Corruption at the Top in France and Illinois

An important implication of the saying, a fish rots from the head down, is that it is important that corrupt heads be swiftly punished so underlings get the message that crime in public office carries considerable risk. In the matter of Ukraine’s possible accession (not merger!) into the E.U. as a new state, the old, deeply entrenched, culture of corruption in the potential state has been of particular concern in the E.U.’s executive branch, the European Commission. In both the E.U. and U.S., it’s worth asking whether some states are more corrupt than others. It is a mistake to treat all states alike in terms of where to direct federal resources and how much of a given state’s resources should be devoted to investigations of state officials. At least in 2025, Illinois and France could be said to have been “problem children” in this regard, and this doesn’t mean that Hawaii and Sweden, for example, also had as sordid corrupt cultures.

In September 2025, a state court in Paris “found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy in connection with the alleged Libyan financing of his victorious 2007 presidential campaign . . . and sentenced him to five years in prison.”[1] A day before going to prison in mid-October, Sarkozy said he would be taking a biography of Jesus and The Count of Monte Christo with him to prison, so it seems that he was continuing with his innocent-victim role in spite of the conviction and sentencing. Short of any contrition or even public recognition by Sarkozy of his own corruption, it fell on Hollande of the Socialist group to praise “the independence of the judiciary,” especially given that the incumbent, Macron, spent an hour with the convicted ex-president on the day before the Sarkozy, of the same political group, was to show up at a prison.[2] In a corrupt culture, it is natural to worry about whether judges might be persuaded that it is in their interests to reduce or rescind the sentence of a powerful political figure.

Admittedly, in notoriously corrupt Illinois, by 2025 four former heads of state had spent substantial time in prison. Otto Kerner, for example, was convicted in 1973 on 17 counts of mail fraud, conspiracy, perjury, and other charges related to a bribery scheme and was sentenced to three years. Dan Walker was convicted in 1987 of bank fraud and perjury related to fraudulent loans that he had obtained after leaving the high office. George Ryan was convicted in 2006 on fraud and racketeering charges related to bribes; he served five and a half years. Last but hardly least, Rod Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office in 2009, and convicted in 2011 on 18 counts of corruption. Whereas the president of the E.U. cannot pardon state officials, the president of the U.S. can, and U.S. President Trump pardoned “Blago’s” sentence in 2020 after the former head of Illinois had served eight years; the former head of France could only hope in vain for a pardon from E.U. President Von der Leyen, but corruption at the state level could end up appreciably shortening Sarkozy’s sentence, and the meeting with Macron could be a sign that their shared political group might work behind the scenes to free the convicted former leader.

Once begun and allowed to spread throughout a state, whether Illinois or France, political corruption involving money is much more difficult than a fire to put out. Companies such as Enron, Wells Fargo Bank, Arthur Andersen, and even Uber came to be known for their deeply dysfunctional organizational cultures. This does not mean that manager-groups at every or even most companies are that unethical.

It is fortunate that not every company is corrupt mentally, for changing an entrenched sordid organizational culture is very difficult at best, with plenty of strategic firings being just one part of the cure. A so-called “coach” hired by Starbucks, for example, to change the attitudes of the executives towards the employees (especially those who try to unionize) would have a full plate. Such a “coach” would find it very frustrating to “drive” talking-points; the obscenely stretched use of jargon wouldn’t get the consultant very far up against the entrenched acerbic attitudes that had come to dominate the organizational culture. Let’s just say the Pike’s Peak blend of coffee was hardly the only thing that was known for being bitter at Starbucks by 2025.

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1. Euronews, “Sarkozy Received by Macron at Elysée Palace before Five-Year Prison Term States on Tuesday,” Euronews.com, 20 October, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Statehood for Canada: Hardly a Merger

The U.S. Constitution includes an open invitation for the accession of Canada into the U.S. as a state. The invitation was made before Canada spread across from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. So, were Canadians to seek statehood in the American union of states (i.e., the U.S.A.), they would have a good argument for Canada being split in to a few states rather than just one. This is qualitatively different than a “merger” between the two countries; the latter ideological conjecture is predicated on a category mistake. Such a mistake would say, for example, that Singapore and China are of the same genus politically even though the former is a city-state and the latter is on the (early modern) empire-scale. Just because both Singapore and China have foreign policies and are member-countries of the UN does not mean that a city-state is to be treated more generally as if it were the same as an empire. By “empire,” I am referring to China itself, rather than any territories it might have beyond mainland China. The Qing emperor Kangzi expanded mainland China to include some central Asian kingdoms, thus making China an empire (of kingdom-level/scale subunits). Similarly, the U.S., as well as the E.U., are empire-scale/level polities of (kingdom-level) polities, whereas Canada does not have enough such polities to qualify as being on the empire-scale, for an empire contains many kingdom-level polities.

When the U.S. federal constitution was written, Canada consisted of Lower Canada, which was French-speaking, and Upper Canada, which is present-day Ontario. There were also maritime colonies to the east. It makes sense, as Ontario hardly stretches across the continent to present-day British Columbia, that the American delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 would naturally view both Upper and Lower “Canada” together as being equivalent to an American republic being represented at the convention, both in terms of population and extent of territory. However, that Upper and Lower Canada were so culturally different, with different languages being predominant in each, had I been at the convention, I would have urged the other delegates to offer statehood as two states rather than just one. Different states having different languages is of course well-known in the E.U., and even in the U.S., German was just narrowly—by one vote—voted down as the official language of Wisconsin by its legislature. Even today, “brats and beer” have a cultural meaning in Wisconsin (e.g., grilled on the lakeside terrace just outside the Rathskeller bar at the University of Wisconsin) that simply does not exist in Illinois, even just miles from the northern border. Imagine if German were the official language of Wisconsin; the cultural differences between the two American republics would be even greater; but I digress.

When U.S. President Trump broached the idea that Canada could join the U.S. as the 51^st state, some government officials at the state level in the E.U. displayed their abject ignorance of what the U.S. was and is by correcting Trump by insisting that Canada joining the U.S. would actually be a “merger” of two sovereign countries. Actually, each of the states in the U.S., as well as those in the E.U., are semi-sovereign and hold residual sovereignty (whereas the U.S. and E.U. have only delegated, enumerated powers/competencies). Neither Texas nor France is a sovereign country anymore, for both have agreed to delegate some governmental sovereignty to the federal system represented by federal governmental institutions. So the presumptuous, dismissive tone used was actually like primped arrogance on stilts during a flood, and in a Nietzschean sense be viewed as a manifestation of the will to power from resentment rather than as a factual statement.

So, when the prime minister of Canada visited the White House in October 2025, Euronews lied that the “US president even made a joking reference to a ‘merger’ between the two countries.”[1] He would not have used the “merger” to refer to Canada becoming a state. The European journalist was writing as an act of power to reduce the US as if it were equivalent to an E.U. state. Canada is not a united states; neither is Mexico. When an official from the British consulate of Chicago spoke at the University of Wisconsin in the 2000s, before Britain had seceded from being an E.U. state, I asked him about how the possible accession (not merger!) of Turkey would affect the European Union. He replied that it would be like Mexico becoming the 51^st state. He was implicitly rejecting the view that Mexico would merge with the U.S., even though Mexico had incorrectly adopted the nomenclature, “The United States of Mexico.” France or Belgium or Germany could call itself a united states, but those republics are nonetheless states in the E.U., which is equivalent, as an empire-scale union of states, to the U.S.

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1. Malek Fouda, “Trump Says There Is ‘Natural Conflict’ with Canada as He Hosts PM Mark Carney at the Oval Office,” Euronews.com, October 8, 2025.

A Drone Wall for the E.U.: Russian Aggression Assuages Euroskeptic States

Speaking after his meeting with U.S. President Trump in Alaska during the summer of 2025, Russia’s President Putin said that if no agreement is reached with Ukraine, the force of arms would decide the matter. In other words, might makes right, or at least military incursion is a legitimate way to decide political disputes between countries. I would have hoped that such a primitive mentality would be antiquated in the twentieth century, but, alas, human nature evolves only at a glacial pace undetected within the lifespan of a human being. In September, 2025, the United Nations was under attack from within the General Assembly because of the continuance of the veto held by five countries in the Security Council; the U.S. had just vetoed a resolution for an immediate cession of Israeli destruction in Gaza. As a former deputy secretary of the UN had admitted to me during the fall of 2024, the veto itself renders the UN unreformable; a new international organization would have to be established sans vetoes for efficacy to be possible. Even so, absent a real enforcement mechanism, such as a military force, a resolution even of a vetoless organization would merely be parchment. The impotence of the UN is one reason why NATO, a defensive military transatlantic alliance, has been valuable in the face of military threats by Russia. Yet in September 2025, after Russian drones had flown into four E.U. states, E.U. President Von der Leyen felt the need to take the lead by again stressing her proposal for a drone wall along the E.U.’s eastern border; she was not deferring to any international alliance, much less to the United Nations. I submit that Von der Leyen’s initiative is yet another means by which the E.U. can be distinguished from international “blocs,” alliances, and organizations. Unlike the latter three, the E.U. has exclusive competencies and is thus semi-sovereign (and the same goes for the state governments).

The full essay is at "A Drone Wall for the E.U."

The E.U.’s Proposed Sanctions Against Israel: Excessive Reliance on the State Governments

To leverage the combined power, or united front, that is possible in Europe, the European Union was established in the waning years of the twentieth century. Roughly thirty years later, the power of the state governments at the federal level still compromised the leverage, especially in foreign affairs and defense. Even in sanctioning trading partners, even qualified majority voting in the Council of the E.U. can be said to have negatively impacted the ability of the E.U. Commission, the executive branch, to leverage the political muscle of the E.U. against other countries. State-level political agendas could essentially hold any possible leverage hostage. It may be worth thinking about why a qualified majority vote in the Council of the E.U., which represents the state governments, rather than in the E.U.’s parliament, which represents E.U. citizens, was necessary for trade sanctions to be applied to duty-free imports from Israel. That state-level political or economic interests could possibility trump applying economic leverage to stop Israel’s genocide and holocaust in Gaza, as well as Israel’s military attacks on other countries in the Middle East can be an indication that the state governments have too much power at the federal level. For if the E.U. is only an aggregation of states, without the whole being more than the sum of the parts, then the whole sans the aggregate cannot very well enact leverage on foreign actors abroad, even those whose behavior has been nothing short of atrocious.

On September 17, 2025, the European Commission released its proposal to sanction Israel “for its ongoing military assault in Gaza, as well as deepening occupation of the West Bank, which Brussels says breach the EU-Israel Association Agreement.”[1] Regarding that treaty, I contend that the E.U.’s state governments should not have any say on the consequences for Israel because the treaty is between the E.U. and Israel. As trade is an exclusive competency of the E.U., only federal institutions, which include the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Court of Justice, rightly have sufficient jurisdiction (i.e., competence) to terminate the Agreement due to the violation or sanction Israel economically (as the Agreement is economic in nature).

Moreover, developing the habit of distinguishing distinctly federal governmental (i.e., executive, legislative, and judicial) institutions from other E.U. bodies that represent the states would not be a bad idea for the European political elite, many of whom have been in fear of even using the term federal because of what that might provoke in Euroskeptic states such as Hungary. That fear, I submit, is likely overblown, and it subtly undercuts the E.U. itself, especially in it being a whole beyond a mere aggregation of states.

The E.U. Commission, subject to judicial review by the ECJ, determined that Israel had violated the Agreement. The decision to act against Israel was based on “’the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza following the military intervention of Israel, the blockade of humanitarian aid, the intensifying of military operations,’ including the ongoing ground offensive, according to the European Commission.”[2] Such a credible finding against Israel does not justify state governments intervening through their access at the federal level through the European Council or the Council of the E.U. on suspicion that the E.U. president and her commissioners were acting out of prejudice against Israel. This in turn is clear from the fact that the proposed sanctions also apply to ten members of Hamas, in addition to two Israeli ministers, Security Minister Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich “for their role inciting violence in the West Bank.”[3] The Agreement, of course, only holds for Israel, rather than Hamas, so that the proposed sanctions extend to Hamas demonstrates that the Commission was “bending over backwards” to be fair in such a one-sided war that it is not really a war, but, rather, a genocide and even a holocaust of cruelty wherein death is not deemed as “punishment” enough according to the utterly fallacious theory of collective justice. 

E.U. President Von der Leyen said the week before the announcement of the proposed sanctions, “The horrific events taking place in Gaza on a daily basis must stop. There needs to be an immediate ceasefire, unrestrained access for all humanitarian aid, and the release of all hostages held by Hamas.”[4] She continued, “We propose to suspend trade concessions with Israel, sanction extremist ministers and violent settlers, and put bilateral support to Israel on hold . . .”[5] I submit that it would be difficult for the justices at the ECJ to find bias in her rationale or remedy, or, moreover, with her legitimacy in taking such a decision for the E.U. as a united front even though some state governments were at odds with her decision. 

The whole is more than the sum of the parts, and yet only if one of the two largest states in opposition vote in favor of the sanctions would they pass. The E.U.’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, was pessimistic, noting at the time, “The political lines are very much in the place where they have been so far.”[6] But that is at the state level; things might have already changed in the European Parliament, whose representatives not only represent European voters, but also have the interests of the E.U. itself, including its treaties with other countries, in mind. 

That the bias woven into the federal-level fabric of the E.U. in favor of the state governments over E.U. citizens could inhibit the E.U. from taking even an economic stand against a genocidal government indicates that the state governments have too much power at the federal—and it is federal—level of the European Union, such that reform in the Union’s basic or constitutional law is warranted. If such is the case, care should be taken so too much power be taken away from the state governments such that they could not even defend their retained sovereignty from undue encroachment by the feds. Americans could afford to take a lesson on that, for a one-size-fits-all public policy becoming monopolistic at the expense of differences between states, whether American or European, does not bode well in any empire-scale union.  

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1. Shona Murray, “EU Moves to Sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank Humanitarian Crisis,” Euronews.com, September 17, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Belgium Eclipses the E.U. on Frozen Russian Assets

Even though the U.S. has compromised the health of its federal system by consolidating so much governmental sovereignty with the Union at the expense of the reserved and residual sovereignty of the states, pitfalls exist at the other extreme too. In the E.U., as long as the states can exercise their sovereignty in foreign policy without respect to the Union, the risk exists that any one state could put its distinct political and economic interests first even if that forestalls united action that the EU could muster on the world’s stage. The risk is aggravated when government officials of a state presume to speak for the entire Union as if they were federal officials. That undercuts the point of having a union of states. The adage, Either we all sail together or we are done for, seems not well known in the state capitals, and even in the European Council and the Council of the European Union.

In early September, 2025, days after E.U. President von der Leyen publicly reopened the matter of using Russian financial assets frozen in the E.U. to pay for Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction, Maxime Prévot, a government official in the state of Belgium told the media that “confiscating those Russian sovereign assets is really not an option for Belgium.”[1] Most of the €200 billions of frozen Russian funds was “held in the Euroclear depository which is subject to EU financial markets regulation.”[2] So even though “Prévot said breaching the rules even in the case of an existential war would leave Belgium and the EU exposed” as risky places for countries to deposit funds, it was the E.U. rather than Belgium to decide on whether to change the financial regulations.[3] It was for the E.U. rather than for a self-interested state such as Belgium to weigh whether making an exception would in Prévot’s words, “create huge bad impact, systemic consequences for the credibility of the European financial services.”[4] At the time, Belgium was not in charge of the European financial services. Even as Belgian officials sought to protect banks in Belgium, the E.U. was in a better position to weigh the risks to future deposits of sovereign wealth funds by other countries against the geostrategic risks should Russia take over Ukraine, and perhaps then look to some eastern E.U. states to invade next. Protecting Belgian banks should not outweigh the strategic interests of the E.U. in pushing back Russia’s President Putin from helping himself to Eastern Europe.

This is essentially an argument that more governmental sovereignty in foreign policy should be delegated to the E.U. from its states, and that state economic interests should not be allowed to forestall such policy. Putting the interests of a part above those of the whole is usually self-defeating, for the dominance of a part can come at the expense of the good of the whole when a united front is needed. Prévot could certainly express his view, but he could not speak for, much less direct, the regulation of the European financial services sector. Moreover, geopolitical interests in international relations and foreign policy do not reduce to what is best for financial regulation.

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1. Shona Murray, “Belgium Will Not Transfer Frozen Russian Assets Despite Commission’s Plans—FM Prévot,” Euronews.com, 5 September, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

The E.U.’s Hungary Overreaching on Sovereignty: International Trade

Sovereignty is not a word to be casually used, especially if in overreaching. In both the E.U. and U.S., state governments have overreached at the expense of the delegated competencies or enumerated powers of the respective Unions of states. The Nullification Crisis in the U.S. and de facto unilateral refusal of the E.U. state of Hungary to observe E.U. law both demonstrate how the overreaching by state governments can compromise a federal system.[1] In the E.U. the refusal to do away with the principle of unanimity in the European Council and the Council of the E.U. enable and even invite such overreaches at the expense of the E.U. itself, and its distinctly federal officials. Even a state government’s pursuit of it’s state’s economic interests does not justify holding the E.U. hostage. The case of supporting Ukraine in the midst of the invasion by Russia is a case in point.

The full essay is at "The E.U.'s Hungary Overreaching on Sovereignty."

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1, In 1832-1833, the government of South Carolina held that the U.S. tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were null and void within the state. “The resolution of the Nullification Crisis in favor of the federal government helped to undermine the nullification doctrine,” which holds that states have the right “to nullify federal acts within their boundaries.” Britannica.com (accessed August 25, 2025). I submit that the European Court of Justice could do worse than declare the same with regard to state laws, including the refusal of a governor or state legislature to implement federal directives, that are in violation of E.U. law and regulations. Monetary sanctions by the European Commission have not been a sufficient deterrent. If either de facto or de jure nullification becomes the norm, then it would only be a matter of time before the Union dissolves and the states could once again take up arms against each other.

The E.U. on Ukraine: On the Human, All Too Human

On August 17, 2025, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the E.U., as a precursor to both of them meeting with Don Trump, president of the U.S. on ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. President Von der Leyen had decided to accompany Zelensky to Washington in part to potentially play interference should the U.S. president again publicly berate Zelensky to his face and in part to protect Zelensky should Trump’s position/pressure be too pro-Russia (i.e., pro-Putin). To virtually all Europeans and to many Americans, Trump’s verbal outburst at Zelensky in the Oval Office had been shocking, especially as it seemed to be pre-meditated and orchestrated. Taking emotional advantage of the head of a state being invaded by the empire-scale Russia can assuredly be reckoned as being a bad host, and even low class for the president of the empire-scale United States. International relations do indeed contain a very human element, and in fact leaving it out of an analysis of an international situation is nothing short of negligent.

The full essay is at "The E.U. on Ukraine."

Trump Meets Putin on Ukraine: On the Exclusion of the E.U.

Like proud male birds dancing for a female for the chance to reproduce, U.S. President Trump and Ukraine’s Zelensky engaged in public posturing ahead of the negotiations set to take place between Trump and Vlad the Impaler Putin of Russia in Alaska on August 15, 2025. For the public, to take the postures as real positions, set in stone, would be nothing short of depraved naivete. Missing in action in all this posturing was E.U. President Van der Leyen and the E.U.’s foreign minister. Instead, the governors of two, albeit large, E.U. states were busy making demands as if their respective political bases were more powerful than the E.U. as a whole. In short, Van der Leyen missed an opportunity to join the dance of posturing.

The full essay is at "Trump Meets Putin on Ukraine." 

Wealth and Ethics in American Fiscal Policy

In a struggle between wealth and ethics, practically speaking the former tends overwhelmingly to win hands down, even if the form of government is at least nominally a representative democracy, but in fact an oligarchy or plutocracy. The influence of the moneyed interest both in the E.U. and U.S. is likely much stronger than most of the respective citizenries know. When the poorest of the poor are to be made worse off financially by cuts in certain government programs while defense contractor companies stand to get more, which tends to mean higher bonuses for executives (and campaign contributions for elected representatives), the skew toward the gilded and away from the most vulnerable economically can be viewed as an x-ray of sorts indicative of rule by wealth rather than by the People. U.S. President Trump’s fiscal budget enacted in 2025 is a case in point by which the questionable morality of the plutocracy or oligopoly form of government can be gleaned.

Plato laid out the following as alternative forms of government, from the best to the worst:

1.       The Ideal State (kallipolis): everyone is doing their respective jobs well; philosophers with knowledge of the good are in charge of making decisions pertaining to public policy.

2.       Timocracy: (e.g., Sparta): people who love honor, social status, and competition are in control. In other words, a military. 

3.       Oligarchy: producers (or suppliers) of goods and services (i.e., business executives and or companies) are in control. That is business runs the government.

4.       Democracy: the “mob” is in control. Direct democracy. Such “mob rule” is volatile, with enacted policies swinging back and forth. This does not include representative democracy, which is better, but not as good as having a philosopher king rule because reason should control the passions in a mind and a city.

5.       Tyranny: a tyrant is in control. This is the worst form of government, for obvious reasons, as an autocrat faces no worldly constraint in unleashing suffering and death on a population. In 2023 through at least 2025, the Israeli government was a tyranny in Gaza.

The three highest Hindu castes fit the three highest Platonic forms of government, with Brahmins, who are ideally priests (or philosophers), soldiers/generals, and merchants in descending order in Hindu society. The “mob” in Plato’s scheme corresponds to the laborers in the caste system. That business managers (including CEOs) running (and thus controlling) government are higher than direct democracy may sound strange to modern ears in the West, even in the E.U., in which Greece is a state unless the difference between well-paid modern elected representatives and a mob of mostly uneducated (i.e., unprofessional) laborers in ancient Athens is grasped. Even in modern representative democracies, complete with terms of office to buffer the momentary passions of the people—passions that can contradict a people’s long-term best interests (i.e., the public good)—corporate interests likely view themselves as superior and thus legitimately at the helm in what is known as a plutocracy, or rule by wealth. The moneyed interests could cite Plato’s hierarchy of government-types without bothering to point out that Plato had mob-rule rather than the U.S. Senate in mind as democracy. We need not pit the reasoning, albeit skewed by self-interest, of CEOs on public policy against what a disorganized mob might come up with as the public good (over partial interests), but we might want to consider whether corporations and individual CEOs should have so much monetary sway with elected representatives and their appointees that a representative democracy is de facto a plutocracy serving the relatively narrow interests of capital. The pecuniary interests of American defense-contractor companies in manufacturing and selling weapons, planes, and tanks to the U.S. Government for use in Israel as it pummeled 2 million residents of Gaza in 2024 and 2025 were not necessarily in the best interests of the United States, which might have been more accurately represented and instituted by the American electorates than business political-action-committees helping representatives get re-elected. Not that any member of Congress cares about that, of course.

Or take the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the Republican lawmakers in both chambers of Congress and signed by President Trump in 2025. The projected economic impacts on the different economic tiers of Americans supports Adam Smith’s fear that company managements and government officials would work together at the expense of workers and even competitive markets themselves. On August 11, 2025, the Congressional Budget Office made public its estimates “that the 10% poorest Americans will lose roughly $1,200 a year as they experience restrictions on government programs like Medicaid and food assistance, while the richest 10% of Americans will see their income increase by $13, 600 from tax cuts. Overall , American households will see more income from the tax cuts in the legislation, including middle income households, but the largest benefit will go to the top 10% of earners.”[1] Such a distributional impact could be expected in a plutocracy, even in the form of a hijacked representative democracy. Very poor disabled Americans living on Social Security (SSI) of less than $1,000 a month already faced reductions if they negotiate a good deal on rent, or a friend or relative helps out with utilities or rent. That the U.S. Defense Department budget was increased, with corporate defense contractors set to reap additional profits as a result, illustrates the questionable ethics in taking from the poorest of the poor, who cannot work, and giving more to wealthy corporations (with higher bonuses, everything else equal, going to executives). Additionally, just for added fun, roughly “2.4 million people won’t be eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [i.e., food stamps] under new work requirements” for poor Americans who have not been declared disabled by the Social Security Administration.[2] Food has thusly been declared not to be an unconditional human right. As the work requirement applied to Medicaid, the government program that funds healthcare for the very poor, access to medical services—and thus good health—was also declared to not qualify as an unconditional human right.

In short, the American social contract between the federal government and its people was changed in ways that stood to make many of the poorest Americans poorer while defense contractors could make even more money from that government. The new social contract reflected a plutocracy or oligarchy in the guise of a representative democracy. Although arguably superior to mob rule, such a trajectory for representative democracy may trouble a good many people, financially or otherwise perhaps in conscience. A person need only read John Rawl’s Theory of Justice to realize that a plutocracy gearing public policy to the narrow interests of a part rather than the whole of a society is diametrically opposed, or antipodal, to a system of government and economy in which the poorest of the poor are looked to first such that they can survive and lead decent, albeit not wealthy, lives before other, increasingly better off tiers are taken into account. In a school yard, only a bully goes after the kids with the least to eat for lunch so to enrich himself and his buddies.

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1. Stephen Groves, “Trump’s Tax Law Will Mostly Benefit the Rich, While Leaving Poorer Americans with Less, CBO Says,” The Associated Press, August 11, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Texas Overreaching

With enough Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives staying in Illinois and New York as of August 3, 2025 that the legislative chamber could not reach a quorum and thus be able to hold a vote on a Congressional redistricting plan that could gain the Republic Party five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Greg Abbott, who at the time was Texas’ head of state and head of the executive branch, was considering various options to bring the lawmakers back. That only one of those options was legal points to the importance of the rule of law being applied to government officials.

The most egregious option, legally speaking, had been proposed by the Attorney General, Ken Paxton, who wrote, the “cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately.”[1] In other words, police whose jurisdiction is limited to Texas would be able to have the jurisdiction expanded by Abbot. “He has no legal mechanism,” Rep. Jolando Jones, one of the departed Texas lawmakers said; “Subpoenas from Texas don’t work in New York, so he can’t come and get us. Subpoenas in Texas don’t work in [Illinois].”[2] The Texas Supreme Court had ruled in 2021 that leaders of the House of Representatives had the authority to “physically compel the attendance” of missing representatives, but not even a decision by Texas’s Supreme Court can reach into Illinois or New York; only the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction throughout the bloc.[3] Hyperextending police-power in Texas beyond even the jurisdiction of the Texas Supreme Court would set a bad precedent that could be used even to cover police brutality. That the Attorney General of Texas suggested the blatantly illegal usurping of Illinois’s retained sovereignty by extending that of Texas is itself troubling. In a federal system, it is necessary that everyone colors within the lines.

Abbott was also considering what was only “a nonbinding legal opinion issued by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton that suggested a court could determine that a legislator had forfeited {one’s] office.”[4] Based only on Paxton’s legal opinion, Abbott said he would “begin trying to remove Democratic lawmakers from office.”[5] Presumably he would make the request to a judge rather than remove the lawmakers by his own authority, which again would be illegal even by Paxton’s reasoning.

The only option backed up by extant law that Abbott was considering is fining the absent lawmakers $500 a day, though even that option was being twisted by Ken Paxton, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time. He “suggested that lawmakers may have committed felonies by raising money to help pay for fines they could face.”[6] So it was apparently illegal to have someone one pay one’s fine. Be careful in Texas if a friend or relative, or even a charity organization, is willing to pay your traffic ticket; you may be committing a felony, which, by the way, is a type of federal law. Perhaps Paxton was actually positioning himself for, or worse, already saw himself, as the U.S. Attorney General rather than a U.S. senator.

That the options that Greg Abbott, the figure-head and chief executive of the Texas government, was considering tended to push beyond what was legal at the time is itself worthy of noticing, for such power-aggrandizement by a member-state in a federal system can, if it were to spread, doom that system as state governments turn on each other and the U.S. president takes sides, thus undercutting that presiding role.

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1. Joey Cappelletti and Andrew DeMillo, “Texas Governor Threatens to Remove Democrats Who Left State over Trump-backed Redistricting,” The Associated Press, August 4, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. I am using a word that is popular in the E.U. for a federal system in which governmental sovereignty is split between a union and states. In truth rather than ideology, “bloc” applies neither to the E.U. or U.S.
4. Joey Cappelletti and Andrew DeMillo, “Texas Governor Threatens to Remove Democrats Who Left State over Trump-backed Redistricting,” italics added for emphasis.
5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.