A Ruling Party That Faces No Consequences for Open Corruption Has No Reason to Accept Elections
We won't survive if we try to play by their rules.
A quick note before today’s article. Verfassungsblog, a constitutional law journal where scholars document democratic backsliding worldwide, published my article Impeaching a Judge for Federalist Society Membership on July 24. It asks whether rulings and ideology can run so counter to the Constitution a judge swore to uphold that the judge is creating an alternative constitution and implementing it through the judicial branch, circumventing the legislative branch and the checks and balances that govern amendment. At a certain point a group of people deciding to change the meaning of a document has stopped interpreting it. If that question interests you, the full article is here.
Over the last eighteen months, officials of the ruling party and the people who fund it have accepted cash bribes on camera, received pardons after making large payments to the president and his family, defied a unanimous directive from the Supreme Court, and shot and killed United States citizens.
Federal prosecutors have charged no one for any of it, and not because federal law enforcement stopped working: the administration closed or defunded the offices that would have brought those cases, the prosecutors who refused to drop them resigned in groups, and the rest of the department kept working.
The same Department of Justice that closed those cases is right now considering a criminal referral against Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted the president. Federal law enforcement is protecting one party and prosecuting its opposition, and every case below is documented by court records, congressional letters, or major news reporting.
They act this publicly because they are not scared: they are in charge, they are getting away with it, and they are confident they can avoid consequences.
And if they can break the law with impunity, elections are the only consequence they still face, which means they have every incentive to steal them, and they have the tools, and they have removed the traditional safeguards; if we play their game, their confidence will be justified.
Here is a brief primer on some of lawless behavior over the last 18 months.
FBI agents filmed the border czar accepting $50,000 in cash. The Justice Department closed the case.
The same department that declined every case above is conducting political prosecutions of the opposition: a criminal referral of Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted Trump; a grand jury investigation of Gavin Newsom and his wife; a criminal investigation of Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for allegedly impeding immigration agents.
The Minnesota prosecutors who resigned rather than close the investigation into the agent who killed Renée Good were themselves punished; Smith told an audience in May that punishing career prosecutors was “a central component” of the department’s strategy, and that “to erode the rule of law in this country you need to attack these people, and that is what we have seen since January 2025.”
Sarah Chayes, who studied kleptocracies in Afghanistan and Nigeria before studying the United States, described the result in On Corruption in America: “In the United States, serious and damaging public corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, that we deem it to be just fine.”
They are not going to police themselves.
The Fourth and Fifth Amendments did not protect Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis, and they did not protect Johan Durán Guerrero in his car in Biddeford. The First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments did not protect Alex Pretti, who carried his handgun with a lawful Minnesota permit while protesting an immigration operation.
Their rights were violated, they are dead, and the agents who killed them have not been charged.
When agents who kill face civil suits, the government argues qualified immunity, and if a state ever charges one, it argues Supremacy Clause immunity. Those doctrines are the excuse. The cases above went unpunished because prosecutors chose not to charge them, and court-made immunity lets every prosecutor present that choice as a legal requirement.
Neither doctrine appears in the Constitution. Judges created qualified immunity in 1967 and expanded it in 1982, judges extended Supremacy Clause protection past the standard the Supreme Court set in 1890, and in 2024 the Supreme Court ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official acts. Judge-made immunity now runs from the agent on the street to the president who directs him.
The Supremacy Clause has never protected a federal agent acting outside the Constitution. The clause makes federal law supreme when that law is made in pursuance of the Constitution, and the standard from the Supreme Court’s 1890 decision in In re Neagle asks whether the agent’s act was necessary and proper to executing federal law. The protection fails either way: an agent who shoots a bystander is not executing federal law, and a statute or order directing unconstitutional conduct is not law the clause makes supreme.
If a federal agent drives drunk through your town, your sheriff’s department arrests him, and nothing in the Constitution says homicide or bribery works differently. States retain the power to enforce their own criminal law inside their borders, and no federal statute or order can authorize what the Constitution forbids.
Idaho tested this once. After an FBI sniper killed Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge, the state charged him with involuntary manslaughter, and in 2001 the full Ninth Circuit ruled 6 to 5 that the prosecution could go forward, writing that a jury could find the agent violated the Constitution. A newly elected county prosecutor then dropped the case, and the court vacated the ruling as moot. The prosecution ended because of an election result, not a court ruling.
And the doctrinal record matters less than what the opposite rule means: a federal agent can steal your rights, abduct you, or kill you because he thought you were not a citizen and he was mistaken, or because you were in his way on the road, and your remedy is to wait for the next presidential election and hope the courts eventually rule against him.
You cannot have a free and fair nation if that is the standard, and it is antithetical to what this nation was founded on.
The court decisions that extended federal immunity beyond that standard will change the way court decisions change: through cases. That means bringing cases even when they are long shots, arresting people, and pushing the issue, and yes, it will be disruptive. Some will lose at first, and bringing them anyway is how appellate courts get forced to rule on the question in public; it is how Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson.
A district attorney or state attorney general who declines to charge because the defendant is a federal official is repeating that excuse, and the doctrine survives because prosecutors keep declining to test it.
To the objection that state prosecution of federal officials sets a bad precedent: we already have the bad precedent. It is decades old, it belongs to one party, and it keeps getting worse. The existing precedent is that Republican officials break the law openly and nothing happens.
Prosecuting a federal official who commits a state crime does not create a precedent; it ends one. The objection amounts to saying they are beating the shit out of me, but I don’t want to set a bad precedent by punching back. No, I don’t want to set a bad precedent by standing up for myself for once. We can't have that, can we?
The fact is, waiting for November assumes the election will operate under legal limits this party no longer observes. If an election can fix this, prosecuting now does not prevent that.
A party that commits crimes in broad daylight because it controls federal law enforcement has no reason to exempt the election from that control, and the control extends past prosecutors: the party appointed six of the nine Supreme Court justices, and when it lacks the votes in Congress it uses parliamentary rules to block action. Every federal remedy requires an institution this party controls or can stop, which means the lawlessness threatens the election rather than the election curing the lawlessness.
Consequences imposed now, under state law, by state officials, are the remaining mechanism for demonstrating to this party that legal limits still apply to it before it decides whether election results apply to it.
The founding documents address this arrangement by name. The Declaration of Independence indicts the king “for protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.” Immunity for agents who kill inhabitants appears in our founding documents once, as a grievance against the king, and this country was founded to end it.
The founders did not begin with revolution. They petitioned, they organized committees of correspondence, and they built their own assemblies, and when the king answered every lawful remedy by growing more rapacious and more cruel, the network they had built to petition became the network that took up arms, from the farmer to the printer to the lawyer. The Declaration recites the sequence itself: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms.”
At The Existentialist Republic we seek reformation: state criminal law, elected prosecutors, and the vote, used while they function. Every case filed, every prosecutor replaced, and every meeting taken builds the record and the organization, whatever comes next.
I wrote this so we can be forewarned and aware of the situation we are in. I also encourage you to frequently let your politicians know your feelings on the situation, and invite friends to do the same. You’re allowed to be angry, unprofessional, loud, and bothersome, within the confines of the law of course.
Here at The Existentialist Republic we are building capacity, whether it be successful reformation or an inevitable revolution, whatever temperature the water needs to reach for the fascist frogs to leap out of our pot, or become dinner.
If you can become a subscriber or buy us a cup of coffee, then you keep us producing model legislation, actively building our 1,000-member Discord activist community, building the case for the D.C. Court of Appeals to direct the Office of Disciplinary Counsel to open a misconduct investigation into Chief Justice John Roberts, and prepping volunteers in six states to convene criminal grand juries to investigate the Department of Government Efficiency’s misconduct. Please don’t let this be the reason you miss a meal or skip rent, but if you can subscribe or buy us some coffee, then you hand us the resources for all this work to continue!
Thanks for being here. - Chris
Buy The ER Some Coffee by Clicking Here
THE CALL TO ACTION
Category: state prosecution of federal crimes.
Difficulty Rating: 4/10. You are scheduling a meeting and having a conversation, and staff meetings are a normal part of the job you are asking them to do.
Who you are contacting: one of your two state legislators. Find them at openstates.org/find_your_legislator. Every office has a scheduler, and you can request the meeting through the contact form or the office phone number.
What you are asking for: a 15-minute meeting with the legislator’s staff, virtual if that works better for you. You do not have to be the expert in this; you are the constituent, and you are going to talk to them about you: you are upset that people are getting murdered in the street and abducted, it feels like the Constitution is being destroyed, and these people are totally above the law. From what you have been reading, states have their own laws and are allowed to prosecute people who break them, even federal agents, and you want to know where your representative stands on that.
How: request the meeting in your own words and offer a few times you are available. In the meeting, tell them what you are upset about, share this article, ask them to read it and give you their thoughts, and ask where the member stands.
If you call to schedule:
“My name is [name] and I live in [city], in the [Representative’s/Senator’s] district. I’m upset that people are being murdered and abducted by federal agents and nobody is charged, and from what I’ve been reading, states have their own laws and can prosecute even federal agents who break them. I’d like 15 minutes with a member of staff to talk about it and find out where the [Representative/Senator] stands. A virtual meeting works if that’s easier. I also have an article I’d like to share for their thoughts. What does the scheduling process look like?”
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
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
Another great article from Chris and his team at ER.
Not only should we fully expect that the entire Republican party and their billionaire handlers will do everything possible, legal or not, to corrupt the upcoming elections, but we also need to understand that part of their attempt will be spreading baseless lies about their losses being fraudulent.
They already showed us as much in recent elections in California and other statewide primaries and special elections. Therefore, every one of us, especially whatever non-controlled news media still exists, should be loudly and constantly preparing the nation for their inevitable lies NOW.
If we wait until after votes have been cast and their lies have taken hold, exactly what we've done in the past 5 elections, then we'll be on the losing defensive once again. Notice that they don't hesitate to start spreading their election lies early and proactively? Once a narrative takes hold, true or not, dislodging it becomes extremely difficult...
It takes longer for reality to set-in on others! It’s just the way there’re programmed! Just imagine a boot crushing your skull, forever!