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Legally and factually speaking, being the sitting president doesn’t make you above the law. Not legally, not constitutionally, not morally, not in any document any founder ever signed, or any US law ever passed, and no not even in the Trump Vs US SCOTUS ruling.

If the president shoots a random person on Fifth Avenue, a police officer can and should arrest him. If he’s running a billion-dollar pardon sale scam, state and federal authorities both have standing to investigate and charge him. And if he commits any crime that any other American would go to jail for, he goes to jail for it too. A broke guy in Tulsa who steals from his employer loses his job and does time; yet currently the president is a prolific child molester who enjoys no legal consequences because he won a rigged popularity contest, despite no legal backing for that collective presumption.

Every judge, every attorney general, every sheriff, every prosecutor who declines to investigate or charge documented criminal conduct because the man committing it is currently president has made a choice. They may not have said the words. But their actions have said them plainly: the president is above the law. That’s the only conclusion their inaction supports.

And you’re not pro-democracy if you’re not willing to apply the law the same to a president as to a homeless person.

Most Americans have come to believe that Donald Trump is effectively above the law because he is the sitting president. Not because they want him to be, but because they think the Supreme Court made it that way. They point to Trump v. United States and say the Court gave him immunity; they point to impeachment and the 25th Amendment and say those are the only two remedies. They’ve concluded, reasonably but inaccurately that until Congress acts with a supermajority, nothing can touch him. They’re wrong. And the people who benefit from that confusion have every reason to keep it going.

Trump v. United States created a partial shield in federal court for official acts. But the Court never defined what an official act actually is, and no court has ever held that bribery, selling pardons, child molestation, or sex trafficking qualify. More importantly, the ruling explicitly did not weigh in on state prosecution. This wasn’t the result of an oversight or a loophole, but a core doctrine in US law.

The dual sovereignty doctrine, which has been the law of this land since the founders wrote it into the architecture of the republic, gives every state independent authority to prosecute crimes committed within their borders; a presidential pardon cannot touch a state conviction. Congress doesn’t have to act. No supermajority is required. If the president commits a crime, a prosecutor with jurisdiction can charge him, and that’s how it has always worked. This article is going to prove that, doctrine by doctrine, objection by objection, because you deserve to know the truth; that not even the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court has ever argued that a president is completely above the law until removed from office through political means.

The founders weren’t subtle about why they built it this way. They’d watched a king operate above the law, and they designed a system with two parallel sets of courts, two parallel sets of prosecutors, two parallel sets of criminal codes, and two parallel sets of criminal statutes specifically so no single actor could capture the whole machine. The dual sovereignty doctrine wasn’t a legal technicality they left lying around; it was the design. States retain independent authority to prosecute crimes committed within their borders because the founders understood that the day would come when the federal government couldn’t be trusted to police itself. That day has a name now. It’s today.

There was a reasonable argument, once, that states should defer to federal institutions on matters like this because those institutions could be trusted to handle them. That argument had merit when the referees were presumed good faith actors.

The Justice Department is being used to target political enemies; the FBI actively helped cover up the Epstein files while powerful men whose names appear in those documents walked free. Handing the ball to a corrupt referee and waiting for a fair call isn’t deference. It’s surrender. We saw how the “wait for midterms, then try a few impeachments, then wait until the election, then charge him with crimes” strategy worked last time he was President. Have we collectively forgotten how this entire playbook was run before? The Heritage foundation came with a game plan to change things by exploiting every vulnerability they could find and learning based off their shortfalls in the first Trump term. The bad guys can’t be the only ones smartening up or we are all doomed.

If you’re telling your constituents that impeachment is the only solution for criminal behavior of a president, then I’m telling you that you don’t believe in democracy. Look at the record. Impeachment: four attempts, zero convictions, zero consequences, zero deterrence. Federal prosecution: sat on for four years by Merrick Garland, handed to a special counsel, and abandoned the moment the political calendar made it inconvenient. Civil suits: ongoing, unresolved, and irrelevant to a man who has no shame and unlimited legal fees. New York dropped its case because a judge decided the timing was wrong. Georgia spent eighteen months being litigated in bad faith, the prosecutor’s private life was investigated until they found something to use against her, and the case was ultimately set aside the moment Trump was about to be president again. Waiting for elections: we waited, he lost in 2020, went home, and came back.

Letitia James announced during her 2018 campaign that she was coming for Trump. She opened the investigation in March 2019, accumulated 930,000 documents, and had fraud documented back to 2011. She chose civil over criminal the entire time, filed her lawsuit in September 2022, and won a judgment of over $450 million in February 2024. Trump came back anyway, and the Justice Department is now using its full weight to prosecute her for it. The cautious path didn’t protect her or stop him. I have tremendous respect for NY AG Letitia James, she made a better version of the standard version judgement call by pursuing civil actions against the man himself. She did everything the right way and after enough delays, Trump was about to be president again and Judge Merchan decided no punishment was appropriate for the mad king. Lest humble Judge Merchan should gain his ire, rather than perhaps some financial or Epstein style “backroom benefits” for enough successful delays in decision making. So much for impartiality, I guess lady justice takes off her blindfold to make absolutely sure the person isn’t president.

We know how to fail. We keep trying the exact same thing, waiting and trying and failing in identical ways, and somehow expecting a different result.

Why can’t we switch it up? Meanwhile, Republicans pass blatantly unconstitutional laws and fight them out in court; they take the long shots, press every issue they have, and dare judges to stop them. And here’s what that strategy does that ours doesn’t: it forces courts to draw lines. The only way we find out where the boundary between the Supreme Court’s “official” and “unofficial” act actually falls is by bringing criminal cases that make courts decide, and every charge not filed is a definition left unmade. And deferral that Donald Trump has not earned the right to have. Every case not brought leaves that boundary undefined, and undefined boundaries drift toward more presidential power, not less. Our criminal justice system is now so used to deferring to power that it makes sense a billionaire president would become king. And that’s what he is if he is above the law as a result of his office.

So here’s what everyone on our side needs to understand about the law, stated as plainly as it can be stated.

The Justice Department has an internal policy memo saying a sitting president can’t face federal prosecution. Congress never passed that as a law, and the Constitution never established it; the department wrote the rule about itself, and it’s now stopped two separate special counsels, Mueller and Smith, from completing their work.

The Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling in Trump v. United States gave presidents broad protection for official acts in federal court, and together, the memo and that ruling have built something close to a king at the federal level. But dual sovereignty is still there. No justice argued the immunity ruling should reach it, and no Congress has passed a law touching it. That defense is still standing. States retain independent authority to prosecute crimes committed within their borders, a doctrine established since the founding and upheld in Gamble v. United States (2019).

Now the objections, one at a time, because you’re going to hear all of them.

1. “Qualified immunity protects him?” No, qualified immunity is a civil doctrine; it applies to lawsuits for money damages, and it’s never applied to criminal prosecution in any jurisdiction in the history of the United States. It’s not a defense to a criminal charge. That’s the end of that argument.

2. “The Supremacy Clause protects federal officials from state prosecution?” No, the Supremacy Clause says federal law is supreme over conflicting state law, but it doesn’t say federal employees are immune from state criminal charges. The Supreme Court said so directly in Johnson v. Maryland (1920): holding federal employment doesn’t secure a general immunity from state law. And In re Neagle (1890) confirmed the protection applies only when the federal officer was acting within lawful federal authority. There’s no federal law authorizing the sale of pardons, so there’s nothing for the Supremacy Clause to make supreme.

3. “Trump v. United States makes him immune?” No, that ruling covers official acts in federal court, and that’s the entire scope of it. No justice argued it reaches state prosecution, not one, and the Court never defined what an official act is. No court has ever held that bribery, corruption, or selling pardons qualifies. The protection that stopped the federal cases doesn’t exist at the state level.

4. “The feds will just take over and kill the case?” No. First, understand what moving to federal court actually means: it is still a state case. Still state law, still a state prosecutor, still state charges, still the same criminal statutes, still pardon-proof. The federal court is just the room it’s in, and nothing got handed over to the federal government. They can attempt removal under 28 U.S.C. § 1442, but the state charges don’t evaporate; the immunity defense must be litigated before an actual judge who must actually rule on it. That’s months or years of legal exposure and a documented public record that can’t be executive-ordered away.

Trump and co regularly take people to court when they know they will lose the case. Why? Because even the cases you lose still involve forcing the other side to use time and energy and resources while possibly gaining bad press.

5. “What about Trump v. Anderson? States can’t do this.” Trump v. Anderson dealt with Colorado trying to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a federal constitutional provision, against a federal candidate; the Court said states can’t unilaterally enforce clauses of the federal Constitution. But nobody here is asking states to interpret the federal Constitution. We’re asking state attorneys general to enforce their own laws against people who broke them, and those are different.

Which brings us back to the people with the power to act. Any elected official, any attorney general, any sheriff, any prosecutor who says in one breath that no one is above the law and in the next breath declines to investigate or charge documented violations of state criminal statutes against this president and his cabinet, has made a choice. Words are cheap. Jurisdiction isn’t. If you have it and you won’t use it, you own the outcome that we all suffer from.

I wrote this because too many people on our side believe that impeachment is the only legitimate path to accountability. That conviction is the prerequisite for consequence. That we have to wait for the votes, wait for the moment, wait for the landslide, wait until the stars align just right and then the consequence fairy will come down and make it all go away. Just like she did with his 34 convictions, right?

None of that’s in the Constitution, none of it’s in Trump v. United States, none of it’s in the Supremacy Clause or the dual sovereignty doctrine or any statute passed by any legislature. It exists only in the minds of people who’ve convinced themselves that charging a president with a crime is somehow more radical than letting him commit them freely.

The 25th Amendment isn’t saving us, and impeachment isn’t saving us. We won’t have the conviction votes, like we didn’t have them the last however many times, and we probably won’t even with a once-in-a-generation landslide in 2026. Of course, if you’re a Congressional Democrat you should pursue impeachment, because you have almost no power outside of that.

If you’re a prosecutor? Waiting and not charging has never been a successful deterrent.

We don’t need a supermajority or a wave election or to wait 6–8 more months and hope nukes aren’t dropped or that elections aren’t successfully stolen by a guy with time, resources, and intent, who is being told “break any law you want because the only way you go down is if you fail to keep this title.”

It requires prosecutors with jurisdiction and the willingness to use it, and those prosecutors exist in your state right now. The statutes exist. The conduct is documented. The only thing missing is the decision to act.

I wrote this because so long as we, as the opposition, have members who believe a president is above the law until another election passes, then we will be submitting to the lies of our enemies which were crafted to make us ineffective in our opposition.

The legal architecture behind everything in this article, including the full taxonomy of state constitutional tools via my academic working paper, with more resources for free download via the links at the bottom of this page.

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CALL TO ACTION

Who you are contacting: your state attorney general and your county district attorney. Find your attorney general at naag.org/find-my-ag, and find your district attorney by searching your county’s name plus “district attorney” or “prosecuting attorney,” since the title changes by state.

What you are asking for: In this moment of national crisis, we need to know that our law enforcement professionals will defend their oath to protect the Constitution, and that no one is above the law. If a sitting US president broke the law in our state, would you enforce the law on them like any other American? These two offices enforce state criminal law, which no president can pardon, and no justice in Trump v. United States argued that ruling reaches state prosecution. They already have the authority. What nobody has made them say out loud is whether they will use it.

Do not copy and paste anything from this article. Offices count identical messages once no matter how many arrive. Write it in your own words.

Say who you are and where you live in their jurisdiction. Say why this matters to you personally, in whatever terms are actually true for you. Then ask them the question, and tell them this: if you waste my time by answering everything but this question, then know that I won’t be fooled and I will be letting my fellow constituents know about your failure and obfuscation.

When you get a reply, share it online so your fellow constituents can know exactly who needs to be replaced come election season.

Send this article to somebody. Post it in your Indivisible chapter, put it in a group thread, or hand it to a friend who mistakenly believes that the Robert’s court made a president above the law. If the Supreme Court ever did rule a president beyond the reach of state criminal law, that ruling would be unconstitutional the day it was written, and our job would be to elect attorneys general and district attorneys who refuse to treat it as binding.

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The strategy was spelled out in advance. First, push out everyone you can. Then institute loyalty tests for the people who remain. Ask those remaining to do unlawful things, so that the only ones who stay have partisan loyalty and are complicit in unlawful conduct. Project 2025 called for a president to make “aggressive use” of executive power “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” and for one who could “handcuff the bureaucracy” and bring “the Administrative State to heel.” What was a proposal in 2024 is now the staffing orders for the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Let’s first look at the purges. To carry it out, Project 2025 recommended a mechanism called Schedule F, which strips career civil servants of their job protections and lets a president fire them for any reason, exposing as many as fifty thousand positions. The Civil Rights Division, the office that enforces voting rights and prosecutes officials who break the law, employed about three hundred sixty-five attorneys in January 2025 and about one hundred five after an April deadline. Seven in ten had left. Seventeen inspectors general were fired in the administration’s first week, those were the watchdogs in charge of auditing agencies for fraud and abuse.

Now let's look at the loyalty test. On her first day, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo demanding that government lawyers zealously advance and defend the administration's interests, with almost no room for dissent. The people who would not work that way said so when they resigned. Two hundred eighty-two Justice Department alumni signed a public letter stating that they had carried out their duties faithfully regardless of who held the White House, until they no longer could. The departures kept coming, and by late April 2026 roughly fifty-five hundred people had left the department, with prosecutors describing colleagues who refused vindictive cases and were fired for it.

The people now staffing the federal criminal justice apparatus have acted at the behest of the regime.

The Department missed the December 19, 2025 deadline the Epstein Files Transparency Act set for releasing its files, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche admitting before the deadline that it would not comply, then withheld or redacted roughly two hundred thousand pages and released much that was already public, prompting an audit by the Justice Department's inspector general. That same Justice Department has brought political prosecutions against Letitia James and James Comey through Lindsey Halligan, a former White House aide with no prosecutorial experience, who presented each case to the grand jury alone, and a federal judge dismissed both indictments after ruling her appointment unconstitutional. The department has also subpoenaed Wall Street Journal reporters’ records after rescinding the policy that had protected journalists.

So here is the serious problem, the one that makes this more than a bad year an election can fix. Suppose we win everything anyway. That presupposition means handwaving the reality that the next federal elections will be neither free nor fair, along with the methods of interference already in full deployment in Republican states and being pushed elsewhere. Say we move past all that. Say Democrats sweep it all. How do you undo the capture of these agencies? Do you fire everyone at the Justice Department and the FBI in a single day, and watch the agencies stop functioning? Do you rehire the thousands forced out, who have moved on, and then fire the ones who stayed? Do you investigate everyone who remained, each of whom will say they were doing their job? Do you build a new body to investigate the old one? That takes years. It takes funding. It takes Congress. It can be obstructed at every step. And the next president inherits all of it at once: a federal debt on track to pass its World War II record this decade and deficits the Congressional Budget Office calls large by historical standards, dozens of emergencies demanding attention, and a government stripped of the resources that would normally handle them.

Rebuilding the Justice Department and the FBI competes against all of that.

There is a path that does not require winning a rigged national game.

You make things right at the most local level you have available.

The states have their own criminal authority, and it does not depend on the federal government. Under dual sovereignty, a state enforces its own criminal law on conduct within its borders, and it does not need federal cooperation to do it. A state attorney general or a county district attorney can investigate and charge federal officials who violated that state's law, on their own authority. A governor can order state law enforcement to investigate, refer cases for prosecution, and direct resources to the effort.

One objection you will hear is that federal officials and officers are protected. They are not protected for criminal activity. The Supremacy Clause shields a federal officer from state prosecution only for acts they were authorized to perform and that were necessary and proper to their federal duties. Obstruction is not a federal duty. Lying under oath is not necessary and proper. Withholding evidence to protect politicians and their friends is not authorized by any law. Conduct that fails that test has never been protected, and the Supreme Court has said as much since 1890. Qualified immunity does not reach these cases either. It is a defense to civil lawsuits for damages, and it has no role in a criminal prosecution at all.

These two doctrines have expanded beyond their original purpose, into a general presumption that the people who work for the federal government cannot be prosecuted under any other law. No law requires that deference. It has gone unused only because we were accustomed to a federal government that prosecuted its own. We let corruption by officials go unprosecuted for years while an ordinary person is charged for smaller offenses. Nothing in the law or constitution renders state corruption statutes inapplicable to federal officials. We have to bring the cases if we want to move the courts, it’s the same strategy the right has effectively deployed for decades.

Investigations are routine. Prosecutors open them every day against ordinary people for far less than what is documented here. State and county prosecutors can open investigations into the fraud and coverups and blatant criminality you see daily and they can do all of it using constitutional authority they already have.

Fortunately, the state response doesn’t prevent the federal government being restored but it helps pursue justice where we have the power to do so. It also makes it clear to bad actors that we will seek every lawful and ethical path to restore justice in this nation.

Those officials work for us, and most of them are elected. You can find your state attorney general at naag.org. Find your county district attorney through your county or district attorney’s office, listed on your county government website. You can call or email both and ask them to examine the publicly released Epstein files for conduct that violates this state’s criminal law, to investigate where it does, and to forward anything bearing on other states to those states’ prosecutors.

This is what we want, justice rather than excuses. Make sure to tell them why it matters to you and a little about yourself, make it clear we want criminal investigations rather than just civil suits.

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Author’s note: This article stems from my academic work on state constitutional postures, set out in Oppositional Federalism: A Taxonomy of State Constitutional Postures Under Authoritarian Capture, free to read on SSRN. For those interested, this article covers tier 2 opposition to authoritarianism, soft secession, when states reduce harm to their residents by building parallel institutions that make the state self-sufficient.

The New Deal was Franklin Roosevelt’s answer to the Great Depression, a broad wave of programs passed between 1933 and 1938. Some of those programs put millions of people to work right away, on government payrolls, building roads, bridges, dams, and schools. Others became permanent, like Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government-owned electric utility that still powers millions of homes today.

We face a pile of crises now, and this time the federal government is itself the source. So as we address the acceleration of GOP-induced existential danger, it’s helpful to explore strategies which were successful in materially similar situations; this article explores one such strategy which we can call “The States’ New Deal.”

The first facet we will cover in the States’ New Deal is revenue generating publicly owned services. The largest publicly owned enterprise in the country is the one the founders themselves built. The Continental Congress made Benjamin Franklin postmaster general in 1775, and the framers wrote the post office into the Constitution itself, where Article I gives Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads. Today the United States Postal Service employs more than half a million people, delivers to every address in the nation, and pays for itself out of postage rather than taxes. It’s public ownership older than our nation and written into the founding documents.

Public ownership like this operates at every level of American government, from city halls to statehouses to federal agencies. Nebraska draws all of its electricity from publicly owned utilities, the only state where that is true, and its residents are not paying a premium for it: nationwide, residential public power customers pay about 13 percent less than customers of private utilities, and an independent Center for American Progress review found that publicly owned utilities have kept residential rates lower on average than investor-owned ones. Chattanooga’s city-owned utility built the first citywide gigabit internet in the United States, and when private carriers went to court to defend a state law capping the network’s territory, they won the cap but never stopped the network, which still serves the city today. A University of Tennessee at Chattanooga study valued that network at $2.69 billion in community benefit over its first decade, with 9,516 jobs created or retained. Austin and San Antonio own their electric utilities and move the earnings into their city budgets each year, the seventeen states that sell wholesale liquor keep the margin on it, and Ginnie Mae, a federal corporation, returns its profits to the Treasury.

North Dakota has done the same within the finance sector. The people of North Dakota have owned their own bank since 1919, as well as their own flour mill since 1922, the largest single-site mill in the country. North Dakota state law also keeps public deposits in their bank, which means that they can use their deposited funds as collateral for lending and borrowing, that their savings generate interest which also ends up back in the public coffers, and that the state can lend its own money to itself as loans to then build revenue generating public works projects. The bank has turned a profit every year it has existed, since Woodrow Wilson was president, and has never needed a bailout. In 2024 the bank contributed $335 million to the state budget.

This is already happening in cities and states across the country. In 2019 California became the first state to let its cities and counties charter their own public banks. In 2022 Philadelphia’s city council created the Philadelphia Public Financial Authority as a first step toward a municipal bank. In 2023 a San Francisco working group approved a plan to convert a city lending corporation into a public bank by 2028. In New York, a bill to let municipalities charter public banks has been introduced session after session, most recently in 2025. In Washington, a bill to create a state-owned bank has been introduced session after session, and the latest version carries into 2026.

Progress in this country has almost always started in the states: abolition, public schools, women’s suffrage, the minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, workers compensation, child labor limits, unemployment insurance, interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, cannabis legalization, paid family leave. Wisconsin created the country’s first unemployment insurance in 1932, three years before the Social Security Act established the same program nationwide, and one of the people who drafted the Wisconsin law was Elizabeth Brandeis, daughter of the Justice who that same year wrote the most famous defense of exactly this method. Dissenting in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, Louis Brandeis called it “one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” The first New Deal was built in the states and then made federal, and a States’ New Deal simply follows that sequence again.

Each of these institutions brings in revenue, solves a problem people actually have, and cuts the leverage the federal government holds over a state. A state that owns its power, its bank, and its hospitals can refuse a federal demand and keep the lights on. Self-sufficiency is leverage.

A publicly owned state health service could launch with a million paying members on the first day, every one of them already covered by the state as an employee, a teacher, a retiree, or a Medicaid enrollee, and every one of them paying at least a quarter less than they pay now. Build the hospitals to match, on the Tricare model the federal government has used for generations, and the state becomes insurer and provider at once, with no bills passing between them.

So how do we pay for it? That is what mayors and legislators always ask, and I come to those meetings with the answer ready. When a private company launches with customers already signed up, everyone can see the certainty of success. When a state does the same thing, people say the government cannot be a revenue stream, even though it already is one.

Municipal broadband starts with a customer base. So does a state health service, and so did the Postal Service, which covers its own costs out of postage. The Bismarck bank and mill send their earnings into the state budget. Washington state collects payroll premiums for paid leave and workers compensation instead of drawing on general taxes. A state that owns its bank holds its own revenue there, lends against those deposits, and keeps the interest inside its borders, as North Dakota has since 1919. Alaska banks a share of its oil money and mails every resident a yearly dividend.

My work crafting the oppositional federalism taxonomy consists of identifying and classifying the five constitutional postures a state can take under federal capture, each grounded in long-standing and entirely undisputed precedent.

Keep in mind that the tiers are categories rather than a linear progression.

Tier 0 is cooperative federalism, the ordinary partnership in which a state administers federal programs.

Tier 1 is uncooperative federalism, in which a state lawfully withholds its own personnel and money from federal work.

Tier 2 is soft secession, in which a state builds parallel institutions of its own.

Tier 3 is oppositional federalism, in which a state turns its sovereign criminal justice authority actively against federal overreach. This means ending the largely non-binding deference that local and state law enforcement authorities have extended towards federal officials who behave criminally.

Tier 4 is constitutional non-compliance. That is just fully breaking the rules when the situation becomes dire enough.

The program described here belongs to Tier 2, self-sufficiency through quality governance: the state builds something that works, residents see that it works, and the argument is won without being argued. Tier 2 is also what makes the others possible, because a state that already owns a working bank, grid, mill, or insurer has built the capacity every other posture relies on.

The same federal government that built Social Security is now controlled by people dismantling it, and waiting for that government to rescue its own creations is not a plan the evidence supports. The states keep the power to act, the Constitution protects the acting, and the record here shows, decade after decade, that the acting works.

We can get it done, it’s just a matter of educating others, activating ourselves, recruiting more folks to do the same, and repeating that process so that our preferred outcome becomes inevitable.

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CALL TO ACTION

1. Ask your city council and/or your state legislators to charter a public bank.

   or

2. Copy paste/mail a printed copy of this article to your city council and/or your state legislators to charter a public bank.

A public bank holds government deposits and lends them out for public purposes instead of parking them with Wall Street. North Dakota has had one since 1919. It has turned a profit every year since, and in 2024 it put $335 million into the state budget. It’s proven, and it pays for itself.

Other places are already doing this. California lets its cities and counties charter public banks. Philadelphia created a public financial authority in 2022. San Francisco is converting a city lending corporation into a bank by 2028. Bills are pending in New York and Washington.

Four ways to reach them:

• Call both the district office and the capitol office.

• Email through the contact form on their legislative page.

• Mail a printed letter.

• Show up at a town hall or district office and ask in person.

Find your state legislators here.

Cover these in your own words:

• What you want: a publicly owned bank for your city or your state, and their vote for it.

• Why it matters to you. Your mortgage, your small business loan, what your city can’t afford to build.

• That a public bank brings in revenue rather than draining the budget, and North Dakota has proven it for a century.

• That other states are already moving on this, and yours should not be last.

For a bonus activity, take a picture/screenshot of what you send and share it on your personal social media or send it to a friend.

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You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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The Existentialist Republic is one year old, and in that single year this community grew to 60,000 readers across our platforms, put a disbarment complaint against the Chief Justice of the United States onto the D.C. Bar’s docket, campaigned for the Minneapolis prosecutions that have now charged two federal agents, drafted eight pieces of model state legislation, and began building citizen grand jury petitions in seven states. This is the record of that year, and the credit for every line of it is yours.

In April I filed a disciplinary complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts with the D.C. Bar, documenting 16 years of federal financial disclosures in which Roberts characterized more than $10 million of his wife’s commission income as salary, and the Bar docketed it as complaint No. 2026-U795. The Board on Professional Responsibility meets on it September 10, which means that whatever happens next, the Chief Justice’s conduct is now before the body that licenses him to practice law.

We drafted eight pieces of model state legislation this year and fully packaged four of them with bill text, advocacy guides, and mailing lists, which is everything a legislator needs to introduce them, and then you funded the delivery. With more than $10,000 of your money, the Make Corrupt Politicians Pay Act is being printed and mailed to Democratic legislators in every trifecta state right now, while volunteers email every Democratic state legislator in the country, all 3,224 of them.

We also launched a series on state-level leaders who deserve more national exposure, because our readership can widen their reach and strengthen their hand where they legislate, and Virginia Delegate Jackie Glass and North Carolina Senator Woodson Bradley were the first two. Delegate Glass then came to us and walked our community through the E.A.R.R. model.

Throughout the year I sent 256 calls to action, which averages one every day and a half, and you kept answering them. Those calls now travel well beyond this community, because BigTentUSA sends them to their own email list, a partnership we launched in a livestream with Rick Wilson.

When the Department of Government Efficiency accessed Social Security records covering more than 70 million Americans, we found the opening in state law: computer crimes are prosecuted where the victim lives, which makes you a victim in your own county and your local police department the place to report it. We wrote report templates citing each state’s criminal statutes, and thousands of you filed them while contacting attorneys general, district attorneys, and police departments in all 50 states. The Supremacy Clause protects federal agents performing their official duties, and taking citizens’ data is part of no one’s official duties.

Then we put a questionnaire to every state attorney general in America, asking whether any law, ruling, or constitutional provision grants a sitting president total immunity from state investigation and prosecution for breaking that state’s laws, and whether their office would commit to reviewing documented evidence of state crimes by a president or cabinet member and taking it to a grand jury. All 50 of them had the chance to say that no one is above the law, and not one of them answered it directly.

So we went further, because six states still allow citizens to convene grand juries themselves, and we organized petition drives in those six states while adding Pennsylvania through its private criminal complaint process. We just finished our first round of interviews with potential petitioners.

In January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and this community responded immediately and kept responding for months. Thousands of your emails reached Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s office, Existentialist Republic members stood on Minneapolis sidewalks for weeks handing flyers to thousands of their neighbors, and we published a complete prosecution memorandum for Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Renee Good. That memo relies only on evidence that is already public, it lays out charges carrying a combined maximum of more than 40 years, and it grounds every count in materially identical cases, which is why hundreds of you sent it directly to Moriarty’s office.

Charges followed, and Moriarty has now charged two ICE agents from that same operation. When the federal government withheld the evidence in the killings, she said it on the record: “We are not giving up. We are going to see this through.” And in July the federal government turned that evidence over, the body camera footage, the agent statements, and the vehicle Renee Good was driving, so much of it is finally with Minnesota investigators.

I went to Minneapolis myself, along with my brother Basheer, where we marched, met with legislators and activists, and handed out flyers alongside our members there, and when I went on ICE watch, ICE agents threatened my life for it. I’d do it again tomorrow.

While those campaigns were in progress, I traveled the country for about a dozen in-person town halls and talks with Indivisible chapters, county Democratic parties, and other organizing groups, from Methow Rising in rural Washington to Indivisible Charlotte in North Carolina, plus Zoom sessions with more groups than I can list here. The Yakima Herald-Republic even wrote about the talk I gave in Yakima to open the Voices of Democracy speaker series.

Over the last year, I’ve even sat down face to face with dozens of elected officials to discuss how their states can use the strategies explained in my academic work and ER publications.

The arguments underneath all of it went out through every channel I could reach. Verfassungsblog and the Brennan Center’s State Court Report published the legal case, among others, the full taxonomy of oppositional federalism went up on the Social Science Research Network and then to the Harvard Law Review, The Nation interviewed me, and Mother Jones, NPR, PBS, and the Brookings Institution all cited the work. I made regular radio appearances with Thom Hartmann, on Laura Flanders and Friends, and on WCPT Chicago, the soft secession article that started so much of this reached its first anniversary, and I published two books, The American Reformation and Toppling Tyrants; free and paid versions available at the bottom of this article.

We opened a Discord server too, and 1,000 of you joined so quickly that scammers and bad actors followed, so we closed new membership to protect people. We’ve spent months rebuilding the server properly, and we’ll relaunch it as soon as we can confidently do so.

If you want one of those events for your own group, virtual or in person, just send me a direct message here on Substack, and don’t worry about the cost, because I often pay for the travel myself. Everything we make has a free version, my books included. The ER builds tools for fighting fascism, and I refuse to let money be the reason anyone goes without them.

One more thing from this year that has nothing to do with strategy. I got my mother onto Substack, and watching her progress has been one of the real joys of the year, because I always knew she was brilliant and now everyone else can see it too. She writes as W. A. Lawrence at Glass Empires, and you should go follow her. My older brother Basheer Ali is on here too, though he hasn’t had as much time to write; mom and I hope to help Basheer build more confidence to share his thoughtful insights on our current moment in history. Feeling like coworkers with my own family is not something I expected out of any of this, and I love it.

My cats, Princess Nandor, Zelda, and Enron, have now turned up in enough interviews and livestreams that they’ve logged more national television time than most cable pundits.

I wrote this piece for one reason, which is that we are making serious progress and you should take the time to feel proud of it. Every docket number, every charge, and every campaign in this record began with readers who gave money, made calls, filed reports, and handed out flyers, and I’m grateful for every one of you. And I want you to know that we are just getting started.

Almost everything you just read about was funded by our Substack subscribers, Buy Me A Coffee page, and our recent GoFundMe campaign.

Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent.

If you can be a subscriber or contribute on BMAC, you expand our capacity to do even more of the work this community has done over the last year. Thank you all for being here, I can’t wait to see how much we get done in the coming years, together.

- Chris

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The Existentialist Republic Library

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers

A note from the author: Following this article, you’ll find the full articles of impeachment we drafted, for anyone who wants to send them to their U.S. House representative and request that they be endorsed and filed.

The U.S. Constitution says a Supreme Court Justice can be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” That phrase isn’t defined in the Constitution. The Constitution grants the interpretation of high crimes and misdemeanors to the U.S. House of Representatives. Not to SCOTUS. The Court has said as much itself, ruling that impeachment is a political question, rather than a judicial one. To the people’s house. The way that mechanism is assembled feels intentional, and worth note.

We elect the members of that house. We send them there to represent us, and by extension to represent our reading of the Constitution. So the question of whether a Justice’s conduct is a high crime or misdemeanor was never handed to lawyers, or to the Court itself. It comes back to us, through the people we elect.

I learned in the military that if you’re going to raise a problem or ask someone to do something, you should come with the solution. So I learned what the impeachment standard actually is, reviewed his conduct against that standard, and then drafted articles of impeachment against Justice Clarence Thomas for the conduct that met it.

The conduct in question is already common knowledge. Over the last two decades, wealthy benefactors have given Thomas private jet flights, yacht voyages, resort stays, real estate money, tuition payments, and the forgiveness of a $267,230 loan, and he left all of it off the disclosure reports he certified each year. He also voted in cases where his benefactors and his wife held direct interests.

The argument for drafting the articles concerns the conditions every Justice serves under, not just removing him from office. Right now a Justice who takes this kind of money runs little risk of being brought before Congress, put under investigation, and made to answer in public. Impeach Thomas, or open an inquiry into him, and things start changing. And for those concerned that a successful impeachment would just mean his retirement and a Trump-appointed successor: the next appointee, and every Justice currently seated, learns that misconduct will no longer be ignored. We need to create an environment where these justices don’t feel above the law or above consequences.

Articles of impeachment are charging counts, the House’s equivalent of an indictment, and a simple majority of the House can adopt them. The Senate then sits as a court, hears the evidence, and votes on each article separately, with a two-thirds vote required to convict and remove. A separate majority vote can disqualify the person from ever holding federal office again. The Constitution’s standard, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, has no statutory definition, and the House has never adopted one. Representative Gerald Ford, leading the 1970 attempt to impeach Justice William O. Douglas, gave the definition that has governed in practice ever since: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

Frank Bowman, the University of Missouri law professor whose book is considered the standard modern history of impeachment, traces “high crimes and misdemeanors” to an English phrase that never meant indictable offenses at all, but the kind of serious bad conduct that warranted removal from office. Essentially, the standard for impeachment is not inherently criminal conduct. This is because the House of Representatives alone decides what the conduct is within that phrase, and that’s never been limited to what a prosecutor could charge. Further, the Congressional Research Service states plainly that impeachable conduct reaches serious violations of the public trust that are not necessarily indictable offenses.

So we drafted four articles in the exact form of H. Res. 1031, the resolution the House used to impeach Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. in 2010, the last time the Senate voted to convict and remove a judge. Porteous was removed for conduct materially similar to what these articles charge: taking undisclosed things of value from people with business before his court, and making false statements about his own finances. The articles are below, ready to file.

Article I charges willful failure to report gifts and transactions the Ethics in Government Act required him to disclose, on reports he certified as accurate, true, and complete, and the evidence of willfulness comes from Justice Thomas’s own filings: he disclosed Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow’s gifts through 2003, stopped after the Los Angeles Times wrote about them in 2004, marked “none” for his wife’s income while the Heritage Foundation paid her $686,589 from 2003 to 2007, corrected more than a decade of forms in 2011, and then omitted the 2014 sale of his mother’s house to Crow, the 2018 Koch summit flight, the 2019 Indonesia trip, and the other omissions charged in Article I.

In regards to the undisclosed gifts, and before most of the rest of this record was public, Jeremy Paul, former dean of Northeastern University School of Law, said: “What he did was just so clearly out of bounds that I don’t think there’s any defense of it.”

Article II charges acceptance of things of value from people with interests before the Court, followed by his participation in their matters. Harlan Crow, whose gifts fill Article I, sits on the boards of think tanks whose fellows file briefs in the Court. Federalist Society official Leonard Leo routed $25,000 to Virginia Thomas through Kellyanne Conway’s polling firm with the instruction that the paperwork make “No mention of Ginni, of course,” while Leo’s nonprofit was filing a brief in Shelby County v. Holder; Justice Thomas sat in that case and voted to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act. The Koch political network flew him to its donor summit, and when the network’s affiliates brought Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo to overturn the Chevron doctrine, he sat in the case and joined the majority.

Article III charges his participation, in violation of 28 U.S.C. 455, in four cases that grew out of his own wife’s work to overturn the 2020 election. Virginia Thomas texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows 29 times pressing him to reverse the result, emailed Arizona and Wisconsin legislators urging them to substitute their states’ electors, corresponded with John Eastman, the architect of the plan for the Vice President to reject state electors, and attended the January 6 rally at the Ellipse. Her husband sat in cases about that same effort, including Trump v. Thompson, where he cast the lone vote to keep White House records from the Select Committee, and Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case. He did recuse from Eastman v. Thompson in October 2023, once Eastman’s correspondence with his wife became public, which shows he knew how to apply the statute to matters involving his wife, and applied it selectively.

Article IV charges false and misleading statements about all of the above, made through the Court’s Public Information Office, through his counsel, and in his amended filings, in the same form the House used in Porteous’s fourth article: each statement quoted, followed by “in truth and in fact, as Justice Thomas then well knew,” followed by the records contradicting it.

These are not the first articles drafted against Justice Thomas. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a three-article resolution on July 10, 2024, charging one count of failure to disclose gifts, income, and transactions and two counts of refusal to recuse from matters involving his wife’s interests. Hers was the first to put the conduct into articles of impeachment introduced in the House, and the articles here build on it, adding the benefactor-interest count, the false-statements count, the loan forgiveness, the Koch charter flight, and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s December 2024 findings.

So what do we get out of impeachment without conviction? Opening an inquiry gives the House the ability to investigate, with subpoena power. From there:

• The investigation can yield legitimate evidence, some of which could be referred to states that may be interested parties in prosecutions, or to a future administration.

• His conduct goes public, and he testifies under oath, where dishonesty can be prosecuted.

• It pulls him away from his duties and his free time, a material cost.

• It potentially causes reputational harm, where the conduct merits it.

• It changes what a search of his name returns.

• It puts a stink on him that follows him into everything else, and makes other groups less willing to work with him.

A House majority can start it the day it decides to.

The fact is, congressional Democratic representatives are severely limited in their powers and it will stay that way barring a supermajority win by Dems that no serious forecast supports. Although Trump’s disapproval is the worst of either of his terms, his approval across major pollsters remains around 38 percent, because Republican approval of him has stayed near 90 percent throughout both terms. Approval that stable, combined with every variety of election interference now in play, does not indicate a once-in-a-generation landslide as particularly likely. But we still have elected officials in those roles, and there are still meaningful and effective ways for them to fight back regardless of outcome.

The party that holds power now already knows this. The Benghazi committee ran for more than two years, brought no charges, and surfaced Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The 2023 Biden impeachment inquiry produced no articles and kept the President’s family finances in the news for a year.

And in 2024, Republicans impeached Biden’s border chief, a cabinet secretary named Alejandro Mayorkas, over immigration policy. There was no crime; the charge was essentially that he ran the border badly. The House impeached him by one vote. The Senate threw it out immediately, no trial. And Republicans considered it a win anyway, because the goal was never removal, it was a year of border hearings, headlines, and a recorded vote to campaign on. That is the tool working as designed, for the party willing to use it.

Does this set a bad precedent? That precedent is already set. Republicans have spent more than a decade setting it, with a target list that reached the President, the Vice President, six cabinet secretaries, and the director of the FBI, and impeaching Justice Thomas would not create it.

Everyone has a job in this fight, and the people we send to the House are no exception. Their power is reduced, not gone, and there is work to do every day of the week. This is one piece of it. We wrote the articles and made the case for aggressively impeaching every corrupt member of this Court because that is the baseline of what a House representative is for.

Want to learn more? Check out the free library of resources at the bottom of this article. But just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the model legislation, and the 20–40 articles per month.

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Call to Action

We are calling for the impeachment of Justice Clarence Thomas, and of every other member of this Court whose record supports it. Contact your U.S. House representative and tell them you want corrupt justices impeached.

Find your representative at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative.

Staffers don’t usually open PDF attachments, since attachments are a security concern, they generally just read the body of the email. Put your own message in the body, where it will be read. When you write, tell them who you are as their constituent, why the corruption on this Court matters to you, and that you want Congress to move forward on impeachment.

If you’re interested, we drafted a full resolution against Justice Thomas that consists of four articles of impeachment. Every allegation is sourced, constructed in the form the U.S. House uses to bring charges. It’s available if you want to send it. You can do that by linking to this article, attaching it as a PDF, or pasting the text of the articles into an email.

The Existentialist Republic Library

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers

States hold four distinct options for public health care, and almost every American debate about “the public option” or “single payer” collapses them into a single blur. This article separates them: regulated private carrier programs, publicly owned insurers, single payer for core coverage, and public payment combined with public delivery. The four differ enormously in what they deliver, and they form an ascending sequence rather than rival destinations, because each stage makes the next one easier to reach. Along the way I’ll answer the standard objections, because each one fails on the law, the economics, or the historical record. I’ll tell you which model I personally favor when we get there, but promoting it is not the purpose of this article. The purpose is to show you the full range of options, because a reader who knows the whole map organizes better and gets fooled less. I would be thrilled with any of the models above the first category, and thrilled most of all to watch a state simply enact full single payer.

The stakes of the classification are practical. Enormous volunteer energy currently goes toward fighting a captured federal system on terrain that system controls: gerrymandered maps, a bought Supreme Court, a Senate that overweights empty land, and an Electoral College that does the same. Meanwhile Democrats hold complete governing control in states covering more than 100 million people, and that control sits largely unused. Health care is the clearest place to use it, and using it well requires knowing exactly what the options are.

The first category is regulated private carrier programs, and several states market these as public options despite the absence of any public insurer. Washington’s Cascade Care, the Colorado Option, and Nevada’s program all follow the same design: the state standardizes benefit packages and caps provider reimbursement, and private carriers sell and underwrite the plans. The insurer remains private, the risk remains private, and the margin remains private. These programs have produced modest premium effects, and those modest results now circulate as evidence that public health coverage fails. The evidence proves no such thing, because no public coverage was ever created.

The second category is a publicly owned insurer competing for voluntary enrollment: the state charters its own insurance company, bears the risk itself, and competes with private carriers for members. A state creates such an enterprise through ordinary legislation, and the precedent is more than a century old. North Dakota chartered the Bank of North Dakota in 1919, and it remains the country’s only state-owned general-service bank, profitable every year, never bailed out, and a steady contributor to the state’s general fund. The same chartering power applies to insurance, and this model is my personal favorite, for reasons of implementation rather than destination: it generates its own revenue, carries little to no tax burden, and, run well, it recruits its own political support, because every member who receives quality service becomes an advocate for expansion. The model already operates successfully in American health care. MetroPlusHealth, a subsidiary of NYC Health + Hospitals, serves nearly 700,000 members as a public insurer competing directly with private carriers. Its Gold Plan covers New York City employees, retirees, and their families with a $0-premium, $0-deductible basic option, and the city opened it to the entire municipal workforce in 2015 as a deliberate growth strategy for the public system. The replication path for any state follows directly. Begin with all public employees and their families, funded by redirecting the money the state already spends on their coverage, which gives the plan a large, stable membership and revenue from the first day without one new tax. Open enrollment to the general public afterward, with income-scaled premiums paid directly to the plan. The sequencing answers the standard actuarial objection that voluntary public plans attract the sick first: the public-employee membership arrives before open enrollment, so the plan holds a broad risk pool before the early adopters join.

The third category is single payer for core coverage: one public payer covers every resident’s core care. This category is what state-level Medicare for All bills propose, including the New York Health Act, CalCare in California, and Whole Washington’s Health Trust. Here the most common American belief about single payer is simply false. Nearly every single-payer country keeps private insurance. Canada allows supplemental coverage for prescription drugs, dental, and vision, and most Canadians carry it. Australia operates a full parallel private hospital system alongside its public Medicare. Private insurance operates alongside the National Health Service in Britain. Single payer describes who pays for the core benefit package, never a ban on private coverage. Which reveals how thin the wall between category two and category three actually is: a publicly owned insurer that keeps growing until private core coverage becomes redundant has become single payer in function, with no conversion date and no abolition of anything.

The fourth category adds public delivery to public payment: the state owns and operates facilities in addition to paying for care. American governments already run hospitals everywhere. NYC Health + Hospitals operates the largest public system in the country, county governments run major systems like Harris Health in Houston and Cook County Health in Chicago, state universities own academic medical centers, and Washington alone has dozens of public hospital districts operating today. This category expands that footprint substantially, and the expansion attacks costs at their source. Private hospital prices run roughly double what Medicare pays for identical services, hospital pricing is the largest single driver of American cost excess, and a facility the state owns has no monopoly margin to charge, because the price becomes an internal budget line rather than a negotiation the hospital wins. Public delivery also protects the payment system itself: a public plan that depends entirely on private hospitals can be squeezed by the rates those hospitals demand, while a state with its own capacity negotiates from strength or bypasses the negotiation entirely. And where private operators close rural hospitals and maternity wards when the margins fail, public facilities answer to need, which is why Washington’s hospital districts exist in the first place.

Now let’s explore some of the objections.

“No state has the funds to support universal health care.”

Every single one of them has the funds, and dozens of smaller economies prove it. New Zealand covers everyone on a gross domestic product smaller than Louisiana’s. Denmark’s economy is roughly half the size of Washington state’s. Costa Rica achieves universal coverage and life expectancy exceeding ours on about $70 billion of total output. The United States spent $15,474 per person on health care in 2024, 18 percent of the entire economy, while every universal system on Earth spends a fraction of that and delivers better outcomes. American states hold no shortage of money. They overpay, by roughly double, for worse results.

“No state has ever successfully implemented one.”

Saskatchewan, July 1, 1962. A farm province of under a million people built single-payer alone, survived a 23-day doctors’ strike backed by the American Medical Association, and operated without federal funding until 1968. The model worked so well that within 10 years every province in Canada had copied it. Taiwan repeated the feat at national scale: its legislature passed the bill in July 1994 and launched the system in March 1995, and within a year the 41 percent of the population that had been uninsured reached the same utilization rates as the previously insured. Coverage today stands at 99.9 percent. And for category two, New York City’s publicly owned insurer has competed successfully for three decades. The proof of concept exists at every stage of the sequence.

“Federal law stops states from regulating or taxing employer health plans.”

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act blocks states from regulating employer benefit plans, and the objection requires treating that partial restriction as a total one. It does not block states from taxing employers and covering residents, and a state system does the second thing, not the first. The Supreme Court drew this exact line unanimously in New York State Conference of Blue Cross v. Travelers (1995): a state law of general applicability survives even when it raises costs for ERISA plans, because it regulates no plan. The Court applied the same rule unanimously in De Buono v. NYSA-ILA (1997), upholding a state tax on an ERISA plan’s own hospitals, and again unanimously in Rutledge v. PCMA (2020). Three unanimous decisions across 25 years. Under a state system, employers keep their ERISA plans untouched; the plans simply become redundant because every resident is already covered. And a publicly owned insurer raises no ERISA question at all, since it competes for enrollment like any other carrier.

“Redirecting federal funds requires complex federal waivers.”

Waivers are required only for one specific design: merging Medicare and Medicaid dollars into a single state pool. That design is optional. A state can cover every resident from its own revenue while Medicare and Medicaid keep operating exactly as they do today, and the waiver requirement never triggers. No federal permission is needed to insure your own residents. And even for a state that wanted the merged pool, waivers are routine machinery: dozens of Section 1115 waivers govern huge portions of state Medicaid programs right now.

“Funding it requires massive tax increases.”

This objection counts the new payment and hides the eliminated one. Employer family coverage now averages $26,993 a year in premiums, with workers paying $6,850 of that directly out of paychecks before deductibles and copays even begin. That money is already effectively mandatory, priced by entities the payer does not control. The replacement contribution goes to an administrator running roughly 2 percent overhead instead of private insurers running 12 to 18 percent, so it comes in lower for most households. A payment that replaces a larger payment is not an increase. The contribution also doesn’t have to be structured as a tax at all: income-scaled premiums paid directly to the plan are established practice in Medicare Part B, in German sickness funds, and in British Columbia for decades, and a category-two insurer runs entirely on premium revenue from the start. The “political backlash” variant of this objection depends on the tax-increase claim being true. Most households would pay less for broader coverage, and voters reward the people who deliver that.

“Sáenz v. Roe means a state would face an unmanageable influx of out-of-state patients.”

Sáenz struck down paying new residents lower benefits than established ones. Bona fide residency requirements are untouched, which is why every state uses them today for Medicaid and in-state tuition. And the feared influx has never materialized anywhere: universal coverage has rolled out region by region across the world, from Saskatchewan to Massachusetts in 2006, and no system has collapsed from this mechanism. The research explains why. People move for jobs, family, and housing, and the sick are the least mobile population there is. Anyone who does relocate becomes a working resident paying in, which is exactly the in-migration every state competes to attract.

So the law permits every category, the money already exists, and working models operate today at every stage. What remains is organizing, and the organizing capacity already exists too. Indivisible chapters alone number in the thousands, and none of them would need to abandon their existing work. If the chapters in a single trifecta state simply added state-level public health coverage to their priorities and applied the pressure they already know how to apply, that state would have universal coverage in under two years. In Washington, Whole Washington has drafted the Washington Health Trust and carried companion bills in both chambers with a record number of co-sponsors. Similar campaigns have run in California, New York, and New Mexico.

Fifty years of health care debate has taught Americans to treat universal coverage as a federal responsibility, which means waiting on the one level of government where we have the least influence, fewest accountability mechanisms, and where oligarchs exercise the most control. The taxonomy above offers far more effective options in those four models, three of them proven at scale, and all of them within the existing legal and fiscal power of the states, and each one a foundation for the next. A single state that acts settles the argument for all fifty, the way Saskatchewan settled it for Canada.

We can get it done, it’s just a matter of educating others, activating ourselves, recruiting more folks to do the same, and repeating that process so that our preferred outcome becomes inevitable.

But just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the model legislation, and the 20–40 articles per month.

Don’t let this be the reason you miss a meal or are late on rent.

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Call to Action

Every state has the money and the legal authority to guarantee health care to every resident. Pick whichever model above you want your state to pursue, then bring it to any of these, or all of them:

• Your state legislators. Find yours at Open States. Ask them to sponsor or support legislation creating the model you’ve chosen.

• Your county Democratic party. Search your county’s name plus “Democratic party.” Ask them to pass a resolution endorsing it.

• An existing campaign in your state, like Whole Washington. Ask how to volunteer.

• Organizations where you already have a voice: your union, your Indivisible chapter, your legislative district organization. Ask them to adopt it as a priority.

In your own words: who you are, where you live, why you care, what you want them to do.

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Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

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Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

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Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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North Carolina received $103 million in federal victim services money in 2018, money that pays for domestic violence shelters and child advocacy centers. By 2024 the award had fallen more than 42 percent to $24.6 million, the sixth straight year of decline, with shelters considering layoffs. Then on April 22, 2025, the Justice Department terminated more than 365 grants worth roughly $811 million nationwide, with victim services among the programs cut off.

North Carolina State Senator Woodson Bradley figured out how the state can start replacing that funding and keep those shelters and victim services running, without raising taxes. She filed Senate Bill 719, the North Carolina Victims of Crime Assistance Act, in March 2025, a month before the terminations, and refiled it as Senate Bill 794. The bill creates a state fund, administered through the Governor’s Crime Commission, that awards competitive grants to the same organizations, and it directs money from criminal court costs and marriage license fees into the fund.

The federal money came from the Crime Victims Fund, which Congress created in 1984 under the Victims of Crime Act and funded with fines and penalties collected from federal criminal defendants. For years, when the Justice Department settled corporate cases through deferred and non-prosecution agreements, those penalties went to the general Treasury instead of the fund, and the awards to states shrank. Congress redirected those penalties into the fund in 2021, and the awards kept falling anyway. Then the Trump administration went after what remained. Federal agencies circulated banned-word lists that flagged terms including “victims” and “gender.” The Justice Department pulled money from the Center for Victim Research and from a program that supplied free sign language interpretation for crime victims. Then it tried to withhold roughly $1.4 billion in Victims of Crime Act grants from any state that refused to help ICE. The grants it tried to hold back pay for domestic violence shelters and victim advocates. It abandoned the plan in October only after 20 attorneys general sued.

North Carolina Republicans had already diverted victim services money once. Bradley wrote on her own Substack about a ProPublica investigation into a 2021 budget maneuver that moved $15 million in victim services funding away from the agencies that had long administered it and into the Human Trafficking Commission, then a two-person operation inside the state court system. People who worked for the commission and the legislature warned it would be overwhelmed, and it was: of 18 crisis centers ProPublica interviewed, 15 reported funding delays that harmed their work, centers cut staff and services, and as of March 2025 most were still waiting for their full funding. One center had to stop paying for a hotel for a trafficking victim, and the woman went back to her trafficker.

Court costs and marriage license fees are non-tax revenue, so the fund survives an appropriation fight and an oppositional federal government. The court costs also keep the burden where the federal fund put it, on offenders rather than on taxpayers. Congress wrote that principle into the Crime Victims Fund: people who commit crimes pay for services to the people they harmed. Bradley kept the principle and applied it at the state level.

Senator Bradley won the only seat in Mecklenburg County that Republicans left competitive when they drew the 2023 map, winning it by 209 votes out of 124,311 cast in a district where registration runs 33 percent Republican and 27 percent Democratic, with 40 percent unaffiliated. Stacie McGinn, the former general counsel to the Mecklenburg County Republican Party, requested a recount, and the recount confirmed Bradley’s win. The two of them face each other again in November. Bradley sponsored more legislation than any other freshman in the chamber during her first session, and she has the 2026 endorsement of the Charlotte Firefighters Association. She calls her politics Team Normal, and when we talked about what that means in regard to public safety she put the argument in one sentence: “you can be all about public safety and still keep our blue values and talk openly about it.” Senate Bill 719 is her proof that the two go together.

You don’t have to live in North Carolina to support Senator Bradley. Follow her at Woodson’s Substack, where she writes from inside the session, and watch her TEDx talk on the story that brought her to this work. Support her campaign from wherever you live at woodsonbradley.com.

We want to promote more of the people who are doing things right: state legislators, city council members, county and state chairs, and the leaders of activist organizations. If you want to be considered for a feature, just send me a direct message here on Substack.

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CALL TO ACTION

The Trump administration cut federal victim services grants in 2025. North Carolina State Senator Woodson Bradley has the fix: Senate Bill 719, the North Carolina Victims of Crime Assistance Act, paid for by criminal court costs and marriage license fees instead of taxes, and any state legislator can file the same bill.

Who you are contacting: your state senator and your state representative. Find them at OpenStates by entering your address, and each listing includes email and phone.

What you are asking for: that they file this bill in your state.

How: email, a call, or a printed letter if you want it on someone’s desk. If you get a form reply or a non-answer, that counts as a no: you can write back once and ask the question again.

When you write or call, cover these points in your own words, because a legislative office reads a hundred identical messages as one message and a letter that sounds like a constituent as a hundred:

• Your name and where you live in their district

• Your state lost the same federal victim services funding that every state did

• North Carolina’s Senate Bill 719 replaces part of it with criminal court costs and marriage license fees, and it raises no taxes

• Why this matters to you

• Whether they will file the same bill, and when you can follow up

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Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

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The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

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A decision is coming. On September 10, the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary board meets, and my misconduct complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts, docketed as No. 2026-U795, is in front of them. Roberts is bound by the Bar’s rules as a member, and the decision is whether they will apply those rules as written, or whether they will say that because this is the Chief Justice of the United States, we will look the other way.

John Roberts has been a member of the D.C. Bar since 1981. The rule that establishes disciplinary jurisdiction, Rule XI, Section 1(a), covers all members of the District of Columbia Bar, and no provision of it exempts judges or Justices.

When someone files a complaint against a lawyer, the disciplinary office opens a case, gives it a number, and takes at least a first look at whether the allegations, if true, would break the ethics rules. Even weak complaints get that much. The lawyer usually gets a chance to respond. In April I filed a complaint against Roberts over more than ten million dollars in commissions his wife, Jane Roberts, received from law firms appearing before his Court, pay far beyond her peers at the firm where she was employed.

That complaint got none of it. The Office of Disciplinary Counsel did not evaluate whether the allegations had merit, did not ask Roberts to respond, did not take the first step. They sent a letter saying, in effect, this is not ours to handle, and treated the complaint as if it never entered the system.

The letter, signed by Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Dru Foster, gave one reason. It cited 28 U.S.C. § 351. That law covers complaints about how a federal judge performs his judicial duties. The complaint I filed did not concern his rulings or anything he has done from the bench. It concerned household income and how he reported it on his federal disclosure forms, reporting worth investigating because it could suggest a pattern of obscuring financial benefit connected to his position. Those forms are personal documents, and Roberts signs them as an individual bound by the rules of the D.C. Bar. Rule XI, Section 2 permits discipline for misconduct “whether or not the act or omission occurred in the course of an attorney-client relationship.” The office cited a law about judicial duties, a law that does not even cover Justices, to close a complaint about a bar member’s disclosure forms.

They know no exemption exists because they proved it. When Jeffrey Clark, a former senior Justice Department official, argued that his federal office placed him beyond the reach of D.C. Bar discipline, this same office took the opposite position and won. No exemption from bar discipline exists for members holding federal office. That was their argument. It prevailed. The position they established in the Clark proceedings and the position stated in their June 24 letter cannot both be correct.

Whether Roberts violated the rules is the question they refused to ask. This article is about the refusal.

The forms listed the money as salary from Major, Lindsey & Africa, Jane Roberts’s employer. An internal spreadsheet, attached to a whistleblower complaint sent to Congress in 2022, showed commissions: $10.3 million between 2007 and 2014, paid out of placement fees from WilmerHale, Hogan Lovells, and Davis Polk. A commission is not a salary. Bennett Gershman, a law professor and former prosecutor, said calling the income salary is incorrect as a matter of law. Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, called the characterization misleading. Kendal Price, an attorney who worked alongside Jane Roberts, alleged under oath that her earnings traded on her husband’s position. Their own letter confirms they considered none of it.

The people who run this system wrote themselves an unreviewable exit. The Board’s own Rule 2.4 states that Disciplinary Counsel’s decision whether to docket a complaint “is not subject to review.” No provision anywhere in the rules gives a complainant a right to appeal. The American Bar Association’s model rules for discipline systems recommend that complainants get exactly that right, an appeal of a dismissal to the supervising board. D.C. chose not to adopt it. So before this complaint ever existed, D.C. was already an outlier on a basic question: how many jurisdictions let disciplinary counsel decline a facially serious complaint against a bar member with no review?

The Barr letter added the second layer. In 2020, twenty-seven lawyers, including four past presidents of the D.C. Bar, filed a complaint against Attorney General William Barr. The office declined to docket it, and among their stated reasons was that they will not intervene in matters currently and publicly being discussed in the national political arena. Read that as a rule of decision and it means visibility is immunity. Put the two layers together and the discipline system can refuse to look at any complaint, for any reason or a wrong reason, and answer to no one, and the more attention a matter draws, the stronger their excuse for inaction. The more powerful the member and the more visible the alleged misconduct, the less the rules apply.

On July 18 I wrote to the Board on Professional Responsibility, the body that supervises the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, and asked them to review the closure. On August 17 their Executive Attorney, James Phalen, responded: the request is docketed, the Board meets September 10, and they will notify me once they have fully considered it. Copies of the letter went to Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton Fox and to Dru Foster, who signed the closure.

I want to be honest about the odds. I can be right on every point of law and they can still close it, because they have reserved that power to themselves. And they are deciding this while the Department of Justice is actively suing their Disciplinary Counsel for prosecuting a different federal official, so the price of applying their rules has never been more visible to them. What they cannot do is close it without cost.

And one path remains open that no rule shields. Rule XI, Section 4(e)(1) empowers the Board to “consider and investigate any alleged ground for discipline ... upon its own motion.” Rule 2.4 protects the office’s decision from review, but nothing prevents the Board from acting on their own authority. Declining to review is easy. Declining to use your own power against your own precedent is a harder letter to write.

When the nine members of the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary board sit down on September 10 for their first meeting of the new term, the complaint I submitted against the Chief Justice is in front of them. They will look at the closure letter, the rules that bind them, and the Clark precedent their own disciplinary office won, and they will choose. They can apply their rules, or they can decide that protecting themselves matters more than the meaning of their own license, because a bar whose rules stop at power is certifying proximity to it, not conduct. To keep it closed, they have to point to an exemption that does not exist, or say nothing and place on the record that they declined to apply their own rules and their own precedent when the member under complaint was the Chief Justice of the United States. Either way we win. If the complaint gets docketed, a Chief Justice answers to the same system as every other lawyer for the first time. If they keep it closed, they hand us proof, in their own letters, that this discretion needs to be taken away from them. Whichever they choose, the question this publication has been asking since April gets its answer in writing, and you will read it here.

Want to make that all reality and start winning some ground? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need to have a plan.

But just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the model legislation, and the 20-40 articles per month.

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Call to Action

Today’s call to action is a single email. Ask your district attorney’s office one question: if a federal agent breaks state law in our county, will your office treat them like anyone else who breaks it? A form letter or a non-answer is the typical response, and it still tells you where your county stands.

You want ICE agents charged when they break state law? That decision belongs to this office. Corrupt officials indicted? Same office. Every accountability outcome runs through a person most voters have never looked at. Successful movements do not treat the law as neutral.

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

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The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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Publisher’s note on sources and standards

This report covers February 2025 through August 2026. Every factual claim is cited where it appears. Sources consist of federal indictments, court filings, agency memoranda, Congressional Research Service publications, Senate correspondence, published threat intelligence from named firms and university research groups, and news reporting. Filings from advocacy organizations are flagged and checked against the underlying documents.

Foreign interference in the 2026 midterms is positioned to be the most extensive in American history, and its full extent will likely never be known, because the Trump regime has made it clear that interference in their favor is invited, our resources largely undefended, violations to help the GOP will go unpunished, and will likely be rewarded through favorable trade and diplomatic treatment.

Further, the portion independent researchers have been able to identify has doubled in a year while the instruments that would have measured greater scale of interference have been thoroughly shuttered and defunded, while those who previously identified election interference that benefitted the GOP now find themselves facing weaponization of the criminal justice system and being treated as enemies of the Trump regime’s purged federal law enforcement apparatus.

This report documents the operations still visible to independent researchers and uses the remaining indicators to estimate the total.

In the first quarter of 2026, narratives from Storm-1516, a Russian operation run through a former Florida deputy sheriff granted asylum in Russia, more than doubled compared with the same period the year before, reaching near-daily output by spring. The count comes from Bloomberg, which identified the operation’s output using signature characteristics published by Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.

Finding 1: Documented foreign influence operations increased substantially through the 2026 election cycle

The Vice President of the United States has repeated a fabrication manufactured by Russian military intelligence. In November 2023, Storm-1516 published a false report that Zelensky’s associates had bought two yachts worth $75 million with money stolen from Western military aid; the brokers involved denied it. Then-Senator JD Vance repeated the claim publicly when explaining his opposition to continued U.S. support for Ukraine. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene shared it as well.

The documented operations running against American audiences right now:

Storm-1516, also tracked as CopyCop. Recorded Future reported that since March 2025 the network created “at least 200 new fictional media websites targeting the United States, France, and Canada,” on top of earlier waves, using uncensored variants of open-source language models and more than 1,000 fake journalist personas.

Spamouflage, a Chinese state-linked operation. The Clemson Media Forensics Hub documented the campaign’s targeting of then-Senator Marco Rubio, and Graphika reported in July that the network distributed manipulated event flyers to disrupt gatherings critical of the Chinese government in the United States and Europe.

A domestic artificial intelligence bot network. Clemson researchers identified at least 686 X accounts that posted more than 130,000 times, posing as conservative voters and working four Senate races and two primaries, and assessed the network as “an American political operation, rather than one run by a foreign government.”

Party-produced deepfakes. The National Republican Senatorial Committee published a deepfake of James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, on March 11: an artificial version of the candidate speaking to camera for over a minute, the first of its kind per CNN, with a disclosure label rendered in small, fading text. CNN reported the ad was the latest in a series of AI-generated products from the committee.

These operations demonstrate that the techniques are normalized, the tools are cheap, and disclosure requirements are minimal where they exist at all.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin measured what targeting like this does to turnout. Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2026, they tracked every digital ad seen by 10,441 people representative of the voting-age population for the six weeks before the 2016 election and matched each person’s exposure to their verified turnout record.

The researchers estimated that roughly 4.7 million people who would otherwise have voted were successfully influenced not to. Nonwhite voters in minority-majority counties in battleground states received the messages at four times the rate of their white neighbors, and the operators used “Martin Luther King Jr.” as a targeting keyword to identify nonwhite voters for suppression.

Lead author Young Mie Kim said the Russian operation was not about mobilizing people but about demobilizing certain groups of people, and that 17 percent of the campaigns studied were tied to Russian operations. Trump won the presidency that year on battleground margins under one percent, including Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes.

The prohibition those advertisers violated is one the Federal Election Commission has lacked the votes to enforce since May 2025.

Finding 2: The Trump administration has dismantled seven federal safeguards against foreign election interference.

The federal defenses against foreign election interference took nearly ninety years to build. Dismantling them began in February 2025 and has not stopped. The defenses had different architects across different decades. Congress wrote the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938 and created the Federal Election Commission in 1974. After Russia’s 2016 operation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation created its Foreign Influence Task Force in 2017, Congress established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018, the intelligence community established its Foreign Malign Influence Center in 2022 to track election interference by Russia and other adversaries, and the State Department ran a counter-disinformation office. The current administration has disabled every one of them since February 2025:

February 5, 2025. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force on her first day, writing that the move would “free resources to address more pressing priorities.”

The same memo limited criminal prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to “instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” Enforcement was narrowed, not ended; the act remains law.

December 2024 through April 2025. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center closed in December 2024, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut its successor office on April 16, and by September the department had halted “all frameworks” for countering foreign disinformation.

February through March 2025. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency froze its election security work and ended funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, telling states in an internal email that the work “no longer supports Department priorities.” Support ended fully on September 30, 2025.

May 1, 2025. The Federal Election Commission lost its quorum and with the quorum lost the legal ability to open investigations, issue penalties, or make rules. Chair Shana Broussard told NOTUS the agency is “hobbled.”

Through 2025. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence terminated 500 staff, a 30 percent reduction, with cuts announced to reach 40 percent of personnel by the end of 2025, and folded core functions of the Foreign Malign Influence Center into other offices. The Brennan Center for Justice noted that the Director of National Intelligence omitted foreign election threats from her worldwide threats testimony, unlike prior cycles.

July 9, 2026. Trump fired the three remaining commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan agency that certifies voting equipment and administers federal election funding, leaving it without a quorum months before the midterms. With CISA’s election work halted, the commission was one of the few remaining federal entities providing election security support to states.

Those offices produced indictments, sanctions, domain seizures, and critical warnings to states and campaigns.

The center found that federal support for election security is “notably absent this cycle,” the first such absence since election infrastructure was designated critical infrastructure in 2017. Election officials told MS NOW they have received no intelligence briefings on possible foreign threats and have no access to regional cybersecurity advisers, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond when asked about it. Sens. Alex Padilla and Mark Warner have demanded intelligence briefings on foreign election threats ahead of the midterms and report that the intelligence office failed to respond to their previous request.

The 2026 midterms will be the first federal election since Russia’s 2016 attack in which none of the defenses built in response are still functioning, and enforcement under the older laws has stopped as well.

Finding 3: Republicans have opened a working channel to the Kremlin and plan to continue using it through the election

In the same period, House Republicans hosted the first Kremlin parliamentary delegation on American soil in twelve years, over written Senate warnings that the visitors came to collect intelligence, with a reciprocal Moscow trip planned for the weeks around the election.

On March 26, 2026, a delegation of Russian State Duma lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., the first such visit since relations collapsed over the invasion of Ukraine, led by Vyacheslav Nikonov of the United Russia party and hosted on Capitol Hill by four House Republicans and one Democrat, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). Every member of the delegation was under United States sanctions. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats wrote to the administration on April 3: “The delegation came onto U.S. soil for one purpose: to advance the Kremlin’s strategic aims—including gathering additional useful intelligence.”

Rep. Luna told the Russian state news agency TASS in July that members of Congress plan to visit Moscow this fall or winter, that administration officials will travel as well, and that an announcement involving Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be coming.

The most senior travel already scheduled is FBI Director Kash Patel’s, who is planning a trip to Russia in October, reported by Politico, with the FSB, Russia’s security service, likely hosting. The agenda is undisclosed, and the Kremlin has declined to confirm the trip. The bureau that stopped investigating Russian influence operations is sending its director to meet the Russian security service one month before the election.

Finding 4: There is no longer an agency able to investigate and penalize illegal foreign campaign contributions

Federal law bars foreign nationals from contributing to American elections, and the Federal Election Commission is the agency that enforces it. It entered 2026 with roughly 195 enforcement matters pending and no authority to act on any of them. Nothing moves until the Senate confirms the commissioners nominated in February.

What that means in practice is visible in a complaint the commission received in February. Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy organization, asked the commission to investigate Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini. The complaint alleges he used his daughter Isabela Herrera, whose only prior federal political gift was $20, to move “prohibited foreign contributions in the name of another totaling $3.5 million” into MAGA Inc., the leading pro-Trump super PAC, while he sought clemency in a federal bribery case. President Donald Trump pardoned him in that case on January 16, 2026, a month before the complaint was filed. The center’s Saurav Ghosh said the sequence suggests Herrera Velutini “flouted the law to corruptly seek presidential clemency.”

When we look at the totality of the circumstances as we approach the midterm elections, we can see that the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have invited foreign interference in their favor, removed the guardrails built to stop it, and rewarded those who provide it. What that means for November is that the operations documented here will be at full operational scale from America’s enemies, and hyper-targeted to convince people to vote MAGA or not show up.

Suppressing turnout remains among the most effective tools these operations have, which is why researchers estimate 4.7 million Americans stayed home in 2016 because of ads aimed at them, and it is the tool that fails when people show up anyway.

Beyond November, the work is electing representatives at the city and state level who are prepared to fight back from a serious oppositional posture. The states retain authority over their own elections, and they can ban what the federal government now permits, fund what it has defunded, and prosecute what it declines to. That is achievable and within reach, so long as we arm ourselves with the knowledge and organize well enough to use it.

Let’s get after it.

Your state can stand up its own single payer healthcare system, arrest ICE agents who break the law, and even create New Deal style jobs programs. There are tremendous options available to us at the state level that are largely untapped.

Want to make that all reality and start winning some ground? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need to have a plan.

But just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the 4 pieces of model legislation, and the 20-40 articles per month.

Don’t let this be the reason you miss a meal or are late on rent.

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Buy The ER Some Coffee

CALL TO ACTION

This takes five minutes.

Find your state legislators at openstates.org. Enter your address and it lists everyone who represents you.

Email any of them and ask for one thing: pass an election protection bill this session that makes it a felony to seize ballots, break into voting systems, or threaten election workers. California passed one in a week. Tell them why you care. If you’ve emailed them before and didn’t get a response then try a call, a letter, asking to schedule a meeting with their staff, or pick someone else to contact.

Use your own words. Say where you live so they know you are a constituent, and ask them to reply with their position.

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers

Just a few months ago, Hungary held an election with roughly 80 percent turnout and threw Viktor Orbán out of power after sixteen years. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, which ran on naming the Orbán government’s corruption openly and promising specific measures to dismantle it, won 53.18 percent of the vote and 138 of the 199 seats in parliament, a two-thirds supermajority, while Orbán’s Fidesz took 55 seats. Magyar’s 3.3 million votes were the most any party has ever received in democratic Hungary. The textbook case of a seemingly successfully captured regime ended at a ballot box the regime itself had spent over a decade engineering to be unloseable.

Orbán lost because several conditions converged, and one of them was that the European Union spent years successfully deploying a working soft-power apparatus that starved his patronage system of the money it ran on. Over the course of the Orbán government’s standoff with Brussels, the EU froze tens of billions of euros earmarked for Hungary on rule-of-law grounds, with around 18 billion still frozen at the time of the election and over a billion permanently forfeited when the first tranche of suspended funds expired at the end of 2024. That money had been the lifeblood of the Fidesz network, much of it historically funneled to Orbán-connected oligarchs who in turn kept the regime’s coalition loyal. Cut off the money and the coalition gets fragile. When Tisza ran a credible challenge, the coalition broke. The collapse was policy doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Currently, the U.S. is suffering from the type of system-wide autocratic capture that the EU is structured to prevent.

That structure has been tested. Hungary and Poland both spent the last decade testing what a member state could get away with on rule-of-law erosion, judicial capture, and the suppression of opposition. The EU built its toolkit in response to them, and the toolkit is both operational and proven. We do not have to invent any of it. We can read what they did and understand what we are looking at when we look at our own structural future.

Here are five tools the EU uses to contain and reverse autocratic capture.

1. Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union is the procedure that can suspend a member state’s voting rights in EU institutions when it persistently breaches the Union’s founding values, including the rule of law and democracy. In the EU, when a member state's government rigs its courts and elections, the other member states have a formal procedure to take away that state's vote in the Union's decisions until the rigging is undone.

2. The Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, in force since 2021, is the financial mechanism, and it is the tool that did the most concrete work against Hungary. The regulation lets the EU withhold funds from a member state when rule-of-law breaches put the Union’s budget at risk. The Commission triggered it against Hungary for the first time in late 2022, and the Council approved suspending billions in budget commitments over concerns about public procurement, corruption controls, and the capture of formerly public universities by government-aligned trusts. Orbán’s regime had been counting on that money. When it stopped, and stayed stopped, the system that kept his coalition fed started to run dry. (After Magyar won, the Commission moved to release the remaining frozen billions, the same tool working in reverse to reward reform.)

3. The third tool consists of two courts. The European Court of Justice handles EU law itself, and the European Court of Human Rights, technically a Council of Europe institution rather than an EU one but operating in tandem, handles human rights. Both provide judicial oversight that no single member state government can capture, because each state seats one judge among dozens it did not choose, through processes no single country controls. A Hungarian or Polish government can pack its own supreme court. It cannot pack the Strasbourg court. Citizens, NGOs, and other member states can bring cases there, and the rulings carry legal weight inside the offending country.

4. The fourth tool is the Copenhagen criteria, which are the standards a country must meet to join the EU and to remain in good standing: stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities. The other tools on this list measure a member against these standards. Imagine if American states had to meet standards like these to remain in good standing, and lost their “good standing” status when they gerrymandered their maps or corrupted their courts.

5. The broader Union budget itself is the fifth EU tool, the one that ties the others together. Structural funds, cohesion funds, agricultural support, research and exchange programs like Horizon and Erasmus, all of it moves through compliance conditions that make authoritarian capture genuinely expensive for the regime building it. The mechanism is quieter than what the American imagination reaches for when it thinks about confronting authoritarianism. No troops, no conventional sanctions, no dramatic confrontation. Just conditions on the money that flows through the Union, calibrated so the cost of authoritarianism climbs above the cost of staying democratic. The financial gravity of belonging to a wealthy bloc does the rest.

The EU model runs on pooled financial and judicial mechanisms shared by countries that keep their own governments, their own laws, and their own constitutional authority, while binding themselves to standards no single member can dismantle alone. That model binds member states to shared democratic standards on the things that matter most. That means strong states with a lean center, and robust shared mechanisms for protecting voting rights, judicial independence, and human rights.

That is a different destination than the one the Federalist Society talks about, and it is the destination this publication has in mind when illustrating a future where America looks structurally more like the European Union than the regressive and perpetually worsening mess we have now.

Some folks might ask: if states get more independent authority, isn’t that what the bad guys want? To tear us apart so the oligarchs can more easily exploit us?

The European Union is the counterexample. Its member states currently retain more independent authority than American states, but take a look at the parts that make up the member states of the EU and ask yourself if we aren't already halfway there: their own constitutions, their own court systems, their own legislatures. Most of them even share a currency, the way American states do. Their Union has not torn apart, because states with autonomy can still bind each other to democratic standards through structured cooperation, and that cooperation can be powerful.

America already is that federation in its bones: states holding their own authority, a central layer built for coordination and common defense. What we can add is the part the EU proved works, shared democratic standards, voting rights, fair courts, human rights, protection of minorities, enforced through pooled financial and judicial mechanisms that are less easily captured.

There is hope in this too. The most dangerous narrative running through American political life right now is the idea that authoritarian regimes consolidate and stay consolidated, that once the GOP wins, they win forever. That captured courts and agencies and the security services leave no room for recourse or reformation. Regimes far more entrenched have been removed and replaced, under far worse circumstances.

The United States has fifty states with independent constitutional authority and the legal capacity, when they choose to use it, to act more independently. That is what soft secession and the broader architecture of state-led opposition are about. That is what the rest of the Existentialist Republic’s American Reformation series has been mapping. The EU shows us the destination is real, the tools are real, and a regime built on what looked like permanent capture can fall in a single election if the soft-power apparatus around it has been doing its quiet work for long enough.

If you find this work of use then consider being an Activist Subscriber. Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can click the button then you are keeping this machine engaging and informing millions of activists per month. Think about that, you choosing to subscribe means millions of people are absorbing these articles and many are engaging in the calls to action and this entire movement grows in power. At a certain point, victory becomes an inevitability if we can educate and activate enough folks! Thanks for being here. - Chris

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Call To Action

Today’s call to action compounds on yesterday’s. Find another way to make the demand. Ask someone else on the contact list and/or ask the same person but in a different way. Maybe you contacted your governor last time, so you can try your mayor. Maybe your mayor sent back a form letter response to your email so this time call, mail a letter, or comment on their most recent social media post to ask why they won’t send a response on this subject.

Here is the action. Email or call your governor’s office and tell them, in your own words, to direct state police to enforce state criminal law against anyone who assaults, abducts, or unlawfully detains a resident, federal badge or not, and to sign an executive order requiring every armed agent in the state to show a face, a name, and legal authority. An agent acting outside the Constitution is not acting in pursuance of it. If you have feelings on those horrific shock gloves, tell them the same. If they aren’t willing to plainly state that nobody is above the law, then are they really who you want as a representative? Do as many of the following as you can handle:

• Your governor, the office that can sign the order this week.

• Your state attorney general, to commit publicly to prosecuting assault, kidnapping, and unlawful detention committed under color of a badge, as Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty already has.

• Your state legislators, to write both into statute so the next governor can’t undo them.

• Post the ask publicly and tag the governor, the attorney general, and your state party, so the ask and any non-answer are both public.

Your own words are what works; identical messages get counted once and filed. A form letter back is a lack of courage, and you can say so in a response to them.

It’s inspiring for others to see a screenshot, photo, or copied text of your activism. Showing others that you are persistently advocating for change is an effective method for building the public activation necessary for a successful social movement.

The Existentialist Republic drafts model state legislation, and one of our state bills addresses this exact conduct: the Epstein Survivors Justice Act.

Everything we publish is available for free in the shop at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER, all listed at $0.00.

Books, shirts, bumper stickers, and physical booklets are at TheExistentialistRepublic.com, and those purchases help keep this machine destroying fascism.

THE EXISTENTIALIST REPUBLIC LIBRARY

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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I started writing this piece to tell the story of the times the Supreme Court was defied. When the cases were all assembled in front of me, something became clear that I didn’t set out to prove: in almost every one, outright ignoring the Supreme Court was the strategically effective move.

The defiers didn’t just escape consequences. They won.

The record runs from 1793 to this month, and it includes both kinds of defiance: refusing a direct court order aimed at you, and continuing conduct the Court’s precedent prohibits.

The record opens in 1793 with Chisholm v. Georgia. Alexander Chisholm, settling a South Carolina merchant’s estate, sued the State of Georgia in federal court over unpaid Revolutionary War supplies, and the Supreme Court ruled the suit could proceed. Georgia refused to appear and refused to pay. The Georgia House of Representatives went further and passed a bill making any attempt to enforce the judgment a felony punishable by hanging.

Nobody forced Georgia to comply. Instead, Congress proposed and the states ratified the Eleventh Amendment in 1795, which stripped federal courts of the power to hear suits against a state brought by citizens of another state. The amendment erased the jurisdiction the ruling rested on, the judgment became unenforceable, and Georgia never paid a dollar. The first major act of defiance against the Supreme Court ended with the Constitution itself amended to adopt the defier’s position.

Worcester v. Georgia came in 1832. The Court held that Georgia law had no force inside Cherokee territory and that the state had illegally imprisoned Samuel Worcester, a missionary who refused to swear a loyalty oath Georgia demanded of white residents living among the Cherokee. Georgia ignored the ruling and kept Worcester at hard labor for ten more months, until he agreed to abandon further legal action and accept a pardon. President Andrew Jackson made no move to enforce the decision. The famous quote attributed to him, that John Marshall made his decision and could enforce it himself, is almost certainly an invention, but the inaction it describes was real.

Georgia lost nothing. The Cherokee paid with the Trail of Tears.

In 1842, Prigg v. Pennsylvania held that federal fugitive slave law overrode state law, and that states couldn’t prosecute slave catchers. But the decision also said the federal government couldn’t force state officials to help. Northern legislatures took that opening as far as it would go, passing personal liberty laws that barred their own judges, sheriffs, and jails from playing any part in capturing and returning people who had escaped slavery. Enforcement collapsed across much of the North because the federal government had almost no officers of its own on the ground.

No state was ever sanctioned for it. The principle those laws established, that the federal government cannot commandeer state officials to enforce federal law, is the same one the Supreme Court endorsed in Printz v. United States in 1997 and the same one sanctuary states rely on today.

Wisconsin escalated from noncooperation to outright refusal. In 1854, the abolitionist editor Sherman Booth helped a Milwaukee crowd break Joshua Glover, who had escaped slavery in Missouri, out of the county jail where federal authorities held him. The federal government prosecuted Booth under the Fugitive Slave Act. The Wisconsin Supreme Court freed him and declared the Act unconstitutional, then refused even to send the case record to Washington, forcing the United States Supreme Court to rule without it.

When the Supreme Court unanimously reversed in Ableman v. Booth in 1859, the Wisconsin court never entered the decision on its own records, and the legislature passed resolutions endorsing the refusal. Federal authorities rearrested Booth himself in 1860, and President James Buchanan freed him on his way out of office.

Then a president did it. In 1861, Chief Justice Roger Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, ruled in Ex parte Merryman that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus, the right of a prisoner to have a judge review the legality of his detention. President Abraham Lincoln ignored the order. He kept suspending habeas corpus, and Congress later passed a law allowing it after the fact, the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863.

His administration also refused to treat Dred Scott, the Taney Court’s 1857 ruling that Black Americans could never be citizens, as binding policy: the State Department issued passports to Black citizens, Attorney General Edward Bates issued an official opinion in 1862 that free Black men were citizens, and Lincoln signed the 1862 law banning slavery in the territories, which Dred Scott had declared beyond the power of Congress.

Lincoln defied the Chief Justice of the United States and won the war.

The one loss in this record is massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. A full decade after the Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954, only 1.2 percent of Black children in the Southern states attended integrated schools. Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its entire public school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate a single classroom.

The defiance broke only twice and each case required its own use of force, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock in 1957, and when federal marshals and troops put James Meredith into Ole Miss in 1962. Everywhere else it broke only when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 let the federal government sue school districts and cut off their money. Some would argue that public school segregation is still alive and well in much of the country, and funded with our tax dollars, just through other means.

The school prayer rulings prove the same point without the paratroopers. The Court struck down official school prayer in Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and devotional Bible reading in Abington v. Schempp in 1963. Two years after the rulings, 64 percent of Southern schools still opened the day with prayer. Enforcement required a local family willing to sue their neighbors and absorb the backlash, so in most places nobody sued, and the devotionals continued into the 1970s.

Congress joined the defiers in 1983. In INS v. Chadha, the Court struck down the legislative veto, a provision that lets one house of Congress, or even a single committee, cancel an executive action without passing a new law. Congress responded by writing more of them, not fewer. The Congressional Research Service counted more than 400 new legislative vetoes enacted in the two decades after the decision, and the separation of powers scholar Louis Fisher counted nearly 1,000 by 2013. Agencies honor them, unconstitutional or not, because the committees that write them also write the agencies’ budgets.

The states found the same lesson with marijuana. In Gonzales v. Raich in 2005, the Supreme Court confirmed that Congress can criminalize all marijuana, including a plant grown at home for medical use in a state that allows it. States legalized anyway. They built licensing systems, collected taxes, and turned a federally illegal drug into a regulated industry operating in the open.

The federal government stood down: the Justice Department’s 2013 Cole memorandum told prosecutors to leave state-compliant businesses alone, and since 2014 Congress has barred the department from spending money to block state medical marijuana programs.

Oklahoma showed how fast defiance can bend the Court itself. In McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020, the Court held that much of eastern Oklahoma remains reservation land for purposes of criminal jurisdiction, which meant the state could no longer prosecute crimes committed by or against tribal citizens there. Governor Kevin Stitt attacked the ruling and state officials refused to cooperate with tribal governments on implementing it.

Two years later the Court retreated. Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta handed the state shared jurisdiction to prosecute non-Indians for crimes against Indians on those same lands, recovering much of what McGirt had taken. As The New Republic put it, the state’s resistance paid off. The whole cycle took 24 months.

Texas engineered the most sophisticated version. In 2021, Senate Bill 8 banned abortion once cardiac activity is detectable, around six weeks of pregnancy, while Roe v. Wade was still binding law guaranteeing the right until roughly 24 weeks.

No Texas state official enforces SB8. Any private person can sue anyone who performs or assists an abortion, for a minimum of $10,000 per violation, and because no official enforces the law, there was no official a federal court could order to stop before the law took effect. The Supreme Court let it operate. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the Court permitted only a narrow suit against licensing officials and never paused the law’s enforcement.

Abortion largely ended in Texas in September 2021, nine months before Dobbs overturned Roe. Texas nullified a constitutional right by procedural design while the right still existed on paper, and the Court’s answer was to eliminate the right.

On March 15, 2025, deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act continued to El Salvador after Judge James Boasberg ordered the planes turned around, and he later found probable cause to hold the administration in criminal contempt for it. On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 that the government must facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man the administration admitted it deported to a Salvadoran prison by error. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem then told the Senate there was no scenario in which he returned. The government delayed for months before finally returning him in June to face federal criminal charges they’d assembled in the meantime.

And the contempt track went nowhere: a divided appeals court panel blocked the criminal contempt proceedings, and 16 months after the flights, no official has been charged, fined, or sanctioned in any way.

The defiers keep winning because the Supreme Court has no enforcement arm. Alexander Hamilton admitted as much while selling the Constitution to the public: the judiciary, he wrote in Federalist 78, has “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment” and depends on the executive even to make its judgments effective. The states, cities, and public add even more layers of cooperation that are entirely necessary for a court to have enforcement power.

Across 233 years, the enforcement required a president willing to send the 101st Airborne to public schools, or for a Congress willing to attach every education dollar in the South to compliance. This creates an asymmetric expense structure where the more jurisdictions refuse, and with greater frequency, the more expensive and resource depleting it becomes to enforce decisions.

Personally, I would rather have the executive branch fighting with states over every scrap of justice we deserve than a near uninterrupted flow of resources coalescing and strengthening their power structures, aiming to make GOP rule permanent

And notice who the defiers were. The most honorable defiance in this record came from abolitionists: Northern legislatures refusing to help catch human beings for enslavers, and a Wisconsin court refusing to acknowledge the same Supreme Court that decided Dred Scott. Defiance has mostly belonged to horrible people because defiance requires institutional power, and for most of American history the people holding that power were defending slavery or segregation. When abolitionists captured statehouses and state courts, defiance served abolition. When blue states wanted legal marijuana, defiance built a licensed industry against a standing ruling and won completely.

So why shouldn’t we also be willing to defy immoral and unjust and unconstitutional rulings, particularly when they come from the highest and most corrupt court in the land?

Red states figured this out. They are defying intentionally, and they have been for a while. They pass the program first and fill the docket with cases they know won’t all win.

By the time the Court rules, reversing feels radical and enforcing the law feels like the disruption.

The strongest objection is that passing a law you expect to defend in court is how legal change has always worked, that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People built the campaign that produced Brown v. Board the same way, and that a definition of defiance covering Texas covers the civil rights movement too.

The objection assumes both sides are running test cases, and the assumption fails twice. Half of this record contains no test case at all: nobody was seeking judicial review when the planes kept flying after a judge ordered them back, when Texas installed more razor wire after the Court said the wire could come down, or when the president declined to enforce a statute the Court had just upheld unanimously. And the test-case half operates on real people for years while the appeals are dragged out.

Linda Brown couldn’t attend the white school while her lawyers litigated. Louisiana’s schoolchildren sit under the state’s chosen scripture right now, while its appeal proceeds.

Let’s look at what’s happening today. Alabama ran the 2022 congressional election on a map the Supreme Court later found illegal, then refused to draw the second majority-Black district the Court ordered in Allen v. Milligan until a court-appointed special master drew it for them. Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas mandated Ten Commandments displays in public classrooms that Stone v. Graham declared unconstitutional in 1980, and the strategy is working: a federal appeals court has now treated Stone as obsolete and let the Texas law stand, teeing the question back up for a friendlier Supreme Court.

Oklahoma’s superintendent ordered every public school to teach from the Bible and called compliance compulsory. And Texas kept installing razor wire at the border after the Supreme Court ruled Border Patrol could cut it.

The presidency now does the same at national scale. The president signed an order stripping birthright citizenship from American-born children against the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment and 128 years of precedent; the Supreme Court struck it down this June, and the administration answered this month with a new order attempting the same outcome.

The administration has refused for a year and a half to enforce the law requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell it or shut it down, a statute the Supreme Court unanimously upheld, a refusal that Jack Goldsmith, the conservative lawyer who ran the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, calls blatantly unlawful. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly found the White House illegally impounding funds, meaning it simply refuses to spend money Congress appropriated by law, with senators counting at least $430 billion blocked. The president’s family collects payments from foreign governments through crypto ventures in open violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, the constitutional ban on a president accepting anything of value from a foreign state without the consent of Congress, including a $2 billion arrangement with a fund controlled by the United Arab Emirates; even the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, concedes the deal “clearly implicates” the clause.

The villains don’t comply in advance, because the record shows, unequivocally, that not complying works.

So why should the response be “but we have to respect precedent”? Defiance is how they’ve won so much ground.

In their eyes, their values and morals matter more than the Supreme Court or the federal government. And honestly, do we not feel the same way about ours?

Governor Bob Ferguson. Governor JB Pritzker. Governor Kathy Hochul. Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Any leader who wants to be successful in defending the rights and liberties of their residents, here is what we ask of you:

Don’t sue first. Do first.

So what can you do about all this?

Check out the call to action below and the Existentialist Republic library at the bottom of this page.

If you find our work at The Existentialist Republic of value and you want to see it not just reach more people and more legislators, we need subscribers to keep growing!

We want to have staff and volunteers communicating full time with activists, legislators, and community organizers, and that growth all moves far more quickly if funded! Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can subscribe or buy us a cup of coffee then you give this fascism destroying machine more capacity!

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Call To Action

The ask takes ten minutes: email or call your governor’s office and tell them, in your own words, to direct state police to enforce state criminal law against anyone who assaults, abducts, or unlawfully detains a resident, federal badge or not, and to sign an executive order requiring every armed agent in the state to show a face, a name, and legal authority. An agent acting outside the Constitution is not acting in pursuance of it. Do as many as you want:

• Your governor, the office that can sign the order this week.

• Your state attorney general, to commit publicly to prosecuting assault, kidnapping, and unlawful detention committed under color of a badge, as Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty already has.

• Your state legislators, to write both into statute so the next governor can’t undo them.

• Post the ask publicly and tag the governor, the attorney general, and your state party, so the ask and any non-answer are both public.

Your own words are what works; identical messages get counted once and filed. A form letter back is a lack of courage, and you can say so in a response to them.

The Existentialist Republic drafts model state legislation, and one of our state bills addresses this exact conduct: the Epstein Survivors Justice Act.

Everything we publish is available for free in the shop at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER, all listed at $0.00.

Books, shirts, bumper stickers, and physical booklets are at TheExistentialistRepublic.com, and those purchases help keep this machine destroying fascism.

THE EXISTENTIALIST REPUBLIC LIBRARY

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers

Notes from the author: This article is very long, because believe it or not this subject is not nearly as persuasive or comprehensive when trimmed to the size of a Facebook post. You’re here because you are a problem solver, you want solutions, and this article explores those in depth. That drive to learn and act is how we get out of this mess, thank you for being that type of person. Additionally, if you aren’t already following my mother’s Substack, Glass Empires provides a complementary series of solution based journalism https://substack.com/@glassempires .

Every governor in the country can declare a state of emergency on their own authority, today. No other country on earth hands that power to fifty separate governments at once.

Before we get to whether governors should use those powers to fight back, we have three things to establish. First, whether what is happening in the United States qualifies as an emergency. Second, what a declaration actually authorizes a governor to do. Third, whether those authorities would be enough to rein in a federal coup.

Let’s begin.

The federal government is holding 65,765 people in immigration detention, more than 46,000 of them with no criminal conviction under a Homeland Security definition that counts driving without a license as a criminal conviction, and elected representatives who try to inspect these facilities are being barred and even arrested. Federal agents have killed American citizens on American streets and hidden their identities while doing it.

The administration froze $259.5 million in Minnesota’s Medicaid funding in February, deferred another $91 million in April, and froze more in July, pushing the total held back from Minnesota and California past a billion dollars. More than a million Minnesotans depend on that program. Judge Eric Tostrud, whom Trump appointed in 2018 and who now serves as chief judge of the District of Minnesota, declined to order the money released. He wrote in the same 42-page opinion that the deferral is historically unprecedented in its size and timing, and then held that Minnesota had sued too early because the administrative process was not finished. The state can come back later. The money stays frozen while it waits, and the clock on the federal review runs into October.

DOGE copied the personal data of 300 million Americans onto an unsecured server and signed a voter data agreement with a political advocacy group. The Justice Department has now sued thirty states and the District of Columbia for their unredacted voter rolls, though they’ve lost twenty-one of those cases. More than a dozen states have willingly handed the data over anyway.

The country has been at war with Iran since February 28, when the United States and Israel struck Tehran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. There was no congressional authorization. Eighteen American service members have been killed and more than 450 wounded, the war has cost $37.5 billion, and it is now in its sixth month with no end in sight.

Governors have declared states of emergency for far less than any single one of these. Together they represent the largest sustained assault on constitutional governance in American history.

None of these are separate crises. The Epstein files are the web we’re caught in. Many of the people starting these wars and funding the authoritarian takeover are in those files. That’s the key. The DOJ takeover, the firing of FBI agents, the smearing of survivors, the consolidation of power, the war: all of it traces back to people protecting themselves from what those files contain, while aiming to make permanent a world where a Jeffrey Epstein type would become President for life rather than appear before a jury.

The federal investigation into Epstein’s co-conspirators is dead, and the Trump administration has spent over a year actively covering it up. SDNY had an active investigation. DOJ headquarters ordered the files transferred out of SDNY, and the investigation stopped. The FBI closed it in July 2025 with a two-page memo claiming no evidence existed. Director Kash Patel, went before Congress and attacked the credibility of the survivors. When Congress “forced” a release of the files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the DOJ produced roughly half of what it had collected, included the survivors’ personal information and intimate details of their abuse, and protected the names of the abusers.

Pam Bondi indicted zero co-conspirators in the fourteen months she ran the Justice Department. Trump fired her on April 2. Todd Blanche, his former personal defense lawyer and the man who personally conducted the Ghislaine Maxwell interview, took over as acting attorney general and was confirmed to the job on August 8 by a vote of 50 to 49.

Nearly fifty women gave federal prosecutors the names of roughly twenty co-conspirators, descriptions of how the operation worked, and details of how it was financed. Every bit of it went nowhere. The federal government will never investigate this because the investigation leads to the people running the federal government. So do we just sit on our hands and wait? Do we hope that elections clear all this up on their own? Do we give this admin 2.5 years to continue building a MAGA army, purging the military and federal government of non-loyalists, attacking elections, and covering up criminal activities?

So who stops this?

How does Congress stop him? They pass a law and he ignores it. They impeach him and the Senate won’t convict because Republicans hold more than the thirty-four seats needed to block it. They hold him in contempt and the DOJ, which works for him, refuses to enforce it. They issue subpoenas and he tells people not to show up.

How do the courts stop him? They issue rulings and there’s no one left to enforce them. He’s purged federal law enforcement of anyone who showed any independence and replaced them with loyalists who’ve made it clear they’ll cover up crimes, protect him and the Republican Party from accountability, and launch political investigations against his opponents. The FBI agents who investigated him are gone, they are not directed to attack his political enemies. The prosecutors who worked cases he wanted buried are gone.

And when a court does have one of these cases in front of it, look at what Minnesota got. A Trump-appointed judge with jurisdiction, the facts on the record, and his own written finding that the administration did something historically unprecedented, followed by a ruling that the state sued too early and the freeze continues. That is the federal judiciary functioning normally. It still ends with the money withheld and nobody stopped.

He told the Supreme Court he wouldn’t listen to them, and nobody came to make him. Because there’s nobody to come. Inside the federal government, the tools are broken. Between 2020 and 2024 the immune system of the federal government was carefully documented. Then 2025 began the Trump “Revenge Tour,” now armed with a to-do list for destroying American democracy.

If we accept that as the whole story, then yes, we’re in a dictatorship today. But accepting that premise means forgetting what this country actually is, what it was built to be, the robust and multi-layered defenses and checks on power that our founders crafted.

The United States isn’t one government. It’s hundreds of governments, and fifty of them are dual sovereigns with their own constitutions, their own criminal codes, their own courts, their own prosecutors, their own police, their own prisons. Just like you can choose civil disobedience, so too can your local, city, and state government.

Every one of our fifty governors has the power to declare a state of emergency. In 42 states the governor can suspend statutes and regulations that would otherwise slow the response down. Most state emergency acts go further than that. Georgia’s lets the governor use all available resources of state government and of every county and city, and transfer the direction, personnel, and functions of state departments. Oregon’s lets the governor direct any state agency to put its personnel, equipment, and facilities to work on the emergency. Washington’s lets the governor waive statutory obligations that would hinder necessary action. Nearly every state also waives the normal procurement process.

Read that list again with the economy in mind instead of a hurricane. A governor operating under those authorities can put people on a payroll immediately, start public works without waiting out the ordinary bidding calendar, and move money, staff, and functions between agencies to wherever they are needed. Franklin Roosevelt did that nationally in the Great Depression. The emergency statutes already on the books give a governor a state-sized version of it, available the day the declaration is signed.

The founders built the country this way because they knew this exact thing could happen. The answer they left us is not in Washington, where every federal check has already failed. It is in fifty state capitals, each with a governor who can act immediately and a criminal code no federal pardon can reach. That is why a captured federal government does not have to mean a captured country, even with a transnational criminal organization calling itself the Republican Party and its oligarch owners running the executive branch.

One state has already started without an emergency declaration, and what happened there tells you both that this works and why the emergency power matters.

New Mexico’s House of Representatives voted unanimously in February to create an investigative subcommittee into Epstein’s operation at Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County. Attorney General Raúl Torrez reopened the state’s criminal investigation the same month. The subcommittee issued twenty subpoenas to state agencies, local law enforcement, federal agencies, and banks including J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. On August 5, it released a 119-page interim report documenting preliminary evidence of what happened to minors at the ranch.

That same day, Torrez sued the Justice Department in federal court, saying it is hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators and stonewalling a state criminal investigation. Federal agencies and United States Attorney’s offices did not respond to the subcommittee’s subpoenas at all. In six months and ten separate requests, Torrez’s office received 31 pages from the local United States Attorney.

New Mexico is doing this with ordinary tools on an ordinary timeline: a legislative subcommittee, a contracted law firm, an attorney general’s office running an investigation alongside everything else it does. Five months of work produced a report its own chair acknowledged contains no major findings yet. That is not a criticism of New Mexico. That is what this looks like at normal speed against a federal government that refuses to comply. An emergency declaration is what changes the speed, the resources, and the authority.

New Mexico is also not the only state with jurisdiction. Epstein’s operation ran through Manhattan, and the phrase “New York residence” appears 45 times in the SDNY prosecutors’ own 86-page memorandum on potential co-conspirators. Florida has its own record. The crimes were never confined to one state, and neither is the authority to charge them.

If states lay down, it’s over. But they haven’t laid down yet. They just haven’t picked up their strongest weapon.

The Epstein files are the web we’re caught in, and the people in those files are the people driving every crisis on that list. The oligarchs funding the takeover. The officials who buried the investigation and covered up the evidence to protect themselves. The people starting wars to change the subject.

A governor who declares a state of emergency can stand up a special investigative task force and go after them directly, because every state has its own criminal code, its own courts, its own grand juries, and the pardon power stops at the state line. This is how you cut the emergency off at its root. Not by fighting each crisis separately, but by going after the people causing all of them.

Twenty-six governors won’t ever do this, because they’re part of the same transnational criminal organization causing and profiting from the crisis. That leaves twenty-four. Twenty-four is enough.

One governor launching this investigation is the law working as designed. Every additional governor is a force multiplier. Two and the administration’s resources are split. Three and they’re split again. Every state that joins divides their attention further, multiplies the pressure, and makes every other participating state safer.

Is Trump going to arrest twenty-four governors for investigating child sex trafficking? Hell no. And if he tries, that makes the story bigger, not smaller.

But what if that launches us into a crisis? The crisis is already here. Maybe there is no conflict free way to get out of this mess. The difference is if the entire crisis is a nation controlled by monsters or the people actually standing up for themselves.

We wouldn’t even be a country today if “we don’t want to escalate things” was our attitude. Oppression never ends through acquiescence.

We fight back and the whole thing cascades. A line attorney who received the order to shut down the federal investigation sits in front of a state grand jury. That person, facing state felony charges no pardon can reach, names the person who gave the order. That same person gets subpoenaed in a different state. The people in the files start calculating whether cooperation is smarter than silence.

How many different states do you think Trump’s criminal behavior has intersected with? How many criminal prosecutions does it take to topple an oligarch? I’ll give you a hint, it’s somewhere between “we haven’t been charging them” and “dozens across multiple states.”

Evidence generated in California that points to crimes in North Carolina gets sent to North Carolina. For those states with Republican attorneys general, they’ll be getting forwarded evidence of child sex trafficking that another state handed them and they get to publicly explain that choice to their own constituents. The investigations don’t stay in blue states because the crimes didn’t stay in blue states. New Mexico’s own commission is bipartisan, with two Democratic and two Republican members, seated by a unanimous vote of the chamber.

Everyone in the chain faces accountability: the people in the files, the oligarchs who funded the operation, any Supreme Court justices implicated in those files, and every person in the FBI and DOJ who was willing to cover it up. Patel. Bondi. Blanche. All of them.

We don’t make decisions to investigate or prosecute criminal activity based on politics. It’s immoral to do that, and doing exactly that is how we ended up where we are today. Every person in the DOJ chain who shut down the Epstein investigation and participated in covering it up made a political decision to protect criminals. Governors who act aren’t being partisan. They’re doing what law enforcement does when the people responsible for investigating have been compromised.

What we get out of this is a democracy with a functioning justice system. That’s way better than saying “the pedophile in charge of the country just started a war, we better get out the vote in 3 months and hope they haven’t rigged the game too much!”

The war in Iran is the tail wagging the dog. They started it to keep us from looking at the files. Don’t let it work. Let one governor open the Epstein files. Let five. Let twenty-four. Maybe one or two Republican governors start getting referrals for the most horrific crimes they’ve ever seen and decide they’d rather help prosecute than explain why they didn’t. If actual Nazis could be flipped, so can some of these people.

The distraction loses its purpose the moment the thing it was designed to protect is under investigation. You want to end the war? Investigate the files. You want to save elections? Investigate the files. You want to open the internment camps? Investigate the files. You want to end the dictatorship? Investigate the files. It all leads to the same place because it all comes from the same place, and the people behind all of it belong behind bars.

Several months ago we published a piece on the above subject. At least 50,000 activists joined in the call to action. Since then New Mexico’s House seated its investigative commission by unanimous vote, its attorney general reopened the criminal case, and on August 5 that office took the Justice Department to federal court over its refusal to hand the files to a state prosecutor. That is the model, already running, already forcing the federal government to answer in court. A governor who adds emergency powers to it moves faster and reaches further, and that decision gets made in a building you can call today.

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Call To Action

Here’s how you fight back.

The federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators is closed. Nobody has been charged in over a year, the attorney general who buried it was replaced by the president’s former defense lawyer, and the people who shut it down are named in the files themselves. Congress can’t force it open and the courts have no one left to enforce their rulings. Every federal tool is broken.

But the states aren’t. Every governor can declare a state of emergency on their own authority, and every state has its own prosecutors, its own grand juries, and a criminal code no presidential pardon can reach. New Mexico has already reopened its investigation and taken the Justice Department to court over it. One governor with emergency powers behind them changes everything.

So contact your governor. Find the contact form at usa.gov/state-governor. Don’t copy anything word for word, because offices discard form letters. Write your own, covering the same points. Here’s the letter I sent Governor Ferguson as a model:

Governor Ferguson,

We are in a state of emergency. Please declare it as such. The threats to our national security, our elections, the economic stability of our state, and the safety of our residents are more than enough to justify the immediate, broad authority only an emergency declaration provides. Use it to aggressively investigate and criminally prosecute the crimes in the Epstein files, and to refer evidence out to other states when it intersects their criminal codes. This is the web connecting every crisis we’re facing, and pulling on it is how we restore democracy and protect the people of Washington state.

Please act on this today.

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Eighteen states have handed their complete voter files to the Trump Justice Department, the drivers license and Social Security numbers of every registered voter included. Between them, those eighteen states hold 148 US House seats, 36 Senate seats, and 184 electoral votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to run the House, the Senate, and the White House.

The administration does not need every state to comply for an effective election theft apparatus and they’re pushing on a dozen fronts at once. Only a few need to be successful for the federal election apparatus to be compromised.

A March 2025 executive order ordered states to change how they run elections and threatened to withhold federal money from the ones that refused to comply. The Justice Department went straight for the data, asking all 50 states and the District of Columbia to hand over their voter files. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a dormant database called SAVE so states could run those files through it for citizenship checks.

A second order, in March 2026, told the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on a federally approved list. Financial pressure was also applied via grant conditions that make states rewrite their election rules and run their rolls through SAVE or lose 20 percent of their homeland security funding, a program worth more than a billion dollars. DHS made those conditions official in July, and two dozen states sued within two weeks.

Most states said no, and so far they are winning in courts. The Federal government has filed 31 lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia, and not one court, trial or appeal, has ruled in their favor. In June a federal judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, struck down the rebuilt SAVE system as a violation of three federal laws and wrote that the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.” Days later a judge in Boston, Indira Talwani, blocked the heart of the mail voting order, ruling flatly that “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” Those wins are not invalid, but they are also not sufficient to protect federal elections.

So why is it not enough to have 30 states protect their voter rolls and data? Because once a state hands over its file, the government keeps it, and the system has been effective the moment one state complies, no matter how many others hold out. Twelve states had turned over complete files by early April. Texas alone ran its 18 million registered voters through SAVE. A court order months later cannot un-transfer a file, and the department’s own Office of Legal Counsel has already written that the Attorney General can compel the files and share them with Homeland Security regardless of what any single state wants.

Alongside the data, the department asked states to sign a confidential agreement to purge any voter it flagged, within 45 days. Two agreed, Alaska and Texas. A state that signs has given the federal executive branch ongoing control over who stays on its voter roll, with no checks or apolitical watchdogs involved.

Control of Congress runs through a handful of competitive states, and several of them already cooperated: Texas, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina. At least 25 states have already run their rolls through SAVE, 60 million registrations in a single year, with another 7.4 million from North Carolina, where Republicans run the election board. The states that matter most to the outcome are the ones that opened the door.

The data rulings protect mostly the states that sued. The mail voting rulings reach further: Talwani has now blocked that order nationwide, and a separate case brought by the NAACP protects ballot delivery everywhere, with the fight now at the Supreme Court. But delivery is the whole of what those wins protect. None of them claws back a file already sent, and none of them touches the purge agreements or the state purge laws. A voter in Houston or Columbus is safe on delivery and exposed on everything else, because that state already gave up its file and joined the purge.

The purge is where the data does its work. In one year the system checked 60 million registrations and flagged roughly 24,000 as possible noncitizens and several hundred thousand more as possibly dead, and it can flag as many as it likes. The burden then runs backward: nobody has to prove a flagged voter is ineligible before the registration is canceled, the voter has to prove they are eligible. In Texas, flagged voters got a letter and 30 days to answer, and some who did turned out to be citizens. It works a second way too, by scaring people off registering at all, since anyone the system flags can be handed to Homeland Security for criminal investigation. In a race decided by a few thousand votes, thinning one side quietly is sufficient to decide elections, even while the national totals barely move.

And the litigation is built so that even losing pays. After losing the data cases in California, Michigan, and Oregon, the department raced to the appeals courts arguing that without a fast ruling the integrity of those states’ elections would be in doubt, telling the judges there is “no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026.” Look at what that does. Months before a vote is cast, the government has entered into the official record a reason to treat the results in the refusing states as suspect. Cooperate, and it takes your data and runs your purge. Refuse, and it hands itself a written pretext to challenge your count.

None of this stops at the voter rolls. The FBI has seized Fulton County’s 2020 ballots and demanded the names of everyone who worked that election, and a March order tells the Justice Department to prioritize prosecuting election officials it decides handed ballots to the wrong people. Collecting workers’ names and dangling prosecution empties the field of people willing to run elections at all, indictment or no indictment. In Congress, Trump is leaning on the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require citizenship papers to register, gut mail voting, and force every state to submit its rolls to Homeland Security. He has said plainly what it is for: it will “guarantee the midterms.”

So here is the actual scoreboard. In a single stretch of June the wins stacked up: courts threw out the SAVE system, blocked the mail voting order, and upheld a state’s ballot deadline at the Supreme Court. Now set beside them what is still in effect. Every file already handed over is still handed over. Every purge agreement signed is still in force, and every registration canceled under it is still canceled. The court filings branding the refusing states’ results suspect are still on file. The grant conditions are still live.

So how many states does it take? Stealing an election needs three things: enough voter data, cooperation from the states holding the competitive races, and an official reason to dispute the results anywhere the ruling party chooses. Texas delivered the first two by itself, 18 million records and a signature on the removal agreement, its own voters purged and its own competitive seats in play. The Justice Department’s court filings delivered the third.

Vote, please. But recognize that this alone is insufficient to take back our country.

Want to do something about it? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need a plan.

But just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the 4 pieces of model legislation, and the 20-40 articles per month.

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More reading

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

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All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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My work puts me in conversation with state legislators across the country, and I keep meeting leaders who make me think “the rest of the country needs to know about their incredible work.” This is the first segment in a new recurring series that features those leaders and their ideas. It begins with Delegate Jackie Glass of Virginia, who created Pitch to the Legislators, a contest that belongs in all fifty states.

Her contest puts resident policy proposals in front of a judging panel of sitting lawmakers along with legislative staff and lobbyists and advocates at Old Dominion University.

Glass served in the Navy from 2002 to 2013, then settled in Norfolk and worked as a community activist. She won the 89th District seat in a January 2022 special election after former Delegate Jay Jones resigned, and voters in the redrawn 93rd District, which covers part of Norfolk, elected her in 2023 and reelected her unopposed last November.

In her invitation to the Virginia legislative delegation, Glass describes the event as “Inspired by the popular show Shark Tank” and writes that it will “bridge the gap between citizens and their government.”

Glass and the other judges accepted entries from Virginia residents of any age. Submissions may not exceed 1,000 words and must include a problem statement, a proposed solution, an implementation plan, and the expected impact. A preliminary panel reviews every submission and selects the finalists, who present for five minutes each before the legislator judges at the Webb University Center on the Old Dominion University campus in Norfolk.

The contest runs inside her Summer School for Certified Doers, a one-day program where attendees learn how to advocate and how to legislate. The Policy Pitch Contest follows the training in the same room, the finalists pitch on the spot, and then everyone celebrates.

The judges score each pitch against three questions published in her rules: “Can the proposal be realistically implemented?” for feasibility, “What is the potential benefit to the community or state?” for impact, and “How creative and original is the proposal?” for innovation. Winners receive recognition and the chance to “work with legislators to develop further and promote their ideas.”

Glass needs only a room and a free online form, plus colleagues willing to judge for an afternoon. An office that gathers those three pieces can replicate the design.

In a standard town hall the official presents and constituents ask questions. Delegate Glass reassigns the roles: residents present while lawmakers question and score.

This year’s pitches came from everyday people and stayed close to home: teacher safety and flooded roads in the region, plus fixing the benefits cliff so that transitioning off public assistance stops punishing the people who do it. One participant pitched a state bank to generate revenue for Virginia without raising taxes, an idea they’d learned about from the articles here at The Existentialist Republic, and wrote about the experience on Substack.

This type of contest isn’t without precedent.

In 2014, two Massachusetts legislators organized a pitch contest for technology workers and committed to filing a bill based on the winning pitch. A Utah advocacy group followed this past June: 115 applicants entered its first competition, and the winner received $10,000.

Now I want to tell you more about why this segment exists, and why I hope you share it elsewhere. I’ll start by saying the name “Ted Cruz.” Anyone who follows politics knows that man’s name. But “Jackie Glass” is a name that is mostly known among her former coworkers in the military, her activist friends who were thrilled to support her successful runs for office, her enthusiastic political supporters, and her peers in the VA House of Delegates.

I’m going to now switch from “writing an article” mode to “researcher and activist talking to you about why this matters” mode.

The more we can find people like Delegate Glass, and shout their successes all over the place, the more they will gain traction, valuable name recognition, and the more they can start to increase their influence among their colleagues.

The fact is, and we see it play out with people like Bernie Sanders and AOC, it isn’t easy being a voice for people over profits in most legislative bodies. In legislatures particularly, you’ll find nearly all of the Democrats will fight for your rights, they just want to make sure that fight doesn’t interfere with corporate profits. I wouldn’t say that always puts them in the “evil” bucket. In my experience it usually puts them in the “you matter to me but also I won’t do anything that disrupts the flow of donor money” bucket.

The thing those corporate folks always tell themselves is “I can’t win a race without donor class and corporate backing. And what good can I do for our community if I can’t win the race?”

For a long time, they were right in noticing that the balancing act of corporate and donor class interests was a near necessity for winning office; unless you were independently wealthy or already had substantial support from something such as holding a leadership position with an influential organized labor group.

So how do we change things?

We get more of the politicians you love when we change the political math, and today the math says that those corporate politicians are usually correct. What tomorrow says? That's on us. All of us. You read this and me writing it, we are that us.

By sharing this article and learning about the people you’ll see in this weekly segment, you strengthen the influence of people who are both tenacious and kind. That’s what we need, isn’t it? Folks who have the resilience of character and effort while also holding a deep compassion for the human condition?

You do not have to live in Virginia to support Delegate Jackie Glass. Her Substack is @jackiehopeglass.

Adopt a Lawmaker is the working name for this segment, and our team is in love with the name, even though the features will not cover lawmakers exclusively. If you have other name ideas, please comment them and let us know!

We want to promote more of the people who are doing things right: state legislators, city council members, county and state chairs, and the leaders of activist organizations. If you want to be considered for a feature, just send me a direct message here on Substack.

This whole machine is largely funded by subscriptions on Substack. The Existentialist Republic community is largely volunteers, drafting legislation, talking to representatives, doing legal research, and expanding our free library of books and booklets. Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can subscribe, just know you’re literally the reason all this can continue. We need fuel for the metaphorical fuel tank, and that tank’s fullness determines the speed with which we can progress!

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CALL TO ACTION

Category: State legislation

Difficulty Rating: 1/10. One call or email, five minutes.

One pitch at Glass’s contest asked Virginia to charter a state bank modeled on the Bank of North Dakota, and the idea belongs in every statehouse. That bank has held North Dakota’s deposits since 1919. It partners with local community banks and returns its profits to the state’s general fund. That’s revenue without a tax increase, and it keeps the state’s money working inside the state instead of feeding the balance sheet of a megabank headquartered a thousand miles away.

Who you are contacting: Your state representative and state senator. Find them at openstates.org.

What you are asking for: A bill chartering a state bank modeled on the Bank of North Dakota.

If you get a form letter back, write back once and ask again.

WHEN YOU CALL OR WRITE, cover these points in your own words: your name, your town, that you are a constituent, that you want the state to charter a public bank modeled on the Bank of North Dakota, why that matters to you personally, and that you want a written answer on whether they will support it.

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The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

Activism Journal

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Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers

The President’s personal attorney now serves as the 88th US Attorney General of the United States of America.

This article makes the case that New Mexico has sufficient public evidence, today, to open a criminal investigation into Attorney General Todd Blanche for bribery of a witness, tampering with evidence, and conspiracy, and that opening one requires nothing but a decision by elected officials who answer to the public.

As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche spent nine hours across two days interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell under limited immunity, three years into her twenty-year sentence for trafficking the children Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump abused.

About a week after Maxwell handed her fresh lies to Trump's eternally loyal attorney, the Bureau of Prisons transferred her from the correctional institution in Tallahassee to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas.

Under Section 30-24-3 of New Mexico law, knowingly giving anything of value to a person likely to become a witness is a third degree felony, and Maxwell is the central living witness to the trafficking of children at Zorro Ranch, Epstein’s New Mexico property, where the state reopened its criminal investigation in February.

The department has not identified who ordered the transfer. House Judiciary Democrats found no record authorizing it in the 3.5 million pages that federal law compelled the department to release, and ten requests for the case file have produced about 31 pages. Hiding evidence to prevent a prosecution is a felony in New Mexico, and knowingly combining with another for that purpose is a separate felony.

Opening a criminal investigation requires credible evidence that felonies may have occurred, a far lower standard than proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The relevant law runs three sentences, all from the New Mexico criminal code.

Section 30-24-3 makes it a third degree felony to knowingly give or offer “anything of value” to “any witness or to any person likely to become a witness in any judicial, administrative, legislative or other official cause or proceeding” to testify falsely or to abstain from testifying.

Tampering with evidence, under Section 30-22-5, consists of “destroying, changing, hiding, placing or fabricating any physical evidence with intent to prevent the apprehension, prosecution or conviction of any person”; the offense is a third degree felony when the underlying crime is a first degree felony, and criminal sexual penetration of a child is a first degree felony in New Mexico.

The third sentence is Section 30-28-2: “Conspiracy consists of knowingly combining with another for the purpose of committing a felony within or without this state,” and New Mexico law makes each member of the combination answerable for the offenses of the others.

Under Section 31-18-15, each third degree count carries a basic sentence of three years and the conspiracy count carries eighteen months, so one count of each, served consecutively, reaches seven and a half years in state prison. A finding of aggravating circumstances lets the court add up to a third to each sentence, and each separate benefit and each separate act of concealment can charge as its own count.

Watch for three phrases as the evidence comes in: anything of value, hiding any physical evidence, and combining with another.

Blanche, then the Deputy Attorney General, questioned Maxwell in Tallahassee on July 24 and 25 of last year. He brought no line prosecutor into the room.

If the President and his personal defense attorney had written out the perfect answers for Maxwell to give, those answers would look exactly like the ones she gave, even where they wholly contradict the extensive and well-documented evidentiary record. She provided those responses in a room with no independent party present, to that same former personal defense lawyer, under an immunity he granted: she claimed to know of no wrongdoing by the President or by any of the well-known men around Epstein.

Epstein’s own emails to her contradict those answers. In April 2011, in a message the House Oversight Committee released last November, Epstein wrote to Maxwell that “that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” the conspicuously silent one, and that a victim, identified in later reporting as Virginia Giuffre, “spent hours at my house with him.” Maxwell replied the same day: “I have been thinking about that.” The subject of Trump and the girls was live between the two of them, in writing. Eight years later, Epstein put the claim in an email to the author Michael Wolff: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” Whatever Epstein meant by stop, his claim is that Trump knew about the girls and spoke to Maxwell herself about them, and her answers to Blanche directly contradicted the documentary record and the evidence a jury already accepted at her trial.

Her own sworn record contradicts her too. Federal prosecutors charged Maxwell with two counts of perjury over her 2016 deposition testimony, alleging she lied under oath when she claimed no awareness of Epstein’s recruitment of underage girls. That is the same kind of false claim she repeated to Blanche. The prosecutors who convicted her told the court she had shown a “willingness to lie brazenly under oath about her conduct,” and they dropped the perjury counts only after the trafficking conviction.

About a week after she fed those lies to the President's eternally loyal attorney, the Bureau of Prisons moved her down a custody level, out of the low-security institution in Tallahassee and into the camp at Bryan, Texas, the least restrictive custody the federal system has and a placement her sex offense conviction barred her from.

An August 13, 2025 letter from Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, signed by every Democrat on the committee and addressed to then Attorney General Pam Bondi and Bureau of Prisons Director William K. Marshall III, describes the camp as “categorically off limits to sex offenders” before her arrival, and describes camp transfers as requiring “multiple levels of review that would ordinarily take months to complete,” followed by a months-long waitlist. “Ms. Maxwell, however, appears to have short-circuited the entire review process and jumped the queue, receiving a place in Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan within a matter of days,” the letter reads. The transfer occurred days before Maxwell was scheduled to sit for a deposition under a bipartisan congressional subpoena.

The letter’s central sentence: “These actions raise substantial concerns that the Administration may now be attempting to tamper with a crucial witness, conceal President Trump’s relationship with convicted sex offenders, and coax Ms. Maxwell into providing false or misleading testimony in order to protect the President.” The members demanded a list of every official who “were aware of, were involved in, or approved” the transfer, and information on “any possible benefits to Ms. Maxwell, including transfers, changes to conditions of confinement, pardons, commutation, or changes to DOJ positions in ongoing matters.” Maxwell’s clemency request is now pending before the President.

In February of this year, Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee and claimed she did not authorize Maxwell’s transfer and does not know who did. The department has still not produced the list of officials the letter demanded. The lawmakers then checked the 3.5 million pages the department was compelled to release under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and reported that “there does not appear to be a single record documenting her transfer or who authorized it.” The records exist, because bureau policy requires them, but they are missing from a production that federal law requires. In June, the same members disclosed a previously undisclosed policy change granting the Attorney General new authority over inmate placement decisions.

The office that has not explained the transfer now formally controls inmate placement decisions, and Blanche is in charge of that office.

The sequence we just outlined has the appearance of a quid pro quo. Maxwell gave demonstrably false testimony clearing the President and within days the bureau delivered her a transfer against their own rules.

Section 30-24-3 covers the offer as well as the delivery, so an investigation does not need a spoken agreement to charge. The department’s official story does not match the department’s conduct, though “trust me bro” seems sufficient evidence for the GOP members of the U.S. Senate and the Fox News crowd.

Whether or not something was explicitly promised, the benefits arrived on a clear schedule.

The mob runs the same way. Nobody says the deal aloud, especially if there are recording devices around. Generally, the participants talk around the deal, and the benefits are made clear. Conspiracy law developed specifically to address this pattern, because organized crime rarely leaves an intentionally recorded and explicit agreement. The evidence here points to coordinated conduct: who delivered what, in what order, for whose benefit. New Mexico’s statute reaches “knowingly combining with another,” and a combination is proven by conduct.

On February 19, Torrez reopened the state’s criminal investigation into Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, because “revelations outlined in the previously sealed FBI files warrant further examination.” His office asked the department for the case file ten times. A department spokesperson answered in July that the department “welcomes New Mexico undertaking additional investigation of the Zorro Ranch and stands ready to provide necessary assistance.” Zorro Ranch appears roughly 13,000 times in the released files; the department has sent Torrez about 31 pages, mainly media clippings and his office’s own past letters.

On August 5, Torrez sued. The 40-page complaint accuses the department of obstruction and includes Blanche among the defendants: “USDOJ and Acting Attorney General Blanche are refusing to facilitate the investigation of state law crimes by hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators from Attorney General Torrez and state law enforcement, when New Mexico is one of few jurisdictions that still may have an opportunity to hold Epstein’s associates accountable or otherwise provide some sense of justice to survivors.” Three days after the complaint named him, the Senate confirmed Blanche as Attorney General, 50 to 49, at 4:31 in the morning. He posted within hours: “I am deeply honored by the trust and confidence President Trump has placed in me to lead the Department of Justice as our great nation’s 88th Attorney General.”

So are Blanche’s violations of state law protected acts under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution? Under Gamble v. United States, the federal government and the states are seen as separate legal entities, each with authority for creating and enforcing its own criminal law; a federal decision not to prosecute does not mean a state cannot pursue charges, and the Constitution's authors did this intentionally because they understood that states act as additional checks and balances on federal power.

In Trump v. Vance, the Court held that a sitting president must answer a state grand jury subpoena, writing that “the public has a right to every man’s evidence” and that since the earliest days of the Republic “’every man’ has included the President of the United States”; a cabinet officer possesses no greater protection than the President who appointed him. A federal officer charged under state law can remove the case to federal court, where a federal judge, and not the officer’s own department, decides whether the conduct was part of a lawful federal duty. Interviewing a witness is such a duty. Conferring benefits for favorable testimony is not.

The House Judiciary Committee has demanded the prison transfer list for a year and received no document in response, because a Congressional committee letter carries no enforcement or compliance mechanism. It has never needed one, until now.

A state can lawfully force the release of that list, as in people get brought into court and potentially face criminally charges for refusing to hand that information over.

Here’s how that works. A state grand jury operates under different laws than U.S. Congress. Its subpoenas are enforceable through contempt in a way that Congressional subpoenas are not, and testimony before those grand juries is given under penalty of perjury. Once New Mexico opened its investigation on February 19, continued withholding of the case file became conduct chargeable under Section 30-22-5.

In 2019, New Mexico closed its Zorro Ranch investigation at federal request and in exchange for information about crimes committed in the state.

Then the federal government sent nothing back.

They said drop the legitimate case and we will give you something in return; the state dropped the case. Then the federal government never gave the thing they promised. And what’s been done about that? Better seven years later than never, the case is being pursued again.

The files the department withholds today reportedly include evidence of “grooming, trafficking, sexual abuse and other misconduct tied to the property.” On Wednesday, announcing the lawsuit, Torrez said: “New Mexico has a duty to protect survivors and investigate crimes committed in our state so that perpetrators can be held accountable.”

I wrote this article because the Epstein Class cannot be above the law, and they only are so long as convenient deferrals of authority are allowed to continue unimpeded.

We can go after these criminals in office, but going after them takes a serious shift in how justice and law are dispensed in this country. The political and legal classes are scared that enforcing the rules on their colleagues is bad for all of them. Good. If that scares a District Attorney or Attorney General, then we are going to shine the light on them too, because they are not allies, and they have failed to follow their oath to the American people and to the Constitution, no matter what letter is next to their name. Those individuals refusing to do their jobs are protecting a murderous gang of seditious human traffickers. We will work to ensure they lose their seats for it, and even to have them taken to account legally, right beside the monsters they shielded. In this nation's hour of need, they aided the enemies of freedom and justice.

And let their legacy be that: losing their career and gaining the ire of the public because they chose to protect seditious pedophiles like Donald J. Trump.

So what can you do about all this?

Check out the call to action below and the Existentialist Republic library at the bottom of this page.

If you find our work at The Existentialist Republic of value and you want to see it not just reach more people and more legislators, we need subscribers to keep growing!

We want to have staff and volunteers communicating full time with activists, legislators, and community organizers, and that growth all moves far more quickly if funded! Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can subscribe or buy us a cup of coffee then you give this fascism destroying machine more capacity!

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Call To Action

The ask takes ten minutes: email, in your own words, and tell them to investigate Todd Blanche for bribery of a witness, tampering with evidence, and conspiracy under Sections 30-24-3, 30-22-5, and 30-28-2. Do as many as you want:

• New Mexico Department of Justice, the office with the investigation open and the lawsuit filed.

• Your own state attorney general, to open under your state’s law and to publicly back New Mexico’s demand for the file.

• Post the ask publicly and tag the offices, starting with the New Mexico Department of Justice on Facebook and your own attorney general’s accounts, so the ask and any non-answer are both public.

• Tag your state Democratic Party and your own state legislators, and ask them to publicly call for the investigation, because officials who cannot open one can still demand one.

Your own words are what works; identical messages get counted once and filed. A form letter back is a lack of courage, and you can say so publicly.

The Existentialist Republic drafts model state legislation, and one of our state bills addresses this exact conduct: the Epstein Survivors Justice Act.

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Books, shirts, bumper stickers, and physical booklets are at TheExistentialistRepublic.com, and those purchases help keep this machine destroying fascism.

THE EXISTENTIALIST REPUBLIC LIBRARY

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

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Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

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Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

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Note from the author: Attached below is the full text of our latest model legislation. We are mailing printed copies to every Democratic state legislator in the sixteen states where Democrats hold both chambers of the legislature and the governorship, emailing it to Democratic state legislators nationwide, and sending it in both forms to all 24 Democratic governors and all 57 state and territorial Democratic Party chairs. That is roughly 1,580 printed packets.

Myself, ER staff, and volunteers will be responding to the emails, phone calls, and meeting requests of whoever responds and requests follow up over the coming months.

If you’d like an easily downloadable PDF of the bill in its entirety, you can click anywhere on this sentence.

TODAY’S ACTIVIST CALL TO ACTION

Share the bill PDF with your state legislators, or share yesterday’s article, which includes a summary of the bill’s key points. Here’s how to find your state legislators and their email addresses.

This bill is passed by states and makes it so anyone can sue, and the state can levy criminal charges, for insider trading and securities fraud connected to political corruption. Anyone who lost money on the other side of those trades would have standing to sue and every word of the bill is built from existing and longstanding legal precedent.

We are mailing this out in the coming week, and we are also issuing press releases, so they’ll be getting asked for comment by media. We need these people to hear from their constituents as well. These politicians need to feel like they are hearing about this everywhere they go. It’s time to go on the offense for justice and democracy.

THE MAKE CORRUPT POLITICIANS PAY ACT

Bracketed terms mark insertions for the enacting state: dollar amounts, felony classes, and cross-references to the state securities act, ethics statutes, pension forfeiture law, and long-arm provisions. The drafter’s notes following the text identify the source law for each section and flag each deliberate departure from that source.

AN ACT relating to the purchase and sale of securities by holders of public office while aware of material nonpublic governmental information; codifying a duty of trust and confidence; creating private civil actions and remedies; establishing investigative and enforcement authority in the attorney general; providing for disgorgement, civil penalties, criminal offenses, whistleblower awards, and pension forfeiture; establishing jurisdiction and venue where victims are located; creating a restitution fund; and providing for severability.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF [STATE]:

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This act may be cited as the Make Corrupt Politicians Pay Act.

SECTION 2. FINDINGS AND PURPOSE.

The legislature finds that:

(a) Public officials obtain material nonpublic information in the ordinary course of legislative, executive, and judicial service, including through classified and confidential briefings, committee oversight, procurement and contracting, regulatory and licensing decisions, and law enforcement investigations.

(b) Congress enacted the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012, Public Law 112-105, which affirms that Members of Congress and congressional employees owe a duty of trust and confidence with respect to material nonpublic information derived from their positions, and which affirms that executive and judicial officers and employees remain subject to insider trading prohibitions.

(c) The STOCK Act creates no private right of action, and its principal administrative sanction for a late transaction report is a $200 filing fee assessed under the Ethics in Government Act procedures it amended.

(d) Since 1934, section 16(b) of the Securities Exchange Act, 15 U.S.C. 78p(b), has required statutorily defined insiders to surrender to the issuer any profit from a purchase and sale, or sale and purchase, of the issuer’s equity securities within six months, without proof of intent or of use of inside information, and has authorized any security holder of the issuer to sue on the issuer’s behalf when the issuer declines.

(e) Article 23-A of the New York General Business Law, known as the Martin Act, authorizes the attorney general of New York to investigate securities fraud by subpoena before filing suit, to obtain injunctions, restitution, and disgorgement without proof of scienter, and to prosecute violations criminally.

(f) Model Penal Code section 1.03 and the venue provisions of state computer crime statutes, including Virginia Code section 19.2-249.2, locate an offense where its results occur and where victims are located, and the Supreme Court of the United States sustained state jurisdiction over out-of-state conduct producing in-state effects in Strassheim v. Daily, 221 U.S. 280 (1911).

(g) The National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996 preserves the authority of the states to investigate and bring enforcement actions with respect to fraud or deceit in connection with securities transactions, 15 U.S.C. 77r(c).

(h) The purposes of this act are to protect investors located in this state from securities fraud committed by holders of public office, to deter the conversion of governmental information into private trading profit, and to recover ill-gotten gains for victims and for the public.

SECTION 3. DEFINITIONS.

As used in this act:

(1) “Attorney general” means the attorney general of this state.

(2) A person acts “while aware” of information if the person knows or possesses the information at the time of the purchase, sale, or communication.

(3) “Contemporaneous transaction” means a purchase or sale of a security of the same class as the security involved in a violation of section 5, or of an option or security-based swap referencing it, executed on the opposite side of the violative transaction during the period beginning with the first violative transaction and ending at the earlier of public dissemination of the material nonpublic governmental information or the close of the [fifth] trading day after the first violative transaction.

(4) “Covered official” means an individual who serves a government, or an entity of a government, domestic or foreign, in any public office, public employment, or public engagement, whatever the title. The term includes an individual holding elective or appointive office, an officer or employee of a legislative, executive, or judicial entity, personal, committee, and leadership staff, and an individual engaged by appointment or contract to perform or advise on governmental functions. An individual formerly described in this paragraph remains a covered official with respect to material nonpublic governmental information obtained during service.

(5) “Covered person” means, with respect to a covered official:

(A) the official’s spouse or domestic partner and any dependent child of the official;

(B) any account, partnership, corporation, or other entity, and any trust other than a qualified blind trust, over which the official exercises investment discretion or control, directly or indirectly; and

(C) any person who executes a securities transaction at the direction or suggestion of the official.

(6) “Fund” means the Securities Victims Restitution Fund established by section 19.

(7) “Issuer” has the meaning given in [STATE SECURITIES ACT].

(8) “Material nonpublic governmental information” means information, however obtained or recorded, that:

(A) relates to a security, an issuer, a market for a security, or governmental action reasonably likely to affect any of them;

(B) has not been disseminated to the investing public;

(C) a reasonable investor would consider important in deciding whether to purchase or sell the security; and

(D) a covered official obtained by reason of the official’s position or in the performance of official duties, including information obtained from another government.

(9) “Profit gained or loss avoided” means the difference between the price at which the security was purchased or sold and its trading price within a reasonable period after public dissemination of the material nonpublic governmental information, together with any gain realized or loss avoided on any option or security-based swap, as determined by the trier of fact.

(10) “Public entity” means this state or a political subdivision, agency, authority, or instrumentality of this state.

(11) “Purchase” and “sale” include short sales and the entry into, exercise, assignment, or termination of any option or security-based swap.

(12) “Qualified blind trust” means a trust meeting the requirements of 5 U.S.C. 13104(f) or of [STATE ETHICS ACT], under which an independent trustee controls the assets and communicates no holdings to the official.

(13) “Security” has the meaning given in [STATE SECURITIES ACT], and includes any option, warrant, or security-based swap referencing a security. For purposes of this act, “security” also includes any commodity or digital asset, and any spot contract or option referencing one, but does not include any contract of sale of a commodity for future delivery, any option on such a contract, or any swap, within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under the Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. 2.

SECTION 4. DUTY OF TRUST AND CONFIDENCE.

A covered official owes a duty of trust and confidence with respect to material nonpublic governmental information, and use of such information for the official’s own benefit, or for the benefit of any other person, in connection with the purchase or sale of a security breaches the duty. For an official of a public entity, this section declares the duty, owed to the public entity and to the public. For every other covered official, the duty under this section includes each duty of trust and confidence arising under the law of the government the official serves, including the duty declared by section 4(b)(2) of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012, Public Law 112-105, and standards of ethical conduct governing use of nonpublic information by executive branch personnel, and this act attaches its remedies to trading and communication in breach of any such duty. The duty continues after the official leaves office as to information obtained during service.

SECTION 5. PROHIBITED CONDUCT.

(a) TRADING. A covered official shall not purchase or sell any security while aware of material nonpublic governmental information relating to the security, the issuer of the security, or the market for the security.

(b) ATTRIBUTION. A purchase or sale by a covered person is attributed to the covered official unless the official proves that the official neither directed nor suggested the transaction and did not communicate material nonpublic governmental information in connection with the transaction.

(c) COMMUNICATION. A covered official shall not communicate material nonpublic governmental information to any person, directly or indirectly, when it is reasonably foreseeable that the person will purchase or sell a security while aware of the information or will further communicate the information for that purpose. Liability under this subsection does not require proof that the official received or expected a personal benefit.

(d) TRADING ON COMMUNICATED INFORMATION. A person shall not purchase or sell a security while aware of material nonpublic governmental information that the person knows, consciously avoids knowing, or recklessly disregards was obtained, directly or indirectly, through a covered official’s breach of the duty stated in section 4.

(e) FRAUDULENT PRACTICES. A covered official shall not, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security, employ any deception, misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, false pretense, or false promise. In any civil action or proceeding under sections 8 through 11 of this act, proof of intent to defraud, of reliance, or of damages is not required to establish a violation of this section.

SECTION 6. PRESUMPTION OF AWARENESS; SHORT-SWING PROFITS.

(a) PRESUMPTION. Proof that a covered official had access to material nonpublic governmental information concerning a security or its issuer, and that the official or a covered person purchased or sold that security within [90] days after the access, establishes a rebuttable presumption that the transaction occurred while the official was aware of the information. The official may rebut the presumption by a preponderance of the evidence. The presumption does not apply to a transaction, or a series of related transactions, of $[1,000] or less.

(b) SHORT-SWING PROFITS. Any profit realized by a covered official or a covered person from any purchase and sale, or any sale and purchase, of any security within any period of less than six months inures to and is recoverable by this state for deposit in the Fund, without proof of awareness of material nonpublic governmental information, of use of such information, or of intent. Transactions exempt under section 7 are excluded. The attorney general may sue to recover the profit. If the attorney general does not file suit within 60 days after receiving a written demand from any person, that person may sue on behalf of the state, and a prevailing demandant receives [20] percent of the recovery together with reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.

SECTION 7. SAFE HARBORS.

Sections 5(a), 5(b), and 6 do not apply to:

(1) a transaction within a qualified blind trust;

(2) a purchase or sale of shares of a diversified, publicly offered investment fund that is not concentrated in an industry or sector within the covered official’s duties and over whose holdings the official exercises no control, or of a direct obligation of the United States or of this state;

(3) a transaction executed under a written plan that the official adopted in good faith before obtaining the material nonpublic governmental information, that specifies the amounts, prices, and dates of transactions or a formula for determining them, that the official did not adopt or modify while aware of material nonpublic governmental information, that provides for no transaction earlier than [120] days after adoption, and that the official filed with the [STATE ETHICS COMMISSION] within [5] business days after adoption; and

(4) a divestiture required by court order, by statute, or by a written ethics agreement, executed as directed.

SECTION 8. PRIVATE CIVIL ACTIONS.

(a) CONTEMPORANEOUS TRADERS. A person who executed a contemporaneous transaction may bring a civil action against any person who violated section 5 and against any person jointly liable under section 9(d).

(b) HOLDER ACTIONS FOR DISGORGEMENT. A person who owns, or who owned at the time of a violation of section 5, any security of an issuer to which the material nonpublic governmental information related may bring a civil action to compel disgorgement to the Fund of the violator’s profit gained or loss avoided, if the attorney general does not file suit within 60 days after receiving the person’s written demand. A prevailing plaintiff under this subsection receives [20] percent of the amount disgorged together with reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.

(c) CREDIT. A court shall credit against disgorgement ordered under subsection (b) any amount the defendant proves it previously disgorged to the Fund or to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for the same transactions.

SECTION 9. DAMAGES, FEES, AND JOINT LIABILITY.

(a) MEASURE. A prevailing plaintiff under section 8(a) recovers the greater of the plaintiff’s actual damages or the plaintiff’s pro rata share, among all persons who executed contemporaneous transactions, of the defendant’s profit gained or loss avoided.

(b) TREBLING; MINIMUM RECOVERY. The court shall treble the amount determined under subsection (a) where the defendant is a covered official or where the violation was knowing. Recovery for a prevailing plaintiff shall not be less than $[10,000].

(c) PUNITIVE DAMAGES. Upon clear and convincing evidence of a willful violation, the trier of fact may award punitive damages. [Punitive damages under this act are not subject to the limitation in (CITE TO STATE PUNITIVE DAMAGES CAP).]

(d) JOINT AND SEVERAL LIABILITY. A covered official who violates section 5(c) and each person who violates section 5(d) in the chain of communication are jointly and severally liable for the full profit gained or loss avoided by all persons in the chain.

(e) FEES AND COSTS. The court shall award a prevailing plaintiff reasonable attorney’s fees and costs. A prevailing defendant may recover fees only upon a finding that the action was frivolous, unreasonable, or without foundation.

(f) [OPTIONAL AGGREGATE LIMIT. Aggregate awards under subsections (a) through (c) against a single defendant arising from the same violation shall not exceed [ten] times the profit gained or loss avoided.]

SECTION 10. INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT BY THE ATTORNEY GENERAL.

(a) INVESTIGATION. The attorney general may investigate a suspected violation of this act on the attorney general’s own initiative or on complaint, before filing any action. In aid of an investigation, the attorney general may administer oaths, subpoena witnesses, and compel the production of documents, communications, trading records, and data wherever located. Disobedience of a subpoena is punishable as contempt. A natural person may not be excused from testifying or from producing records on the ground that doing so would incriminate that person, but testimony or records compelled over an assertion of the privilege against self-incrimination, and evidence derived from them, may not be used against that person in any criminal case except a prosecution for perjury or contempt committed in the proceeding. Investigative materials remain confidential until an action is filed, except that the attorney general may share them with other law enforcement and regulatory agencies.

(b) CIVIL ENFORCEMENT. The attorney general may bring a civil action for a temporary or permanent injunction, appointment of a receiver, restitution, disgorgement with prejudgment interest, and civil penalties under section 11. Proof of scienter, reliance, or damages is not required for relief under this subsection.

(c) CRIMINAL AUTHORITY. The attorney general and the [district attorney or county prosecutor] of any county in which venue lies under section 13 have concurrent authority to prosecute offenses under section 12.

SECTION 11. DISGORGEMENT AND CIVIL PENALTIES.

(a) DISGORGEMENT. In an action by the attorney general, the court shall order disgorgement of the full profit gained or loss avoided, with prejudgment interest at [the statutory judgment rate].

(b) CIVIL PENALTY. The court shall impose a civil penalty for each violation of section 5. Each purchase, each sale, and each communication in violation of section 5 is a separate violation. The penalty for each violation shall not exceed the greater of three times the profit gained or loss avoided or $[1,000,000] for a natural person and $[2,500,000] for any other person. Where the defendant is a covered official, the penalty for each violation shall not be less than the profit gained or loss avoided.

(c) DEPOSIT. Amounts recovered under this section shall be deposited in the Fund.

SECTION 12. CRIMINAL OFFENSES.

(a) OFFENSE. A person who violates section 5 commits an offense.

(b) GRADING. Without proof of intent to defraud, an offense under subsection (a) is a [class A misdemeanor]. With intent to defraud, or with knowledge that the information was material nonpublic governmental information, the offense is graded by the profit gained or loss avoided: less than $10,000, a [class E felony]; $10,000 or more but less than $100,000, a [class D felony]; $100,000 or more but less than $1,000,000, a [class C felony]; $1,000,000 or more, a [class B felony].

(c) FINES. Notwithstanding [GENERAL CRIMINAL FINE CEILING], the sentencing court may impose a fine of up to the greater of three times the gross gain from the offense or $[5,000,000] for a natural person and $[25,000,000] for any other person.

(d) EXCLUSION; PROOF. No criminal liability arises from section 6(b) standing alone. The attribution rule of section 5(b) and the presumption of section 6(a) do not apply in a prosecution under this section, and each element of an offense must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt without their aid.

(e) RESTITUTION. The sentencing court shall order restitution to identifiable victims, and any remaining forfeited gain shall be deposited in the Fund.

SECTION 13. JURISDICTION AND VENUE.

(a) JURISDICTION. A person is subject to prosecution and to civil suit in this state for conduct prohibited by this act occurring wholly or partly outside this state if:

(1) any element of the violation, or a result of the violation, occurred within this state;

(2) a party on the opposite side of the violative transaction, or any person who executed a contemporaneous transaction, resided or maintained a principal place of business in this state at the time of the violation;

(3) any person injured by the violation resided or maintained a principal place of business in this state at the time of the violation;

(4) the issuer of the security is organized under the laws of this state or maintains its principal place of business in this state; or

(5) an order was placed from, routed through, received in, or executed through equipment or facilities located in this state.

(b) VENUE. Venue lies in any county in which a person described in subsection (a)(2) or (a)(3) resided or maintained a principal place of business at the time of the violation, in the county of the issuer’s principal place of business, or in [the county of the seat of government].

(c) PERSONAL JURISDICTION. Conduct described in subsection (a) constitutes the transaction of business and the commission of a tortious act within this state for purposes of [STATE LONG-ARM STATUTE], and the courts of this state may exercise personal jurisdiction over the violator to the limits of the constitutions of this state and of the United States.

SECTION 14. WHISTLEBLOWER AWARDS AND PROTECTIONS.

(a) AWARDS. A person who voluntarily provides original information that leads to the collection of monetary sanctions exceeding $[100,000] under this act shall receive an award of not less than 10 percent and not more than 30 percent of the amounts collected, paid from the Fund, in an amount the attorney general determines based on the significance of the information and the assistance provided.

(b) RETALIATION PROHIBITED. No employer may discharge, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or otherwise discriminate against a person for providing information under this act, assisting an investigation or action under this act, or testifying in a proceeding under this act. An aggrieved person may bring a civil action for reinstatement, two times back pay with interest, compensation for special damages, and reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.

(c) CONFIDENTIALITY. The attorney general shall keep the identity of a person providing information confidential to the extent the law of this state permits.

SECTION 15. ACTIONS IN THE NAME OF THE STATE BY PRIVATE PERSONS. [OPTIONAL]

(a) FILING. A person may bring a civil action for a violation of this act in the name of the state. The complaint shall be filed in camera and under seal, shall remain under seal for at least 60 days, and shall be served on the attorney general together with a written disclosure of the material evidence the person possesses.

(b) ELECTION. Within 60 days, extendable for good cause shown, the attorney general may intervene and conduct the action or may decline, in which case the person may proceed.

(c) SHARES. If the attorney general conducts the action, the person receives 15 to 25 percent of the proceeds. If the person conducts the action, the person receives 25 to 30 percent of the proceeds. In either case, a prevailing person also receives reasonable attorney’s fees and costs, and the balance of the proceeds is deposited in the Fund.

(d) BARS. No action may proceed under this section based on allegations that are the subject of a pending proceeding by the state or the attorney general, or based on publicly disclosed allegations unless the person is an original source of the information. The procedural rules of [STATE FALSE CLAIMS ACT] govern actions under this section to the extent they are not inconsistent with this act.

SECTION 16. PENSION FORFEITURE; DEBARMENT.

(a) FORFEITURE. A covered official who holds elective or appointive office under this state or a political subdivision of this state and who is convicted of a felony under section 12 forfeits pension and retirement benefits as provided in [STATE PENSION FORFEITURE ACT], and forfeited amounts shall be applied first to restitution and disgorgement obligations under this act. This subsection does not apply to an officer, employee, or staff member serving in a civil service position, whose benefits remain governed by [STATE PENSION FORFEITURE ACT] according to its own terms.

(b) DEBARMENT. A person convicted under section 12 is disqualified from contracting with any public entity of this state for [5] years after conviction, and the conviction shall be referred to any licensing board with authority over the person as a possible ground for discipline.

SECTION 17. INDEMNIFICATION AND INSURANCE PROHIBITED.

No public entity of this state shall indemnify or reimburse any person for, or purchase insurance on any person’s behalf against, disgorgement, civil penalties, punitive damages, restitution, or criminal fines imposed under this act. Any agreement to the contrary is void as against public policy.

SECTION 18. LIMITATIONS; TOLLING.

(a) PRIVATE ACTIONS. An action under section 8 shall be brought within the later of [3] years after the plaintiff discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, the facts constituting the violation, or [8] years after the violation.

(b) STATE CIVIL ACTIONS. An action by the attorney general under sections 10 and 11 shall be brought within [10] years after the violation.

(c) PROSECUTIONS. A prosecution under section 12 shall be commenced within [7] years after the offense.

(d) TOLLING. Each limitation period in this section is tolled during any period of fraudulent concealment of the violation [and during the defendant’s continuous service in the office through which the material nonpublic governmental information was obtained].

SECTION 19. SECURITIES VICTIMS RESTITUTION FUND.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT. The Securities Victims Restitution Fund is established in the state treasury. The Fund receives disgorgement, civil penalties, short-swing recoveries under section 6(b), and criminal fines net of restitution collected under this act.

(b) DISTRIBUTION. The attorney general shall establish a claims process to distribute Fund amounts attributable to a violation to persons injured by that violation. Amounts unclaimed [3] years after deposit transfer to [the general fund] [an investor protection and education account].

(c) PAYMENTS. Awards under sections 6(b), 8(b), 14, and 15 are paid from the Fund.

SECTION 20. CONSTRUCTION; SEVERABILITY; RELATION TO OTHER LAW.

(a) This act is remedial and shall be liberally construed to effect its purposes.

(b) The rights and remedies provided by this act are cumulative with those provided by [STATE SECURITIES ACT] and by any other law.

(c) If any provision of this act, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held invalid or preempted, the remainder of the act, and the application of the provision to other persons and circumstances, are unaffected.

(d) Nothing in this act regulates the registration or offering of securities. This act addresses fraud, deceit, and breach of duty in connection with securities transactions.

SECTION 21. EFFECTIVE DATE; APPLICABILITY.

This act takes effect on [DATE] and applies to purchases, sales, and communications occurring on or after that date. Section 6(b) applies only where both matched transactions occur on or after that date.

DRAFTER’S NOTES

Section 2. Each finding is supported by primary authority: the STOCK Act, Public Law 112-105; section 16(b) of the Securities Exchange Act, 15 U.S.C. 78p; the Martin Act, N.Y. General Business Law article 23-A, whose no-scienter civil standard dates to People v. Federated Radio Corp., 244 N.Y. 33 (1926); Virginia Code section 19.2-249.2, which places venue for computer crimes in the county where the victim owner has its principal place of business, where any act occurred, or through which access was routed; Strassheim v. Daily, 221 U.S. 280 (1911); and the NSMIA antifraud savings clause, 15 U.S.C. 77r(c).

Section 3. The definition of material nonpublic governmental information adapts the STOCK Act’s phrase for information derived from an official’s position or gained in the performance of official duties. The awareness standard adapts SEC Rule 10b5-1(b), 17 C.F.R. 240.10b5-1. The contemporaneous transaction definition gives statutory content to the standing class Congress created in Exchange Act section 20A, 15 U.S.C. 78t-1. The exclusion of exchange-traded futures reflects the exclusive federal jurisdiction provision of the Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. 2; a state statute reaching those contracts would face preemption, so the act covers securities and security-based swaps only.

Section 4. The duty codifies STOCK Act section 4(b)(2), which affirms a duty of trust and confidence owed to Congress, the United States Government, and the citizens of the United States, and extends the same duty to state and local officials. The misappropriation theory the duty rests on is settled federal law under United States v. O’Hagan, 521 U.S. 642 (1997).

Section 5. Subsections (a) and (d) codify insider trading liability as courts have built it under Exchange Act section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5. Subsection (c) is a flagged departure: it drops the personal benefit element of Dirks v. SEC, 463 U.S. 646 (1983), as reaffirmed in Salman v. United States, 580 U.S. 39 (2016), and follows instead the Insider Trading Prohibition Act, H.R. 2655, which the House of Representatives passed in 2021 with a knowing, consciously avoided, or recklessly disregarded standard for downstream traders. A legislature may define the elements of a state cause of action without adopting judge-made limits on the federal cause of action. Subsection (e) transplants the Martin Act’s fraudulent practices catchall, N.Y. General Business Law 352-c, together with the no-scienter rule of Federated Radio.

Section 6. Subsection (b) answers the problem of suspected but unprovable use of inside information the same way Congress answered it in 1934: strict liability for short-swing profits under section 16(b), including the demand-and-sue mechanism that lets any security holder enforce when the responsible enforcer declines. Two departures are flagged. The class of insiders becomes covered officials rather than corporate officers, directors, and ten percent holders, and the recovery goes to the state Fund rather than to the issuer, because the principal whose information was converted is the public. Subsection (a) is a burden-shifting presumption built from the predicate facts of access and a closely timed trade; the official rebuts by ordinary preponderance.

Section 7. The qualified blind trust standard comes from the Ethics in Government Act, 5 U.S.C. 13104(f). The diversified fund exception parallels the excepted investment fund concept in the same statute. The trading plan safe harbor adapts Rule 10b5-1(c) as amended in 2022, including a cooling-off period, and adds public filing with the state ethics commission.

Section 8. Subsection (a) creates the private action the Martin Act lacks, a gap the New York Court of Appeals confirmed in CPC International Inc. v. McKesson Corp., 70 N.Y.2d 268 (1987), and models it on section 20A, 15 U.S.C. 78t-1. Subsection (b) extends the 16(b) shareholder suit to give any investor in the affected issuer a route to force disgorgement, with a percentage award in place of the common-fund fee doctrine that sustains 16(b) litigation.

Section 9. Trebling follows Clayton Act section 4, 15 U.S.C. 15, and civil RICO, 18 U.S.C. 1964(c). The statutory minimum recovery follows the model of 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(3). One-way fee shifting follows 42 U.S.C. 1988 and Christiansburg Garment Co. v. EEOC, 434 U.S. 412 (1978). Two departures are flagged: the act removes section 20A’s cap limiting total private recovery to the defendant’s profit and removes its offset for amounts disgorged to the SEC, so private damages, state penalties, and disgorgement stack. Constitutional review of punitive awards under State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408 (2003), is the reason subsection (f) offers an optional aggregate limit.

Section 10. The investigative architecture is the Martin Act’s: pre-suit subpoena power under section 352, injunctions and restitution under section 353, receivership under section 353-a, and criminal authority under section 358. Disgorgement as a Martin Act remedy was sustained in People v. Greenberg, 27 N.Y.3d 490 (2016). Concurrent county prosecutor authority is a drafting choice for enforcement redundancy and mirrors the concurrent structures common in state computer crime codes.

Section 11. The penalty structure adapts Exchange Act section 21A, 15 U.S.C. 78u-1, which authorizes a civil penalty of up to three times the profit gained or loss avoided. The dollar alternatives adapt 21A’s controlling person figures. The floor for covered officials, a penalty of no less than the full gain on top of disgorgement of the full gain, is a flagged enhancement grounded in the breach of public trust.

Section 12. The intent-based grading split comes from Martin Act section 352-c, which makes securities fraud a misdemeanor without proof of intent to defraud and a felony with that proof. The dollar tiers follow the structure of state theft grading. The alternative fine adapts 18 U.S.C. 3571(d), raised from twice the gross gain to three times, a flagged increase. Subsection (d) keeps the strict liability rule of section 6(b) civil only.

Section 13. Subsection (a)(1) is Model Penal Code section 1.03(1)(a), which reaches offenses where either conduct or a result element occurs in the state. Subsections (a)(2) through (a)(5) adapt the victim-location and routing venue rules of Virginia Code section 19.2-249.2 to securities transactions. Strassheim supplies the constitutional basis for prosecuting out-of-state conduct with in-state effects, and Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783 (1984), supplies the effects test for civil personal jurisdiction.

Section 14. The award band of 10 to 30 percent of collected sanctions comes from Dodd-Frank section 922, 15 U.S.C. 78u-6. The collection threshold is lowered from the federal $1,000,000 to a bracketed state figure because state cases will run smaller. The retaliation remedy blends 78u-6(h) with the False Claims Act, 31 U.S.C. 3730(h).

Section 15. The qui tam mechanics, including the seal, the intervention election, and the 15 to 25 and 25 to 30 percent relator shares, are the False Claims Act’s, 31 U.S.C. 3730(b) through (e). This article is marked optional because it is the act’s least tested piece in the securities context. The Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act, 15 U.S.C. 78bb(f), preempts certain state-law class actions involving nationally traded securities but excludes actions in which a state or political subdivision is the plaintiff. An action filed in the name of the state under this section is designed for that exclusion, and the private remedies in section 8 are structured as individual, demand-based actions rather than class actions for the same reason.

Section 16. Pension forfeiture follows the Pennsylvania Public Employee Pension Forfeiture Act, 43 Pa. Stat. sections 1311 through 1315, and the 2017 amendment to the New York Constitution permitting reduction or revocation of pensions for officials convicted of felonies related to their duties. Federal pensions are beyond state reach, so subsection (a) is limited to state and local officials.

Section 17. The bar on indemnification and insurance follows the settled exclusion of intentional wrongdoing from public indemnification statutes, for example N.Y. Public Officers Law section 18, and the public policy against insuring intentional misconduct. Without this section, taxpayers would pay the penalties the act imposes on their own officials.

Section 18. The private limitation structure lengthens the discovery and repose periods of 28 U.S.C. 1658(b). The ten-year state enforcement period follows the ten-year disgorgement period Congress added at 15 U.S.C. 78u(d)(8). Tolling for fraudulent concealment is settled doctrine. The bracketed tolling during the defendant’s continued tenure in the office is novel and flagged; its analogs are the adverse domination doctrine and equitable estoppel against defendants who control the channels of disclosure.

Section 19. The Fund adapts the Fair Funds mechanism of Sarbanes-Oxley section 308, 15 U.S.C. 7246, which directs penalties and disgorgement to defrauded investors before any residue reaches the treasury.

Section 20. Liberal remedial construction restates the Martin Act rule of Federated Radio. The application-severability language in subsection (c) matters here more than in most acts, because a court that found one application preempted, for example a particular private claim involving a nationally traded security, would sever that application and leave state enforcement, qui tam actions, and the remaining private claims intact.

Reach to federal officials. The act applies to federal, state, and local officials alike, and the notes flag the three objections that will be raised. First, a personal securities trade in a private brokerage account is private conduct, not an official act, so the Supremacy Clause immunity of In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890), which protects federal officers acting within the scope of federal duty, does not attach. Second, the Speech or Debate Clause protects legislative acts and evidence of them, Gravel v. United States, 408 U.S. 606 (1972); it constrains what proof is available against a member of Congress, and it does not license the trade itself. Third, Liu v. SEC, 591 U.S. 71 (2020), construes the scope of equitable disgorgement under a federal statute and places no limit on disgorgement a state statute expressly authorizes.

Standing architecture. The instruction that any harmed investor be able to sue is implemented on three tracks with different proof burdens. A contemporaneous trader proves a violation and recovers treble damages with a statutory floor under sections 8(a) and 9. Any holder of the affected issuer’s securities can force disgorgement to the Fund and keep a percentage under section 8(b), or recover short-swing profits with no proof of use at all under section 6(b). A citizen with original information can prosecute the state’s civil case and keep up to 30 percent under section 15.

REVISION NOTES (AUGUST 2026)

Section 3(4) defines the covered class by function, any public office, employment, or engagement of any government, domestic or foreign, without enumerating levels of government, on the drafting pattern of statutes that define an offense by conduct without listing the actor’s employer. The functional form follows enacted law: the Model Penal Code’s definition of “public servant” reaches any person participating as adviser or consultant in performing a governmental function, and state codes adopting it, including New York Penal Law section 10.00(15), have applied it for decades. The functional form strengthens the general-applicability answer to any attainder challenge and reaches advisers and contractors engaged to perform or advise on governmental functions, a class the enumerated version missed. Coverage attaches by position, so the section 6(b) matched-trade rule operates without any proof about information. Section 3(13) extends coverage to commodities and digital assets in spot transactions, following the scope of New York General Business Law section 352, which reaches securities and commodities and which the New York attorney general has applied to digital-asset trading. The exclusion for futures, options on futures, and swaps within exclusive Commodity Futures Trading Commission jurisdiction under 7 U.S.C. 2 remains. Section 6(a) adds a de minimis floor of $[1,000] with aggregation of related transactions against structuring. Section 12(d) confines the section 5(b) attribution rule and the section 6(a) presumption to civil proceedings, following Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U.S. 510 (1979), and County Court of Ulster County v. Allen, 442 U.S. 140 (1979). Section 16(a) applies pension forfeiture to elective and appointive officeholders of this state and its subdivisions and leaves civil-service personnel under the state’s existing forfeiture law.

SECOND REVISION (AUGUST 2026, VET PASS)

Section 4 is restructured on a recognition model: for officials of this state and its subdivisions the section declares the duty, and for all other covered officials the act attaches its remedies to duties of trust and confidence already arising under the law of the government served, including section 4(b)(2) of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, Public Law 112-105, and the executive branch standard at 5 C.F.R. 2635.703. The restructure removes any claim that this state defines the internal obligations of another sovereign’s officers; the state attaches remedies to breaches of duties that other law creates, the mirror of how misappropriation doctrine borrows duties from state law. Section 6(b) applies to any security as defined in section 3(13) so the automatic rule reaches the digital assets the definition covers, a flagged departure from section 16(b)’s equity-security limit. Section 10(a) adds use and derivative-use immunity for compelled testimony on the standard of Kastigar v. United States, 406 U.S. 441 (1972), following Martin Act immunity practice, because investigation of individuals fails without an immunity mechanism once the privilege is asserted.

A note before we start. This one runs long, as many of my pieces do. I thought about splitting it. I decided not to. Article length is an output of the subject matter, not an input for the algorithm. If you came here for a hot take, there are plenty of places to get one. If you came here to understand how authoritarian regimes survive and how they fall, stick with the piece.

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Academics who study authoritarianism for a living have spent decades building frameworks that explain how regimes consolidate, how they fall, and what reverses them. Most of us living through this do not have those frameworks. That gap is part of how authoritarian regimes win. The fix is simple. We learn what the scholars already know. Then we know what to do.

Some of you already have pieces of the picture. You may have encountered Erica Chenoweth’s work and the 3.5 percent rule, though there is far more to her research than the pop science version has shared. Selectorate theory might be familiar if you are a CGP Grey fan or if you have read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. Steven Levitsky’s name you may know from How Democracies Die or from his more recent work on competitive authoritarianism with Lucan Way. And if you are a regular reader here, you already know the framework I have developed and published academically around Oppositional Federalism and Soft Secession.

Few people in American political discourse have pulled all four into one picture. These are four separate bodies of academic work, built by different scholars across different decades, answering different questions. This piece pulls them together, explains each one clearly, and shows how they connect into a single map of how authoritarian regimes rise, how they fall, and what Americans can do about our homegrown autocrats. All of this should be delivered in language that is clear whether you have a PhD in political science or you are still in high school.

An important definition up top: regime durability is how long a system of power lasts, and what makes it robust or fragile. Political scientists have spent decades studying what keeps authoritarian leaders in place and what finally removes them.

The first framework we will explore is called selectorate theory, and it comes from a 2011 book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith called The Dictator’s Handbook. The core insight is simple enough to explain over a beer. Every leader, democratic or authoritarian, depends on the loyalty of a specific group of people to stay in power. Bueno de Mesquita calls this the winning coalition. In a functioning democracy, the winning coalition is huge, because you need millions of votes to stay in office, which means you have to deliver things that millions of people actually want, like roads, schools, hospitals, and safe streets. In a dictatorship, the winning coalition is tiny. It might be a few hundred generals, oligarchs, and security service chiefs. The dictator does not need to please the public. He needs to keep those few hundred people both paid off and scared.

Smaller coalitions produce more durable regimes.

This is why Putin has survived twenty-six years of disasters that would have ended any politician. His winning coalition is small, maybe a few hundred siloviki and energy oligarchs, and they are kept loyal through money from Gazprom and Rosneft plus the credible threat that defectors die, often in horrible ways. The Russian public’s approval of him is essentially decorative. If every Russian voter turned against him tomorrow and the FSB stayed loyal, he would still be president.

Now watch what Trump is doing and ask yourself what it looks like in selectorate terms.

The civil service has been purged of non-loyalists. Federal law enforcement got the same treatment. Ethics offices are shut. Loyalists run the FBI, the Pentagon, and the IRS. A Supreme Court majority operates under unitary executive theory, which holds that Republican presidents have unlimited authority while Democrats face every procedural and judicial obstacle the system can manufacture. Each move reduces the number of people whose cooperation he needs to govern. Each shrinks the winning coalition. That is the pattern of a leader building the machinery to not need your vote.

The second framework is called competitive authoritarianism, and it comes from Steven Levitsky at Harvard and Lucan Way at the University of Toronto. Their 2010 book argued that a whole category of modern regimes are neither full democracies nor full dictatorships. Elections happen. Opposition parties campaign. Most of the formal institutions of democracy stay in place. But the incumbent bends the rules hard enough that he almost always wins. He captures the courts and the media. He redraws districts to guarantee his party wins. His enemies face prosecution. He stays in power through elections that international observers call free but not fair.

Hungary under Orbán was their textbook case. And in October 2025, Levitsky told a Harvard Kennedy School forum that the United States has now joined the list. In his own words: “We have very clearly descended into at least a mild form of what I would call competitive authoritarianism.”

Two months later, in a December 2025 piece in Foreign Affairs with Way and Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote that the United States in 2025 “ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany, or even Argentina are democracies.” He also wrote the line that changes everything: “Trump’s authoritarian offensive is now unmistakable, but it is reversible.”

That word, reversible, is why this piece exists.

Levitsky and Way’s framework is built specifically to explain what selectorate theory explains poorly, which is the cases where authoritarian-leaning incumbents actually lose. They identified three conditions that converge when these regimes fall. First, the opposition unites behind a single credible alternative. Second, international linkage, particularly economic linkage with democracies, constrains how far the incumbent can go in crushing the opposition. Third, the patronage machine loses the money it needs to keep the coalition loyal.

Hungary had all three. And on April 12, 2026, the theory’s prediction came true in real time.

Péter Magyar was a former Fidesz insider. His ex-wife Judit Varga had served as Orbán’s justice minister until she was fired in a scandal that, per Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton, “was probably Orbán’s fault, but that he blamed on her.” Magyar defected in 2024, built the Tisza Party, and won in a landslide earlier this month. Whether his government dismantles the Fidesz machine or becomes a different version of it is a question the next four years will answer, not this article.

What matters for our framework is what the structural moment in Hungary proves. The EU had frozen roughly 28 billion euros of structural funds over rule-of-law violations, starving the Fidesz patronage network that ran on EU money redirected to Orbán’s son-in-law and a handful of connected oligarchs. That is condition three in the Levitsky and Way framework. Hungary’s EU membership meant Orbán could not simply arrest Magyar or disappear him without triggering consequences that would make things worse. That is condition two. And Magyar’s defection from inside the machine, carrying a critique that only an insider could credibly deliver, created the conditions for opposition unity that Hungarian politics had failed to achieve for sixteen years. That is condition one. All three conditions converged, and the regime lost an election it had designed to be unloseable.

The turnout on April 12 hit the highest level since Hungary’s transition to democracy. Magyar won. And Levitsky, asked to comment, said this: “Oppositions can win despite a tilted playing field. Democracies are facing many challenges in many parts of the world, but so are autocracies.”

That is the hopeful part. Here is what he said in the next breath.

Defenders of democracy, he warned, should not take too much comfort from Orbán’s loss, because in some ways Trump has already been more oppressive. He specifically cited Trump’s use of the Justice Department to investigate political opponents and ICE’s shooting deaths of protesters, calling them “steps that Orbán’s government never took.”

The Harvard political scientist whose framework best explains how Orbán fell is telling us that the American case is already worse than the Hungarian one on the specific measures that predict whether a regime consolidates or falls. Scheppele has been making a parallel point for over a year. She noted that Orbán, in the early years of his rule, cut Hungarian university funding by about 40 percent, because universities are the bastion of independent opposition in a hybrid regime. “Orbán’s main weapon of attack against all independent institutions, including the universities, was always financial,” she said. “That’s exactly what we’re seeing here.” Look at what this administration has already done to American universities in one year, and then ask yourself whether we have fifteen years of Orbán’s runway or whether we are already past it.

The third framework evaluates tipping points that create regime change. Erica Chenoweth at the Harvard Kennedy School spent years building the largest dataset in the world on how authoritarian regimes fall. With Maria Stephan, they published Why Civil Resistance Works in 2011 and has updated the research since. The core finding has come to be called the 3.5 percent rule. When active, sustained nonviolent participation by 3.5 percent of a country’s population enters the field against an authoritarian regime, that regime essentially always falls. Every case in the dataset that hit the threshold succeeded. In the United States, 3.5 percent is roughly twelve million people.

What Chenoweth measured is not the moral case for nonviolent resistance. They measured the mechanism. In their Harvard Gazette interview, they described four elements that define a successful nonviolent campaign. “The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained. The second thing is that the movement needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites.” Their research found that at the 3.5 percent threshold, defections from the regime’s pillars begin to happen. Leaders in business, media, and politics start to shift. Police and military personnel become less willing to carry out orders against their own neighbors. Members of the ruling party start to calculate that the regime is going down and they need to be on the right side when it does. That is selectorate theory described from the opposite angle. The winning coalition breaks.

Here is where we actually stand. On June 14, 2025, the No Kings protests drew approximately five million participants across more than two thousand locations. On October 18, 2025, that number rose to approximately seven million. On March 28, 2026, eight million Americans took to the streets across more than 3,300 sites, making it the second-largest single-day protest in American history. The trajectory is climbing. We went from roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent to approximately 2.4 percent across three successive mobilizations. We are two-thirds of the way to the threshold in single-day turnout. What we have not yet done is sustain it.

If you have looked at the No Kings protests and thought to yourself that this is a useless parade of hashtag resistance, that this is the same crowd marching once and going home while the regime only gets stronger, I want to take that critique seriously. Because Chenoweth takes it seriously too. Their own research has found that nonviolent movements in the 2010s were larger than in previous decades and statistically less effective, and they named the reasons. Movements relied too heavily on protest as the only tactic. They failed to build coalition discipline before mass mobilization. They did not maintain unity across waves. Her updated work explicitly finds that boycotts and strikes often do more damage to an authoritarian regime than street demonstrations, and that movements with higher participation from women have substantially better success rates.

Maria Stephan, her co-author on Why Civil Resistance Works, put it plainly. What the research found to be decisive, Stephan wrote, was “not simply a few mass demonstrations that brought a lot of people out into the streets, but sustained campaigns that drew together diverse groups of people from different parts of society; that were able to expand the repertoire of nonviolent actions beyond symbolic protests and street demonstrations to include sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, and other acts of non-cooperation; that integrated what Gandhi referred to as the ‘constructive program’ of self-governance and community care.”

“Could you imagine,” Chenoweth asked in their Harvard Gazette interview, “if 11.5 million people were doing something like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things would be totally different in this country.”

The prescription is mass noncooperation sustained for nine to eighteen months. We fill those institutions. Everyone does, in some capacity. A governor in a different way than a city clerk, a city clerk in a different way than a resident. Sustained refusal from the people inside the machinery can break it.

This is why the No Kings March numbers are and also why they are insufficient on their own. A country that can put eight million people in the streets on a single day has the raw capacity to generate the 3.5 percent threshold Chenoweth measured. But raw capacity is not the same as organized, sustained, diversified resistance. We have answered whether Americans will show up. We answered it three times in less than a year, each time in larger numbers. What we are still answering is what happens in between the marches, though millions of Americans are showing up in increasing numbers for the boycotts, strikes, refusals, parallel institutions, legislative pressure campaigns, that represent sufficient sustained noncooperation and opposition to break a regime before the world is destroyed.

The fourth framework is my own work, published academically on state-federal postures in response to federal authoritarian capture, with more scholarship in progress. The first three frameworks are theories of how authoritarian power operates and how it falls. Mine is the bridge from that theory to 250 years of American constitutional law and federalism in action.

Every posture in this framework has been sitting in the American constitutional order since the founding, and most of them have been used, by states across the ideological spectrum, in response to federal policies those states judged wrong, illegal, or incompatible with the safety of their residents. Governors have always held emergency powers and National Guard authority. State attorneys general have always held independent criminal authority under dual sovereignty doctrine . Mayors have always been able to refuse federal cooperation. State supreme courts have invalidated federal laws on state constitutional grounds and released federal prisoners. What did not exist was a map. The framework sorts the postures into tiers and shows how they can be concurrently applied, so that a governor in California and a district attorney in Philadelphia and a sheriff in Vermont can all represent influential pressure points against the same autocratic problem. There are a lot more of us than there are of them, and this applies that logic to the thousands of governmental agencies and levers that exist at the state, local, and even personal level.

The baseline is cooperative federalism. Call it tier zero. States share data with federal agencies, state law enforcement assists federal enforcement, state administrators implement federal policy. Most states on most days and in most ways. The framework starts counting at the point of departure from that baseline.

Tier one is uncooperative federalism. The state withholds cooperation with federal enforcement. A sheriff declines to hold a person for ICE. A state jail refuses to let federal agents operate inside it. A state legislature passes a law directing state police to leave federal enforcement to federal officers. Northern states did this throughout the 1840s and 1850s with Personal Liberty Laws that refused to let state officials or state jails assist federal slave-catchers. California did it in 1996 when it legalized medical cannabis while federal law still classified every gram as a Schedule I felony. Eleven states are doing it right now with laws limiting ICE partnerships, and the Trump DOJ has publicly listed those jurisdictions specifically to apply pressure. The posture is not partisan. Second Amendment sanctuary counties refuse to enforce federal gun laws they consider unconstitutional. Marijuana sanctuary states do the same in the other direction. What ties them together is the decision by a state government that its people are better served by the state declining to be a limb of federal enforcement. Many Democratic governors, legislatures, mayors, and city council members are currently engaged in Tier 1 response. Think of it as “we don’t have to help you do things.”

Tier two is soft secession, also known as financial independence. The state builds parallel financial and social infrastructure to protect its residents from federal corruption, aggression, and exploitation. Twenty-four states built entire legal cannabis markets, with state licensing agencies, state tax stamps, state testing requirements, and state retail regulations, creating a parallel commercial system where the federal one refused to exist. California has positioned its state-run banking infrastructure, its independent climate compacts with other states, and its separately negotiated trade relationships with other countries as exactly this kind of parallel system. Every state with a Medicaid expansion covering people the federal government tried to leave behind is doing tier two work. When the federal government becomes a threat to the people living in a state, the state builds what its residents need outside the federal government’s reach. Think of this tier as “we don’t need you and won’t let you hold us back.”

Tier three is oppositional federalism. The state uses its sovereign authority to go on offense against federal officers who break state law. During Prohibition, state courts let murder prosecutions proceed against federal agents who had shot into cars they claimed were transporting liquor, in cases like Castle v. Lewis and Ex parte Huston. In 1906, the Supreme Court allowed Pennsylvania to prosecute two federal soldiers for killing a civilian at a federal arsenal. Today, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown is suing the sheriff of Adams County for cooperating with ICE in violation of state law. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has said on the record that any ICE agent committing a crime in his jurisdiction will be charged and prosecuted under state law that no presidential pardon can reach. A state attorney general indicting a federal agent is not hypothetical. It is American constitutional practice with a paper trail going back over a century. Think of this tier as “Hey, bad guys. We are coming for you.”

Tier four is constitutional non-compliance. The state uses its sovereign authority to nullify federal law within its borders and, when the situation demands, uses state power to stop federal action on state soil. Wisconsin did this in 1854.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the federal Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, ordered federal prisoners released through state writs of habeas corpus, and freed Joshua Glover from federal custody. The federal government used the identical constitutional posture in 1957, when Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock to enforce school desegregation over the resistance of the governor. Same tier, same constitutional mechanism, wielded by different sovereigns, both in the direction of protecting people. Twenty-four states are operating in this tier right now on cannabis, licensing and regulating conduct the federal Controlled Substances Act defines as a felony, and the federal government has chosen not to enforce because the political cost of enforcement is too high.

That is what tier four looks like when a state is willing to use it and the federal government is not willing to pay to stop it. What a state should do with this posture today, against mass detention without due process or the operation of federal concentration camps within its borders, is not a new question. It has American precedent pointing toward protecting people. Think of this tier as “there are literal concentration camps, whether it’s me, or me and my friends, or the mayor ordering the city police, or the governor activating the national guard, we are using every power we have to stop horrific things from happening.”

The tiers stack and overlap. A state can, currently is, and definitely should be operating in multiple tiers simultaneously, because the federal regime is operating across multiple pressure vectors simultaneously. A state that licenses cannabis, limits ICE cooperation, builds its own banking infrastructure to fund universal healthcare, and charges a federal agent who commits assault is operating in tiers one, two, two, and three all at once. California is currently operating to various degrees in all three tiers. It isn’t yet at the sufficient pitch, but it is a necessary start.

The framework does not hand anyone new authority. The authority has always been there. What the framework does is make the patchwork legible so actors can plan their moves, so that a governor can see which tier to operate in and what escalation looks like, a district attorney can plan prosecutions that stack with what his state attorney general is doing, and a sheriff can see that his daily cooperation decisions are part of a larger structure and adjust them accordingly.

The American constitutional order has been operating in this taxonomy for 250 years. Most Americans have never seen the map. The map is what turns thousands of disconnected decisions by governors and attorneys general and mayors and sheriffs into a coordinated national strategy for reversing authoritarian consolidation and ultimately restoring democracy without needing to wait for a single, and stealable, election.

Now put all four frameworks on the table at the same time. What comes next is the synthesis. It is an argument, built from the academic scholarship, rather than a claim any of the four scholars has made in exactly these terms.

Selectorate theory tells us what the regime is trying to do. Shrink the coalition until only a few hundred people matter, and use the tools of government to make every other American irrelevant to staying in power. Competitive authoritarianism tells us that this kind of regime falls when three conditions converge, which are opposition unity, international constraint, and patronage collapse. Chenoweth’s research tells us what the public mobilization piece of opposition unity has to look like in numbers, which is 3.5 percent sustained, and tells us the mechanism is defection from the regime’s pillars. The Oppositional Federalism framework is the bridge from that theory to American practice, mapping the sovereign postures city, local, and state governments already hold onto a structure that tells every actor which tier their moment requires and what the next move is.

This is regime durability as a fight. The regime is trying to extend its life by shrinking its coalition. We are trying to cut its life short by breaking the coalition it has already built. Every executive order, every firing, every state AG filing, every protest you attend or skip, every billionaire who stays silent or speaks up. Every one of those moves is a deposit or a withdrawal from the regime’s durability, and now you can see the ledger.

Levitsky’s warning is the one that should shape every decision we make from here. Trump is already doing things Orbán never did. We do not get to copy the Hungarian playbook and wait for 2028, because the 2028 election may not look anything like the April 2026 election in Hungary, and we cannot count on the rigging being only partial by the time we get there. The work has to be happening now, at every level, in every state, in every institution. Ten thousand complaints filed with fifty state attorneys general is progress. State legislatures passing non-cooperation bills bring us closer still. District Attorneys investigating and charging high level members of the regime is even more progress still. Every institutional refusal, every citizen complaint, every sustained nonviolent action adds up into the combined force that breaks the regime’s coalition before the regime can finish shrinking it.

We are the durability variable now.

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Note from the author: If you want any of our free booklets, guides, model legislation, and more, check out our library at the bottom of this piece.

The Make Corrupt Politicians Pay Act is a complete model state bill that makes public officials return the profit they earn trading on nonpublic government information, and the campaign funding its delivery to 1,580 offices is live today. The full statute, the budget, and the mailing plan are one link away: https://gofund.me/f62f9e8ec

The same five lines the campaign page uses state the act:

• Disgorgement: the full profit goes back.

• Treble damages: the traders harmed collect three times their losses.

• Civil fines run up to three times the profit.

• Felony charges scale with the dollar amount.

• A convicted official loses the public pension.

A victims restitution fund pays the people harmed before the state keeps a dollar.

Each of the five sections exists in current law and is enforced somewhere right now: the Supreme Court approved fund-routed disgorgement in Liu v. SEC, antitrust law supplies the treble multiplier, section 21A of the Securities Exchange Act already sets fines at three times the profit, the states grade theft by dollar amount in their own codes, and Pennsylvania and New York forfeit pensions on conviction under current law. You can even check the drafter’s notes, which map every section to its source, and the sources answer the quiet question a reader asks, whether any of this can happen.

This campaign prints the act and mails it to each and every Democratic legislator in the sixteen states where Democrats control both chambers and the governorship, while email carries the same package to Democratic legislators in the other thirty-four states and both channels reach the 24 Democratic governors and the 57 state party chairs. The budget, the accountability terms, and the complete statute appear on the campaign page at the link above, and The Existentialist Republic publishes the record afterward, office by office: received, filed, declined, or unanswered.

This mailing is one piece of a larger push. Activists in The Existentialist Republic’s Discord are contacting legislators, subscribers are reaching out to their own representatives as constituents, and each envelope arrives in an office already hearing from the voters that office answers to. We are flooding the politicians’ zone, and the two actions at the end are your part of the flood.

Objections arrive quickly, and each answer below is written so you can easily repost it word for word.

“This is performative. It will never pass.” Federal bills stall because passage needs votes Democrats do not have. This one is a state bill. Democrats control both chambers and the governorship in sixteen states, which means introduction the day a session opens and a floor vote soon after without one Republican. Nothing performative about it and not a single excuse available for voting no.

“Federal officials are immune to state law.” No statute says so. The immunity courts recognize covers a federal officer performing a lawful and constitutionally valid federal duty, and the Supreme Court held in Mesa v. California that an on-duty federal employee still answers to state law when the act itself serves no such duty. Trading stocks appears in no official’s duties. Same as a DUI: the job changes nothing about the charge.

“This is just a bill aimed at Trump.” The act names no one and takes effect only for conduct after passage. The same sections govern both parties, federal officials along with state and local ones, and the act reaches whoever chooses to trade on nonpublic information once the law exists.

“Why not prosecute the trades already in the news?” The Constitution bars punishment under a law that did not exist when the conduct occurred; the term is ex post facto. The act runs forward from passage. Officials file public disclosure reports for each transaction, and any matched purchase and sale within six months after enactment makes the profit recoverable on the public record alone.

“Fines let them off easy.” The opposite complaint arrives in the same threads: “Prison goes too far.” The act answers both at once: disgorgement recovers the gain, treble damages repay the traders’ losses, the restitution fund pays victims first, and intentional violations carry felony charges graded by amount. Neither remedy replaces the other.

The Existentialist Republic drafted this act because prosecuting financial crimes is far easier than prosecuting treason. We organized this mailing list because sixteen legislatures have democratic control and this is an opportunity to deliver for voters in a way that will not just be newsworthy, it will represent a historic turning point in US history. Delivery is the remaining step, and the campaign funds the delivery. And if this campaign gets a big enough response, we do the same thing for the next bill, and the one after, getting more sophisticated each iteration.

Two Ways to Flood the Zone

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• The full act, the budget, and the accountability terms are on the page, readable before you give a dollar.

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Contact Your Legislator

• Write your state legislators in your own words. Identical form messages get counted once and filed, and your own words are what works.

• Points to cover: you are a constituent, you want the Make Corrupt Politicians Pay Act introduced in the next session, the full text is on the campaign page where you can copy the 5 images containing the text and share them with your representatives.

• Reach the office however you like: email, a call, a fax through FaxZero, or a printed letter. A call covers the same points, spoken in your own words.

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Author's note: this is an update on a previously published article. It includes expanded information to address specific questions that have arisen since it was first shared. You can also find our booklet “Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare” listed for $0.00, by clicking on this sentence. Also, all references/citations are listed at the end of this article.

Washington State House Bill 2712 of 2010 was titled the “Washington state sovereignty and federal tax escrow account act of 2010.” The legislation proposed creating a Federal Tax Escrow Account in the state treasury. Instead of employers forwarding collected federal taxes to Washington, they would send them to the state. The state would hold the money in escrow. A legislative panel would review federal spending for constitutional compliance. The state would release only the portions deemed constitutional. Funds designated for unconstitutional spending would either support programs currently funded through federal allocations or return to taxpayers directly.

The bill died in committee without hearings. It was sponsored entirely by Republicans during Democratic trifecta control of the state legislature and the Obama administration. Opponents called it obviously unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause and pointed to McCulloch v. Maryland, which established that states cannot interfere with federal functions. The bill wasn’t expected to pass and served primarily as symbolic Tea Party opposition.

But that was 2010. Blue states in 2025 face fundamentally different circumstances.

Federal spending conceals systematic constitutional violations funded by blue state revenue. California remits over $400 billion annually in federal withholding taxes. That money pays for ICE enforcement actions in Los Angeles conducted over state objections. New York sends hundreds of billions that fund DOJ prosecutions targeting Democratic officials. Illinois revenue deploys National Guard units to Chicago despite the governor’s explicit refusal to cooperate. Federal agents conduct immigration raids without warrants or probable cause in Democratic cities, violating active court injunctions. The administration ignores judicial orders whenever they don’t agree with them. Blue states finance an apparatus that occupies their own territory, corruptly prosecutes their own officials, and violates their own constitutionally codified authorities.

States control the mechanism to stop it.

Employers across blue states withhold federal taxes from worker paychecks every year and send that money straight to the IRS. State legislatures can order them to stop. Pass a law requiring every employer in the state to redirect federal tax withholdings to a state escrow account instead of D.C. The money then sits in state control. Does the federal government want access? Then they can submit to independent audit proving funds will be allocated according to congressional appropriations, not redirected through executive action. Demonstrate spending complies with constitutional limits and active court orders. Prove compliance with anti-commandeering doctrine and due process protections. Pass the audit, get the money. Fail it, the billions stay in escrow until constitutional compliance can be verified.

The escrow mechanism also functions as anti-corruption compliance oversight. States aren’t refusing to remit taxes arbitrarily. They’re establishing accountability for an executive that operates above constitutional limits. When the administration runs pay-for-pardon schemes, accepts private jets from foreign governments in violation of the emoluments clause, and uses federal resources for quid pro quo arrangements, states have authority to demand verification that tax dollars aren’t financing corruption before releasing funds.

The inspection criteria require constitutional compliance. Federal spending must follow congressional appropriations, not executive redirection. Operations must stay within statutory authorization. Enforcement must respect due process and court orders. These criteria aren’t arbitrary. They’re baseline constitutional requirements the administration currently violates with blue state revenue. Stop using our resources to do your dirty work.

Meet the standards, and the funds release. Refuse, and hundreds of billions sit in state accounts each month to accrue interest that benefits the good folks of whichever states step up.

Legal arguments about constitutionality don’t determine whether this strategy works. Enforcement capacity does. The federal government cannot physically enforce against coordinated states. Whether the Supreme Court rules this constitutional or unconstitutional doesn’t change that operational reality. Constitutional objections don’t determine success or failure. Enforcement capacity determines success or failure.

Cannabis legalization violates explicit federal law. The Controlled Substances Act made marijuana illegal nationwide. Federal courts didn’t give states permission to legalize. States did it anyway. When enough states stopped enforcing federal drug law, federal authorities lacked resources to enforce independently.

If we could use nullification for people to get high, why can’t we use it to protect human rights and stop fascism?

REAL ID followed identical dynamics. The law passed in 2005 with mandatory implementation by 2008. Twenty-five states passed legislation explicitly opposing the mandate, citing federal overreach and Tenth Amendment violations. The federal government extended the deadline in 2008. Then extended it again in 2009, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2020, 2021, 2022, and most recently to 2027. Nineteen years of extensions because the federal government couldn’t enforce when enough states chose not to participate.

Cannabis and REAL ID demonstrate what happens when states coordinate on action the federal government calls illegal. Enforcement becomes unfeasible. The federal government lacks capacity to arrest state tax commissioners across 15 states while maintaining tax collection systems, cannot seize state treasuries by force, and cannot withhold federal funding from net contributor states that send more to Washington than they receive. The enforcement mechanisms don’t exist for this scale of coordinated resistance.

Some will argue that tax escrow accelerates institutional breakdown in ways that harm the populations blue states aim to protect. The concern deserves direct engagement because it rests on a premise that no longer reflects reality. The argument assumes functional institutions that coordinated resistance might damage. Those institutions already failed. A president led a violent attempt to overturn an election, faced no prosecution for four years, then won the presidency again under questionable circumstances.

The premise that we can vote our way back to previous norms misunderstands what norms are and how they function. Norms aren’t legislation that remains enforceable after violation. They’re behavioral expectations that cease to constrain the moment enough powerful actors demonstrate willingness to ignore consequences. When someone breaks a norm and faces no consequences, that norm no longer exists as a governing constraint. You cannot comply your way back to a world where the other side follows rules they’ve already demonstrated they’ll violate whenever advantageous. Every “line in the sand” that produced no consequences confirmed that no lines exist.

Republicans now have every incentive to lie, cheat, and steal so they can avoid accountability or consequences, while simultaneously destroying every enforcement mechanism that was previously relied upon.

Institutions already collapsed. What remains is whether to acknowledge that collapse and build alternative accountability mechanisms, or continue pretending institutions still function while they’re systematically weaponized against you. Tax escrow creates consequences for executive lawlessness where none currently exist.

Single state action gets isolated and crushed. However, States acting simultaneously representing the majority of federal revenue creates one of two scenarios, both superior to current circumstances. Either the administration complies with constitutional requirements to access hundreds of billions in blue state revenue, or blue states retain that revenue and stop financing federal operations conducted against their explicit objections. The administration cannot simultaneously violate existing agreements and continue extracting blue state funding.

The coordination infrastructure already exists. Governors Safeguarding Democracy launched November 13, 2024, founded by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis to coordinate state resistance strategies. The organization brings together Democratic governors who control massive economic leverage. California alone accounts for 14.5 percent of national GDP. New York adds another 8 percent. Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington, and other Democratic trifecta states collectively represent over $7 trillion in economic output. Fifteen states remain under Democratic trifecta control. Twenty-two states plus Washington D.C. have Democratic attorneys general. These governors have conducted tabletop exercises for months, running scenarios on federal funding cuts and rights violations. They’ve developed legal frameworks for state resistance. They’re preparing for confrontation. Tax escrow is the confrontation that ends the current crisis.

The stakes aren’t ideological. They’re existential.

That means we have a duty to act decisively and proactively. Hitler wasn’t stopped through appeasement, autocrats truly never are. They will always take as much as they can and it will never be enough.

State legislatures can pass tax escrow legislation within 90 days. We know how to implement this. We know it works. The impacts would deal a devastating blow to a regime that currently has at least another full year to consolidate power further.

You can find our booklet “Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare” listed for $0.00, by clicking on this sentence.

Tax escrow is one strategy. Public banking eliminates Wall Street control over state finances. Interstate compacts coordinate multi-state resistance. Criminal prosecutions hold federal officials accountable when Washington won’t. Revenue diversification reduces dependency. Federal oversight has collapsed. States either build independent systems or watch corruption operate with impunity using their money. Learn more in our new booklet “Intro to Soft Secession,” available now at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.

References

American Immigration Council. (2025, September 8). How the Supreme Court’s latest decision clears the way for racial profiling during immigration raids. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/supreme-courts-decision-racial-profiling-immigration-raids/

Ballotpedia. (n.d.). Democratic Attorneys General Association. Retrieved November 10, 2025, from https://ballotpedia.org/Democratic_Attorneys_General_Association

Ballotpedia. (n.d.). Election results, 2024: State government trifectas. Retrieved November 10, 2025, from https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_State_government_trifectas

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2011). Census of state and local law enforcement agencies, 2008. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/csllea08.pdf

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2012). Federal law enforcement officers, 2008. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/federal-law-enforcement-officers-2008

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2022). Heroin, fentanyl, and other opioid offenses in federal courts, 2021. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hfooofc21.pdf

City and County of San Francisco v. Trump, No. 3:25-cv-01350 (N.D. Cal. 2025).

CNN. (2025, November 9). How federal agencies’ roles have shifted amid Trump’s immigration battle. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/09/us/ice-immigration-federal-agencies-trump

Colorado Governor’s Office. (2024, November 13). Governors launch initiative to protect American democracy. https://governorsoffice.colorado.gov/governor/news/governors-launch-initiative-protect-american-democracy

Congressional Research Service. (2025). “Sanctuary” jurisdictions: Legal overview (Report No. LSB11321). https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB11321/LSB11321.1.pdf

Congressional Research Service. (2025). Recent White House actions on immigration (Report No. LSB11265). https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11265

Cornell Legal Information Institute. (n.d.). Anti-commandeering doctrine. Constitution Annotated. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-10/anti-commandeering-doctrine

Crowell & Moring. (2024). Key changes to the state attorneys general – 2024 to 2025 transition. https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/key-changes-to-the-state-attorneys-general-2024-to-2025-transition

Department of Homeland Security. (2020, March 26). Acting Secretary Chad Wolf statement on the REAL ID enforcement deadline. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/26/acting-secretary-chad-wolf-statement-real-id-enforcement-deadline

Department of Homeland Security. (2025, January 14). REAL ID flexible enforcement period announcement.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2007). Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States, 2007. U.S. Department of Justice.

McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/17/316/

Murphy v. NCAA, 584 U.S. 453 (2018).

National Immigrant Justice Center. (2025, October 7). Federal judge extends consent decree prohibiting ICE from arresting people without warrants or probable cause. https://immigrantjustice.org/press-release/federal-judge-extends-consent-decree-prohibiting-ice-from-arresting-people-without-warrants-or-probable-cause/

New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992).

NORML. (2025, October 15). FBI: Marijuana possession arrests comprised over 20% of all drug-related arrests in 2024. https://norml.org/blog/2025/10/15/fbi-marijuana-possession-arrests-comprised-over-20-of-all-drug-related-arrests-in-2024/

Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2025, November 7). Federal judge permanently blocks Trump from deploying National Guard to Portland. https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/07/portland-oregon-national-guard-trump-politics-karin-immergut/

Orrick. (2024). The 2024 elections for state attorneys general: Initial results. https://www.orrick.com/en/Insights/2024/11/The-2024-Elections-for-State-Attorneys-General-Initial-Results

Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997).

Tenth Amendment Center. (2010, January 18). ResistDC: The federal tax funds act. https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/01/18/resistdc-the-federal-tax-funds-act/

U.S. Department of Justice. (2025, May 29). Justice Department publishes list of sanctuary jurisdictions. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-publishes-list-sanctuary-jurisdictions

Washington State Legislature. (2010). House Bill 2712: Creating the Washington state sovereignty and federal tax escrow account act of 2010. https://apps.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=2712&Year=2009&Initiative=false

The White House. (2025, January 20). Executive Order: Protecting the American people against invasion. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-american-people-against-invasion/

The White House. (2025, April 28). Executive Order 14287: Protecting American communities from criminal aliens. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/protecting-american-communities-from-criminal-aliens/

Wikipedia. (2025). Real ID Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act

Wikipedia. (2025). State legislation in protest of federal law in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_legislation_in_protest_of_federal_law_in_the_United_States

Note from the author: you can scroll to the bottom of this article to find call and email scripts for a daily activist action, as well as free downloads of Existentialist Republic activism training books, booklets, model legislation for your representatives, and prosecution memorandums for DOGE and others. You can be a force multiplier by sharing it with friends, neighbors, and activist groups.

Update from the author, August 2026: On July 9 the Wisconsin Elections Commission, three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 that there is probable cause Elon Musk violated Wisconsin Statute 12.11, the election bribery felony this article names, when he repeated the giveaway during the 2025 state Supreme Court race. The commission referred the case to Brown County District Attorney David Lasee, and his office owes the commission a report by mid-August. Two citizens and a complaint form started the process that produced a felony referral. Let’s keep getting after it.

In the closing weeks of the 2024 election, Musk spent roughly $290 million on Trump’s behalf, a figure documented in Federal Election Commission filings. About a quarter billion of that went through America PAC, the super PAC he founded in May 2024. Another $20.5 million ran through a vehicle called RBG PAC, funded by his revocable trust and structured to hide his connection until after the votes were counted. More than $50 million of the America PAC money paid for a giveaway program: a million dollars a day to one signer of an online petition, with the petition restricted to registered voters in seven swing states. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. No other states eligible. More than a million people signed. The first three winners came from Pennsylvania in the days leading up to its October 21 voter registration deadline. Musk personally announced the winners at public events, holding cardboard checks the size of a person.

He told the public, in his own words, that the selection was random.

On October 5, 2024, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk told the crowd: “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America.” Two weeks later, on October 19, at a Harrisburg town hall with Trump’s campaign, he announced the giveaway program: “We’re going to be awarding a million dollars randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election.” That same day, he posted on X to his then-200 million followers that the prize would be “randomly” awarded. The next day, October 20, he posted again that signers had “a daily chance of winning $1M!”

Random. Daily chance. Sweepstakes language. The kind of language that, if accurate, describes a lottery.

Sixteen days after Musk first used the word “randomly,” his lawyers told a Pennsylvania state court, under oath, the opposite.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had filed against Musk and America PAC on October 28, 2024, seven days before the election, in Krasner v. Musk, case number 241003509 in Philadelphia’s main trial court. The civil filing was the move available on that timeline. Criminal charges require grand jury work that cannot happen in a week. What was not available in those seven days has been available in the eighteen months since.

The hearing was on November 4, 2024, the day before the election. Judge Angelo Foglietta presided. The PAC put two witnesses on the stand. Christopher Gober, the PAC’s lawyer and former treasurer, and Christopher Young, its executive director and current treasurer.

Gober’s words on the record: “There is no prize to be won. The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance. We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”

Young testified that he personally vetted the recipients ahead of time, that the petition functioned “like a job application,” and that signers were screened for political alignment with the PAC’s mission before they could be selected. He confirmed that recipients signed nondisclosure agreements about how they were actually chosen. Asked about Musk’s use of the word “randomly,” Young conceded that it was “not the word I would have selected.” The judge denied Krasner’s preliminary injunction the same day on narrow Pennsylvania-lottery-law grounds, finding that because the recipients were preselected, the giveaway technically did not meet the legal definition of an illegal lottery.

The civil filing produced the evidentiary record any future prosecutor inherits. Gober’s admission, on the record, that the recipients of more than $50 million in payments were preselected, while Musk was simultaneously telling 200 million people the recipients were random. That record has been on Krasner’s own docket for eighteen months. The criminal investigation he announced remains open. No charges have been filed. A person without Musk’s resources who paid even a single voter twenty dollars to vote a particular way could be charged under 25 P.S. § 3539, Pennsylvania’s vote-buying statute, and would face up to seven years in prison. A person caught selling drugs on a Philadelphia street corner with less evidentiary documentation than what is on the Krasner v. Musk docket would be in the back of a squad car the same day. The asymmetry is not about the strength of the case. It is about the identity of the defendant.

That brings us to the law.

Pennsylvania’s vote-buying statute, 25 P.S. § 3539, makes it a third-degree felony to give “any gift or reward in money, goods or other valuable thing” with intent to influence a person’s vote. The statute is short, plain, and direct. The required elements are a person, gave something of value, to other persons, with intent to influence their vote for a particular candidate. Each element maps to public conduct on the record. Musk is the person. America PAC’s $50 million giveaway program, with payments restricted to registered voters in seven swing states, is the value given. The recipients, all registered voters in those states, are the persons. The intent to influence votes for Trump appears in the public statements at the Butler rally, in the geographic restriction to swing states, in the timing keyed to Pennsylvania’s registration deadline, and in Young’s sworn testimony that recipients were screened for political alignment with a PAC whose stated purpose was electing Trump. The maximum penalty is seven years. The statute of limitations runs five years from the conduct, closing in October and November of 2029.

Three other states have functionally similar statutes that the same conduct violates.

Wisconsin’s Statute 12.11 makes it a Class I felony to offer “anything of value” to induce an elector to go to the polls, vote, or refrain from voting. The Wisconsin statute is broader than Pennsylvania’s because it reaches inducement to turn out at all, not only inducement to vote a particular way. The maximum penalty is three and a half years. The statute of limitations closes in 2030.

Michigan’s MCL 168.932(a) makes it a five-year felony to attempt by bribery, menace, or other corrupt means to influence an elector. Statute of limitations closes in 2030.

Nevada’s NRS 293.700 makes it a Category D felony to bribe or use any other corrupt means to influence an elector, punishable by one to four years. Statute of limitations closes in late 2027, the earliest of the four windows by more than two years.

The conduct also implicates state and federal fraud statutes covering knowing misrepresentations made to induce action. Musk told millions of people the giveaway recipients were chosen randomly while his own lawyer admitted in court the recipients were preselected. That is the textbook structure of a fraud charge. The cleanest fraud theory under federal wire fraud law, 18 U.S.C. § 1343, is unavailable because the people who would actually file it work for the administration Musk helped elect.

The election conduct is the chargeable case. The post-election conduct is the political case. Both are connected as one scheme. Within months of the election, the administration awarded SpaceX roughly $6 billion in Pentagon launch contracts, and the Department of Justice has now acknowledged in a court filing that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency violated a federal court order by accessing Social Security Administration data. The election conduct bought the office. The post-election conduct is the office paying its debts.

That is the case. Now to the prosecutors.

The case is winnable. Not a slam dunk, but winnable. A little better chance than a coin toss of successful conviction, maybe a 60% chance Elon is convicted of a felony criminal activity, but that requires a state pursuing the charges. The odds change if every state with standing pursued criminal investigations and prosecutions. It’s probably a two year process minimum from the moment a prosecutor decides to pursue the case and most prosecutors know how much can change in two years, the financial cost, all for something that could be an expensive loss on their record. A case against a billionaire is rarely a slam dunk just because they can afford the representation that gets a case delayed or dismissed over a typo in a filing.

What Gober said on the stand is why I say it’s worth pursuing. “We know exactly who will be announced.” That admission converts the entire defense theory in one sentence. Once the jury hears the public statements about randomness next to that sworn testimony, the intent question is settled. A prosecutor can walk a jury from registered voters in seven swing states through money paid for the purpose of registering and signing to this is what the statute prohibits, in forty minutes of direct examination. The defense will eat fifteen years and ten million dollars trying to climb back out.

A prosecutor running this case in a state with a broad fraud statute would charge vote-buying and fraud in tandem. Two paths to conviction give a jury two chances to hold the defendant accountable, and the same evidence supports both theories. The Gober admission proves the misrepresentation. The geographic restriction proves the intent. The defense ends up arguing that millions of dollars paid to preselected recipients with NDAs was somehow neither vote-buying nor fraud, which is a hard sell to twelve people who got picked off a Philadelphia jury pool.

So far, everyone in a position to charge has done the same calculation and decided the personal cost is higher than the institutional reward.

That is what is broken in America. We can have clear evidence someone has committed crimes in full view of the public, stolen elections, and if they are monied and connected then a District Attorney or Attorney General will decide the case isn’t worth pursuing.

You commit a big enough crime and the government throws up its hands because justice just doesn’t fit into their budget at that point. The AGs and DAs and County Prosecutors who think this way are the enemies of justice. They are supposed to be its defenders and they are the demolition crew. They’re the guardians of those who are destroying our system. Lady justice is blindfolded for a reason, she doesn’t check her career win rate or exclusively pursue justice when the defendant is an easy target.

This is what kills a democracy. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Larry Krasner, Philadelphia District Attorney.. He is the founding spokesperson of the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach, a nine-prosecutor coalition that launched on January 28, 2026, with public commitments to prosecute federal officials who exceed lawful authority.

FAFO has filed one charge in three months. That charge is against an ICE officer in Hennepin County who had an aggressive on duty road rage incident and waved his gun around at the other car. One filing across nine prosecutors and three months is a record of talking, far more than doing. The press conferences and the “hunt you down the way they hunted Nazis” rhetoric are aggressive. The actual filings don’t reflect that.

The publicly stated reason for the gap is federal obstruction of evidence on the priority shooting cases. What “federal obstruction” actually means in the FAFO context is that prosecutors who want federal cooperation in their evidence-gathering are not getting it, and they are using that absence as a reason to wait rather than as a problem to work around. That is a choice consistent with the larger pattern: file when filing is easy, hold press conferences when filing is hard, and credit yourself with caring about accountability while the docket sits empty.

The Musk case has none of the evidentiary complications, no supremacy clause challenges, with the benefit of being entirely disconnected from the federal government’s official reach.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul charged three Trump lawyers under Wisconsin’s election-conspiracy statute in June 2024, a case that survived a motion to dismiss and was bound over for trial in December 2025. He has the demonstrated willingness and the statutory runway through 2030.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford indicted six Republican fake electors in December 2023, and the Nevada Supreme Court reinstated the case in November 2025 after an earlier dismissal. His statute of limitations on the Musk conduct closes in roughly eighteen months, the shortest window of the four states. Ford has the urgency and the demonstrated willingness.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged sixteen Republican fake electors in July 2023. A Michigan judge dismissed the cases on September 9, 2025, on insufficient-evidence-of-intent grounds. The Musk record on intent is substantially stronger than the fake-electors record because of Gober’s sworn admission.

That is the terrain. Four prosecutors. Each one a space for you and me and the rest of our readers to suss out just how deep the rot is within our justice system.

Now, we apply pressure and remind ourselves that you can’t always see the cracks in a dam forming, or know which will be the crack that breaks the dam and releases the flood of justice to wash away the excrement we call Donald Trump and his cohorts.

The legislation, non-stop escalating legal activist campaigns, free training, free books, none of those exist without this community, we need everyone and we need to grow our numbers if we want to make victory inevitable.

This work always has a maximum speed limit that is determined by the total number of activists participating and the new subscribers who fund it all. Keeping the lights on at the Existentialist Republic means 10 activists minimum join the ranks as subscribers on every single article. Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss a rent payment. If you think it’s worth it, and you can afford it, then just click the link below. Thank you for being here. - Chris

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ACTIVIST ACTION

Category: criminal prosecution of Elon Musk for vote buying.

Difficulty Rating: 1/10. One call or one email, five minutes, and it does not matter what state you live in.

The pressure goes to one office. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner brought the civil case that put the sworn testimony on the record, that record has been on his own docket for eighteen months, and the Wisconsin Elections Commission has now found probable cause of felony election bribery over the giveaway Musk ran there in 2025. The call takes twenty seconds and the office logs it whether you live in Pennsylvania or not. Calls accumulate. They are not the only thing that matters, but they are part of how pressure gets applied.

Who you are contacting: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, the prosecutor whose office holds the evidence.

What you are asking for: criminal charges against Elon Musk under 25 P.S. § 3539, Pennsylvania’s vote-buying statute.

How to reach the office: call (215) 686-8000, email justice@phila.gov, the address Krasner named in his November 2025 victory speech as the place to reach him, or mail Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, Three South Penn Square, Philadelphia, PA 19107.

If the reply is a form letter, or a response pointing at the 2024 civil case as the office’s answer, write back once and call it insufficient in your own words. We need criminal cases for criminal actions, not civil suits that are easily ignored by the ultra-wealthy.

Level two, for readers who want more: Krasner is a Democrat, and the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee is the county party in his city. Tag @PHLDems and chairman Bob Brady at @BobBradyPHL when you post about the case, or email the party at info@phldems.org, and tell them their district attorney has the evidence for criminal charges against Elon Musk and you want the party demanding he file. The party office is (215) 241-7800.

WHEN YOU CALL OR WRITE

Say who you are and where you are calling from. Name the case, Krasner v. Musk, docket 241003509. State the two facts: Musk’s own lawyer admitted under oath on November 4, 2024, that the million-dollar recipients were preselected while Musk told the public the selection was random, and Wisconsin’s elections commission found probable cause of felony election bribery this July over the giveaway he ran there. Say why you care in your own words. Close with the demand: criminally charge Elon Musk under 25 P.S. § 3539.

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