-27 found that 49% of Americans believe the US should arrest Netanyahu, who arrived in Washington, DC on Monday to meet with President Donald Trump and attend the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) funeral.

Just 27% of respondents said the US should not execute the warrant, while 23% were unsure, according to the poll released Tuesday.

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Nearly a quarter of people who voted for Trump in 2024 agreed with Mamdani, as well as 21% of people who identified themselves as supporters of Trump’s MAGA political movement. The view was also held by 68% of Democrats and 55% of Independents, as well as 24% of Republican voters.

Forty-seven percent of respondents also said they believed Netanyahu was guilty of war crimes.

With Americans increasingly disapproving of Israel and the powerful pro-Israel lobby, sympathizing with Palestinians, and now backing the arrest of Netanyahu by an “overwhelming margin,” said the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Trump is nevertheless “welcoming him back into the White House to lobby for more impunity, more war, and more of our tax dollars going to Israel.”

Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus wrote that while nearly half of Americans believe the US should execute the ICC warrant, “we’ve got prominent Democrats and Republicans and their online supporters calling Mamdani a terrorist for wanting to do that very thing.”

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, are among those who have condemned Mamdani’s demand for Netanyahu’s arrest. Waltz said the US would not execute the warrant because the country, like Israel, is not party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, and does not recognize the court’s authority. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has threatened to “dismantle” the court.

On Tuesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) denounced the White House for hosting the Israeli prime minister while Israel is “wrongfully detaining an American citizen,” 20-year-old student Sama Safi, who was detained in the West Bank on June 2.

“As I speak, we’ve not been able to get justice for American citizens killed by violent Israeli settlers or by the IDF,” Van Hollen continued, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “As I speak, Palestinians in the West Bank are under violent assault by Israeli terrorists who are terrorizing Palestinian villages, lighting mosques on fire, torching cars, pushing Palestinians off their lands, killing innocent Palestinians.”

“When Donald Trump meets with Bibi Netanyahu, things don’t go well for the United States of America,” said the senator, noting that five months after Israel convinced the administration to launch an “illegal war against Iran,” American soldiers are being killed and injured in the region.

“On top of all that,” said Van Hollen, “Prime Minister Netanyahu has a warrant out for his arrest for committing war crimes. He should be nowhere close to the Oval Office of the president of the United States.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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After 43 Days of Silence, Kentucky’s Dem Governor Calls on McConnell to Prove He Can Serve or Resign

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Mitch McConnell 4/30/26

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) makes his way to a vote in the US Capitol on April 30, 2026. 

(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

“Kentuckians are just asking you to be honest,” said Gov. Andy Beshear.

Stephen Prager

Jul 28, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

After weeks of sitting on his hands, Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear issued an ultimatum to the state’s absentee Sen. Mitch McConnell on Tuesday: Prove you’re alive and can do the job or step down.

Since he was hospitalized on June 14, McConnell’s 4.6 million constituents have been left with virtually no answers about the 84-year-old Republican’s condition, leading to rampant speculation of a cover-up.

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Some even pondered whether the former Senate Republican leader may have shuffled off this mortal coil altogether, but that his staff was keeping mum until the presumptive August 3 deadline to avoid a special election that could lead to suboptimal results for the GOP.

Beshear, who has the power to call a special election to fill vacant Senate seats, had chastized McConnell and his staff for weeks for the lack of transparency about his condition. But he continued to balk about taking action, even as members of his party begged him to “do something.”

That is, until Monday, when McConnell’s office released an update from his physician, which stated that the senator was undergoing “a strenuous course of physical therapy and rehabilitation” but was “not yet medically cleared to leave the rehab facility and return to the office.”

Beshear finally sent McConnell a letter demanding proof of life.

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“It has now been 43 days since news of your hospitalization,” Beshear wrote. “During that time you have cast zero votes, engaged in no official activities, and aside from two photos and corresponding statements, have made no effort to communicate with your Kentucky constituents or the nation.”

The governor noted that the physician’s statement still provided no details about the seven-term senator’s actual condition, “including whether you can speak, reason, or carry out your duties as a senator.”

“As governor of the state you serve,” Beshear continued, “I am calling on you to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”

Beshear said he’d sent the same letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who took over McConnell’s longtime role in 2025 before he announced his plans not to run for reelection.

Beshear said if McConnell still proved “unwilling” to demonstrate his capacity to serve, he’d insist Thune—one of the few people who claim to have spoken to McConnell since he vanished from public view—fully investigate his condition.

“All of this speculation and even this letter could have been avoided with a minimal amount of transparency,” Beshear concluded. “Kentuckians are just asking you to be honest.”

While most states allow governors to name an interim replacement when senators die or get expelled, Kentucky is one of just four exceptions, ironically thanks to some classic McConnell machinations.

In 2021, the then-Senate minority leader pressured Kentucky’s GOP-controlled Legislature to restrict Beshear’s power to unilaterally name a replacement, instead requiring him to pick from a list approved by the departing senator’s party.

Three years later, Kentucky abolished temporary replacements entirely, meaning the most Beshear could do was call a special election.

That said, the law has not yet been tested by a vacancy, and Beshear has said he’d be willing to challenge its constitutionality in hopes of naming the replacement himself, adding a 48th member to the chamber’s Democratic caucus, at least until January, when it would be filled by whoever wins McConnell’s seat during November’s midterms.

While Kentucky is a consistently red state and has not elected a Democratic senator since 1992, Beshear’s multiple terms as governor show it is capable of electing Democrats in statewide races, and could be more likely to do so in what is projected to be a blue wave year.

But Kentucky’s law also says special elections must be called at least 63 days before they occur. This gives Republicans ample incentive to keep McConnell as Schrödinger’s senator until at least August 3, after which a replacement would not be able to take office until the new Senate term begins in January.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Beshear argued that McConnell’s absence for the rest of the year “might not be a bad thing.”

“McConnell hasn’t been there to vote on the SAVE Act, which would tear voting rights away. He hasn’t been there to vote to support this war on Iran that this president started and shouldn’t be continuing,” Beshear said. “Not having Mitch McConnell show up isn’t necessarily a bad thing because he certainly doesn’t show up to help the American people.”

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Stephen Prager

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Book: “Considerations on Representative Government”

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Considerations on Representative Government

John Stuart Mill

In this powerful work, John Stuart Mill sets forth representative government as the most sensible compromise between unreflective rule by the masses and the self-indulgence of the few. The reader may sense that Mill is being pulled in opposing steadfastly committed to majority rule with minority rights while at the same time being just enough of an aristocrat to believe that the masses need examplars to emulate.On Representative Government is one of the most compelling political essays of the 19th century.

About the author

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham’s.

(Goodreads.com)

Book: “This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy”

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  • This Is The Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy

This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy

by Ben Wikler (Author)  Format: Hardcover

“Ben Wikler is one of the most strategic and respected leaders of his generation. If we do what this book says, we will win.”―Nancy Pelosi

From the most successful Democratic operative of the last decade, a revelatory account of what you―yes, you―can do to defeat Trumpism.

If you are looking at the spiraling crisis of American politics in the Trump era and wondering how the hell we get out of this mess, This Is the Plan is the book you’ve been waiting for.

Ben Wikler led the Democratic Party of Wisconsin to a string of improbable victories in a state with a political system so rigged that it was dubbed a “democracy desert”―which is, coincidentally, Trump’s goal for the whole country.

Now, in This Is the Plan, Wikler distills lessons from the front lines in America’s most closely divided state to map out a comprehensive plan to dictator-proof American government, defeat MAGA at every level of the ballot, and build a future of democracy, opportunity, and freedom for all.

It will be a blast. The plan is to, as he writes, “have fun storming the castle―in a civil, metaphorical, and non-January-6th-y way.”

Drawing on decades of organizing, from local races (including a race for county coroner that hinged on the issue of zombification) to presidential showdowns, Wikler brings us behind the scenes to explore the hidden structures of power that shape our politics and our lives, and takes us into the art and science of winning elections. As he details a people-powered path out of the political wilderness, Wikler reveals what you personally can do to move the needle.

This Is the Plan reveals, year by year and step by step, a vision not only to end America’s collapse into authoritarianism but also to reconnect us to our neighbors―and, fighting side by side for democracy, to build meaning, community, and joy.

(Amazon.com)