FXBG Advance Wednesday, July 1, 2026
When Your Vote Stops Protecting You. Slip Slidin' Away. Growing Crops AND Electricity. Virginia Has a New Two-Year Budget.
When Your Vote Stops Protecting You: Slaughter Ruling Opens Door Even Wider to Corruption
By Phil Huber, Advance Columnist
A few miles from where I live, men once fought and died over the shape of this republic. This is also George Washington’s hometown—the place where a young man was taught that no leader stands above the law. On June 29, the Supreme Court forgot that lesson, and reshaped the republic again, this time with the stroke of a pen.
In a 6–3 decision, Trump v. Slaughter, the Court ruled that the president can fire the leaders of independent agencies—like the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board—for any reason at all, or no reason. To do it, the Court threw out a rule it had followed since 1935.
Here’s what that means in plain terms. You can still vote for your members of Congress. They can still pass laws that create agencies to keep your food safe, your job fair, and your savings honest. But they can no longer protect those agencies from a president who decides they should work for him instead of for you. Congress builds the fence. The Court just gave the president the key to take it down.
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Slip Slidin’ Away? History shows that almost every past empire, including Rome, begins to decay after 250 years
By Donnie Johnston, Advance Columnist
This should have been America’s shining hour. Our 250th anniversary as a nation.
And it could have been our shining hour had it not been for President Donald Trump and his MAGA cult. But instead of the rest of the world offering congratulations for a republic that has long been the model for democracy, other nations are shaking their heads and wondering what happened to the America that was.
The debacle with the reflecting pool pretty much sums up Trump’s second term in office. He promised American flag blue, and we got green slime with a $16+ million price tag.
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Growing Crops and Electricity: Researchers Tout Virtues of Combining Solar Panels and Farming
By Bruce Saller, Advance Contributor
Most solar farms have panels mounted near the ground in long rows separated by several feet for maintenance access. The ground is usually covered with low-growth grass or plants that are not harvested. There is another approach being utilized, though, that allows farmers to use a significant portion of the land around solar panels.
Agrivoltaics is the practice of using land for concurrent farming and solar production. The solar panels are installed higher and farther apart, allowing farmers to grow crops or raise livestock under the panels.
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Virginia Has a new Two-Year Budget. Here’s What Lawmakers Now Require of Data Centers
VaNews/Virginia Public Access Project
From Tuesday: A new tax has been activated for data centers, the most energy-intensive industry in Virginia, through a provision of the two-year state budget the legislature finalized Monday. The spending plan preserves data centers’ sales and use tax exemption, the focus of a protracted legislative fight over the past few months. But the new tax represents the state’s first major efforts to claw back millions from the industry specifically for their energy use and address residents’ concerns about the rapidly multiplying facilities…. The state sales and use tax exemption saves data centers an estimated $1.9 billion a year, a figure that dwarfs the expected revenue from the new energy consumption tax. —Shannon Heckt, Virginia Mercury
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Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines, which, let’s be honest, are all many of us have time to read anyway.
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