Blow out 250 candles and you would expect a party. Instead we are having an argument about whose party it is.

On one side, the White House and its allies want the country’s birthday to double as an altar call. Back in May, thousands filled the National Mall for Rededicate 250, a prayer festival organized by Freedom 250, the group working with the administration on the anniversary. The pitch, according to organizers, was to give thanks for God’s providence and rededicate the country as one nation under God. According to NPR, of the 19 faith leaders scheduled to speak, 18 were Christian, and most were evangelical. Axios reported that Muslims, Reform Jewish voices, mainline Protestant leaders and historically Black Protestant denominations were largely missing from the stage.

Supporters see a homecoming, faith restored to the center of the founding story. Critics see something narrow being sold as something universal. Robert P. Jones, who founded the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, told Axios the lineup skipped even the mainline Protestant traditions many of the founders actually belonged to.

Here is the awkward part. The founders make lousy mascots for a Christian nation. George Washington wrote constantly about Providence, yet Jesus was largely absent from his public and private writing, according to historians. Thomas Jefferson rejected core Christian doctrines, took a razor to his New Testament to cut out the miracles, and gave us the phrase about a wall of separation between church and state. John Adams prized religion as fuel for public morality but was a Unitarian who rejected the Trinity. These were Enlightenment men, arguing. The argument was the point.

Now flip to a very different fight over what counts as American. According to a new Economist and YouGov poll, 29 percent of us say we would vote for a candidate who calls themselves a democratic socialist, while 45 percent would not and 26 percent are unsure. The same survey, conducted June 26 to 29 among 1,606 adults with a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points, found 32 percent hold a favorable view of socialism against 39 percent unfavorable.

For a label often treated as foreign contraband, that is a lot of open doors. And it is not abstract. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won City Hall in New York last year, and the movement has since notched wins in Washington, Los Angeles and Colorado. Among voters 18 to 29, according to that same poll, 36 percent say they would back a democratic socialist. Capitalism still wins the popularity contest, 44 percent to 19 percent according to the poll, but the settled question feels a lot less settled.

So what do the two fights share? Both try to freeze a moving thing. One camp wants to declare, by decree and worship set, that America is Christian at its core. Another insists America is capitalist by definition, and that anyone outside that box barely qualifies. The country keeps refusing to hold still for either portrait.

That refusal is not a defect. It is the oldest tradition we have. An interfaith effort called Faith250 has quietly gathered roughly 260 congregations, according to Axios, to read the Declaration alongside Frederick Douglass asking what the Fourth of July meant to the enslaved. That is closer to the real inheritance. Not a finished creed to salute, but a fight worth having.

We are turning 250 in the middle of a family argument about who we are. Good. Before the fireworks, put the harder question to the neighbor beside you: whose country did we say this was? Go beyond the headlines…

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The post July 3, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

Imagine a job where your paycheck more than triples the year you start, and the raise shows up not from your boss but from strangers all over the world who suddenly find it very useful to put money in your pocket. That is roughly the story told by President Trump’s latest financial disclosure, released this week by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, which shows his businesses pulled in more than $2 billion in 2025, his first year back in the White House. That is more than triple what he reported the year before, according to PBS NewsHour’s reporting on the filing.

Where did it come from? A lot of it did not exist as a serious revenue stream before he ran the country again. According to the 927-page disclosure, more than $1.2 billion came from just two crypto ventures: World Liberty Financial, the company he and his sons helped launch, and the $TRUMP meme coin he rolled out three days before his inauguration. The Hill reported he took in over $526 million from World Liberty token sales and more than $635 million in royalties tied to the meme coin.

Here is the part worth slowing down for. That meme coin surged, then crashed, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary buyers who followed his lead lost money while he cleared hundreds of millions, according to New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton, speaking on PBS NewsHour. One commentator quoted by The New Republic estimated that $10,000 put into the coin on inauguration day would be worth about $415 now. The house won. The people who trusted the pitch did not.

Then there is the foreign money, which is where this stops being a story about one man’s bank account and becomes a story about ours. In January 2025, a firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates paid $500 million for a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, according to reporting by Forbes and The Hill. Months later, an Emirati state fund used the company’s stablecoin to complete a $2 billion investment in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, as CBS News and CNN reported. That fall, Trump pardoned Binance’s founder, who had pleaded guilty to money laundering failures. We are meant to read all of that as coincidence.

The president says he is hands off. “We have funds that run my money,” he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, according to The Hill, describing accounts he claims not to touch. But a meme coin bearing his own name, launched on the eve of his swearing in, is not a mutual fund some manager picked for him.

Why should any of us care how a billionaire earns his billions? Because the same administration writing crypto rules is now the biggest winner from crypto, and the same White House negotiating with Gulf governments is quietly cashing their checks. Ethics experts from across the political spectrum, interviewed for a report published by AOL, reached for words like bribery and emoluments, not as insults but as legal categories the Constitution was built to prevent.

Past presidents understood the optics. Jimmy Carter handed his peanut farm to an independent trustee. George W. Bush sold his stake in the Texas Rangers, according to PBS NewsHour. They gave things up so that we would never have to wonder who they were serving.

We are past wondering now. The disclosure is public, the numbers are staggering, and the midterms are the next place we get to say what we think of a presidency that pays this well. The receipts are right there. The only open question is whether we bother to read them. Go beyond the headlines…

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The post July 2, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

The teen birth rate in this country has fallen 78 percent from its 1991 peak through 2021, reaching a record low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is not luck. It is one of the quieter public health success stories of our lifetimes, and much of it traces back to programs that taught young people accurate information about their own bodies.

Now the federal government is pulling the plug on a big chunk of that work. The Department of Health and Human Services has terminated 53 grants worth about $67 million, roughly two years before they were set to expire, according to The Hill. The cuts land on universities, community groups, and public health departments across more than two dozen states. HHS said most were canceled because they normalized or promoted sexual activity for minors.

Ask the people who run these programs and you hear something different. In Philadelphia, a group called AccessMatters got a letter on June 26 canceling its $1.2 million grant, effective immediately, according to The Hill. That grant funded free reproductive health programming for more than 1,100 teens between the ages of 13 and 19. Its president, Ayana Bradshaw, said the organization was doing exactly what the program required of it. “There’s no way of doing this programming without these dollars,” she said, per The Hill.

Here is where it gets complicated, and worth being honest about. The reclaimed money is not vanishing. HHS is rerouting it into two new grant streams, one worth $63.4 million and another worth $8.3 million, according to The Hill. The new priorities lean toward “body literacy” and “parental rights,” and every applicant must first pass an “alignment review” to confirm it matches the agency’s goals. Supporters say the old curricula went too far. Critics say “alignment review” is a polite name for an ideological filter.

We have seen this play out before. During the first Trump administration in 2017, HHS ended teen pregnancy grants for more than 80 recipients, also two years early, according to Stateline. A group called Democracy Forward sued, and courts ruled the move violated the agency’s own regulations, handing down a permanent injunction. Last year, a similar directive requiring curricula to reflect what HHS called “the immutable biological reality of sex” was blocked by a federal judge after Planned Parenthood affiliates in California, Iowa, and New York sued, according to The Hill. Legal experts expect this round to land in court too.

So what is actually at stake for the rest of us? Money, for one. Teen childbearing carries real public costs, and prevention is cheap next to the alternative. But the bigger question is who gets to decide what a 16-year-old is allowed to learn about staying healthy. When the CDC itself credits the decline to teens delaying sex and using contraception, trading proven curricula for programs that must pass a political litmus test is a gamble with young lives.

Much of the world treats this as settled science. We are choosing to relitigate it. The programs on the chopping block were not radical. They were working. And the quiet lesson here is that progress is not permanent. It has to be funded, defended, and watched. If we look away, the number that took 30 years to earn can start moving the other way. Go beyond the headlines…

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The post July 1, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

For more than a century, a single sheet of paper has quietly opened almost every door in American life. A birth certificate gets a newborn a Social Security number. Later it unlocks a passport, a first job, a mortgage, a voter registration, a spot in the military. Most of us never think about it. Today, the Supreme Court could change what that piece of paper means for every baby born on American soil, including the ones born to us.

The justices are expected to rule in Trump v. Barbara, the case testing President Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. Roughly 3.6 million children are born in American hospitals every year, according to ABC News, and for all of them the birth certificate alone has been proof enough that they belong here.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 to settle the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, says it plainly. Everyone born here and subject to our laws is a citizen. The Supreme Court agreed back in 1898, in a case called Wong Kim Ark, ruling that a child born on our soil was a citizen no matter where his parents came from. Congress wrote the same promise into federal law in 1940. So this is not some loophole. It is the settled meaning of the Constitution, affirmed again and again for well over a century.

The administration wants to read one phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction,” in a brand new way, arguing that children of undocumented parents and even temporary visa holders do not count. The president calls the current policy a “scam.” But here is the part that rarely makes the headline. Ending birthright citizenship would not shrink the undocumented population. It would grow it. Researchers at the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State project that the change would add 2.7 million people to the unauthorized population by 2045 and 5.4 million by 2075, because roughly 255,000 babies a year would be born here without American citizenship, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

So what happens next depends entirely on nine people. If the Court sides with the president, the birth certificate stops being proof of anything. Federal agencies would have to check a newborn’s parents before granting a passport or benefits, according to ABC News, which means every new parent, citizen or not, inherits the paperwork. Some children would be born stateless, eligible for deportation before they can crawl. And Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in April that the same logic could later be used to strip citizenship from people already born here.

If the Court sides with the families, the promise holds, and something quieter happens too. We find out whether a conservative majority, three of them appointed by this very president, will still tell him no. That answer matters far beyond immigration.

The administration leans hard on “birth tourism,” the image of wealthy foreigners flying in to collect a passport. Yet that practice accounts for maybe 26,000 births a year, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a sliver of the millions born here. We are being asked to rewrite the Constitution to chase a problem that barely exists.

This was never really about other people’s babies. It is about whether the rules that protect the smallest among us can be rewritten by a single signature. The Court will tell us today. The question we should sit with is simpler. If a birth certificate no longer means you belong, what does? Go beyond the headlines…

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The post June 30, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

Imagine a recruitment video. Agents in dark suits and sunglasses stride in slow motion, bomb-sniffing dogs work a perimeter, and officers cradle rifles while a smooth voiced narrator promises a calling higher than any other. It plays like the trailer for a Secret Service thriller. It is actually a hiring reel for the people who guard nine robed lawyers most of us will never see do their jobs.

According to POLITICO, the Supreme Court is quietly more than doubling its own police force, which sat below 200 officers for years and is now pushing well past that. The reasons are not invented. In 2022 a person arrived near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home carrying a pistol and 37 rounds of ammunition, an episode that ended in an attempted assassination charge and, according to NBC News, a sentence of just over eight years even though prosecutors asked for 30. Last year, according to POLITICO, an Alaska man was arrested for sending nearly 500 threats to six justices. This is also a moment of rising political violence that has claimed lives across the spectrum, and nobody serious wants a justice harmed.

Here is the harder part. We are paying for all of this, and we are barely allowed to know how. The court’s budget for salaries and expenses has climbed from $98.3 million in 2022 to a request of $210.3 million for 2027, a 114 percent jump in five years, according to POLITICO’s review of budget documents. Congress has added tens of millions more in emergency money, including a $28 million infusion last November and another $30 million this spring. Yet no justice has appeared before Congress to defend the court’s budget in more than seven years.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said it plainly this spring, according to POLITICO. She is glad to fund the security, but the court has never come up to explain what it does with the money. A hearing that might have finally broken that silence was postponed last month, with no new date set.

This matters because this is no sleepy institution. This is the same court that, by a vote of six to three, struck down the centerpiece of President Trump’s tariff agenda in February, that has narrowed the Voting Rights Act, that rewrote abortion law overnight. It reaches our wallets, our ballots, and our bodies. An institution with that kind of power over our lives owes us more than armored SUVs and a slick video. It already bans cameras from its courtroom and cloaks its deliberations. Now it is wrapping a growing and secretive security force around itself too.

There is a quieter cost here as well. As the justices retreat behind details and barricades, several admit they now travel mostly to friendly rooms full of people who already agree with them. When the people who hold final say over our laws only ever hear from their own side, the law stops feeling like justice and starts feeling like a ruling written by people who only ever listen to half the room.

So here is the deal we should insist on. Protect the justices, fully. But protection funded by us comes with one basic condition, the same one we ask of everyone else in government. Show up, open the books, and answer the question. We can keep nine people safe without letting them vanish from public view. The day we stop asking where our money goes, and who these justices actually are, is the day we trade our place as citizens for a seat as subjects. Go beyond the headlines…

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The post June 29, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

The stage was set. The presidential seal was mounted on the podium, and a bipartisan housing bill was just waiting for the president’s signature. Then, with about an hour to go, the whole thing collapses. Aides scramble to yank the seal off the podium. The signing is dead. Why? Because President Trump decided, in that moment, that he would not lower anyone’s housing costs until Congress passed a voting bill that almost nobody in his own party can actually pass.

That was Wednesday in Washington, and it tells us most of what we need to know about where the fight over our elections stands right now.

Trump has spent months insisting the SAVE America Act is the most urgent thing in the country. He called its passage a “national emergency” on Truth Social this week, according to his own posts. The bill would require documentary proof of citizenship to register, gut voting by mail, and let private citizens sue local election officials. The trouble is that Senate Republicans have told him flatly they do not have the votes, even if they blew up their own rules to try.

The courts have been even less forgiving. On Monday, a federal judge in Washington, a Biden appointee, ruled that the administration’s expanded SAVE database, built to scan voter rolls for noncitizens, violated federal privacy law, according to NPR. The next day, a separate judge struck down Trump’s order requiring proof of citizenship to register. The day after that, Judge Indira Talwani in Boston blocked his attempt to compile federal lists of “confirmed citizens” and to stop the Postal Service from delivering ballots to anyone left off those lists. Even a Trump appointed judge in Maryland threw out the Justice Department’s demand for that state’s voter files.

So what is all of this actually protecting us from? Here is the part worth sitting with. When the government ran more than 60 million voter records through its revamped SAVE system, it flagged about 21,000 as possible noncitizens, less than 1 percent, according to NPR. In Georgia, a comprehensive audit ordered by the state’s Republican secretary of state found 20 noncitizens on a roll of 8.2 million voters, according to ABC News. Twenty. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime, and review after review finds it vanishingly rare.

Now weigh that against the cost. About 1 in 10 eligible voters, roughly 21.3 million of us, say we either do not have or could not quickly find our proof of citizenship, according to a national survey reported by NPR. Married women who changed their names, rural voters, older Americans, anyone who simply cannot lay a hand on a birth certificate this week. A fix aimed at 20 people in Georgia would put millions of the rest of us through the wringer.

And the search keeps widening. ICE agents have pulled local voter files in Webb County, Texas, and Forsyth County, North Carolina, according to Axios. The Justice Department has sued roughly 30 states for their voter rolls, losing case after case.

Here is the thing to hold onto as November approaches. The guardrails are holding because judges, state officials, and senators in both parties keep saying no. Those guardrails are not automatic. They hold because people insist on it. So the next time someone tells us our elections are riddled with fraud, we can simply ask for the number. The number is 20. The real question is whether we let 20 become the excuse to make voting harder for 21 million of us. Go beyond the headlines…

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The post June 26, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

We do not usually think of a housing bill as a hostage. But this week the president treated one like a bargaining chip.

On Wednesday, Trump abruptly canceled a planned signing of bipartisan legislation meant to bring down housing costs, announcing he would sign it only after Congress passed the SAVE America Act, according to NPR. His own party would have gotten the win. He handed it back anyway. The same fixation has already sunk the renewal of a surveillance tool and nearly wrecked Republican efforts to fund immigration enforcement, NPR reports.

What makes that worth pausing on is the timing. The very week the president was trading away a popular bill to force through a voting overhaul, a new survey found that a majority of us now believe there are grounds to remove him from office. According to the June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, 53% of Americans say there are grounds for Congress to impeach Trump, including 40% who say “yes, definitely,” while 39% say there are not. The poll surveyed 2,087 adults from June 17 to 22 and carries a margin of error of about 2.2 percentage points.

The reasons people gave were not scattered or vague. Asked in their own words, 30% pointed to corruption and enriching himself, and another 30% named abuse of power, things like defying court orders and turning the Justice Department against his enemies, per Strength In Numbers. One in five, 20%, cited the war in Iran and the fact that he bombed another country without asking Congress. Smaller shares named his felony record and his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, each at 16%.

Now set that against what the SAVE America Act would do. It would require documentary proof of citizenship to register, and according to a 2025 University of Maryland study cited by NPR, roughly 21.3 million eligible voters, about 1 in 10, say they do not have or cannot quickly find those records. It would force states to hand their complete voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. It would create new criminal penalties for the election officials who run our voting. And it rests, as NPR notes, on the false claim that noncitizens vote in numbers large enough to swing elections, something the Bipartisan Policy Center and election experts say is extremely rare.

Read those two stories together and a throughline appears. A president a majority believes has abused power is spending his leverage to make it harder for us to vote. The case for impeachment that voters describe is, at its heart, a worry about a leader who treats limits as optional. The voting bill is that same worry written into law. He even tried to impose proof of citizenship by executive order, an effort a federal court permanently blocked on Wednesday, according to NPR.

None of this means impeachment is near. A Republican House will not impeach a Republican president, and the SAVE Act still lacks the 60 votes it needs in the Senate. But the distance between what a majority of us believe and what Congress is willing to do is the real story heading into the midterms.

The honest question is not whether the president has earned the doubt. A majority of us have already answered that. The question is whether we will still have a clear, unobstructed way to register that verdict at the ballot box. That answer is being written right now, and we should all notice who is holding the pen. Go beyond the headlines…

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The post June 25, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

There are cold shoulders and then there are cold shoulders. Four years ago, according to the Pew Research Center, 83% of Canadians called the United States a reliable partner. Today that figure sits at 35%. Our closest neighbor, the country we share the longest open border with, the place that buys more of our goods than almost anyone on earth, has quietly stopped counting on us.

That collapse is not a fluke. It is the centerpiece of a sweeping new Pew survey of 42,151 adults across 36 countries, conducted between February and May of this year. The picture it paints is bleak. Across those nations, according to Pew, a median of just 23% of people say they have confidence in President Trump to do the right thing in world affairs. A median of 57% now hold an unfavorable view of the United States itself, while only 37% see us positively.

We have been here before, in a sense. America’s standing abroad sank during the Iraq War years too. What feels different now is the breadth of the retreat and who is doing the retreating. These are not rivals souring on us. They are friends. In Germany, the share of people who believe we weigh other countries’ interests when we set foreign policy has fallen from 60% three years ago to 23% today, according to Pew. In Japan, reliability ratings slid from 76% to 59%. Tariff anger runs hot even among allies, with only 17% of Canadians and 8% of Germans approving of how the president handles trade.

Why should any of this land at our kitchen tables? Because reputation is not a vanity metric. It is leverage. When allies trust us, they buy our debt, host our troops, share their intelligence, and stand with us when we need them most. When that trust thins, every negotiation gets harder and every favor gets pricier. The war we launched alongside Israel against Iran in February clearly sharpened the global mood. A median of 74% of people across those 36 countries disapprove of how the president handled it, according to Pew, and researchers could measure attitudes curdling in real time as the survey ran.

The story is not uniform, and honesty requires saying so. In Hungary, where a Trump ally governed until this spring, the share calling us reliable actually rose from 59% to 65%. Trump still draws warm reviews in Israel, the Philippines and parts of Africa. Strongmen and the voters who admire them tend to like what they see. But that is precisely the company we now keep, and it is fair to ask whether that is the room we want to be standing in.

Here is the part we cannot blame on foreigners. Pew found that a median of 56% of people abroad say our government no longer respects the personal freedoms of its own people. That is a verdict on us, handed down by neighbors watching from a distance. And the doubts are not only theirs. At home, according to Pew, 62% of us disapprove of the decision to strike Iran, and 59% say it was the wrong call.

None of this is carved in stone. Reputations recover. Allies forgive. But they do so when they see a genuine course correction, not a louder version of the same. The midterms this November are the first real chance we have to say out loud what the rest of the world is already shouting. The neighbors have noticed. The only question left is whether we have. Go beyond the headlines…

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The post June 24, 2026 appeared first on Latina Lista.

We just watched the oldest president in our history blow out 80 candles. And a few miles from a UFC birthday bash, an 82-year-old woman did the math on whether her grocery money stretches to the end of the month. Those two scenarios, happening at the same time in this country, say something uncomfortable. Gray hair in power has not translated into protection for the rest of us who are aging without a cushion.

Donald Trump turned 80 on June 14, and the people who write our laws skew old too. But age at the top has not bought security at the bottom. If anything, the safety net millions of us will lean on is fraying right when we need it most.

Start with the check most of us count on either now or in the future. Social Security’s own trustees now project that the retirement trust fund runs dry in late 2032, which would trigger an automatic 22% cut to everyone’s benefits unless Congress acts, according to the 2026 Trustees Report. That is not a distant abstraction, because more than 60 million people already rely on its retirement and survivor benefits. And rather than shoring it up, Washington moved the reckoning closer. A senior tax break tucked into the big tax and spending law Trump signed in 2025 will drain roughly $170 billion from the program through 2034, according to the Tax Policy Center, by cutting the very revenue that keeps it solvent. Thinner immigration makes the hole deeper. For the first time in at least half a century, more people left the country than arrived in 2025, according to the Brookings Institution, and many of those departing workers were paying payroll taxes toward benefits they would never collect.

Now think about care. In December 2025 the administration rescinded a rule that would have set minimum staffing standards at nursing homes taking Medicare or Medicaid money, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania had estimated that standard could prevent roughly 13,000 deaths a year. At the same time, the people who do the bathing, lifting and feeding are getting harder to find. One in three home care workers is an immigrant, according to KFF, and the crackdown is thinning their ranks just as demand climbs.

The squeeze reaches the kitchen and the mailbox too. The 2025 law cut federal funding for SNAP, which helps more than 6 million people 65 and older buy groceries, and pushed costs onto states that may not absorb them. Medicaid cuts threaten the at-home care most of us would choose over a facility. The damage is already visible. While homelessness fell for most age groups between 2024 and 2025, it climbed for people 65 and up, with nearly 45,000 seniors unhoused, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Here is the part we cannot look away from. The population of older Americans grew 13% from 2020 to 2024, according to the elder law scholars who flagged these trends in The Conversation, yet the programs built to catch us keep getting quietly trimmed. We are not asking for charity. We paid in. The senators we elect this November will be sitting in their seats when that 2032 cut lands, so the question for every candidate is blunt. What is your plan to keep the promise? If they cannot answer, we already know what their silence will cost us. Go beyond the headlines…

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Somewhere in the Roosevelt Room last week, the president of the United States described invading another country the way the rest of us describe a weekend errand. Cuba, he told “The Axios Show,” is “a hopscotch.” It has “a nice property” and “a nice shoreline.” That was the pitch. Not a threat assessment, not a strategy, just a glance at the map and a shrug.

When Axios asked whether an operation in Cuba might unfold like the January raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump answered, “Possibly. It’s possible,” according to the interview published June 19. He said Secretary of State Marco Rubio is “involved very much,” and that his timeline stays “flexible.” Translation: a nation of roughly 10 million people, 90 miles from Florida, is now something we might seize whenever the mood strikes.

We have already seen something like this play out before. The United States captured Maduro on January 3 and flew him out of the country, according to The Associated Press, in an operation Trump now describes as 201 people finishing the job in 48 minutes. The aftermath has been messier than the highlight reel. We announced we would “run” Venezuela until a transition, and Venezuela’s own vice president called us an illegal invader. More than six in 10 Americans said the operation should have required approval from Congress, according to a Washington Post poll. It never got one.

Now consider the stated reason Cuba could be next. U.S. intelligence found the island acquired more than 300 military drones and discussed using them against Guantanamo Bay, American vessels and possibly Key West, according to Axios, which noted this “could become a pretext for U.S. military intervention.” Sit with that word. Pretext. We are being told in advance what the excuse will be.

Here is what the talk of shoreline leaves out. Cuba is starving in the dark, and we helped switch off the lights. After the Maduro raid, the Venezuelan oil that once covered roughly half the island’s supply stopped, and Cuba produces only about 40 percent of the fuel it needs, according to NPR. The national grid has collapsed more than once this year, leaving its roughly 10 million people without power, according to NPR reporting from Havana. The United Nations has warned the health system is buckling. This is not a “nice property.” It is a humanitarian emergency — which the US caused.

And most of us are not buying the sales pitch. Only 23 percent of Americans support using military force to overthrow Cuba’s government, while 53 percent oppose it, according to an Economist and YouGov poll in March. A separate survey from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and YouGov found 64 percent of us opposed a U.S. military takeover of the island. We did not want the Venezuela invasion either. Support for it was only 26 percent that week, according to Economist and YouGov.

So why does our wanting matter so little? Because the pattern of the past six months is a president treating war as a personal errand and Congress as an afterthought. He skipped the vote on Venezuela. He fought Iran and told Axios there are “no limits” on his power now. Cuba would be the third act, and the precedent does not stay in the Caribbean. A war power that needs no permission can point anywhere.

We are not spectators. The 2026 midterms are our next chance to say plainly that the Constitution still puts the question of war in our hands, not one man’s. Call the members of Congress who are supposed to cast that vote. Ask them, on the record, whether they will authorize an invasion of Cuba or stop one. Make them answer before the drones do. Go beyond the headlines…

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