Schaumburg Area Democrats

09/02/2026

09/02/2026

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September 1, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SEP 1








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Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom. The five right-wing justices concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop the construction of the ballroom, did not have legal standing to sue and that national security considerations came down on the side of construction.
The majority said it was not resolving the issue of whether the project is legal.
It was Chief Justice John Roberts who covered that aspect of the controversy. He wrote in dissent that the project is “likely unlawful.” “The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote. He wrote that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”
Nonetheless, as Josh Gerstein of Politico reported, the project will likely be completed before the question of its legality is resolved.
Trump’s behavior in his second term is a logical outcome of the theory of the “unitary executive.” Under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, those eager to stop Congress from passing legislation that benefited the American people at the expense of businessmen began to argue for the idea that because the president was the head of one of the three branches of the U.S. government, he could not be checked by either of the other two branches: the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts).
On July 1, 2024, the United States Supreme Court, stacked with Trump’s appointees, took this theory to a conclusion that overturned the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.
It decided that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.
This permission structure appears to have convinced Trump he can do whatever he wishes, including rigging elections so he cannot lose.
Yesterday Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exposed what appears to be a plot to steal the 2026 midterm elections.
Blumenthal released a letter he had written to Postmaster General David Steiner calling attention to an official whistleblower report, which he attached to the letter.
It’s eye-popping.
The whistleblower warns that there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” According to the whistleblower, the “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”
The whistleblower says “the administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters. As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”
The complaint continues: “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.” But the rushed IT development of the new system means it “will almost certainly have significant operating problems when released to the public.” The whistleblower notes that multiple officials from the USPS have described the development process for the system as “a sh*t show.”
The whistleblower said that work on the “USPS election ballot mail IT project” began in June 2026 and has continued despite an injunction from a federal court ordering work on it to stop. Normally, it would take “nine months to a year or more” to roll out a project “of this complexity, magnitude, and importance.” Considering the rush and the consequences, the whistleblower wondered “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”
The complaint says: “The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk. Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
Blumenthal noted that the USPS has a restrained role as a mail carrier. It has never before played a gatekeeping function and yet is now building an entirely new system to put itself “in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out.” He called for Postmaster General Steiner to “to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”
Blumenthal demanded Steiner answer no later than Friday whether the USPS has stopped work on the project as ordered by the courts, as well as provide the names of those who worked on the project and the dates they were active. By September 8, he wants to see all records about the project.
Blumenthal told reporters: “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”
The administration’s attack on elections is especially concerning considering the recent suggestions that Trump is spending most of his time on his legacy projects like the ballroom, leaving him largely unaware of what is going on in the administration. Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic reported yesterday that when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll went directly to Trump with his concerns about what Hegseth is doing to the Army, Trump was surprised to learn “how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth” and “expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”
Driscoll resigned yesterday.
As for the plan to sabotage mail-in voting? Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration, which oversees the administration of federal elections, posted: “These whistleblower allegations are extraordinary. If Trump Administration officials knowingly built a system designed to prevent Americans from receiving their ballots, that is not election security. It is a betrayal of our Constitution and the American people.”
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/31/supreme-court-white-house-ballroom-john-roberts-dissent-01057685
https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2026-8-31_usps_whistleblower_letter_final_with_disclosure.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/us/politics/whistle-blower-voting-by-mail.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/driscoll-hegseth-military-resignation/688479/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whistleblower-postal-service-new-mail-ballot-system/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
Bluesky:
morelle.house.gov/post/3muhwh36ory2y
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© 2026 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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08/22/2026

Costco just did something AMAZING...
FIRST: Costco SUED Trump for a refund of his unfair tariffs that placed the economic burden on U.S. consumers.
THEN: The Supreme Court sided with Costco!

NOW: Trump owes over $130 BILLION in tariff refunds to companies like Costco.
Listen, we’re racing to prove that Democrats from your area support Costco in their brave decision to stand up for Trump. As a top local Democrat, you’ve been chosen to take the poll below:
LIVE POLL IN PROGRESS
REGISTERED TO: You
IN: Your area
CONFIRM: Do you have a Costco Membership?
YES >>

NO >>

*PLEASE RESPOND BY 11:59 PM ON 08/21/2026*

Costco is a CHAMPION of their customers. They didn’t crack under the pressure of the Trump administration, and now they’re landed a HUGE win!
We need to prove overwhelming support for Costco, and stand with them against Trump’s disastrous economic policies. Even if you don’t have a Costco membership, it’s critical that we know where local Democrats stand. Please, take the poll:
CONFIRM: Do you have a Costco Membership?
YES >>

NO >>

Thanks for responding,
Team BRL

08/22/2026

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2371809820015667

08/22/2026

08/22/2026

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August 21, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

AUG 22








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On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety. Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”
State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least 200 Black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner’s bid to end enslavement. Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.
But white Virginians, and white folks in neighboring southern states, remained frightened. Turner had been, in their minds, a well-treated, educated enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt. And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways. They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing, and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.
And states across the South passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.
Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.
In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina explained that society needed “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”
But when they organized in the 1850s to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education. In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to Hammond’s “mud-sill” theory “assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible…. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.”
Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed “book-learning,” and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”
When they were in control of the federal government in the 1860s, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor Black and white Americans, apportioning money according to illiteracy rates.
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business messing with education: that process, he said, belonged to the states—which for the next century denied Black people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.
Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and Brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional.
Immediately, white southerners lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Others took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools.
Within years, these segregation academies would dovetail neatly with the religious schools organized after the 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision in which the Supreme Court struck down state-mandated prayer in public schools, and the 1963 Abington School District v. Schempp decision prohibiting teachers from leading students in prayer and Bible reading. The Supreme Court decisions against prayer in schools reinforced the idea that the government opposed “family values,” and fundamentalists pulled their children out of public schools and created alternative religious schools. Fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell began to suggest that public schools should be abolished entirely.
Both of these developments provided constituents for Ronald Reagan’s rise to political power with a message that public employees had gotten too powerful and that public enterprises should be privatized.
After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced: “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the secretary of energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used it to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system remained a top priority for those on the right. In his first term, Trump asked Congress to fund “school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children. These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them.” His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a staunch supporter of school choice and the voucher system; she and her family gave $600,000 to promote school choice ballot laws in the decade before 2017.
The coronavirus pandemic sped up the push to defund public schools as Trump pushed hard to transfer funds from the closed public schools to private schools. That push helped to change the nature of vouchers from ones targeted at students from poor families or students with special needs toward vouchers for everyone. In 2022, Arizona lawmakers passed the biggest school voucher program in the nation.
Advocates claimed that the new program would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide,” but in fact, as Eli Hager of ProPublica explained in 2024, the parents most likely to apply for subsidies already had their children in private school or were homeschooling them, using the vouchers to replace what they had been paying in the past. The state’s spending on vouchers ballooned to $886 million in 2024–2025 as families from wealthier, whiter school districts used vouchers for children who were already in private school. The costs blew a hole in the state’s budget: in 2024, Arizona faced a shortfall of $1.4 billion, forcing the state to slash spending for water infrastructure, road repair, and community colleges.
But voucher programs continued to expand, helped by DeVos’s continued promotion of vouchers after Trump left office. In 2022 a nonprofit she founded poured about $9 million—about $2.5 million of which came from DeVos and her husband—into state elections, backing nearly 200 candidates who would push school vouchers to subsidize private schools with public tax money.
In May 2025, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed into law a voucher program in Texas under which, beginning this fall, families will receive about $10,000 a year for each school-age child to spend at a private school or $2,000 for children being homeschooled. The program is capped at $1 billion in its first two years, but experts predict it will rise to almost $5 billion by 2030.
The measure had faced opposition from Democrats and also Republicans from rural districts who worried about money draining from their public schools. It passed only after national pro-voucher advocates poured money into replacing the Republican state legislators who had stood against a voucher system with pro-voucher candidates. Abbott said that one of those donations, $6 million from Republican megadonor billionaire Jeff Yass of Pennsylvania, was the “largest single donation in Texas history.”
Earlier this month, Jaden Edison and Sneha Dey of the Texas Tribune explained that a report from the state comptroller showed that of the more than 100,000 families participating in the new private school voucher program, most are white and from urban areas. Their families make less than twice the federal poverty level. About 70% were already attending private schools or being homeschooled.
Austin Democratic state senator Sarah Eckhardt said the report “proves this program is a billion-dollar handout to exclusive private schools concentrated in big cities, while public schools across the state are underfunded and closing at an alarming rate.”
In Arizona, opponents of the voucher program tried to put onto the ballot this fall a measure that would have limited eligibility for the program by income and cracked down on the misuse of funds by homeschoolers, who used voucher money for ninja warrior training centers, trampoline parks, pianos, and so on. But voucher supporters sued over the signatures on the ballot measure, and on Tuesday the Arizona Supreme Court decided in their favor, throwing the measure out of this fall’s election.
Elvia Díaz of the Arizona Mirror wrote: “Arizona school vouchers that are pulling $1 billion away from students in K–12 public schools are here to stay, whether we like it or not.” She noted that “the real challenge is a public school system left underfunded and a voucher system left unchecked.”
In 1831, southern lawmakers tried to create a white nation by making it a crime to educate Black Americans. In 2026 the intent to exclude certain Americans from participation in the Enlightenment principles that undergird the nation remains the same, only less explicit.
—
Notes:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h500t.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/in-southern-towns-segregation-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/nation-risk-and-re-segregation-schools
https://progressive.org/magazine/private-school-vouchers-levin/
https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2021/05/07/tracking-the-growing-cost-to-taxpayers-of-private-school-vouchers/
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona-education/2021/08/17/arizona-gov-doug-ducey-offers-incentives-reject-mask-mandates/8169357002/
https://www.courthousenews.com/devos-family-donated-600k-school-choice-ballot-efforts/
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/12/07/504451460/school-choice-101-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-does-it-work
https://www.npr.org/2017/02/28/516717981/watch-live-trump-addresses-joint-session-of-congress
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001297849
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/28/trump-private-schools-pandemic-451757
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/12/07/504451460/school-choice-101-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-does-it-work
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/betsy-devos-american-federation-children-private-school-rcna76307
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/16/greg-abbott-jeff-yass-camapaign-donation/
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/03/texas-school-vouchers-greg-abbott-signs/
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/esa-students-texas-school-vouchers-first-year/
https://www.sosaznetwork.org/2026/a-case-study-on-arizonas-universal-esa-voucher-program/
https://www.propublica.org/article/arizona-school-vouchers-budget-meltdown
https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/arizona-empowerment-scholarships-what-304-million-bought
https://azmirror.com/2026/08/18/school-voucher-regulation-measure-prop-212-is-pushed-off-the-ballot/
https://azmirror.com/2026/08/20/arizona-voters-wont-get-to-rein-in-vouchers-dont-tell-us-they-all-love-it/
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/01/texas-voucher-applications-demographics/
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Of the almost 275,000 students who applied for vouchers, 45% are white and 75% attended a private school or home-school in 2024-25, final numbers show.