• In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and the GOP-run legislature passed HB 1205, which let county elections officials redefine the“ actual cost” of validating each signature and jack the fee up to $ 4.57 per petition in a county like Palm Beach, from under a dollar before: the result was exactly what they wanted, with all 22 active citizen initiatives failing to qualify for the 2026 ballot.
• In Missouri, working people had killed the GOP’ s phony“ right to work” law by 67 percent in August 2018 and won paid sick leave with 58 percent of the statewide vote in November 2024. So, Republican Governor Mike Kehoe signed the repeal of both eight months later, and voters now face Amendment 4 on the August 4 ballot, which would require a citizen-initiated amendment to win a majority in every one of the state’ s eight congressional districts while leaving the Republican-controlled legislature’ s own amendments free to pass on a simple statewide majority.
Over the short-term, this sort of corruption works to the advantage of the party using it, and to the detriment of any party that refuses to play the game. As a result, the Democratic Party— which hasn’ t endorsed such corruption since the days of Boss Tweed— is effectively bankrupt with a debt of around $ 2 million as we head into the most important election in our lifetimes.
But the Republican Party— which openly embraces such crude, bare-assed corruption— is sitting on $ 130 million( almost entirely from oligarchs and giant corporations) and Trump has a SuperPAC with over $ 400 million( ditto).
None of this could have happened if five corrupt, on-thetake Republicans on the Supreme Court hadn’ t completely altered the rules of our politics with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, both based on a complete lie told by a wealthy conservative Supreme Court clerk over 140 years ago( as I document in detail in Who Killed the American Dream?).
It’ s as if they’ re trying to create a new Civil War here in America. Seriously: history tells us that corruption and regional / political favoritism is one of the leading forces causing civil unrest and often signals or provokes the end of democracy in a nation.
• The 1971 civil war and genocide in Pakistan that resulted in Bangladesh forming and splitting away was caused by a corrupt Pakistani government reducing to as little as 20 percent of central development spending monies for the eastern part of the country— which held 60 percent of the population— keeping the rest for themselves in the west.
• In Northern Ireland, thirty years of killings were provoked by unionist-run councils allocating public housing and municipal jobs by party loyalty, as Britain’ s own Cameron Commission concluded in 1969.
• When Nigerian politicians unfairly allocated that nation’ s oil revenue it led to a famine that killed three million people and led to Biafra splitting away as a separate republic.
• Sudan’ s ruling clique similarly ran the national budget as a spoils system for its own region and lost a third of the country to South Sudan( I was there during the civil war).
Research published in the American Political Science Review found that while a generalized rich-versus-poor inequality can tear a society apart, regional inequality is the number one predictor of social and political upheaval and the consequent destruction of democracy in a nation.
The“ winning” side begins to more aggressively rig the system to protect their own privileges and keep themselves out of jail, while the“ losing” side mobilizes to protest the inequality.
As both double-down on their positions and word spreads about how some regions are being screwed while others get rich, the body politic is thrown into turmoil. Like we’ re seeing right now in America. A federal judge has already ruled that stripping these billions of green energy dollars exclusively from Blue states is a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, but Wright and Trump did it anyway and are making no apologies or corrections.
We must put a stop to this now; while these cancelled green energy, Medicaid, and FEMA projects are merely three examples of increasingly widespread Trump and GOP corruption, they should still become a national scandal if for no other reason than that they feed this deadly process of regional resentment and political alienation.
Call your member of Congress and your senators and demand to know what they’ re going to do about these clear, corrupt, and dangerous violations of our Constitution and the political norms that democracy requires. The number for the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.
68 The Trial Lawyer