Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat might not be his to keep much longer, with Kentucky’s Democratic governor is looking hard at ways to replace him. Donald Trump is hijacking the airwaves to re-litigate the election he lost six years ago. A new report shows federal and local law enforcement have blinded and seriously injured protesters across the country with crowd control weapons. And New York just became the first state in the country to ban the construction of massive AI data centers, over concerns that they’ll overload the power grid and drain water supplies.
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Kentucky Governor May Override GOP Legislature’s Restrictions to Replace McConnell
Two-term Kentucky Democratic Governor Andy Beshear says he’s seriously exploring all legal options to replace Republican Senator Mitch McConnell if the 84 year-old can’t return to work. Beshear told MS NOW that he’s exploring his authority as governor to act in the event of a sudden vacancy.
Kentucky’s Republican legislature, which can override Beshear’s vetoes with its supermajority, did their best to curb his powers. They previously passed two laws designed to box out the term-limited Democrat. First, they tried forcing the governor to pick a potential Senate replacement from a list of three names approved by Republican lawmakers. When that didn’t stick, they passed a second law saying Beshear can’t fill the seat at all and instead has to call a special election.
But Governor Beshear thinks he’s found a way around Republicans in the state capitol. One provision in the Kentucky constitution gives the governor authority to appoint state officers when a vacancy opens up. What remains unclear is whether that language extends to vacant federal offices as well. Beshear observed that before Kentucky ever had a law spelling out the process, multiple governors made similar appointments anyway, presumably relying on that same language in the state constitution.
This conversation is increasingly noteworthy given that McConnell’s team released a so-called “proof of life” photo, showing the 84-year-old wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, sitting in a hospital bed next to his wife, Elaine Chao, holding a copy of last Sunday’s newspaper. It’s been roughly a month since McConnell was found unconscious at his D.C. home and needed CPR.
In a statement released alongside the photo, McConnell said he fell, didn’t break any bones, didn’t suffer a concussion, and didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. He added there were no tumors or hemorrhages, but that he was briefly rendered unconscious and hospitalized. He also confirmed he’s been dealing with a mild case of pneumonia. Keep in mind that the 911 audio revealed paramedics mentioning cardiac arrest, meaning they couldn’t detect a pulse.
For weeks, McConnell’s staff, led by his aide Terry Alan Carmack, has stonewalled reporters with the same line about the senator “appreciating the outpouring of support.” There has yet to be any real update on his condition, his treatment, or whether he’ll actually be able to return to the Senate.
Beshear is also stating for the record that one staged photo isn’t enough. He wants to see McConnell actually speaking in an interview or a video, and prove he can actually do the job Kentuckians elected him to do. Until that happens, expect Beshear to keep looking hard at that constitutional provision.
And remember why the Seventeenth Amendment exists in the first place. Americans ratified it in 1913 because they’d had enough of party bosses in state legislatures cutting backroom deals over who got to sit in the Senate. Kentucky Republicans writing two laws to keep the voters’ twice-elected governor away from this decision is precisely the old corruption that amendment was designed to bury. That seat doesn’t belong to a supermajority in Frankfort. It belongs to the people of Kentucky.
Trump Plans to Hijack Airwaves to Air Grievances About 2020 Election
President Donald Trump is demanding a primetime TV slot this Thursday night to drag all of us back to 2020 all over again. Trump announced his plans for a national 9 PM address on Truth Social, writing about himself in the third person. He didn’t go into detail, but reporting suggests he’ll roll out a “potpourri” of topics, including alleged foreign interference in the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
It’s not clear yet which countries Trump plans to name, or whether this is just a rehash of foreign interference attempts intelligence officials already investigated years ago. Russia did try to damage Biden back in 2020 by pushing bogus claims to U.S. media and officials, some of them close to the Trump administration. Iranian-linked hackers also tried and failed to compromise Trump’s 2020 campaign. And an official in the first Trump administration warned in 2019 that China was trying to influence public opinion in the U.S.
But none of that backs up the narrative Trump and his allies have clung to for six years running. Rudy Giuliani built an entire harebrained conspiracy theory around Dominion Voting Systems, falsely claiming the voting machine company’s software was built with help from a dead Venezuelan president and Chinese officials. Giuliani was eventually disbarred for peddling lies.
Trump has yet to accept that he lost the 2020 election. Remember, this is the same president who got impeached for pressuring Ukraine to make up dirt about Joe Biden ahead of that election in exchange for financial support. Whatever claims Trump may make Thursday night, don’t expect anything that changes the basic fact that he lost fair and square to Joe Biden.
When John Adams lost to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, in an election every bit as bitter as anything we’ve seen, he got in a carriage and went home to Massachusetts. It hurt him deeply, and he still did it, because he understood the republic mattered more than his pride. Every defeated president for over two centuries honored what Adams started. Six years of refusing to do what Adams did isn’t a grievance. It’s a slow-motion assault on the one tradition that separates a democracy from everything else.
New Report Reveals Significant Injuries to ICE Protesters at Hands of Law Enforcement
A disturbing new report shows that crowd control weapons that both federal and local law enforcement deployed against anti-ICE protesters have caused serious, lasting damage to Americans, including blindings and traumatic brain injuries. Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley documented 412 verified cases of these so-called “less lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tear gas and pepper spray being misused between June 2025 and May 2026, resulting in at least 203 confirmed injuries.
Researchers say the real number is almost certainly higher, since things like chemical injuries, chronic pain and hearing loss are harder to verify through visual evidence.
This is still happening. Protesters assembled outside the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, this spring in May and June with detainees who were on a sustained hunger strike. During the unrest, ICE officers pepper sprayed New Jersey Democratic Senator Andy Kim, which made national headlines and led to even larger demonstrations against Trump’s ICE crackdown. In the days that followed, officials used batons, shields, and tear gas on protesters, arresting dozens of people.
The lead author of the report, Dr. Rohini Haar, says she was inspired to dig into the hard data after seeing news of a pastor in Oakland getting shot in the face with a chemical weapon by a federal agent. Researchers classified “misuse” based on whether protected groups like journalists and healthcare workers were targeted, whether vulnerable people like children and the elderly were singled out, and whether weapons were used in ways that violated manufacturer guidelines, like firing at someone’s head or using them at point-blank range.
A separate ProPublica investigation found at least 79 children were harmed by tear gas or pepper spray during ICE operations. Nationally, Department of Homeland Security sub-agencies like ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection were responsible for 64 percent of the documented incidents of misuse. Local law enforcement played a role too, especially in cities like Los Angeles.
Researchers also found a sharp jump in incidents that tracked directly with former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino’s arrival in Minneapolis this winter, who led the aggressive ICE crackdown there before getting pulled from his post and reassigned after two U.S. citizens were killed. Bovino eventually retired and criticized the Trump administration for not going far enough.
Since Trump’s mass deportation operations began in January 2025, at least nine people have died during federal immigration enforcement operations according to the Associated Press. Two more deaths came just this month in a six-day span in botj Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine.
We’ve seen this movie before. On March 7th, 1965, state troopers met peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma with tear gas and clubs, and Americans watching those images on their televisions were so sickened that Congress passed the Voting Rights Act five months later. The historians quoted in this reporting are drawing that comparison for a reason. The country knew what to do the last time it saw its own government gassing citizens in the street. The question now is whether we still do.
New York Bans Data Center Construction
New York will soon become the first state in the country to hit pause on new hyperscale data centers. These are the massive server farms that guzzle unprecedented amounts of electricity and water to power artificial intelligence. Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul is set to sign an executive order freezing state permits for these facilities for at least a year while regulators write new rules covering energy use, water consumption and environmental impact.
Hochul says data center development is threatening to increase New Yorkers’ utility bills and drain water resources for ordinary residents, and argues it’s her job to step in. Her order halts new permits and forces state regulators to actually study what these facilities are doing to the grid before any of them actually get built.
Tech companies are livid. They argue moratoriums like this one harm local job creation and give China an edge in the AI race. Maine tried something similar earlier this year, but Democratic Governor Janet Mills vetoed it. Roughly a dozen states have floated similar moratoriums without much progress, although some municipal and county governments have passed their own temporary bans.
This is a major issue taking place in the middle of a tight New York governor’s race. Hochul’s Republican challenger, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, is against a statewide freeze and wants local governments to be the ultimate deciders regarding new data center construction. The New York State Assembly already passed its own moratorium, but Hochul’s office said it was too complicated and opted for an executive order that takes effect the moment she signs it. New York hasn’t yet been a hub for data centers, but that’s exactly why Hochul wants rules in place before it plays host to any in the future.
This is an old American fight wearing new clothes. In 1935, Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act because a handful of holding companies had turned the electric grid into their private piggy bank, jacking up rates on ordinary families while answering to nobody. FDR called them out by name and broke them up. The grid belongs to the people who pay for it and depend on it, and when the richest companies on earth want to drink it dry, somebody in public office has to say the public comes first. That’s what Hochul just did.
That’s your Monday morning rundown. Mitch McConnell’s ailing health has Kentucky’s governor actively exploring how to replace him. Donald Trump is commandeering primetime TV to push his own debunked conspiracy theories about an election he already lost. Federal and local police have caused documented, lasting damage to protesters by abusing crowd control weapons. And New York just took the boldest state-level action anywhere in the country to rein in Silicon Valley’s runaway power and water demands.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for being here, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are a few stories you may have missed:
Ron Johnson Doubts Authenticity of Mitch McConnell Photo. Even Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) Republican colleagues are skeptical of the proof-of-life photo McConnell’s office released this week. During an interview with far-right outlet Real America’s Voice, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told host Eric Bolling that he “heard from some other sources that was an older photo.” He later issued a partial retraction of his remarks and urged everyone to consider the full context of his remarks, and went on to wish McConnell a speedy recovery.
Artist Collective Mocks Trump’s Iran War with ‘Participation Trophy’ Sculpture. The artist collective known as “Secret Handshake” recently erected a statue in Washington D.C. of a giant golden trophy with a “#1” inscription on the bottom of the cup, which is labeled as an “Iran War Participation Trophy.” The group is also behind sculptures depicting President Donald Trump walking hand-in-hand with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
FBI Fires Analysts Who Spoke Out Against Fulton County Raid. The FBI, which is led by Trump loyalist Kash Patel, recently fired two analysts who raised concerns about the raid on an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia earlier this year. Agents seized “all physical ballots” from the 2020 election, in which Trump narrowly lost Georgia to Joe Biden thanks to high voter turnout in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County. Agents have a deadline of July 17 to release the results of their investigation.
Trump Calls Kamala Harris ‘Half’ a Person. President Trump recently quipped in an interview that he was up against “two and a half” people during his lone 2024 debate against then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The president argued that NBC News debate moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir constituted two opponents, while the first Black female vice president was the “half.” The founders of the United States initially decreed that Black people were considered three-fifths of a person when deciding on apportionment for slaves.
