A New Era of State Legislative Opposition Has Arrived

Four New Laws That Can Fight Fascism

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey.Getty Images

Bottom Line Up Front: We’ve released substantially expanded, more robust versions of our model legislation. Read them if you want, and share if you think more people should see it. If you want to exercise some serious influence on public policy, you can get them in front of your state representatives. Email, call, text, mail, book meetings, leave it on their car windshield, fold it into a paper airplane and toss it to their staff; all great options.

Look up your representatives at openstates.org, then talk their ear off and advocate for the policies that can change everything.

The four bills are the Fiscal Sovereignty and Election Protection Act, the Bribe Is a Bribe Act, the Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act, and the Corporate Welfare Accountability Act. If you want to see the 125-page academic working paper behind these laws, you can read Oppositional Federalism on SSRN.

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Over the last year, I’ve been traveling across the U.S., meeting with County Democrat groups, State Democrat chairs, dozens of city- and state-level representatives, activists, Indivisible chapters, Veterans for Peace chapters, and a patchwork of other organizations. People are ready for change, actively growing more capable, and showing up for democracy. After a year on that road, from Florida to Washington State, I believe we can get through this and build a better future. Not just better. An incredible future. We can build an America where healthcare and housing are a human right, where no foreign nation or corporation or oligarch can purchase our politicians, where even a president or a trillionaire can be held accountable under the law, where people have more rights than corporations, a nation where our tax dollars are spent saving lives rather than taking them.

It won’t be easy, but nothing worth having comes without intention and commitment.

There is beauty in that work.

Here at The Existentialist Republic, we aim for clarity. We are not selling optimism, and we are not surrendering to defeat. We look at this moment in history plainly, and we build the strategies and tactics that will be of most use.

You’re here for it, I’m here for it, our staff and volunteers are here for it, our nearly 60,000 subscribers are here for it, and millions more readers and activists and elected officials are here for it. We are here together, united in a resolve to leave this world better than we found it.

Part of this mission is sharing legislation that can equip cities and states with the tools to improve the lives of their residents and fight back against the ugly fascist tide.

What follows is the latest version of four model bills we have been developing and strengthening over the past year. Each one is written for any state legislature, and each is built on existing case law and existing statutes. The summaries below name the precedents, so you can see the floor under every claim. The bills are designed to work against an authoritarian federal government. If you agree these should be brought to a vote in all 50 state legislatures, follow the instructions at the end to send them to your representatives, and share this with others so they can do the same.

The boldest of the four is the Fiscal Sovereignty and Election Protection Act. It is built for the worst case. What do you do if they steal the election and the courts let them? The bill hands a state control over something the federal government cannot ignore. The tax money. If the federal government subverts an election, every employer in the state stops forwarding federal payroll taxes to the federal government and deposits them into a state escrow account instead. The money sits in trust and returns to the federal government in full the moment constitutional government resumes.

The legal foundation under the bill is older than most people would guess. The federal government cannot conscript a state’s officials or its administrative machinery into carrying out federal law. The Supreme Court has affirmed that principle across three decades, in New York v. United States (1992), Printz v. United States (1997), and Murphy v. NCAA (2018). The state withholds its own cooperation from a government that has broken the thing that made its authority legitimate. It does not nullify a single federal tax. The Constitution is a compact. Federal authority comes from legitimate elections. When a federal government subverts those elections, it breaks the compact, and the state is no longer bound to fund it.

That compact theory is not a new or partisan invention. When Republicans in Washington State drafted their own tax escrow bill in 2010, they wrote that the Constitution is a compact between the people of the sovereign states, creating a federal government as their agent and endowing it with only enumerated powers. The cleanest precedent is that bill, Washington State House Bill 2712 of 2010, the “Washington State Sovereignty and Federal Tax Escrow Account Act,” which proposed the same core mechanism this bill lays out: employers redirect collected federal taxes into a state escrow account, a panel reviews federal spending, and the state releases only what it deems constitutional. It was sponsored entirely by Republicans during Democratic control of the legislature and the Obama administration, and it died in committee. That single fact disarms the “fringe blue-state fantasy” dismissal, because the same idea came from the right first.

There is also a live 2025 wave of similar legislation. Democratic legislators in Maryland, New York, Connecticut, and Wisconsin introduced bills in 2025 to withhold federal payments, including federal taxes collected from state employees’ paychecks, when federal agencies defy court orders or unlawfully claw back appropriated funds, as NBC News reported in June 2025. New York’s version is the RECOURSE Act, sponsored by state Sen. Jessica Ramos and Assembly Member Micah Lasher, as City & State New York reported in October 2025.

This bill goes further than any version on the record, and the reach is the most legally exposed part. The 2025 bills, and the 2010 Washington State bill, reach only the federal taxes a state already collects and remits, money that passes through the state’s hands. This bill reaches all employer withholdings statewide, which is far bigger and far more legally exposed, because that money never touches the state. New York’s sponsors admitted they cannot impound the hundreds of billions that flow directly to the IRS for exactly that reason. No bill on the record, left or right, has gone this far. This one does it on purpose.

Still, the bill is a peaceful response to an emergency. The federal government has the Insurrection Act, which lets a president put soldiers on American streets. Set against that, a state holding tax revenue in trust until lawful government resumes is the measured, reversible answer. Every employer who complies is indemnified and legally defended by the state, so no business carries the risk alone. You can read the Fiscal Sovereignty and Election Protection Act in full.

The Bribe Is a Bribe Act goes after the people the federal system has stopped touching. It gives a state’s attorney general authority to prosecute any public official whose corruption harms the state’s residents, from a city councilmember to a Supreme Court justice to an FBI director. No federal office sits above a state charge.

The bill rests on two settled rules. The first is dual sovereignty. A state and the federal government are separate sovereigns, so a state may charge conduct that also violates federal law, and a presidential pardon reaches only federal offenses. A pardon cannot touch a state charge. The Supreme Court affirmed this in Gamble v. United States (2019). The second is the limit on federal officer immunity. A federal officer is protected only for conduct that was necessary and proper to a lawful federal duty, and a crime is never a duty. Taking a bribe is not necessary and proper to any office, so no federal officer can claim immunity for it. The Supreme Court drew that line in In re Neagle (1890).

The bill also closes the loopholes federal courts have spent a decade creating. It defines bribery and corruption the way normal people already understand it. The Supreme Court narrowed the federal definition twice. In McDonnell v. United States (2016), it held that setting up meetings and making introductions do not count as the kind of official act bribery law reaches. In Snyder v. United States (2024), it held that the main federal bribery statute does not reach gratuities, the rewards handed over after the favor is done. This bill writes both back in.

There is a fight the bill plans for. A federal officer charged in state court will try to move the case to federal court and argue the act was part of the job. The bill directs the attorney general to oppose that move and to seek return to state court, and it states that the conduct it covers can never be a federal duty. That argument defeats the immunity defense once the forum is settled. If the attorney general declines to act, residents can bring the case themselves. Corruption that now escapes on a technicality becomes prosecutable, with no pardon and no immunity left to hide behind. You can read the Bribe Is a Bribe Act in full.

The federal government released millions of pages on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and charged no one new. The Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act lets a state do what the federal government will not. It gives a state’s attorney general full authority to investigate and prosecute the trafficking and sexual abuse documented in the Epstein files, when the conduct happened on the state’s soil or harmed its residents. Because these would be state charges, no presidential pardon can reach them.

The numbers are the reason the bill exists. On January 30, 2026, the Justice Department completed its release under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, putting out more than 3 million pages, more than 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images, which brought the total to nearly 3.5 million pages, according to its own release statement. The same Department acknowledged holding more than 6 million potentially responsive pages, so it released about half. It brought no charges. Other governments moved faster. After the release, at least nine criminal investigations opened across eight countries, including Turkey, Lithuania, and Latvia, as NBC News and Reuters reported, and Norway charged its former prime minister with aggravated corruption. Inside the United States, New Mexico reopened its state investigation into activity at Epstein’s ranch, a case it had closed in 2019 at the request of federal prosecutors. The authority is real, and other prosecutors are already using it.

The legal foundation is the same dual-sovereignty rule behind the Bribe Is a Bribe Act. A state and the federal government are separate sovereigns. A state may prosecute conduct that also violates federal law, and a presidential pardon reaches only federal offenses, so it cannot touch a state charge. The bill gives the attorney general the tools prosecutors use against organized crime. It grants investigative subpoenas that compel documents and testimony without waiting for federal permission. It allows grand juries. It grants use immunity, which compels a witness who would otherwise stay silent to testify, while barring the state from using that compelled testimony against the witness. The Supreme Court set the rules for use immunity in Kastigar v. United States (1972), and New York has used this kind of investigative subpoena power for more than a century under its Martin Act.

A state that takes up this authority can investigate the people named in those files, compel the testimony the federal government never sought, and bring charges no pardon can erase. The bill funds a Survivors’ Compensation Fund from the fines and forfeitures it collects, not from taxpayer money, so the people who profited from these crimes pay for the harm they caused. The survivors have waited decades. The bill gives a state the power to act when the federal government will not. You can read the Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act in full.

The Corporate Welfare Accountability Act draws a simple line. A corporation cannot take public money with one hand and write political checks with the other. If a corporation uses its treasury funds to make political contributions, to candidates, parties, committees, or the outside groups that spend on elections, it no longer qualifies for state tax breaks, subsidies, grants, or government contracts. The condition reaches corporate treasury contributions. Personal donations stay fully protected.

The principle is old and the courts have upheld it. Federal law has barred government contractors from making political contributions since 1940, and in Wagner v. Federal Election Commission (2015), the full D.C. Circuit upheld that ban, finding it serves the government’s interest in preventing corruption and protecting merit-based decisions. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in 2016. Several states run their own versions, conditioning public contracts on contribution limits, with strict ones in New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut, and federal courts have upheld these conditions where a record of corruption supports them.

The logic is one a taxpayer feels without needing a lawyer to explain it. If a company can afford to fund campaigns, it can afford to operate without taxpayer help. Public money is meant to serve the public, not to subsidize a corporation that turns around and spends on the politicians who award it.

The bill handles a corporation’s independent political spending through disclosure instead of a ban. A state cannot bar that spending, which the Supreme Court held in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), so the bill does not try. It requires any company that takes a covered benefit to disclose all of its political spending, independent expenditures included, in a public registry, posted beside the public money the company receives. The company keeps its right to spend. The public gets to see the spending sitting next to the subsidy. Courts uphold disclosure where they would strike a ban, so the provision reaches the spending without drawing the lawsuit a ban would invite. The bill also carries criminal penalties for a willful violation, and it requires a company to name its parents, subsidiaries, and controlling owners, so the contribution condition cannot be dodged through a shell. You can read the Corporate Welfare Accountability Act in full.

These bills have already been shared, in full, with more than 150 state representatives, and there is legitimate enthusiasm around them. Some of you have read earlier versions. The updated and strengthened versions are linked in each section above. For those of you already familiar with this work, and for anyone reading them for the first time, we want to hear what you think in the comment section.

Consider this. Most people never do what you just did. You sat down and read a set of proposed laws, and now you can advocate for their passage.

There are roughly 3,224 Democratic state legislators in the United States. Picture it. How different would America be if all 50 states introduced these four bills in their next legislative session? How different would it be if 10 of those states then passed all four? A few minutes of your time can push things in that direction. When you share these bills and ask people what they think, you show others how easy it is to move public policy. You can invite them to do the same.

Of course, you might not be ready for all of that, and that is alright. If you simply share this with someone, or with a group, and ask what they think of these laws, you have educated people and started a real conversation about public policy that matters. Will that alone save the world? No. But it is part of the butterfly effect.

Each bill is written with placeholders, so any state can adopt it with minimal changes.

Sending these bills to your statehouse takes a few minutes. Find your state representatives at openstates.org, then send them this piece or the bills directly. The full text of each bill is linked at the end of its section above. If you want help with your outreach, or advice from the Existentialist Republic community, leave a comment on this post and we will work with you.

These bills draw on my work in constitutional federalism. In my academic work Oppositional Federalism, I set out a five-posture taxonomy of how states confront an authoritarian federal government, and I develop oppositional federalism and soft secession as two of those postures, with the doctrine and the precedent behind each. This nation was founded on stopping tyranny rather than bending the knee to disgusting tyrants. Let’s revive that tradition.

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The American Reformation: How states can use the U.S. Constitution to break authoritarian capture — physical copy / free download

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