This week, in a federal courtroom on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the police commissioner of a United States territory was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for selling his badge. The next day, the territory’s former budget director got seven years for helping him do it. Five months earlier, in the same courthouse, the territory’s former Sports, Parks, and Recreation commissioner was sentenced to five years for a parallel shakedown. His bagman got five years and eight months. Their contractor of choice, a man named David Whitaker who founded a company called Mon Ethos Pro Support, pleaded guilty in 2024 and turned state’s witness (U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice).

Six convicted public-corruption defendants in two parallel schemes inside one small territorial government. The money was federal disaster-relief money, sent down from Washington under the American Rescue Plan Act to help the Virgin Islands rebuild after hurricanes. The bribes that bought it were paid in cash, in private-school tuition, in luxury travel, and in restaurant equipment for the police commissioner’s personal restaurant project. And the very company paying the bribes was caught planting fourteen surveillance devices inside Virgin Islands government offices, then billing the government more than $130,000 to come back and “find” them (Exec Security TSCM, Virgin Islands News Online).

You did not read about this in the New York Times. You did not read about it in the Washington Post. You did not read about it in the Wall Street Journal. The people of the Virgin Islands are American citizens. The money was American taxpayer money. The convictions are federal. And the mainland press treated the story like a foreign country.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

Three of our nine principles describe exactly what just happened in St. Croix.

“Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” When the most senior law-enforcement officer in a territory is on the payroll of the contractor he is supposed to oversee, democracy is not being safeguarded. It is being inverted (U.S. Department of Justice).

“One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Federal Judge Mark Kearney applied the law to a police commissioner, a budget director, a parks commissioner, a middleman, and a contractor. That is one law working as designed. The question is whether anyone above them, including the governor who appointed them, will face the same standard (U.S. Department of Justice).

“Govern with a Balanced Approach. Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.” The Virgin Islands Police Department paid Mon Ethos $3.31 million for CCTV services. The Department of Sports, Parks, and Recreation tried to steer the company another $1.43 million security-camera contract. The Office of Management and Budget pushed payments to the company forward in the queue. None of this was essential service delivery. It was a captured government writing checks to a captured contractor (Loop News).

The Sordid Details

The story begins with David Whitaker, founder of Mon Ethos Pro Support, a St. Thomas-based company that pitched itself as a one-stop shop for cybersecurity, surveillance, and digital services. By the early 2020s, Mon Ethos had embedded itself across multiple Virgin Islands government agencies. The Virgin Islands Police Department alone had paid Whitaker’s company $3.31 million for CCTV services. The Department of Sports, Parks, and Recreation had a $1.43 million security-camera contract in motion. And the Office of Management and Budget controlled the spigot of federal American Rescue Plan Act money that kept Mon Ethos paid (Loop News, Virgin Islands Free Press).

To keep that spigot open, Whitaker paid bribes. Lots of them.

Police Commissioner Ray Martinez took nearly $100,000 in benefits. According to evidence presented at his federal trial, the payments included cash, luxury travel, personal expenses, private-school tuition for a member of his family, and restaurant equipment for a personal restaurant project Martinez was building on the side. In exchange, Martinez approved Mon Ethos invoices and helped award the company a $1.4 million contract funded by federal disaster-recovery dollars. The federal jury convicted him in December 2025 on every count brought against him: honest services wire fraud, federal program bribery, money laundering conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. On June 9, 2026, Judge Mark Kearney sentenced him to ten years in federal prison, ordered him to forfeit $127,000, pay $77,250 in restitution, and a $5,000 fine (U.S. Department of Justice, Facebook post by Virgin Islands Source).

OMB Director Jenifer O’Neal helped move Mon Ethos invoices to the front of the territory’s payment line. She was convicted on every count alongside Martinez in December 2025 and on June 11, 2026, Judge Kearney sentenced her to seven years in federal prison (U.S. Department of Justice).

In a parallel scheme, Sports, Parks, and Recreation Commissioner Calvert White solicited a $16,000 bribe in exchange for steering the $1.43 million security-camera contract toward Mon Ethos. He successfully collected $5,000 of it. White and his middleman, Benjamin Hendricks, owner of A Clean Environment USVI, were convicted at a five-day jury trial in July 2025. On January 22, 2026, Judge Kearney sentenced White to five years in prison and Hendricks to five years and eight months. White was the son of a longtime Virgin Islands senator and was fitted with a GPS ankle monitor on his way out of the courthouse (U.S. Department of Justice, Virgin Islands Free Press).

Whitaker pleaded guilty in September 2024 to two counts of wire fraud and one count of bribery concerning federal programs. He cooperated. He testified against the commissioners. His sentencing was held on June 10, 2026, the day between Martinez and O’Neal, with prosecutors seeking a reduced 22-month term in light of his cooperation (WTJX).

And then there is the wiretap. In September 2024, court documents were unsealed showing that Mon Ethos had planted fourteen eavesdropping devices inside Virgin Islands government offices, including inside the Office of Management and Budget itself. The same company that was bribing the budget director was bugging her office. And the same company then turned around and billed the Virgin Islands government more than $130,000 for technical surveillance counter-measure services to detect and remove the very devices it had planted. The territory paid that bill (Exec Security TSCM, Virgin Islands News Online).

Six convicted defendants. Three sitting cabinet-level commissioners under one governor. Federal disaster money targeted. A contractor who bugged the offices of the officials he was bribing. This is what one-party government looks like when nobody is watching.

Both Parties Have Failed Us

The Virgin Islands is governed almost exclusively by Democrats. Governor Albert Bryan Jr. is a Democrat. He appointed Martinez. He appointed O’Neal. He appointed White. He has not been charged with any crime and the U.S. Attorney has not implicated him in the bribery schemes. But he requested the resignations of Martinez and O’Neal only after the FBI seized their cellphones, and he was reluctant even then to concede that his administration had erred in continuing to do business with a contractor whose founder was already a convicted felon (Virgin Islands Consortium, Loop News).

This is the pattern of one-party rule everywhere it takes root. Where the party in power faces no real opposition, the people inside the government stop fearing the voters and start fearing only the federal prosecutors. The Virgin Islands have a Democratic monopoly. Other places have Republican monopolies. Ohio just produced one of the largest utility-bribery cases in American history under Republican one-party rule in Columbus. Newark, New Jersey just produced a duffel-bag-cash deputy mayor under Democratic one-party rule. The party label changes. The structure does not. One-party dominance plus federal dollars plus weak local press equals exactly this kind of scandal, in cycle after cycle, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction.

And the national press has failed every one of these stories. The Virgin Islands case checks every box that should make it national news. American citizens. Federal money. A sitting police commissioner convicted. A sitting budget director convicted. A sitting parks commissioner convicted. A contractor planting listening devices inside government offices, then billing the government to find them. And yet the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have produced essentially nothing on it. What coverage exists has come almost entirely from territorial reporters at WTJX, the Virgin Islands Consortium, the Virgin Islands Free Press, Virgin Islands News Online, the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation, Loop News, and one DOJ press release picked up nowhere else. That is not journalism failure as an accident. That is a structural blind spot in how the mainland press decides whose corruption matters (WTJX).

The Virgin Islanders who paid for this scandal cannot meaningfully vote for the president of the United States who appoints the U.S. Attorney that prosecuted it. They cannot send a voting member to the Congress that allocated the disaster money that was stolen. They have an inspector general, a territorial DOJ, and the FBI. That is what stood between them and total impunity, and only just barely.

We do not have time left to keep tolerating this. A democracy in which territorial citizens fund a captured government, federal money buys a contractor who bugs the very officials he is bribing, the local press carries the story alone, and the mainland press cannot find the territory on a map, is a democracy already failing the people inside it. The Centercratic Party exists to insist on the alternative: term limits that break the political machines, one law that actually applies to commissioners and contractors and governors, transparent procurement that makes bug-the-budget-director schemes impossible, and a politics where federal disaster money goes to rebuild communities instead of to building police commissioners’ restaurants.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

On June 3, 2026, a Summit County grand jury in Akron, Ohio, returned a fresh indictment against the two men accused of orchestrating the largest public corruption scheme in Ohio history. Former FirstEnergy Corporation Chief Executive Officer Charles “Chuck” Jones and former Senior Vice President of External Affairs Michael Dowling were charged with a combined 22 new felony counts, including engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, bribery, telecommunications fraud, conspiracy, tampering with evidence, tampering with records, and obstructing justice (Ohio Attorney General, WOSU Public Media).

This was the second indictment. The first ended in March 2026 in a Summit County courtroom after a six-week trial and nine days of jury deliberation, with the jurors deadlocked. According to outgoing Attorney General Dave Yost, ten of twelve jurors voted to convict (Signal Akron, Signal Ohio).

The retrial is set for late September 2026. While Ohioans wait, the same Ohioans continue paying the $445,000-a-day cost of the legislation that the alleged bribery was designed to buy. Total ratepayer cost to date: more than $500 million (Common Cause Ohio).

If you read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post this week, you almost certainly did not see this story. The Summit County grand jury filed 22 felony counts against two former executives of one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country, in the middle of one of the biggest state corruption cases in American history, and the national press could not be bothered.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party holds nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what happened in Ohio.

“Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” A $61 million dark-money operation funneled through a 501(c)(4) shell to elect compliant legislators and buy a billion-dollar bailout is the textbook definition of an extreme tactic by a special interest (U.S. Department of Justice).

“One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” The speaker who took the money is serving 20 years. The lobbyist is serving five. The PUCO chairman who allegedly took $4.3 million is dead. The two corporate executives allegedly at the top of the scheme have been indicted twice by the state and once by the feds, and they still walk free (Ohio Attorney General).

“Govern with a Balanced Approach. Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.” A $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout for failing nuclear and coal plants that competitive markets had already condemned is the opposite of fiscal discipline. It is government as a private subsidy machine for the people who paid to capture it (Energy and Policy Institute).

The Sordid Details

Here is the scheme, stripped to its bones.

In 2017, Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling, the two top executives at FirstEnergy, faced a problem. The company owned aging nuclear power plants at Davis-Besse and Perry that could not compete on the open electricity market. The subsidiary that owned them, FirstEnergy Solutions, was sliding into bankruptcy. They needed a state legislative bailout. They needed it big, and they needed it fast.

They allegedly bought one.

According to federal prosecutors, FirstEnergy and an affiliated generation company funneled approximately $61 million in dark money through a 501(c)(4) called Generation Now, which was controlled by then-State Representative Larry Householder. The money was spent to elect Householder’s preferred candidates to the Ohio House, install him as Speaker, and then pass House Bill 6 in 2019. HB6 imposed a new charge on every Ohio electricity ratepayer to bail out the failing nuclear plants and two aging coal plants partially owned by FirstEnergy and a consortium called Ohio Valley Electric Cooperative (U.S. Department of Justice, Grist).

That was only half of it. While Householder ran the legislative side, Jones and Dowling allegedly handled the regulator. In January 2019, just before Governor Mike DeWine appointed Sam Randazzo to chair the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, FirstEnergy paid Randazzo $4.3 million through what it later admitted was a sham consulting agreement. Once seated as PUCO chair, Randazzo helped shape HB6, fought the citizen referendum effort to repeal it, and four months after the bill became law gave FirstEnergy another gift: he eliminated the requirement that FirstEnergy submit to a 2024 rate case. That single decision let FirstEnergy keep its books closed for years and likely cost Ohio ratepayers millions more (Energy and Policy Institute, Ohio House).

In 2021, FirstEnergy entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the federal government, admitted to paying both the $61 million to Householder’s operation and the $4.3 million to Randazzo, and paid a $230 million federal penalty. Householder was convicted at trial in 2023 and sentenced to 20 years. Borges got five years. Randazzo killed himself in April 2024 (Watching PUCO, U.S. Department of Justice).

But Jones and Dowling have continued to fight. Their first state trial began in early 2026 in Summit County. Six weeks of testimony, dozens of witnesses, hundreds of exhibits. Their defense was that Randazzo was not yet a public official when they paid him, and that the $4.3 million was meant for his outside clients, who they say he then stole from. The jury deliberated nine days and could not agree. Yost said the vote was ten to two for conviction. Judge Susan Baker Ross declared a mistrial on April 1 (Signal Ohio).

The June 3, 2026 reindictment is the state’s second swing. Jones faces eight counts. Dowling faces 19, including 14 separate counts of tampering with records. Yost said in a video statement that the new indictment includes facts the state did not have during the first trial, uncovered through a civil lawsuit against FirstEnergy that surfaced documents prosecutors had not previously seen. The new charges allege a scheme stretching from 2010 to 2021, with Jones and Dowling working in concert to, in the indictment’s own words, “steal the power of government and bend it to the will of FirstEnergy” (TiffinOhio.net, Ohio Attorney General).

While the two men prepare for their September retrial, Ohio ratepayers keep paying. The coal-plant portion of HB6 ran from 2020 until August 14, 2025, when Governor DeWine finally signed HB15 to end it. By then it had cost Ohio electricity customers more than $500 million, roughly $445,000 every single day, to subsidize coal plants that competitive markets had already condemned (Common Cause Ohio).

Both Parties Have Failed Us

The Republican Party owns this one in Ohio. Larry Householder, Republican Speaker. HB6, passed by a Republican-controlled legislature. Sam Randazzo, Republican appointee of a Republican governor. Mike DeWine, Republican governor, who later said he wished he had not appointed Randazzo. Dave Yost, Republican attorney general, who at least had the integrity to indict the executives and to push the second indictment through before he left office. One-party Republican rule in Columbus produced one of the largest pay-to-play schemes in American political history (Ideastream State News).

But the failure is bipartisan in its design. Democratic-run states have produced their own utility-and-statehouse corruption cases, from Illinois ComEd to New York. The pattern does not care which party holds the gavel. It cares only that one party holds it firmly enough that there is no real opposition to police the deals. Where one party dominates a state capital, regulated industries learn that the most efficient lobbying dollar is the one delivered straight into the speaker’s dark-money pocket. Republican or Democrat, blue state or red, the structure of one-party dominance is the structure of corruption.

And the press has failed too. Ohioans owe what they know about this scandal to Cleveland.com, the Akron Beacon Journal, Signal Akron, Signal Ohio, WOSU, Energy and Policy Institute, and Common Cause Ohio. The national outlets that filled their front pages with federal politics for the last two years could find no room for the largest state-level utility bribery prosecution in American history. A grand jury returns 22 felony counts against the alleged corporate masterminds of a scheme that has already cost Ohio ratepayers half a billion dollars, and the national press treats it as too parochial to bother with.

We do not have time left to keep tolerating this. A democracy where utilities buy speakers, speakers buy laws, regulators sell decisions, and ratepayers absorb the bill, while the national press looks the other way, is a democracy already paying for its own decline. The Centercratic Party exists to insist on the alternative: term limits that break the political machines, one law that actually applies to everyone in the boardroom and at the PUCO, transparent campaign finance that makes a $61 million dark-money laundry impossible, and a politics where regulators work for ratepayers instead of for the companies they regulate.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

On June 3, 2026, in a federal courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo sentenced a former Deputy Mayor of one of America’s largest cities to twelve months and one day in federal prison. His name is Carmelo Garcia. He is 51 years old. He is a former Democratic state assemblyman from Hudson County. He was personally recruited into Newark city government at the request of Mayor Ras Baraka. And in the words of the United States Attorney for New Jersey, he ran a corrupt scheme to obtain bribes and kickbacks from two Newark business owners in exchange for steering city-owned property into their hands (U.S. Department of Justice, Hudson County View).

The total value of what he took: $156,810. The most cinematic single transaction: a gym bag set down on the floor of a restaurant bathroom stall in Mountainside, New Jersey, while Garcia washed his hands at the sink and an intermediary dropped an envelope holding $25,000 in cash into the bag (NJ.com, News 12 New Jersey).

Search the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal for any of the names in this story. You will find nothing on the sentencing of a sitting big-city deputy mayor for a six-figure bribery conviction. That silence is the first scandal. The conduct is the second.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what happened inside Newark City Hall.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” Carmelo Garcia did not safeguard anything. He was the official inside the building who decided which developers got preliminary designated developer status on Newark-owned land. He sold that decision. The special interest was a pawnbroker and his partner. The extreme tactic was a stream of cash, watches, and a paid luxury hotel stay routed to a public official whose entire job was to act on behalf of the people of Newark (U.S. Department of Justice).

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Garcia got twelve months and one day. Any ordinary American who walked into a New Jersey restaurant bathroom to collect $25,000 in cash from a stranger would face the same federal statutes Garcia did. But ordinary Americans do not get recruited into deputy mayor jobs by mayors. Ordinary Americans do not get the long, slow path Garcia got: indicted in October 2021, allowed to plead guilty in June 2024, sentenced almost two years after that (New Jersey Globe, Patch).

The seventh reads: “Govern with a Balanced Approach. Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.” The Newark Department of Economic and Housing Development exists to provide an essential service: turning vacant and city-owned property into housing and economic activity for Newark residents. Garcia ran that department. He used it as a private auction house. There is no balance here. There is only government as instrument of personal enrichment (Hudson County View).

The Sordid Details

The two businessmen who bought Garcia were Frank Valvano Jr., 57, of Florham Park, and Irwin Sablosky, 66, of Springfield. They co-owned a New Jersey pawnbroker, jewelry, and check-cashing chain operating under the name William Rich and Sons. Sablosky was also a former president of the Springfield Board of Education. The two men wanted Newark-owned real estate. They wanted the city to hand them designated developer status so they could acquire and redevelop city properties through limited liability companies they controlled. They needed an official inside Newark city government who could make that happen. They paid for one (New Jersey Globe, Hudson County View).

The payments began in 2017. On June 28, 2017, business records later seized by federal agents from the Belleville location of William Rich and Sons show that Valvano and Sablosky provided Garcia with a high-end watch valued at approximately $7,500. By November of that year, the Newark City Council had adopted resolutions approving redevelopment agreements for two Valvano and Sablosky entities, 123-131 Riverside LLC and 281 Passaic LLC (U.S. Department of Justice).

The big moment came on June 14, 2018. Garcia by then was Acting Deputy Mayor and Director of the Department of Economic and Housing Development. The meeting was arranged by twenty-one phone calls and text messages between Garcia and an intermediary the federal indictment calls Individual 2. The location they settled on was a restaurant in Mountainside, New Jersey. Garcia arrived carrying a gym bag. He told Individual 2 to meet him in the bathroom. Inside the bathroom, Garcia set the gym bag on the floor of a stall and walked to the sink to wash his hands. Individual 2 entered the stall, placed an envelope holding $25,000 in cash inside the bag, and left. Garcia picked up the bag and walked out (U.S. Department of Justice, NJ.com).

Four days later, on June 18, 2018, Garcia sent an email from his official City of Newark email address to the department’s Director of Redevelopment, moving the Valvano and Sablosky entities forward in the city’s designated developer pipeline. The cash had cleared. The official act followed in ninety-six hours (New Jersey Globe).

On April 12, 2019, Garcia took another $5,000 in cash. Between those bookend payments, federal investigators documented additional benefits: jewelry from the pawn shop, watches, a $2,994 four-night stay at a luxury Florida hotel that Valvano paid for, and cash payments of $250 to $1,000 at a time that Garcia personally walked into the pawn shop to collect to fund his attendance at political fundraisers, golf outings, and mayor’s balls (U.S. Department of Justice, News 12 New Jersey).

When federal agents searched the Belleville location of William Rich and Sons in September 2020, they found handwritten notes. One column was labeled with the letter “C,” almost certainly for Carmelo. The bottom of that column carried a horizontal line and one final figure: 156810. That is the running total of what the pawn shop paid the deputy mayor. The bookkeeping was not even encrypted. It was a column of numbers on a piece of paper next to a cash register (U.S. Department of Justice).

By late 2018 the businessmen were complaining in text messages that Garcia kept asking for more. “We’ve done nothing but spend tons of money and give away jewelry,” Sablosky wrote to Valvano. “Carmelo wants more too. We can’t afford it.” This is what public service looked like in Newark City Hall (U.S. Department of Justice).

And Garcia was not operating alone. A parallel federal investigation produced sentences last December for two more men inside the same Newark machine. Former Newark City Councilman Joseph A. McCallum Jr., 70, also a board member of the Newark Community Economic Development Corporation, got 18 months in prison for wire fraud and tax fraud tied to a separate bribery and kickback scheme involving Newark development projects. Malik Frederick, 65, the consultant who moved money between developers and McCallum, got 25 months. The same federal indictment that named Garcia as a co-conspirator named McCallum and Frederick. Three convicted public-corruption felons. One Newark city government (U.S. Department of Justice, RLS Media).

Valvano and Sablosky have both pleaded guilty and been sentenced. The pawn shop is on the public record as the financing arm of a deputy mayor’s corruption. Garcia, who had previously been Executive Director of the Hoboken Housing Authority, of the Irvington Housing Authority, and a one-term Democratic state assemblyman before Mayor Baraka brought him into Newark, is on his way to federal prison (New Jersey Globe).

Both Parties Have Failed Us

Carmelo Garcia is a Democrat. So is Joseph McCallum. So is Ras Baraka, the mayor who recruited Garcia into city government. So is every member of the Newark City Council who voted those redevelopment agreements through in November 2017. This corruption was not bipartisan in execution. It was one-party rule in a one-party city using one-party machinery to convert public land into private wealth, with a pawn shop as the cashier.

But the failure here is bipartisan. Republican-run cities have produced the same kind of conviction. The bathroom-stall handoff is a recurring scene in American public-corruption indictments because the incentive structure on both sides of the aisle rewards exactly this conduct: lucrative discretionary decisions about public property, controlled by a small number of officials, with no party competition strong enough to police it. Where one party dominates, whether the color is blue or red, the bribes follow.

And the national press, which spent the last two years writing tens of thousands of words about federal politics, could not be bothered to write a paragraph about a sitting deputy mayor of one of New Jersey’s largest cities trading public housing decisions for cash in a gym bag. The story exists only because the United States Attorney for New Jersey, the FBI, and a handful of New Jersey local reporters at the New Jersey Globe, NJ.com, Hudson County View, News 12, and Patch did their jobs. The institutions Americans pay to inform us about how their cities are run looked away (Hudson County View).

We do not have time left to keep tolerating this. A democracy that lets one party run a city as a closed shop, that lets a deputy mayor take $156,810 from a pawn shop over two years and serve roughly one day in prison for every $429 he stole, that lets the national press treat the conviction as too small to mention, is a democracy living on borrowed time. The Centercratic Party exists to insist on the alternative: term limits that break machines, one law that actually applies to everyone, and a politics where the people deciding what gets built on public land are not the same people taking envelopes in restaurant bathrooms.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

On July 22, 2026, the City of Corpus Christi, Texas, population three hundred and twenty thousand, will begin a two-day trial to remove its sitting Democratic mayor from office. Pre-trial hearings ran this Monday and Tuesday. The federal injunction the mayor sought to stop the proceedings was denied on May 22 (KRIS 6 News, KEDT).

The four counts against Mayor Paulette Guajardo: aiding a fraud, committing perjury, leaking confidential information, and ordering the deletion of public records. The evidence at the center of all four counts is a single PowerPoint slide containing a screenshot from the Federal Emergency Management Agency website. The screenshot had been altered. The city auditor said so. The city manager said so on a recorded phone call (KRIS 6 News, Texas Tribune).

That altered document was used to extract two million dollars in taxpayer-funded incentives for a downtown Homewood Suites hotel. The developer, Elevate QOF LLC, had principals who donated to Mayor Guajardo’s political campaigns. The FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Corpus Christi Police Department all investigated. All three walked away. No charges were filed (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times, KRIS 6 News).

This story is not getting national press. It should be. Strip the city name off the top and this is the textbook American corruption case of 2026.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Two of them describe exactly what happened in Corpus Christi.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” A two million dollar public award based on a forged federal exhibit is the textbook case of why this principle exists. The special interest is a hotel developer whose principals donated to the mayor’s campaign. The extreme tactic is the alteration of a screenshot from a federal agency to manufacture a justification for taxpayer money the developer was not otherwise entitled to. Every guardrail of honest public hearings was bypassed in service of moving public money to a private donor’s project (KRIS 6 News).

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” The most damning fact in this case is not the altered document. It is that the FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Corpus Christi Police Department all reviewed the same forgery, the same recorded admissions, the same auditor findings, and all three walked away. A private citizen and a competing developer are now doing the work that federal and state law enforcement decided was not worth doing. One law for the Homewood Suites developers. A very different law for any ordinary American who alters a federal document to obtain two million dollars (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times).

Anatomy of a Two-Million-Dollar Slide

Here is what the public record now shows.

In April 2022, FEMA released updated flood maps for Nueces County, effective October 13, 2022. Months later, in July 2022, the partners behind Elevate QOF LLC reorganized their downtown Corpus Christi property into a planned 126-room Homewood Suites. The flood maps had already been published. The developers knew the rules (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times).

In February 2024, Elevate QOF submitted an incentive application asking the city for two million taxpayer dollars. The application included a PowerPoint slide displaying a screenshot of the FEMA website. The part of the screenshot that would have shown the flood maps were published before the project was even on the drawing board was concealed. The first ordinance reading in February 2024 justified the two million dollars as necessary to cover “FEMA flood zone costs.” When the second reading came on April 23, 2024, the justification had quietly changed. Now the two million was for “street-level retail and public space.” Same money. Different reason. The city charter requires two “same” readings of an ordinance. This was not that (KRIS 6 News).

In August 2024, a whistleblower allegation reached the city auditor. In August 2025, the auditor issued a memorandum to the city council. The key finding, in the auditor’s own words: the FEMA document “appears to have been altered” to obscure the fact that flood maps had been issued months before the Elevate project was even considered. The auditor recommended an independent external investigation (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times).

Then come the depositions. In testimony from the civil lawsuit filed by competing developer Ajit David, City Manager Peter Zanoni admitted under oath that he had been told the document was altered. In a recorded phone call to David made days before the April 2024 council vote, Zanoni said it plainly: “Right, it was altered. And then when you read the entire PowerPoint it’s so obvious that the reader, or the writer, wanted to be led to believe that the FEMA change was just recent.” On the same call he described what he characterized as a deliberate scheme: “They hatch the scheme that, okay, FEMA floodplain, that’s infrastructure, fixing the bottom floors.” Yet when the council voted on April 23, 2024, Zanoni’s public warning was reduced to this: “The issue with staff is there’s still some uncertainty in some of the information, we’re working to get that.” The city attorney later confirmed in writing that the entire council was informed about the altered screenshot in executive session (KRIS 6 News).

The mayor’s defense, through her attorneys, is that she was never told the document was a “forged federal document,” and that what was altered was merely a screenshot of a federal website, not an official federal document. David swore in his lawsuit that he personally explained the alteration to Guajardo in person on April 16, 2024, again on April 23, and emailed her the proof on April 19 (KRIS 6 News).

In August 2025, Corpus Christi resident Rachel Caballero filed a citizen removal petition under the city charter. In March 2026, by a 5-3 council vote, the petition advanced to formal removal proceedings. In April 2026, articles of impeachment listing the four counts were filed. Guajardo sought a federal injunction. On May 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge George C. Hanks Jr. denied her motion. Trial: July 22 and 23 (Texas Tribune).

The legal fees the city has spent defending this controversy, by Councilman Roland Barrera’s count: more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of public money, on top of the two million already paid out (KRIS 6 News).

Three Investigations. Zero Charges. One Quiet Closing.

Forging a federal document is a felony. Using a forged document to obtain public funds is a felony. The document was forged. The funds were obtained. Two million dollars of public money changed hands.

The city did exactly what a city is supposed to do. It referred the case to law enforcement. Three agencies took the file. The Corpus Christi Police Department. The Texas Rangers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Between them, they had every advantage a prosecutor could ask for. A city auditor’s written finding that the FEMA document had been altered. A sitting city manager on a recorded phone call calling the alteration a “scheme.” Sworn testimony from city leadership confirming the alteration in deposition. A city attorney’s email confirming the council was warned in executive session. A paper trail from February 2024 to August 2025 that anyone with a working printer could assemble in an afternoon (KRIS 6 News).

In December 2025, all three agencies closed their files. No charges. No public explanation. No referral up the chain to a federal grand jury. Just a quiet announcement from the city of Corpus Christi that the investigations were over (KRIS 6 News).

If an ordinary American had altered a federal screenshot to claim two million dollars in COVID relief, or two million dollars in disaster aid, or two million dollars in food stamps, the FBI would have had them in handcuffs before the check cleared. The Justice Department prosecutes pandemic loan fraud at amounts a fraction of this size, every week, in every federal district in the country. The same alteration. The same statute. The same evidence standard. The only thing different about Corpus Christi is the politics, the donors, and the zip code.

That is what makes this case dangerous. Not the mayor. The mayor will get her trial in July. The developers will have their day in civil court. What does not get a day in court is the decision by three law enforcement agencies to look at a documented forgery worth two million taxpayer dollars and shrug. That decision creates a rule, even if nobody writes it down. The rule is: if you are well-connected enough, in the right city, with the right political alignment, the criminal statutes that govern document fraud do not apply to you. Everybody else gets the handcuffs.

Once Again

This is the kind of story that exposes both parties at once.

Democrats will tell you the mayor is innocent until proven guilty, that no criminal charges were filed, and that this is a politically motivated removal driven by a competing developer with an axe to grind. They will be partly correct. Then they will not say the next sentence, which is that a Democratic mayor presided over a vote handing two million taxpayer dollars to her own donors based on a presentation the city auditor concluded had been altered, and the Democratic Party at every level above the Corpus Christi city limits has said nothing. Not the Texas Democratic Party. Not the national party. Not a single elected Democrat outside Nueces County has called for her resignation or even an independent investigation. When a Democratic mayor’s donors win a two million dollar contract on a doctored slide, the rest of the party prefers to look at the floor.

Republicans will tell you, accurately, that this is exactly the kind of small-city corruption story that gets ignored when the mayor is a Democrat and would be a Fox News lead if she were a Republican. They will be correct. Then they will not lift a finger to do anything about it. Corpus Christi is not a national pickup target. The Texas governor and attorney general have shown no interest beyond the Texas Rangers walking away. Republicans will use this story for one cable cycle, fundraise off it for a week, and forget it the moment the trial ends. The structural problem, federal law enforcement closing a file on a documented forgery, will not get one minute of Republican congressional oversight.

Once again, our parties have failed us. The competing developer who blew the whistle is privately funding a lawsuit. The citizen who filed the petition is paying her own legal expenses. The city has spent three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of public money defending the controversy. The federal government, the body that actually owns the altered document, has done nothing.

This is exactly the gap a centrist party is supposed to fill. Centercrats are the people who can say two true things at the same time. A mayor is entitled to the presumption of innocence and to a fair trial under the city charter, and the documented alteration of a federal exhibit used to move two million dollars to a campaign donor is fraud whether or not federal prosecutors choose to call it that. The two-party system purposely avoids putting both statements on the same page, because doing so would force both parties to admit that the institutions Americans rely on to catch this kind of corruption are no longer reliably catching it.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late. A small Texas city is doing the work the FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Corpus Christi Police Department refused to do. On July 22 and 23, ordinary residents and elected council members will sit through the trial federal prosecutors decided was not worth their time. If the largest law enforcement apparatus in the world cannot summon the will to charge a documented federal document alteration that moved two million dollars to a politically connected developer, then the line that separates American government from ordinary graft has already moved. The only question left is whether the rest of us notice in time.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

On December 11, 2025, Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice P. Scott Neville Jr. signed an order recalling seven retired circuit court judges to part-time service. One of them was James R. Brown, who spent eighteen years on the Cook County bench before retiring in 2020. The assignment was traffic court. The term ran through December 7, 2026. The authority cited was Article VI, Section 15 of the Illinois Constitution, which lets the high court bring back retired judges to clear backlogs (Illinois Courts, Injustice Watch).

Brown showed up. For six weeks he heard traffic cases. There were no complaints from litigants. No complaints from lawyers in his courtroom. No accusations of bias on the bench. Nothing.

Then, on January 26, 2026, at 6:30 in the morning, Cook County Chief Judge Charles Beach sent Brown a text message. The Illinois Supreme Court had just issued a one-sentence order vacating his assignment. No hearing. No notice. No referral to the Illinois Courts Commission, which is the body the state constitution actually created to discipline judges. One sentence (Injustice Watch, Liberty Justice Center).

What had Brown done in those six weeks to earn a summary removal? Nothing. The trigger was a column he had written four months earlier, in September 2025, on a small news site, before he had even applied for recall. The column was conservative. The court did not like it. So they took his robe (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Two of them describe exactly what the Illinois Supreme Court just did, and what the rest of us are now obligated to defend.

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” The Illinois Constitution creates a specific body, the Illinois Courts Commission, to handle complaints about judges. That body holds hearings, takes evidence, and lets the accused respond. None of that happened to Judge Brown. The same court that is supposed to defend due process pulled his assignment in one sentence, in the dark, without ever telling him what he had done wrong. And as we will see, two sitting justices of that same court ran openly partisan campaigns, took millions from a sitting Democratic governor, and then refused to recuse themselves from cases involving that governor’s signature laws. One law for the retired conservative. A very different law for the partisan justices already on the bench (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).

The fifth reads: “Debate with Facts and Dignity. Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.” A retired judge wrote a column. People disagreed with the column. The proper response was to write a column back. Instead, the Cook County Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers filed letters with the Illinois Supreme Court asking that he be removed for what he had written. Not for anything he had said on the bench. For an op-ed. The high court complied. That is not a debate. That is a punishment for speech, dressed up in robes (Chicago Council of Lawyers, CWB Chicago).

Two principles. One judge. One column. One state’s judicial branch coordinating against a retired man because they did not like an essay he posted on a website almost nobody reads.

The Column, the Letters, and the Order

Here is what the public record now shows.

On September 5, 2025, Judge Brown published a column titled “His Judgement Cometh and That Right Soon” on johnkassnews.com, a small Chicago opinion site run by the former Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. The column criticized progressive prosecutors by name, defended the Trump administration’s federal law-enforcement actions, and used heated language about Soros-funded district attorneys, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Kim Foxx, and the question of biological men in women’s sports. It was, plainly, a conservative opinion column. Brown signed it with his name. He was retired. He held no judicial office at the time (johnkassnews.com, Injustice Watch).

Three months later, on December 11, 2025, the Illinois Supreme Court recalled him to traffic court. Six other retired judges were recalled the same day. No bar group objected to any of them (Illinois Courts).

On December 29, 2025, the Cook County Bar Association, the nation’s oldest Black bar association, issued a press release demanding the high court reverse the recall. On January 5, 2026, the Chicago Council of Lawyers followed with an open letter to all seven Illinois Supreme Court justices. Both letters cited the column. Both letters argued that Brown’s published views disqualified him from hearing traffic cases (Chicago Council of Lawyers, Injustice Watch).

On January 26, 2026, three weeks after the second letter, the Illinois Supreme Court, which currently sits five Democrats to two Republicans, issued the one-sentence order vacating Brown’s assignment. No hearing was held. No findings were made. No notice was given. Brown learned about it from a text message at 6:30 in the morning (Ballotpedia, Injustice Watch).

On February 18, 2026, Brown filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Illinois Supreme Court justices, Brown v. Neville et al., case number 1:26-cv-01825 in the Northern District of Illinois. He is represented by the Liberty Justice Center. The complaint alleges First Amendment retaliation, viewpoint discrimination, and a due process violation (Liberty Justice Center, Federal complaint).

On June 1, 2026, a federal judge rejected the Illinois Supreme Court’s motion to dismiss. The federal court found that Brown is “likely to succeed on his due process claim.” The Illinois high court’s argument that it could remove a recalled judge for any reason or no reason, without any process at all, was rejected on the merits at the earliest possible stage (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).

Three Judges the Court Will Not Touch

Now consider what the Illinois Supreme Court does not punish.

Start with the cleanest comparison. Judge Ramon Ocasio III is a sitting Cook County circuit judge. He has written publicly on racial justice, on the Civil Rights Act, and on mass deportations. He is on the bench right now. He has not been removed. There has been no letter from the Cook County Bar Association or the Chicago Council of Lawyers. There has been no one-sentence order at 6:30 in the morning. He is a sitting judge with a published record of political opinion writing, and the Illinois Supreme Court has done nothing about it. The only difference between Judge Ocasio and Judge Brown is the direction the opinions point. That is the textbook definition of viewpoint discrimination, and it is the basis of Brown’s federal lawsuit (Wall Street Journal).

Now move up to the high court itself. Two of the five Democratic justices who run that court, Elizabeth M. Rochford and Mary K. O’Brien, were elected in 2022 after openly partisan campaigns. Both accepted millions of dollars in campaign donations from Democratic Governor JB Pritzker. Both trumpeted endorsements from Democratic politicians and left-wing activist groups. They did this while the court was preparing to hear a constitutional challenge to the state’s ban on so-called assault weapons and a challenge to Pritzker’s signature criminal justice reform abolishing cash bail. When the gun ban challengers asked them to recuse, both refused. They sat on the cases that had been funded, in effect, by the same governor whose laws were on trial (Legal Newsline).

In September 2023, Justice Rochford went one step further. She spoke at a political fundraiser in Lake County in her official capacity as a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. The fundraiser benefited the Lake County Women’s Political Action Committee, a group that exists, in its own words, to elect female Democratic candidates. The Illinois Code of Judicial Conduct, in Rule 4.1, expressly prohibits judges from publicly endorsing or speaking on behalf of political candidates or organizations. Rochford did it anyway. Her defense was that “the content of my speech was not political in any way.” The Cook County Bar Association did not issue a statement. The Chicago Council of Lawyers did not issue a statement. No public action was taken by judicial regulators (Legal Newsline).

So here is the rule the Illinois Supreme Court is now operating under. A retired conservative judge writes a private-citizen op-ed and is summarily removed from traffic court by one-sentence order with no hearing. A sitting circuit judge writes political columns from the left and stays on the bench, untouched. Two sitting Democratic justices take millions from the governor, refuse to recuse on his marquee cases, and speak at partisan fundraisers in their official judicial capacity. The bar associations stay silent. The high court protects its own.

Brown received the unanimous endorsement of every single bar association in Cook County, including the same two bar groups that just demanded his removal, at his last retention election in 2014. Nothing about the man changed between 2014 and 2026. What changed was the column (Liberty Justice Center, Kass interview).

Once Again

This is the kind of story that exposes both parties at once.

Democrats will tell you, accurately, that judges have to be careful about public speech and that retired judges writing inflammatory columns invite legitimate questions about their fitness for recall. They will be correct, in the abstract. Then they will not say the next sentence, which is that the very same standard, applied honestly, would have forced Rochford and O’Brien off the gun ban cases and pulled Rochford out of that Lake County fundraiser. Their own party will not call it what it is, because the high court is delivering political outcomes the party likes.

Republicans will tell you, accurately, that this is viewpoint discrimination and that a state high court cannot punish a judge for an op-ed without due process. They will be correct. Then they will spend the next six months turning Judge Brown into a culture-war martyr on conservative cable, fundraising off him, and using the case to attack every Democratic-elected judge in the country. They will not spend much time asking why, when Republican-controlled high courts pull similar moves against liberal judges in red states, the principle of independent courts always seems to be situational.

Once again, our parties have failed us. One side will not police its own high court. The other side will turn a genuine constitutional violation into a partisan trophy and discredit the underlying principle in the process. The result is the same in either case: independent courts get weaker, due process gets thinner, and the next state’s high court is already drafting the next one-sentence order against the next judge who wrote the wrong column.

This is exactly the gap a centrist party is supposed to fill. Centercrats are the people who can say two true things at the same time. Judges should hold themselves to high standards of public restraint, and that standard has to apply to the partisan-fundraiser justice on the bench just as much as it applies to the retired judge with an op-ed. A state supreme court has broad authority to manage judicial assignments, and that authority does not extend to summary removal for protected speech with no hearing. Both statements have to be on the page at the same time, or the country gets nowhere. The two-party system purposely avoids putting them there.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late. A retired American judge wrote one column on a small website almost nobody reads, and his own state’s highest court took his robe in a one-sentence order in the dark. A federal court has already ruled he is likely to win his due process claim. The state high court could have referred the matter to the Illinois Courts Commission and held a hearing. Instead they sent a text message at 6:30 in the morning. If five justices can erase a judge for an op-ed while two of their own colleagues sit on cases bankrolled by the governor, that is not an independent judiciary. That is a political branch in a robe.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

On May 11, 2026, the mayor of a city of 55,000 people walked into a federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, signed a plea agreement, and admitted in writing that she had spent the years 2020 through 2022 working as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China. Her name is Eileen Wang. She had been elected to the Arcadia City Council in November 2022 and elevated to mayor in the city’s rotating mayoralty. She is the first elected official in United States history to plead guilty to acting as a covert agent of the Chinese government (The Bureau, DOJ).

She resigned that same afternoon. On May 29, 2026, she stood in federal court and entered the formal guilty plea. Her sentencing is set for October 6, 2026. She faces a statutory maximum of ten years in federal prison (ABC7 Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times).

If a small-town mayor on the East Coast had taken even a single phone call from a Russian intelligence officer in 2020, the story would have been on a continuous Cable News loop for six straight months. A sitting American mayor on the West Coast pleads guilty to running a propaganda operation for the Chinese government, and the story is barely a five-minute segment on the local ABC affiliate. Forty-eight hours after the plea, most Americans east of Pomona had never heard her name.

That is not just a Beijing story. It is a story about what gets covered in the United States in 2026, who pays attention to local elections, who is targeting them, and what happens when one of the most powerful intelligence services in the world picks a sleepy suburb in the San Gabriel Valley to grow a political plant.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what Eileen Wang violated, and what the rest of us are now obligated to defend.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” When a foreign government’s intelligence service runs an asset into a city council seat, that is not a special interest. It is a hostile government. Wang took an oath to the Constitution in December 2022. According to her own signed plea agreement, she had spent the previous two years executing directives from PRC officials and “obscuring her connections to the Chinese government from the public” (NPR). You cannot defend the Constitution for everyone if you are working, in secret, for the regime that exists to undo it everywhere it can.

The third reads: “Protect Election Integrity. Strengthen election security with strict voter ID standards and modern, accessible voter rolls. Restore confidence in the system.” Election integrity is not just about who casts the ballot. It is about who runs for the seat and who funds the campaign. Wang’s campaign treasurer and then-fiance, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, was a former officer of China’s Ministry of Public Security. He bragged to his PRC handlers that he had helped elect a “New Political Star” in California and asked Beijing for $80,000 to expand the operation, with Wang’s victory as the centerpiece of the pitch (The Bureau, LA Times). That is foreign interference in an American election. Local, but foreign. Specific, but documented. If election integrity means anything, it means asking who is paying for the campaign of the person who just took the oath.

The eighth reads: “Defend Our Freedom. Unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber, and economic threats.” The threat from the People’s Republic of China is not coming. It is here, it is operational, and it has been running through a website called U.S. News Center, posting articles dictated by PRC officials in WeChat group chats, including a 2021 essay arguing that “there is no genocide in Xinjiang” and that “forced labor” in Chinese cotton production does not exist (Los Angeles Times). A sitting American mayor was reposting that essay on the orders of a foreign intelligence service. Defending freedom is not an abstract foreign policy slogan. It is the work of identifying that operation, prosecuting it, and never letting the public forget it happened.

Three principles, one mayor, one foreign government, one city of 55,000 people.

How Beijing Walked Into Arcadia

Here is what the public record now shows.

Arcadia is a wealthy suburb of about 55,000 people on the eastern edge of the San Gabriel Valley. Roughly 59 percent of its residents are Asian. More than 46 percent are foreign-born. It has a large, well-established Chinese American community (NPR). Federal investigators have previously identified Arcadia as a hub for Chinese underground banking networks tied to Sinaloa cartel fentanyl cash flows in the Project Sleeping Giant DEA investigation (The Bureau). This is not Beijing operating in a vacuum. It is Beijing operating in a city where the ground was already softened.

The operation, in plain English, worked like this.

Beginning in late 2020, Wang and Sun ran a website called U.S. News Center, branded as a Chinese American community news source. Sun was a former officer of China’s Ministry of Public Security, which is one of the principal intelligence agencies of the PRC. Together they “received and executed directives” from PRC government officials. They posted Beijing-supplied articles, sometimes pre-written by Chinese officials, sometimes shared in WeChat group chats with other operatives, and they reported screenshots back to their handlers showing how many people had viewed each article (DOJ).

In June 2021, a PRC official messaged the group with a pre-written essay arguing China’s position on Xinjiang. Wang published it. By August 2021, she and three other members of the same group chat were amplifying the same Beijing-scripted essay across their respective websites (The Bureau).

In November 2022, Wang was elected to the Arcadia City Council. Sun served as her campaign manager. Sun then bragged to his Chinese handlers, in messages later seized by the FBI, that he had helped elect a “New Political Star” with connections to prominent California politicians. He reported her city council victory up the chain to PRC intelligence contacts. He asked Beijing for $80,000 to expand operations targeting “anti-China forces,” using her election as proof of concept (The Bureau).

In August 2023, Wang and Sun traveled together to China and met with PRC officials. Federal prosecutors describe the visit as a direct operational conduit between Beijing’s overseas apparatus and an American elected official (The Bureau).

Sun was arrested in December 2024. He pleaded guilty in October 2025 and is currently serving a four-year federal sentence. The Sun indictment did not name Wang. It identified her only as “Individual 1.” The FBI had been watching her for months (DOJ, DOJ Sun sentencing).

On April 1, 2026, federal prosecutors filed Wang’s plea agreement under seal. On May 11, 2026, it was unsealed. Wang resigned as mayor that afternoon. On May 29, 2026, she stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty. She will be sentenced October 6, 2026.

The defense from Wang’s attorneys, Brian Sun and Jason Liang, is that their client was deceived by “someone she believed to be her fiance.” It is, on its face, an absurd defense. She spent more than two years co-operating an explicitly Beijing-directed propaganda website. She traveled to China with him and met PRC officials. The FBI captured the messages he sent to his handlers describing her as their “New Political Star” who was helping them reach senior California politicians (NPR).

Beijing’s “whole society approach” to intelligence, as former DEA agent Nicholas Eftimiades explained to NPR, does not just target nuclear secrets. It targets local diaspora communities. It recruits city council members and mayors with the explicit hope that they will rise to higher office. Once installed, those officials can monitor dissidents inside the diaspora, surveil visiting Taiwanese delegations, and steer local government policy in directions Beijing prefers (NPR). Wang was not a one-off mistake. She was a designed product of a system. The system worked, right up until the FBI seized Sun’s phone.

Once Again

This is the kind of story that exposes both parties at once.

Republicans will tell you, accurately, that the case proves the threat from the Chinese Communist Party is no longer theoretical. They will be correct. Then they will spend the next six months blaming Democrats for being soft on China, and they will mostly mean the Democrats they want to defeat in November. They will not spend much time asking how their own party screens its candidates, vets their campaign treasurers, or audits the immigrant community PAC endorsements they are also chasing, because at the local level both parties chase those endorsements.

Democrats will tell you, accurately, that anti-Asian hysteria is real, that Chinese Americans are not Beijing’s agents, and that lumping a 59 percent Asian American city in with a single corrupt mayor would be a slander against tens of thousands of innocent residents. They will be correct. Then they will move on, because the alternative is sitting with the uncomfortable fact that the mayor in question pleaded guilty, that she is the first elected American official ever to do so, that her campaign was run by a former officer of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, and that a Democratic congresswoman, Rep. Judy Chu, accepted campaign donations from Wang and has not publicly returned them (Fox News).

Once again, our parties have failed us. One side will turn this into a culture war about loyalty and the other side will refuse to talk about it because there is no clean partisan version of the story. The result is the same in either case: the public learns almost nothing, and the next Arcadia is already underway in some other city of 55,000 people in some other state, with some other PAC, and some other “new political star” being cultivated by some other handler in some other group chat.

This is exactly the gap a centrist party is supposed to fill. Centercrats are the people who can say two true things at the same time. The Chinese Communist Party is running real operations against American elected officials right now. Anti-Asian bigotry is also real, and lumping every Chinese American in with one Beijing-directed mayor can never be tolerated. Both of those statements have to be on the page at the same time, or the country gets nowhere. The two-party system, as it is currently operating, purposely avoids putting these two statements on the same page.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late. The mayor of a wealthy California suburb just admitted in federal court that she was working for Beijing. She is the first. She will not be the last. The story deserved a six-month cable news loop. It got a five-minute local segment, and a sentencing date in October that most of the country will miss.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Yesterday’s issue of this report was about Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine. The leader of the Senate Democrats endorsed him. Bernie Sanders held his hand at a rally. Elizabeth Warren stayed with him. Ruben Gallego defended him on national television. Chris Murphy told Face the Nation he had not really followed the story. All of this happened after the Nazi tattoo, the six-woman sexting paper trail, and the antisemitic tweet that is still up.

Today’s issue is about a different Democrat in a different state. His name is Jonathan Windy Boy. He has been a member of the Montana Legislature for 23 years. He is 67 years old. He represents Box Elder, on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation. In Maine, the Democratic Party closed ranks around its accused candidate and pulled him across the finish line. In Montana, the Democratic Party publicly demanded that its accused senator resign, the Republican Senate President joined the call, the Senate Minority Leader joined the call, the legislature’s American Indian Caucus joined the call, and on May 27, 2026, 39 of the 50 sitting Montana state senators, from both parties, signed a public letter telling him to leave (Montana Free Press, KTVH).

That is 78 percent of the chamber. Republican and Democrat. Eight days ago.

Windy Boy has not responded to the letter. He has not resigned. He says the allegations are “a coordinated political smear.” He is still a state senator. He is still drawing his salary. He is still entitled to his vote. The four senators on the Senate Ethics Committee recused themselves from signing the letter so that they could investigate him later. Everyone else just signed.

A 39-senator bipartisan supermajority asked one man to leave the building. The man said no. That is where Montana is in June 2026, and that is the rare American political story where the institution did its job and the man inside the institution refuses to let the job finish.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what is happening in Helena.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” When 78 percent of your colleagues, from both parties, ask you to leave, the dominant act is not standing on due process. The dominant act is the one man overriding 39 elected representatives by simply refusing to go. The Constitution gives Windy Boy due process in a court of law. It does not entitle him to a Senate seat against the unified judgment of the chamber.

The second reads: “Limit Terms for Accountability. Impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment and ensure representatives remain accountable to voters.” Windy Boy has been in the Montana Legislature, in some seat, since 2003. Twenty-three years. He has cycled between the House and Senate so many times that his Wikipedia-style summary is just a list of chamber dates. The reason he believes he can outlast a 39-senator letter is the same reason he believes he can outlast every allegation since 2002: he has been in that building longer than most of the people writing the letter. Entrenchment is what lets a man treat a near-unanimous resignation demand as background noise. If Montana had real term limits on legislative service, this story might have ended in 2017, when the harassment was first substantiated.

The fifth reads: “Debate with Facts and Dignity. Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.” Calling a substantiated 2018 ethics complaint, an on-the-record accuser, and an underage abuse allegation “dirty politics” and “slanderous allegations” is bad-faith deflection. Jen Gross is a real former state senator with a real complaint that a real outside investigator substantiated in 2018. Brenda Russell is a real Pennsylvania woman whose underage daughter and niece are real. Calling those women political smears is not debate. It is the playbook.

Three principles, one senator, and one chair he will not vacate.

What the Record Actually Shows

Here is what is on the public record, all from named reporters at named outlets, none of it speculation.

In April 2026, Helena attorney Brian Miller, a Democrat running in the same congressional primary as Windy Boy, surfaced allegations by Brenda Russell, a Pennsylvania woman, that in July 2002 Windy Boy sent sexually explicit messages and nude webcam photos to her then-15-year-old daughter and her 15-year-old niece. Russell says the contact began on a family computer, that she warned Windy Boy in a phone call to leave the girls alone, and that he continued to send naked images afterward. She says the original encounter happened around a powwow at Fort Totten, North Dakota, where Windy Boy was the event emcee, and that he tried to get the teenagers to come to his hotel room at the Spirit Lake Lodge and Casino. Russell has been posting about it on her Facebook page since February 2026. Miller now represents her (Montana Free Press, April 16, Yellowstone Public Radio).

On May 8, 2026, former Montana state Sen. Jen Gross, a Billings Democrat who was the youngest member of the Montana Senate during her term, publicly attached her name to a 2018 sexual misconduct complaint she had filed anonymously against Windy Boy. The original complaint was investigated by Great Falls attorney Jean Faure. Faure’s March 2018 report substantiated the harassment, recommended discipline, and concluded, in language that has not aged a day, that “the offensive conduct is subtle but apparent. A pattern of these behaviors seems to be established.” Gross’s complaint covered texts Windy Boy sent her between August and October 2017, calling her “gorgeous” and “A wonderful sight for My Sore Eyes.” When she pushed back about boundaries, he replied, in writing, “Just, between you and me. You can step all over me and there are no boundaries.” The same Faure report also documented earlier inappropriate texts Windy Boy sent to a legislative staff member (Montana Free Press, May 8, Associated Press / MTPR 2019).

Windy Boy resigned his chairmanship of the State-Tribal Relations Committee in spring 2018 before the Republican House Speaker, Austin Knudsen, could remove him. Knudsen identified Windy Boy by name to the AP in 2019. No criminal charges were ever filed.

In May 2026, a former legislative staffer told reporters that Windy Boy had once shown her an explicit photo of himself (KTVH).

On May 13, 2026, Senate President Matt Regier (R-Kalispell) and Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers (D-Belgrade) issued a joint statement stripping Windy Boy of all interim committee assignments, including his seat on the School Funding Interim Commission. “Sen. Windy Boy still needs to do the right thing and completely resign from public office,” they wrote, citing “credible allegations dating back over two decades, including sexually explicit and harassing communication to minors and to legislative staff” (KLTZ).

On May 27, 2026, the bipartisan letter went out. Thirty-nine state senators, Republican and Democrat. “We recognize that you have a right to due process and the presumption of innocence,” the letter reads. “However, allegations of this nature, involving minors and abuse of position, carry serious implications for the credibility and functioning of the Legislature.” Four senators on the Ethics Committee did not sign so they could rule on him later. “This issue is not going to go away,” the letter continues, “and will undoubtedly continue to escalate the longer you choose to remain in office” (KTVH).

Windy Boy’s response, in a statement on May 6 when he reactivated his congressional campaign: “My enemies are making a lot of noise but just as before there have been no charges, no adjudication, this is all dirty politics, based upon rumors and slanderous allegations to influence election outcomes just weeks before voting begins.” He added that he has not “been afforded my constitutional rights to due process,” and that he is “innocent until proven guilty” (KTVH May 6).

That is the defense. There has been no court case, therefore there has been no wrongdoing. State Democratic Party Chair Shannon O’Brien answered it in plain English: “The credible allegations against Senator Jonathan Windy Boy are serious, longstanding, and disqualifying for public service.” Disqualifying does not require a courtroom. It requires a chamber and a conscience.

The chamber has spoken. The conscience is still missing.

Once Again

Here is what makes the Montana story so remarkable next to the Maine story.

In Maine, the Democratic Party leadership had every tool available to walk away from Graham Platner. They had the leader of their Senate caucus, the most famous progressive senators in the country, and the bully pulpit of the entire national party. They could have pulled the endorsement on the day the Nazi tattoo story broke. They could have pulled it on the day his wife’s report of the sexting trail was published. They could have pulled it after the Netanyahu tweet. They did not. The party stayed with the man because the seat was worth the man.

In Montana, the Democratic Party did the opposite. The state party chair called for resignation the day she learned of the allegations. The Senate Minority Leader called for resignation. The American Indian Caucus called for resignation. Thirty-nine of fifty senators called for resignation. The party did everything it is supposed to do. And it has not been enough, because the man in the seat does not have to listen.

That is the second failure of our two-party system, and almost nobody talks about it. The first failure, the Maine failure, is the one where the party protects the unfit candidate because the math says it should. The second failure, the Montana failure, is the one where the party tries to remove the unfit officeholder and cannot, because the rules of the chamber do not actually force a resignation when 78 percent of the chamber requests one. The senator goes home, ignores the letter, and shows up for the next floor vote.

Both failures end at the same place. The unfit man holds the seat. The voters who pay his salary watch it happen. The chamber writes a letter and the cameras move on.

The Republicans have spent ten years swallowing every disgrace that wore a red jersey. The Democrats spent yesterday and the day before that and the day before that defending a candidate with a Nazi unit tattoo. Today, the Democrats in Montana are doing the rare and honorable thing, demanding accountability from one of their own. Tomorrow, Windy Boy will still be a state senator, because nothing in the Montana Constitution allows 39 of his colleagues to force him out.

Once again, our parties have failed us. One party has lost the ability to say “this candidate is not qualified” out loud. The other party can say it, can vote it, can sign it, can publish it, and still cannot remove the man from the seat. The first failure makes you angry. The second failure makes you tired, because it tells you that even when the system gets the diagnosis right, the system cannot reliably finish the treatment.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late, because the alternative is what we have right now. A Maine Democrat with a Nazi tattoo on track to be his party’s nominee for the United States Senate. A Montana Democrat with two decades of substantiated and credible misconduct allegations refusing to leave the state Senate seat 39 of his colleagues asked him to vacate.

One of them is asking for your vote. The other is daring you to take his seat away. Both of them are still in the game, and the voters are now the only people left with the power to end either story.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Graham Platner is the Democratic Party’s nominee in waiting for the United States Senate seat from Maine. The primary is June 9, 2026, which is six days from the day this issue goes out. As of this morning, the leader of his party in the Senate, every prominent progressive in Washington with a microphone, and most of the people who claim to care about American character have all decided that a man with a Nazi paramilitary tattoo on his chest, a sexting scandal involving at least six women, and an antisemitic tweet sent less than 48 hours ago is the candidate they want carrying their flag.

This is not satire. This is the Democratic Party of June 2026.

On Monday, June 1, Platner’s official campaign account posted on X that “Senator Collins is bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.” The complaint, in plain English, was that Susan Collins accepts donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The translation, also in plain English, is the oldest libel in Western politics: the Jews control your senator (Wall Street Journal, RedState).

That tweet was the third scandal in a 30 day stretch. In October 2025, photos and video surfaced showing Platner with a chest tattoo that the Anti-Defamation League and The Maine Monitor identified as a Totenkopf, the skull-and-crossbones emblem of the Nazi SS-Totenkopfverbande, the unit that ran the concentration camps. Platner said he got it drunk in Croatia in 2007 and did not know what it was. A former top campaign staffer said he absolutely did (The Maine Monitor, Politico). On May 30, 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s own wife, Amy Gertner, had flagged sexually explicit text messages between her husband and roughly half a dozen other women to the campaign’s political director during the candidate vetting period (Wall Street Journal, New York Times).

A Nazi tattoo. Texts to six other women that his wife sent to his own campaign. A blame-the-Jews tweet aimed at the only senator currently standing between Donald Trump and a rubber stamp Senate. And yesterday, June 2, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood in front of cameras and doubled down on his endorsement. “As I said, I endorsed Graham Platner,” Schumer told reporters. “We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate” (Fox News via Facebook, Politico).

That is where the Democratic Party is in June 2026.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Four of them are buried under what is happening in Maine right now.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” Sticking with Platner is not a defense of the Constitution. It is a rejection of every basic vetting standard a party is supposed to apply to a person seeking lifetime entry into the world’s most powerful legislature.

The fifth reads: “Debate with Facts and Dignity. Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.” Posting “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu” about a sitting United States senator is not a fact. It is the dual-loyalty smear that has been used against Jews and people who support Jews for two thousand years, dressed up as a campaign tweet.

The sixth reads: “Seek Unity through Broad Support. Build policies that earn broad, lasting support.” When Sen. Bernie Sanders responds to a sexting scandal by saying “maybe as a nation we focus on issues more important than the Platner marriage,” and Sen. Ruben Gallego defends the candidate by saying he has “lived a very, you know, real experience,” they are not building broad, lasting support. They are telling everyone outside their narrow progressive base that nothing this man does is disqualifying as long as his policy positions are correct (Wall Street Journal).

The eighth reads: “Defend Our Freedom. Unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber, and economic threats.” Israel is one of those allies. A candidate with a Nazi unit tattoo who responds to scrutiny by blaming his opponent’s vote on “Benjamin Netanyahu” is not defending that alliance. He is testing whether anyone in his party is willing to enforce the principle.

Four principles, one candidate, and a Senate primary six days away.

What Happens When a Party Has No Floor

Here is what we know, from reporting in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Politico, ABC News, PBS NewsHour, The Maine Monitor, and Jewish Insider, all sources we have linked in this piece.

We know Platner got a tattoo of the SS-Totenkopf, the Death’s Head insignia worn by the unit that guarded Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and the rest. We know he says it was a drunken accident in Croatia in 2007 and he never knew what it meant. We know an acquaintance told Jewish Insider that Platner himself referred to it as “my Totenkopf” (Politico). We know his former campaign political director, Genevieve McDonald, wrote on Facebook, “Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.” We know that in October 2025 he announced he would cover it, then admitted there was no place in rural Maine to remove it, then chose a cover-up design instead (PBS NewsHour).

We know that on May 30, 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife had taken sexually explicit text messages from his phone, involving roughly half a dozen women, and brought them to the campaign’s then-political director, Genevieve McDonald, during the Labor Day weekend Bernie Sanders rally last year (Wall Street Journal). We know that when a reporter asked Platner directly if the story was true, he answered, “No, no. This is the amazing part. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer. I’m sorry, that’s frankly journalistic malpractice.” We know that when the reporter pressed him on whether he was confirming the messages did not exist, he pivoted to saying that what McDonald told the Times “is not true.” We know that his own wife told ABC News she stood by him and that they were in counseling (ABC News).

We know that on June 1, his official campaign account posted the AIPAC tweet, and that as of June 3 it has not been deleted.

We know that Sen. Schumer endorsed him publicly even after the tattoo story broke, and reaffirmed that endorsement the day after the AIPAC tweet (Politico). We know Sen. Bernie Sanders held hands with him at a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Portland on May 25 and has continued to back him after each scandal (Fox News). We know Sen. Elizabeth Warren is still with him. We know Sen. Ruben Gallego, asked on national television about the sexting reports, said Platner has “lived a very, you know, real experience” (Wall Street Journal).

We know Sen. Chris Murphy went on Face the Nation, was asked plainly whether Platner passes the character test, and answered, “Yeah, I mean I have not followed this story as closely as others have, but Graham Platner is somebody who served our country. He served his community. He’s also made mistakes and he has admitted that” (Washington Examiner). A United States senator was asked, on camera, whether a candidate with a Nazi tattoo and a six-woman sexting paper trail passes a character test, and his answer began with “I have not followed this story as closely as others have.” That sentence should be on a coffee mug in the Centercratic Party online store.

We know Sen. Cory Booker, the morning after the WSJ texts story broke, said on television, “I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer” (Washington Examiner, YouTube). We know Sen. John Fetterman, on June 2, became the first sitting Senate Democrat to publicly condemn Platner over the scandals (CNN via Facebook). We know Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts called the tattoo “personally disqualifying” weeks ago (Fox News).

Two Democratic senators willing to say the obvious. Three willing to defend the indefensible. One leader of the caucus doubling down. That is the floor of the modern Democratic Party in June 2026, and it is underground.

What is most painful is the response from the rank and file. In the comment thread on the Wall Street Journal editorial that ran yesterday, a reader named David Gronek wrote, “The fact that this guy made these texts doesn’t bother me near as much as the fact that he lies about them. The same way he lies about his tattoo and his knowledge of what it means.” A reader using the handle RM Marinace replied, “What about it has he lied about? He’s been very up front, and he and his wife are admitting to counseling for the issues he deals with in their marriage that are directly related to his service in our military” (Wall Street Journal Free Expression).

That is not one staffer. That is a voter. A voter who reads about a Nazi unit tattoo, a six-woman sexting trail, a wife who turned the texts in to the campaign herself, an AIPAC dog-whistle tweet, and a candidate who calls the New York Times reporting “journalistic malpractice,” and who responds: what has he lied about? That voter is going to walk into a polling place on June 9, and that voter is not alone.

Once Again

This is what tribal voting looks like at its terminal stage. A candidate’s morality, his honesty, his judgment, even the literal symbol of the regime that murdered six million Jews on his chest, none of it matters as long as he has the right letter after his name and the right opponent in the other column.

Democrats are doing what Republicans did with Roy Moore in 2017, what Republicans did with George Santos in 2022, what Republicans have done with Donald Trump every year since 2015. They are looking at a candidate they know has no business near a Senate seat, doing the math, and deciding that the seat is worth the man. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, hardly a friend of organized labor or single payer healthcare, named the rot accurately: “Their choice will also be a measure of how willing the Democratic Party is to indulge the ugly anti-Israel sentiment curdling in American politics” (Wall Street Journal).

Once again, our parties have failed us. The Republicans gave us a movement that absorbs every disgrace as long as the disgrace is on the winning team. The Democrats are now showing the country that they will do the same, in real time, in plain sight, for a Senate seat in a state with 1.4 million people. There is no party left that will simply say, “This man is not qualified. Find another.” That sentence used to be the most ordinary thing in American politics. In June 2026, it is the rarest.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late, because nobody inside either tent is going to do it for us. Six women, one Nazi tattoo, one AIPAC tweet, and a Senate primary on Tuesday. The Democrats are still in. The voters now decide whether the party has any floor at all, or whether the floor has finally given way for good.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

The Washington Legislature Took Their $4 Billion, Sent Half a Billion to a Climate Slush Fund, and Called It Budgeting

The Law Enforcement Officers’ and Firefighters’ Retirement System Plan 1, known in Olympia as LEOFF 1, was closed to new members in 1977. The cops and firefighters who paid into it across the next half century did the thing every politician in America tells working people to do. They put money in, decade after decade, and trusted the state to keep its end of the deal. By June 2024, the plan was 160 percent funded. The state actuary projected it would reach more than 200 percent by 2029. Roughly 5,945 retired first responders were receiving benefits from it. The fund did not have a hole. The fund had a surplus large enough to make a legislature with a hole in its own budget start to look at the surplus the way a hungry teenager looks at the last slice of pizza on the counter.

So Olympia ate the pizza.

On April 1, 2026, Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson signed Engrossed Second Substitute House Bill 2034 into law. The bill terminates LEOFF 1 on June 30, 2029, replaces it with a successor fund holding only 110 percent of projected liabilities, and reallocates the surplus, roughly $4 billion, to two places. About $569 million is earmarked for the state’s Climate Commitment Account. The rest, somewhere north of $3.4 billion, lands in the Pension Funding Stabilization Account, a holding tank from which lawmakers can draw to plug general budget holes during the 2027-2029 biennium (Reason Foundation, Wall Street Journal).

On April 30, 2026, nine retired first responders, led by former King County Sheriff and former Congressman Dave Reichert, filed a federal class action against the state, the Department of Retirement Systems, and its director, Kathryn Leathers, in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington (Hagens Berman, Seattle Weekly). The suit accuses Washington of violating the Contract Clauses of both the federal and state constitutions. According to the lawyers at Seattle’s Hagens Berman, this is the first time in American history a state has ever simply terminated a public employee pension plan.

The first responders who ran toward the calls now have to run toward a federal courthouse to get back the money they were promised. That is where Washington is in June 2026.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them are bleeding out on the floor of Olympia.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” HB 2034 is not compromise. It is a one-party majority terminating a contractual pension obligation that has been in force since 1969 in order to feed a different one-party majority’s spending priorities. The bill passed the House 55 to 39 on its first run, passed again 50 to 46 on the concurrence vote, and passed the Senate 25 to 22 (Washington State Legislature). Every yes vote in both chambers came from a Democrat. Every Republican voted no. That is not governance. That is domination with a roll call vote.

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Washington state law, specifically RCW 41.26.040(3), states plainly that “all funds held by any firefighters’ or police officers’ relief and pension fund shall remain in that fund for the purpose of paying the obligations of the fund.” That is one law for all of us, including the legislature. The Hagens Berman complaint quotes the statute, then alleges that HB 2034 “violates RCW 41.26.040(3) by requiring the transfer of at least $2.5 billion (and likely billions more) out of the LEOFF Plan 1, after which the money may be transferred to the general fund during the 2027-2029 fiscal biennium” (Hagens Berman press release). If “one law for all” means anything, it means the people who write the laws do not get to ignore them when the budget gets tight.

The seventh reads: “Govern with a Balanced Approach. Champion centrist solutions rooted in unity, fairness, and forward thinking.” There is a balanced way to handle a 160 percent funded pension. You could lower employer contribution rates and free up money in city and county budgets, where police and fire are actually paid. You could expand benefits for surviving spouses. You could leave the cushion in place against a market downturn, which is what cushions are for. What you do not do, if you are a centrist with a calculator, is terminate a 50 year old contract with retired cops and firefighters so that you can move $569 million into a separate fund nobody negotiated for. That is not balance. That is a raid wearing a green ribbon.

Three principles, one bill, $4 billion, a federal lawsuit, and an entire caucus that voted yes on all of it.

How a 160 Percent Funded Pension Becomes a Climate Slush Fund

Washington entered the 2026 session staring at a multi-billion dollar budget gap. The state’s tax revenue projections had softened. The Climate Commitment Account, funded by carbon allowance auctions under the state’s cap-and-invest program, was running short of what House Democrats had wanted to spend out of it. The Washington Policy Center, in a February 2026 analysis, summarized the House budget approach in one sentence: “The House partially follows that approach but then raids the LEOFF 1 pension fund to backfill the climate account” (Washington Policy Center). The Senate’s competing budget did not include the LEOFF 1 transfer. The Senate eventually folded.

The architect of the bill was Rep. Timm Ormsby, a Democrat from Spokane and the chair of the House Appropriations Committee. Ormsby reintroduced HB 2034 in the 2026 session after a 2025 version stalled. This time he moved it out of his own Appropriations Committee without a public hearing in that committee, and the House passed it on a 55 to 39 vote on the evening of Friday, February 13, 2026 (The Center Square, Washington State Council of Fire Fighters). The Senate took it up in Ways and Means later that month, passed it 25 to 22 on March 6, and the House concurred March 12. Ferguson signed it on April 1.

Ormsby, asked by the Washington State Standard whether the legal challenge his own bill invited might succeed, said the lawsuit “runs afoul of any court precedent.” In the same interview, he insisted, “Whatever pension those firefighters and law enforcement signed when they came into service, those benefits are guaranteed” (Seattle Weekly). That is the legislator who just rewrote the pension reassuring you that he didn’t rewrite the pension.

The numbers Ormsby’s bill actually moves are these. About 80 percent of contributions into LEOFF 1 came from the state. The remaining 20 percent was split between local government employers and the workers themselves. The plan was 160 percent funded as of June 2024 and projected to exceed 200 percent by 2029. HB 2034 caps the new fund at 110 percent of liabilities, sweeps the difference, and earmarks $569 million of it for the Climate Commitment Account, where it backfills the money the House wanted to redirect to a working-families tax credit (Reason Foundation, Washington Policy Center).

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, not normally a publication retired cops and firefighters get a lot of help from, called the move what it is. “On April 1, Washington’s Governor Bob Ferguson enacted House Bill 2034,” the Journal wrote. “Of this surplus, $569 million is directed to a ‘climate commitment account,’ while approximately $3.4 billion will be available for general spending by lawmakers starting next year” (Wall Street Journal). Translated out of editorial English: half a billion dollars of money set aside for retired first responders is being used to plug a hole in a climate program, and the rest of it is being parked in a vehicle the legislature can drain to plug any other hole it has.

The Washington State Council of Fire Fighters, which negotiated the only meaningful concession in the bill, was reduced to advertising what the bill does not do. “HB 2034 does not reduce benefits. HB 2034 does not change eligibility. HB 2034 does not alter pension formulas or COLAs. HB 2034 does not eliminate medical benefits” (Washington State Council of Fire Fighters). Every one of those sentences is true. None of them addresses the actual question, which is whether a state can simply walk into an overfunded pension trust and walk out with $4 billion.

Reichert, who paid into LEOFF 1 from his first day as a King County deputy in 1972, put the human version of it on the record. “The reasons for needing the money are suspect to us,” he told the Washington State Standard, “and it’s also offensive that they’ve just disregarded the emotional, physical trauma that these 5,500 remaining cops and firefighters have experienced throughout their career.” Then he said the line that has now traveled through every police union newsletter in the country. “It almost seems like elder abuse in a way” (Seattle Weekly).

A 75 year old retired sheriff is using the phrase “elder abuse” to describe what his own state government just did to his pension. That sentence should end somebody’s career. In Washington, in June 2026, it has not ended anybody’s.

Once Again

Every yes vote on HB 2034 in both chambers was a Democrat. That is one party’s failure in plain sight. The other party’s failure is quieter and, in the long run, just as damaging. Washington Republicans had no power to stop this bill, but the national Republican Party has had years to make pension protection a real federal floor and has chosen, again and again, to fight every other culture war first. The Contract Clause is in the Constitution. It has been there since 1789. It exists precisely to stop a temporary legislative majority from breaking the promises a previous government made to the people who served it. If that clause cannot protect a 160 percent funded police and fire pension from being raided to feed a climate slush fund, it cannot protect anything, and both parties have spent two generations letting it erode.

Meanwhile, the cushion is gone. LEOFF 1 used to have 60 cents on the dollar above what it owed its retirees. Starting June 30, 2029, it will have ten cents, and the rest will be sitting in the Pension Funding Stabilization Account waiting for the next legislator with a budget problem and a story about emergencies. The first time the stock market drops 20 percent in a year, those retired cops and firefighters are going to find out what 110 percent funding looks like the morning after. They will discover, the way Detroit retirees discovered, the way Puerto Rico retirees discovered, that “guaranteed” is a word politicians use right up until the moment they need the money.

Once again, our parties have failed us. Democrats wrote and passed a bill that violates their own state’s pension trust law to feed a climate program that has nothing to do with policing or firefighting. Republicans, locked out of the building, offered no national alternative and no federal backstop. The retired first responders are now in federal court arguing that a contract is a contract, and they have to hope a judge agrees with them before the 2027 budget writers get to work.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late, because nobody inside this Capitol is going to do it for us. The first responders ran into the burning buildings on the front end of the deal. The rest of us have to refuse to let Olympia walk out the back with their pensions on the way out.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

$8 Million in Gambling Money Walked In Right Behind Them, and Pennsylvania’s Senate Is What Was for Sale

On May 20, 2026, three Republican Pennsylvania state senators stood for reelection in the most expensive primary fight in the modern history of the chamber. None of them faced a serious challenger of their own creation. None of them faced a wave of grassroots anger. None of them faced an issue voters in their districts were demanding be solved.

What they faced was an auction.

Two gambling industries, fighting over how Pennsylvania will tax the next decade of slot machines, sports books, and so-called “skill games,” dumped more than $8.1 million into three Republican primaries through a daisy chain of shell PACs, dark-money nonprofits, and out-of-state mailboxes. The challengers they recruited included a professional cowboy, a masonry contractor, and a 32-year-old Army veteran working as a counselor. None of them had run for office before. None of them appeared to know they were being used as the human delivery vehicle for an industry tax fight.

Welcome to representative democracy, Pennsylvania edition, where the people writing your laws are the prize and the people on the ballot are the wrapping paper.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them are on trial in Harrisburg this month.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” Two gambling industries spending $8.1 million through a daisy chain of shell PACs to install or intimidate three state senators is not lobbying. It is the textbook extreme tactic by a special interest, repeated twice, in opposite directions, on the same ballot. The Pennsylvania Senate was not asked to compromise. It was put on notice.

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Underneath that principle sits a simpler idea every Pennsylvanian should be able to take for granted. The tax code is not for sale. The corner store owner who sells lottery tickets does not get to bid for her own tax rate. The retiree on a fixed income does not get to bid for hers. Neither do you. When a $2 billion industry can spend $3 million to recruit a cowboy in a Senate primary because the legislature would not give it a 16 percent tax rate, the cowboy is not the absurd part of the story. The 16 percent is.

The fifth reads: “Debate with Facts and Dignity. Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.” A skill games executive who chairs a political committee called “Protecting Our Democracy” and uses it to mail flyers attacking a Jewish state party chair with the Israeli flag draped across his face is not engaged in debate. He is engaged in laundering an industry tax fight through the most poisonous imagery he can find. There is no fact in it. There is no dignity in it. There is only the bad-faith tactic the principle explicitly prohibits.

Three principles, three violations, eight million dollars, two industries, one state Senate. The rest of this story is the receipts.

The Auction Floor

Pennsylvania has two gambling industries that hate each other and one legislature they both want to own.

On one side sit the licensed and taxed casinos and the sports betting giants, FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics Sports Book, who pay a 36 percent tax rate and follow state gaming rules. On the other side sit the so-called “skill games” terminals, the Pace-O-Matic machines tucked into gas stations, bars, and convenience stores across the commonwealth, which have operated for years in a legal gray zone, pay no state gaming tax at all, and pull in an estimated $2 billion a year. Governor Josh Shapiro wants to tax them at 52 percent. Senate Republicans floated 35. Pace-O-Matic, the company that builds them, supports 16. The skill games bill died in last year’s budget and is the fight that everybody in Harrisburg is now refighting.

So both industries did what industries do when a legislature will not give them what they want. They went shopping for new senators.

The targets were chosen with care. Sen. Lisa Baker of the 20th District in northeast Pennsylvania, Sen. Camera Bartolotta of the 46th in Washington County, and Sen. Chris Gebhard of the 48th in south-central Pennsylvania were all Republican incumbents in safe Republican seats. The primary, not the general, was where any vote on gambling taxes would be settled. Knock out the incumbent in May and you do not even have to pretend to court the general electorate in November.

So on the sports betting side, FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics funneled money into a federal super PAC called Win for America, which by March 31 reported $46 million on hand. Win for America moved money to American Conservative Fund. American Conservative Fund moved money to Win for Pennsylvania. All three committees, the Campaign Legal Center and Spotlight PA found, were registered within weeks of each other at the same northern Virginia address by the same individual. Win for Pennsylvania spent $5 million defending the three incumbents.

On the skill games side, Pace-O-Matic executives and the company’s own PAC fed money into Operators for Skill PAC, which fed money into a state political committee called Citizens Alliance and a federal super PAC of the same name. The state committee alone reported $1.5 million in the first months of 2026, 98 percent of it traceable to Pace-O-Matic. The federal version reported $1.3 million, two-thirds from the same source. That money paid for the mailers, the ads, and the field operation attacking the three incumbents. Total skill-games spending on the three primaries came in around $3 million.

Three state Senate primaries. Eight million dollars. Two industries openly bidding on the same three Republicans.

Sen. Bartolotta, who survived her primary, told reporters that somebody is “trying to take the Senate of Pennsylvania hostage.” Sen. Gebhard, who also survived, was more reflective. “Seeing the sheer power of third-party money,” he said, “we probably should be having a conversation on: ‘Is this a positive for the system and the people of Pennsylvania?’”

A Capitol lobbyist, granted anonymity by Spotlight PA to speak honestly, put it less politely. “It’s about special interests being told no, and the only path to retribution is to control the next generation of Senate leadership.”

That is not a legislature. That is a livestock auction with a press office.

The Cowboy, the Mason, and the Counselor

The three people who agreed to ride this money into battle are the saddest part of the story, because they did not appear to know they were the saddle.

In the 48th District, the skill games money found Clovis Crane, a professional cowboy and horse breeder from rural south-central Pennsylvania. More than $1 million flowed into his race against Sen. Gebhard. Crane lost.

In the 46th District, the money found Albert Buchtan, who owns a masonry firm in Washington County. He lost to Sen. Bartolotta.

In the 20th District, the money found Tyler Meyers, a 32-year-old counselor and U.S. Army veteran. Meyers told Spotlight PA, “It’s ridiculous that for someone like me to run, I have to get lucky with someone like [Citizens Alliance] being willing to fund my campaign in the first place. I’m a working-class man.” Meyers lost to Sen. Baker.

A cowboy, a mason, and a counselor walked into a Republican primary, and somebody else paid for everything. None of the three challengers ran on skill games tax policy. None of them ran on sports betting tax policy. The voters in those three districts were never asked, on the ballot or anywhere else, what Pennsylvania’s gambling tax rate should be. The voters were asked to choose between an incumbent and a stranger whose campaign was being run by a Virginia mailbox.

The industries did not need the challengers to win. The industries needed the incumbents to look over their shoulders. Sen. Gebhard now knows that if he votes the wrong way on the next skill games bill, Pace-O-Matic can drop another million dollars on him in 2030. Sen. Bartolotta knows the same. Sen. Baker knows the same. That is the entire point. The auction does not have to clear for the bid to do its work.

The Coleman Receipt

If anybody in Harrisburg doubted the trade was that direct, Sen. Jarrett Coleman of the 16th District has been kind enough to put it in writing.

In July 2025, Coleman published an op-ed defending the skill-games industry’s preferred tax treatment. Spotlight PA reported that he subsequently received $426,000 from Operators for Skill PAC. A sitting state senator wrote an op-ed in favor of a tax rate one industry desperately wanted and then collected $426,000 from that industry’s political arm.

Coleman is not on the ballot until 2028. That is not a defense. That is the schedule.

The Antisemitic Mailer Nobody Was Supposed to Trace

The ugliest moment of this primary belongs to a man named Joseph Calla, an executive at Capital Vending and, according to filings reviewed by Spotlight PA, a $156,000 donor to Operators for Skill PAC since 2017. Calla chairs a new political committee with the kind of name that should embarrass everybody who sees it: “Protecting Our Democracy.”

In the closing days of the primary, Protecting Our Democracy mailed Lehigh Valley voters a flyer attacking the Democratic frontrunner, Bradley Merkl-Gump, as “the hand-picked candidate of the corporate, Israel-first Democratic party boss and insiders.” The mailer overlaid an image of Pennsylvania Democratic Party chair Steve Santarsiero, who is Jewish, with the Israeli flag.

The point of the mailer was not to elect a Republican. The point was to push Democratic voters away from Merkl-Gump and toward a weaker candidate, Mark Pinsley, who would be easier for Coleman to beat in November. Pinsley won the primary. The strategy worked.

The strategy was funded by a man whose business is skill games terminals.

This is what happens when a state legislature becomes a corporate asset. Antisemitic mailers stop being a moral problem and start being a line item.

Once Again

Pennsylvania Republicans took the gambling industry money. Pennsylvania Democrats sat across the aisle and watched a Democratic primary get bent into a shape that benefited a skill games executive. Neither party has introduced legislation to close the shell-PAC chains that made any of this possible. Neither party has called for hearings on whether a state senator who writes an op-ed for an industry and then collects nearly half a million dollars from that industry’s PAC has a problem the ethics code should address.

Aaron McKean, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, described the mechanism plainly. Money laundered through chains of PACs leads to “a less informed vote at the end of the day. And that’s a real problem for our democracy.”

It is a real problem. Both parties know it is a real problem. Both parties prefer the problem.

When two industries can openly bid on three state senators, and the only question left is which industry’s preferred tax rate wins, there is no longer one law for all of us. There is one law for whoever wrote the bigger check, and a working cowboy, a working mason, and a working counselor sent home to wonder what just happened to them.

Once again, our parties have failed us. We have a primary system that runs on industry money, a campaign finance system designed to hide where the money came from, and two parties who treat both as features. We have to save our democracy before it is too late, because nobody inside this auction house is going to do it for us.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

CalPERS Would Not Audit Itself. The Retirees Did. Wait Until You Read What They Found.

If you live in California and you teach school, drive a fire truck, sweep a courthouse floor, or push paper in a county office, your retirement is parked inside the largest public pension fund in the United States. It is called the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Everyone knows it as CalPERS. It holds $630 billion. It serves 2.4 million people. And on May 22, 2026, a 255-page forensic investigation landed on the desks of every California legislator and showed that the fund has been quietly hemorrhaging money, hiding fees, and protecting Wall Street insiders for years.

The investigation was led by Edward Siedle, a former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney, and Chris Tobe, a respected pension analyst. It was paid for by the people with the most to lose, the Retired Public Employees’ Association of California, who passed the hat among their members and raised over $245,000 from 350 donations to hire an investigator their state government should have hired decades ago. The retirees did the work California’s Democratic legislature refused to do.

What Siedle found should end careers. What California’s political class did next should make every voter in the country pay attention. The same party who lectures the country about democracy and protecting working families is the one running interference for a $630 billion pile of public money that nobody is allowed to look inside.

This is what corruption looks like when it wears a blue jersey.

The Numbers Nobody Wants You to See

Let’s start with performance, because that is the only thing a pension fund exists to deliver.

CalPERS ranks in the bottom 15 percent of all 230 large public pension funds in the United States. Bottom 15 percent over five years. Bottom 15 percent over ten years. This is not a one-bad-year story. This is a fund that has been losing ground to its peers for a decade and counting, while paying its CEO and three other executives more than $1 million each per year to deliver those results.

CEO Marcie Frost responded to the Siedle report by calling it “an opinion piece full of baseless assertions and breathless language designed to make our members needlessly fear for the stability of their pensions.” She insisted CalPERS ranks in the top 5 percent of large pension funds. The forensic report, working from public filings and peer comparisons, says the opposite. Members are entitled to know which one is right. The CEO will not let them find out.

Roughly 9 percent of CalPERS’ assets sit in what the industry calls zombie funds. These are aging private equity partnerships that have stopped producing real returns but keep charging management fees every year. CalPERS keeps paying. CalPERS will not say how it values these holdings, because CalPERS will not let anyone audit the books.

When Siedle asked for the documents, CalPERS first sent him a broken link. Then, on April 29, 2026, the fund mailed him a DVD. A DVD. In 2026.

The Apollo Pipeline

Here is the conflict at the center of everything.

CalPERS pays an outside firm called Wilshire Associates to advise it on where to put the money. Wilshire is owned by two private equity firms, CC Capital and Motive Partners. Apollo Global Management, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, holds a 24.9 percent stake in Motive Partners. CalPERS, according to its own latest annual report, has $772 million invested in nine Apollo funds.

Read that again. The consultant who tells CalPERS where to invest is partially owned by Apollo. CalPERS pours money into Apollo. Apollo earns fees on the CalPERS money. Wilshire earns fees from CalPERS for advising. The circle closes. The retirees keep waiting for returns that never quite arrive.

Apollo has been collecting fees from CalPERS for more than 20 years. Some were routed through middlemen called placement agents. One of those middlemen was a man named Alfred Villalobos.

The Bodies in the Basement

Villalobos was a CalPERS board member from 1993 to 1995. After he left the board he set up a firm called ARVCO and went into business as a placement agent helping private equity firms win CalPERS contracts. Between 2005 and 2009 he collected approximately $50 million in fees. Apollo paid him $14 million alone to help land a $3 billion CalPERS investment. Federal prosecutors said Villalobos delivered some of that money to a former CalPERS CEO named Federico Buenrostro in paper bags and shoeboxes at a Sacramento hotel.

In 2014, Villalobos was indicted on federal bribery and fraud charges. Weeks before trial, in January 2015, he killed himself in Reno. Buenrostro pleaded guilty and in May 2016 a federal judge sentenced him to 54 months in federal prison. He had accepted more than $200,000 in cash bribes, a Lake Tahoe condo, and a $300,000 a year consulting job from Villalobos in exchange for steering CalPERS investments and forging documents that allowed Apollo to collect its commission on the $3 billion deal.

In 2020, CalPERS suffered yet another scandal when its Chief Investment Officer, Yu Ben Meng, resigned over allegations that he had personally approved a $1 billion investment in a firm in which he held shares. He left. The fund moved on. No independent investigator was appointed.

After Villalobos and Buenrostro, California passed some rules requiring placement agents to register as lobbyists. The state did not create an inspector general. It did not mandate a forensic audit. It did not appoint an outside watchdog with subpoena power. It treated the worst pension corruption scandal in American history as a one-off and went back to sleep.

Leon Black, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Money Trail

Apollo was founded by a man named Leon Black. In 2021, Black admitted he had paid Jeffrey Epstein more than $170 million for what he called tax advice. The founder of the firm collecting billions in fees from California’s teachers and firefighters paid the most notorious sex trafficker in modern American history $170 million for tax advice.

In February 2026, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors filed a formal complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, arguing that Apollo had not properly disclosed those Epstein payments to its investors. Two unions whose members include pension fund beneficiaries had to ask the federal government to investigate the firm their own pension fund was pouring money into. CalPERS did not file the complaint. CalPERS leadership did not even acknowledge it.

The Audit That Was Never Allowed

Here is where the Democratic-Party angle becomes inescapable.

California’s legislature is controlled by Democrats. The governor is a Democrat. The state treasurer and state controller, both of whom sit on the CalPERS board, are Democrats. The board itself is composed of public employee union leaders, appointees of state Democratic leaders, and those two statewide Democratic officials. There is no Republican veto pen to blame here. This is one party, in one state, with total control of every lever of pension oversight.

And here is what that party has done with that control.

The retiree group who paid for the Siedle investigation has previously introduced legislation to create an inspector general’s office for CalPERS. The legislation failed to pass. State Senator Dave Cortese of San Jose, a Democrat, introduced a bill this session that would have required private equity firms doing business with California’s public pensions to disclose basic information about their holdings. The Senate Appropriations Committee killed it. CalPERS staff opposed it, claiming with a straight face that letting beneficiaries see where their money goes would force the fund to raise its employer contribution rates by more than $6.1 billion per year. The legislators heard that argument and folded.

Compare California to New York. In 2009, the New York State Common Retirement Fund was rocked by a placement agent pay-to-play scandal nearly identical to the CalPERS one. By 2010, New York had established independent oversight, mandatory disclosure, and an inspector general with subpoena power. New York fixed it. California, run by the same party who runs New York, has spent 17 years refusing to.

This is not an accident. This is a design choice. The Democratic donor class in California overlaps significantly with the Wall Street firms collecting the fees. The public employee unions who endorse Democratic candidates also place leaders on the CalPERS board. The political incentives all point one way, which is toward keeping the books closed and the questions unanswered.

What the Retirees Are Owed

The 2.4 million Californians who paid into CalPERS did not sign up to fund Apollo’s fees. They did not agree to underwrite zombie partnerships. They did not consent to a consultant secretly owned by the firm collecting the largest checks. They were promised a pension. In exchange they accepted lower pay than their private sector counterparts and gave their working years to public service.

They are owed the truth. They are owed an audit. They are owed an inspector general. They are owed a CEO who answers questions instead of issuing press releases. They are owed a board who asks questions instead of rubber-stamping staff memos. They are owed a legislature who works for them instead of for the lobbyists who write the campaign checks.

Margaret Brown, the president of the Retired Public Employees’ Association who led the fundraising drive, told the Sacramento Bee that the CalPERS board “delegated almost all the decisions to the staff, and they don’t ask any questions.” She added, “That never would have happened if there was an independent inspector general inside CalPERS’ offices.”

She is right. The party in power knows she is right. And it has chosen, year after year, to let it continue.

The Wave

Once again, our parties have failed us.

Republicans in Washington have spent the last six months protecting a president’s family from tax investigators, steering Pentagon loans to the president’s son, and dropping bribery cases for billionaires who pledge investment dollars. The big national papers cover those stories around the clock.

But while the cable networks chase the federal sideshow, the largest public pension fund in the country has been quietly rotting under the watch of the other party. Democrats in Sacramento have killed inspector general bills, killed disclosure bills, and let four executives clear $1 million a year for bottom-15-percent results. They have protected Wall Street fee streams from the same retirees they claim to fight for.

Two-point-four million Californians, who built classrooms, put out fires, drove ambulances, and processed unemployment claims, are being told to trust a $630 billion black box run by people who will not open the books and overseen by politicians who answer to the donors collecting the fees.

This is not democracy. This is patronage with a pension fund attached.

The Centercratic Party’s fourth principle is One Law for All. That means one set of rules for the executive in the corner office and one set for the retiree on a fixed income. It means private equity firms who do business with public money have to answer the same questions as a contractor bidding on a public road.

The Centercratic Party’s eighth principle is Stewardship of Trust. Every public dollar carries a promise. Every pension contribution is a covenant between a worker and a state. When that covenant is broken, the trust does not just shrink. It disappears. And once it disappears, every other promise our government makes starts to look like a lie.

We must save our democracy before it is too late. That means fixing the institutions both parties have hollowed out while we were busy fighting each other on cable news. It means demanding California’s Democratic legislature pass an inspector general bill this session. It means demanding the CalPERS board produce, in plain English, every fee paid to every Apollo fund since 2000. It means demanding the resignation of any executive who responds to a 255-page forensic investigation with the phrase “opinion piece.”

The retirees of California raised $245,000 of their own money to find out what their government would not tell them. The rest of us owe it to them to read what they found, share it, and make sure that next election, the people who hid this answer for it.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Sources:

• Gretchen Morgenson, NBC News, “Nation’s largest public pension fund plagued by secrecy and underperformance, probe finds,” May 22, 2026

• William Melhado, Sacramento Bee, “External investigation of CalPERS recommends inspector general to oversee fund,” May 22, 2026

• Edward Siedle and Chris Tobe, CalPERS: America’s Misled and Misleading Pension Leader, Retired Public Employees’ Association of California, May 2026

• Los Angeles Times, “Ex-CalPERS official Villalobos commits suicide,” January 15, 2015

• U.S. Department of Justice, “Former CalPERS CEO Sentenced to 54 Months’ Imprisonment for Role in Corruption Conspiracy,” May 31, 2016

• CBS News San Francisco, “Former California Pension Fund CEO Given 4.5-Year Prison Sentence for Bribery,” May 31, 2016

• Capitol Weekly, “CalPERS and Villalobos: The end of private equity’s ‘golden years,’” September 1, 2016

• Institutional Investor, “Wilshire Associates Is Being Bought by Private Equity Firms,” October 2, 2020

• Adam Ashton, Jefferson Public Radio, “With more money than ever, California’s biggest pension funds are a political battleground,” May 11, 2026

• International Business Times, “Top Pension Fund Faces Fresh Scrutiny After Independent Probe Alleges Secrecy, Weak Returns,” May 2026

• Straight Arrow News, “Forensic Investigation Finds Major Issues at Nation’s Largest Public Pension Fund,” May 2026

I would like you to meet the Milwaukee Election Boss Who Says She Broke the Law to Save Democracy

On the morning of October 25, 2022, ten days before the midterm elections, the second-highest election official in the City of Milwaukee sat down at her city-issued work laptop, logged into Wisconsin’s public absentee-ballot portal, and requested three military absentee ballots in the names of three women who did not exist.

Their names were Holly Jones, Holly Adams, and Holly Brandtjen. Each came with a fabricated date of birth and a fabricated Social Security number. The official, Deputy Director of the Milwaukee Election Commission Kimberly Zapata, then opened a second screen inside WisVote, the restricted statewide voter registration database that only election administrators are permitted to access. She used her administrator-level credentials to look up the home address of Republican State Representative Janel Brandtjen, chair of the Wisconsin Assembly Elections Committee and one of the most prominent voices in the country promoting 2020 election conspiracy theories.

She routed the three fraudulent ballot requests through clerks in South Milwaukee, Shorewood, and Menomonee Falls. According to the appellate court that later upheld her convictions, she chose those municipalities specifically because she believed their clerks were “subpar” and would not catch the fraud. She had the three military absentee ballots mailed to Brandtjen’s house.

Brandtjen received them on October 27, photographed them, and posted them on social media. Two days later, Zapata’s supervisor sent her a news article about the discovery. Zapata wrote back, “She has a point.” On November 1, she admitted to her boss she had created the fake voters herself. The next day she was fired. Two days after that, the Milwaukee County District Attorney filed felony charges.

On May 12, 2026, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed her conviction on one felony count of misconduct in public office and three misdemeanor counts of election fraud. Her appellate defense, that she was a private-citizen whistleblower, that she had never personally taken possession of the ballots, that she was raising the alarm about real flaws in the system, was rejected on every point.

A Democratic election official, paid by Democratic city taxpayers, working in a city governed by Democrats, used her official credentials to commit documented election fraud. She did it, by her own admission, to prove that election fraud was possible. And in doing so, she handed every election denier in America the one thing they had been desperately searching for since November 2020: a real, court-documented case of an insider faking ballots from inside the system.

Let the Democratic Party of Wisconsin take a bow. This is whom they hired.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.”

Underneath that principle sits a simpler idea that any voter in any precinct in this country should be able to take for granted. The people who run our elections are not permitted to commit election fraud. Not for any reason. Not to make a point. Not to expose a flaw. Not because the other side is spreading lies. The badge, the laptop, the database, the access, none of it is a license. It is a trust.

The seventh principle reads: “Truth Over Spin. Decisions should be made with facts. Disagreements should be honest, not deceptive.” Kimberly Zapata told investigators, told her boss, and told a jury that she committed election fraud because she wanted “the truth to come out” about real vulnerabilities in the system. That is not truth over spin. That is fraud dressed up as journalism. A genuine whistleblower writes a memo, files a complaint, calls a reporter, testifies before a committee. A genuine whistleblower does not generate three fake voters, route their ballots through clerks she has personally identified as incompetent, and mail the evidence to the home of the politician she dislikes the most.

The eighth principle reads: “Stewardship of Trust. We do not own our offices. We hold them in trust for the people we serve.” Zapata held her office in trust for every voter in the City of Milwaukee, Republican, Democrat, and independent. She broke that trust on her work laptop, on city time, using credentials issued to her because the people of Milwaukee believed she would protect their elections rather than rig them, even just a little, even just to make a point.

The Sordid Details

The criminal complaint, the trial record, and the May 12 appellate opinion lay out a case that should disturb every American who has ever defended the integrity of our elections.

Zapata was 44 years old in October 2022, a veteran election administrator with administrator-level access to WisVote, a city laptop, and city credentials. Her job, as the appellate court put it, was “to ensure that elections ran smoothly and securely, including overseeing absentee voting.” She knew the system inside out.

She also worked in a commission that, like election offices across the country, had been receiving sustained harassment and death threats from 2020-election conspiracy theorists. By her own account to investigators, she was frustrated. She wanted, she said, to redirect the conspiracy theorists’ attention “from outrageous conspiracy theories to something that’s actually real.”

So she committed three felonies and three misdemeanors.

She chose Janel Brandtjen because Brandtjen was, in Zapata’s own words, “the most vocal election fraud politician that she knew.” Brandtjen had advocated for decertifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Wisconsin and had used her committee chairmanship to amplify conspiracy theories the courts, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, and a Republican-led nonpartisan audit had all rejected. Zapata’s plan was to expose the military-absentee process as exploitable and force the conspiracy crowd to focus on a real vulnerability instead of an imagined steal.

What she actually did was give them a gift.

When the ballots arrived, Brandtjen did not interpret them as evidence of a system that had caught itself. She interpreted them as evidence that someone inside the system had committed fraud. She was right. She announced it publicly. Election deniers across the country seized on the story. The Heritage Foundation added the case to its Election Fraud database, where it sits as exhibit number one in the argument that government insiders are rigging elections. Every conspiracy podcast and election-denial influencer who has spent the past five years telling Americans the system cannot be trusted now has a real conviction, of a real Democratic election official, who really did use her real credentials to fake real ballots, to wave in the air.

The prosecution presented the case to a Milwaukee County jury in March 2024. The jury deliberated and convicted Zapata on all four counts. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Kori Ashley sentenced her to nine months in jail, stayed in favor of 12 months of probation, 120 hours of community service, and a $1,000 fine on each misdemeanor count. She did not spend a day in state prison.

Zapata appealed. Her two arguments were, in essence, that she had not really committed election fraud because she never tried to vote the ballots herself, and that she had not really been acting in her official capacity because she was operating as a private-citizen whistleblower.

The Court of Appeals rejected both, unanimously. On the fraud count, Judge Geenen wrote that “obtaining” a ballot under Wisconsin law includes constructive obtainment, not just physical possession. Zapata “controlled both the names under which the ballots would be generated and the destination to which those ballots would be sent.” On the misconduct count, the court found what it called a “material connection” between her conduct and her public office. She used her work laptop. She used her employee credentials. She used her administrator access to WisVote. She used her inside knowledge of which municipal clerks were less likely to catch fraud. None of that, the court said, was the work of a private citizen.

She had also tried to invoke the rule of lenity and a First Amendment defense. The court refused to even reach those arguments, ruling she had forfeited them by failing to develop them properly.

The conviction stands. The probation continues. The damage to public confidence in our elections, on the other hand, will outlast the sentence by decades.

The case also did not happen in a vacuum. Just weeks before the appellate ruling, a Wisconsin man named Harry Wait was convicted of fraud and identity theft for requesting absentee ballots in the names of Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason during the same 2022 election cycle. Wait was a private citizen on the right. Zapata was a Democratic election official on the left. Two people, opposite sides of the spectrum, both convinced they were exposing fraud, both convicted of committing it.

That is not a system in good health. That is a system in which trust has decayed so far that people on both sides have started rigging elections to prove that elections are being rigged.

Our Parties Have Failed Us Again

The fourth principle of the Centercratic Party, One Law for All, is not a slogan. It is the load-bearing wall of a republic. When a deputy elections director can use her official credentials to fake military ballots and send them to the home of a politician she dislikes, the wall is cracking from a side most Democrats refuse to admit it can crack from.

The Democratic Party has spent the past five years, correctly, calling out Republican-led efforts to undermine confidence in our elections. The voter intimidation. The frivolous lawsuits. The fake electors. The cynical drumbeat of “rigged” and “stolen” aimed at outcomes the courts had already settled. All of that has been real, and all of it has been damaging.

Then a Democrat inside the Milwaukee Election Commission, on her work laptop, on city time, did the one thing the conspiracy theorists had spent two years failing to prove anyone was actually doing. She rigged a small piece of the system. And she did it to prove the system could be rigged.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party did not defend her. She was fired within 48 hours. The Democratic mayor of Milwaukee condemned her on the day she was charged. There was no campaign to overturn the conviction, no fundraising appeal in her name, no martyr narrative. That is the bare minimum, and the party deserves no parade for clearing it.

But the broader Democratic message machine has spent the last three years pretending this case did not happen. Search the press releases of the national party committees from 2022 through this month. You will find thousands of statements about Republican attacks on election integrity. You will find almost nothing on Kimberly Zapata. She is the most inconvenient data point for the party’s preferred story about who threatens American elections, so the party looked away.

The Republican Party has failed too. The conspiracy ecosystem has cited the case relentlessly, but no serious Republican leader has used it the way it should be used, as a bipartisan call to professionalize election administration, raise the criminal penalties, and harden access controls on systems like WisVote. The case has been weaponized, not addressed.

The 45 percent of Americans who belong to neither party did not vote for any of this. We voted for elections we could trust, run by professionals who do not have personal scores to settle on the city’s dime. Kimberly Zapata broke that trust. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has now told the country, on the record, that she broke it as a public official, using her official credentials, for reasons no court was willing to dignify as whistleblowing.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Meet the Republican Party’s Newest Senate Nominee

On April 16, 2026, in a McLennan County courtroom in Waco, Texas, a prosecutor from the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stood up and proposed that a man accused of repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy should serve a total of one day in jail. One. Day.

The defendant, Waco attorney Adam Dean Hoffman, would plead guilty to two misdemeanors, “indecent assault” and “display of harmful materials to a minor.” He would not have to register as a sex offender. He would not surrender his Texas law license. He would walk out of court that afternoon a free man, having served the day he spent in jail after his original arrest before bonding out.

The judge, Roy Sparkman, stared at the prosecutors. “Somebody want to explain this to me?” After listening, he said it again, slower. “One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it.”

No one could. After a recess, the deal was revised to 30 days and a surrendered law license. The victim’s mother, who had earlier agreed to the deal under pressure from the prosecutors, told the judge at the April 27 sentencing hearing that 30 days was not enough either. “He’s dangerous,” she said. “This isn’t justice, and I can’t do it.” Sparkman pushed the sentence to 60 days. Hoffman was released from the McLennan County Jail in under 30 days, on May 25, for good behavior.

That was the same day, give or take a few hours, that Texas Republican primary voters went to the polls and made the man whose office offered this deal their nominee for the United States Senate. On May 26, with Donald Trump’s last-minute endorsement and a turnout heavy on the MAGA base, Ken Paxton crushed sitting Senator John Cornyn 64 to 36 percent, a margin of nearly 28 points. Cornyn had spent the final weeks of the campaign running ads about Paxton’s handling of this exact case. They did not move the needle.

Let the Republican Party of Texas take a bow. This is whom they chose.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.”

Underneath that principle sits a simpler idea that any parent in any Texas town would recognize. A child who has been hurt by an adult is entitled to a justice system that takes that hurt seriously. A prosecutor who has accepted the trust of the State of Texas is supposed to fight for that child, not bargain her away to spare an accused man’s law license.

The seventh principle reads: “Truth Over Spin. Decisions should be made with facts. Disagreements should be honest, not deceptive.” The Attorney General has spent two weeks refusing to address basic questions from state legislators, victims’ advocates, and reporters, while his political operation runs on the message that he is the only candidate willing to fight for ordinary Texans. That is not truth over spin. That is the spin.

The Sordid Details

Here is what the Texas Tribune and The Texas Newsroom established through hundreds of pages of court records and more than a dozen interviews, in a deep investigation published May 19.

The case began with a young boy. Texas reporting protocols protect his name, so let it be enough to say he was abused as a child, that he told an investigator Adam Hoffman raped him and showed him pornography, and that he testified about what happened to him at trial in the summer of 2025. The Waco police investigation, by the Tribune’s account, was botched at the start when a regular officer interviewed the boy instead of a trained child abuse expert. The case still produced a trial.

The trial ended in a hung jury after nine hours of deliberation. The lead juror sent a note to the judge that read, “Deliberations are not productive at this point.” Of the twelve jurors, seven believed the boy’s testimony and the forensic evidence proved Hoffman’s guilt. Five were leaning toward not guilty. Under Texas law, the Attorney General’s office, which had taken the case three years earlier after the elected local district attorney recused himself, was free to retry Hoffman on the original charge of continuous sexual abuse of a young child.

It chose not to.

Instead, Paxton’s prosecutors, Brenda Cantu and Dorian Cotlar, approached the boy’s mother. They told her the office could move forward without her consent, because they represent the State of Texas, but that they would prefer her agreement. They proposed the one-day plea. She prayed about it. She agreed. She said later, in a quote that should be carved into the wall of every Attorney General’s office in America, “We were put in an impossible situation. How do you trust the prosecution to go back to a case that they want to plead out when they’re the ones that are supposed to fight for it, and they don’t want to do it?”

The deal might have ended quietly there. It did not, because Judge Sparkman refused to accept it. He pushed for 30 days. By the April 27 sentencing hearing, the mother had changed her mind and told the court that 30 days was not enough. Sparkman raised the sentence to 60 days. Hoffman was out in under 30.

Then the judge said something that would be repeated, in shock, in every newsroom in Texas. “I’m seeing a pattern here that is concerning me,” Sparkman said. “If they get a mistrial, all of a sudden it’s just a little misdemeanor with a slap on the hand.”

He pointed to two examples. Seth Sutton, a Waco attorney charged in 2020 with hiring a hit man on a man he believed had molested his stepdaughter, originally facing a first-degree felony that could have meant life in prison. The AG’s office took the case after the local DA recused. The trial hung. The AG’s office dropped the felony and let Sutton plead to a misdemeanor, “terroristic threat,” with a four-day jail sentence. Rakim Sharkey, charged in 2017 with continuous trafficking of two girls and an adult woman, facing decades. The AG’s office tried it, lost to a mistrial when COVID infected the courtroom, and pleaded the case down to probation with no sex offender registration. Sharkey was rearrested in 2025 for a string of new felonies, his probation revoked. He is now serving 22 years.

A pattern, the judge said. Trial. Mistrial. Misdemeanor. Slap on the hand. Three serious felony defendants, three Attorney General prosecutions, three sweetheart deals.

On May 14, two Republican state representatives, Pat Curry of Waco and Jeff Leach of Plano, the same Jeff Leach who led the Texas House investigation that resulted in Paxton’s 2023 impeachment, demanded answers. “A Texas child was systematically groomed, targeted, abused, and assaulted by Adam Hoffman,” Leach said. “This is totally unacceptable for this to have happened and the people of Texas should be outraged.” Leach had already sent a letter to Paxton’s office calling the deal “incomprehensible.” Curry, whose district includes the courtroom, said it plainly. “It’s certainly not lost on me how suspicious this looks.”

Even John Cornyn, the man Paxton was about to defeat at the polls, called it out. “Predators who commit these crimes tend to repeat them over and over again, until stopped,” Cornyn said. “Paxton could have stopped this one, but instead cut him loose to reoffend over and over again, putting more children at risk.”

Paxton’s office did not respond. It still has not responded. It pointed reporters to a letter the two prosecutors wrote to Leach, which said the boy “preferred to move on with his life and prioritize his mental and emotional health.” That is the entire public defense, as of this writing, from the Attorney General of the State of Texas, for why a man accused of repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy will spend less than a month in jail and will not be on any sex offender registry in this country.

Twelve days after that press conference, Texas Republican primary voters made Ken Paxton their nominee for United States Senate. Within hours, Cornyn-aligned groups quietly scrubbed their attack ads, including ads featuring the Hoffman case, from social media. Within a day, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which had spent the runoff calling Paxton’s behavior “repulsive and disgusting,” issued a statement attacking the Democratic nominee and made no mention of Paxton at all. The party that called him repulsive on Monday endorsed him on Wednesday.

This is the man Texas Republicans now want sitting in the seat once held by Lyndon Baines Johnson. A man under felony indictment for nine of his eleven years as Attorney General. A man impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House on a 121 to 23 vote in 2023, with eight of his own senior aides having reported him to the FBI for bribery and abuse of office. A man whose wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce in July 2025 on “biblical grounds.” A man whose office, the highest law enforcement office in the state, just gave a child sex abuser less than 30 days behind bars and refused, in writing, to explain why.

This is whom Texas Republicans chose. Knowing all of it. Choosing it anyway.

Our Parties Have Failed Us Again

The fourth principle of the Centercratic Party, One Law for All, is not a slogan. It is the load-bearing wall of a republic. When a state’s Attorney General can offer a child sex abuser a one-day plea, refuse to explain it for two weeks, and then have his own party’s voters reward him with a Senate nomination, the wall is cracking.

The Republican Party of Texas has now told the country, on the record, that none of this disqualifies a man from federal office. Not the indictments. Not the impeachment. Not the eight senior aides who reported him to the FBI. Not the silence on the Hoffman case. Not the boy. The party that calls itself the law and order party looked at all of it on May 26 and said yes, give him the Senate seat.

The Democratic Party in Texas has failed too. It has been so weak for so long that the contest for Senate this November is starting roughly even in the polling despite Paxton’s record. A healthy two-party system would have made this race unwinnable for a man like him. Ours did not.

The boy in Waco does not have a party. He has a mother who told a judge that what Paxton’s office did was not justice. He has a judge who said, from the bench, that he was seeing a pattern. He deserved a system that fought for him. He did not get one.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

When Justice Becomes a Performance, the Curtain Always Slips

In a federal courtroom in Chicago on the afternoon of May 21, 2026, a United States Attorney stood up and admitted, in front of a federal judge, that the prosecutors who worked for him had broken the rules in front of a grand jury, and then redacted the transcripts to keep her from finding out. The judge, April Perry, sat on the bench and told him she had read thousands of grand jury transcripts in her career, including transcripts of presentations by United States Attorneys themselves, and that what she had just seen in his office’s redacted transcripts was unlike anything she had ever encountered before.

“I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” Perry said.

The case she was dismissing involved four people. Their names are Kat Abughazaleh, Andre Martin, Brian Straw, and Michael Rabbitt. Two of them were Democratic Party candidates or officials. One had run for Congress. One was an Oak Park village trustee. One was a Democratic committeeperson. They had been protesting outside the Broadview ICE detention facility in suburban Chicago in late September 2025. Federal prosecutors charged them with felony conspiracy and misdemeanor counts of impeding a federal officer. Each was facing the possibility of federal prison.

On May 21, every charge against them was dismissed with prejudice, meaning the government can never bring them back. The reason was not innocence in the abstract. The reason was that the people who were paid by the taxpayers of the United States to bring the case had been caught manipulating the grand jury process to manufacture an indictment that the first grand jury had already refused to give them.

This is not a Republican story or a Democratic story in the partisan sense. It is a story about what happens when the most powerful prosecutorial machine on earth is pointed at the political opponents of the people running it. And it is, as a New York Times analysis published on May 26 confirmed, at least the third time since November 2025 that a federal judge has caught Trump administration prosecutors doing exactly this.

What the Judge Found in the Transcripts

The Centercratic Party was founded on nine governing principles. The fourth principle reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.”

That principle is built on a simple premise. The grand jury, which is enshrined in the Fifth Amendment, exists for one reason: to stand between an ordinary citizen and the awesome power of a federal prosecution. It is the people, not the prosecutor, who decide whether the evidence is strong enough to put a person on trial. When prosecutors manipulate that process, they have not just bent a rule. They have hollowed out a constitutional right.

According to Judge Perry’s findings, read aloud in court and later released in a 60-page unsealed transcript first published by the Chicago Sun-Times, the prosecutors in the Broadview case did four things.

First, they engaged in what the law calls “vouching.” The lead prosecutor told grand jurors, in effect, that they should trust her personally and that her office would never bring an unjust case. Defense attorney Christopher Parente called it “a 101 no-no for any prosecutor.” Vouching is forbidden because it replaces the jurors’ independent judgment with the prosecutor’s reputation.

Second, the prosecutors held substantive conversations with grand jurors outside the grand jury room itself, away from the official record. What was said in those private conversations is still not fully known.

Third, and most damning, the first grand jury that heard the case refused to indict. It returned what is called a “no true bill,” an outcome that has historically been rare and that signals the panel did not believe the evidence supported charges. Rather than accept that result, prosecutors then re-presented the case to a second grand jury, but only after they had excluded the jurors who had voted against indictment from the second deliberation. With the dissenters removed, the diminished grand jury returned the indictment the prosecutors wanted.

Fourth, when defense attorneys began to suspect something was wrong and demanded the transcripts, the United States Attorney’s Office redacted them. Judge Perry initially believed about 30 lines had been removed. Defense attorney Christopher Parente told the court that prosecutors had actually concealed entire pages and never informed the judge of the scope of the redactions.

“I was incredibly shocked by the redactions that were made,” Perry said in the closed hearing. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

When the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Andrew Boutros, finally appeared in her courtroom to dismiss the case, he claimed he had been unaware of the conduct until late April. He told the judge he did not believe the prosecutors had acted with intent to mislead her. Then, in nearly the same breath, he defended the underlying charges and called the protesters’ behavior “unacceptable in a civilized society.”

Perry cut him off: “You are significantly undercutting your mea culpa here by standing behind the charges and continuing to vilify these particular defendants.”

She also indicated that sanctions against the United States Attorney’s Office, including potential ethical violations referrals, are still on the table.

The Pattern Is Now Visible to Anyone Willing to Look

What happened in Chicago is not an isolated incident. It is the third time in seven months that a federal judge has formally accused Trump-era Department of Justice prosecutors of grand jury misconduct.

In November 2025, a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia accused the Justice Department of a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” in its prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey. The judge cited “fundamental misstatements of the law” by the prosecutor before the grand jury, the use of potentially privileged communications during the investigation, and “unexplained irregularities” in the grand jury transcript itself. That case was later dismissed entirely after a federal judge ruled that the interim United States Attorney who had filed it, Lindsey Halligan, had been illegally appointed. Comey was then re-indicted in April 2026 in a different jurisdiction over a now-deleted Instagram photograph of seashells arranged on a beach.

In May 2026, a federal judge in Nashville dismissed charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia after finding “presumptive vindictiveness” by federal prosecutors. The judge cited the timing of the indictment, public statements by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and the unusual personal involvement of senior Justice Department officials in a routine criminal case as evidence that the prosecution had been thoroughly tainted by political motivation.

Now Chicago. A New York Times analysis published on May 26, 2026, summarizing the pattern, noted that career prosecutors are openly resisting politically directed cases, that judges are catching grand jury irregularities at a rate without modern precedent, and that the Justice Department’s senior leadership has been pressuring line prosecutors to bring weak cases against perceived political enemies and to use aggressive tactics to push them past skeptical grand juries.

The Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice, the post-Watergate unit that prosecuted public corruption regardless of party, has been reduced from 40 prosecutors to 2 since January 2025. The Office of Government Ethics has been without a Senate-confirmed director for more than 16 months. The internal guardrails that used to catch this kind of behavior before it reached a courtroom have been systematically dismantled.

What is left are individual federal judges, sitting one case at a time, doing what they can with the evidence in front of them. In Chicago, Judge Perry happened to be one of them. She is a Biden appointee who spent years working in the same United States Attorney’s Office that she has now publicly rebuked. She is also the same judge who, in October 2025, blocked President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois, a decision the administration unsuccessfully asked the Supreme Court to overturn. Without her insistence on reading the unredacted transcripts, the misconduct in this case would almost certainly never have come to light. The defendants would have gone to trial. Some of them would likely have been convicted. The cover-up, in defense attorney Nancy DePodesta’s words, was “absolutely shocking.”

Once Again, Our Parties Have Failed Us

The Department of Justice exists for a reason. It enforces the laws that Congress passes against the people who break them. When it works, it is the most important guarantor of a free society on the planet. When it is captured by a political faction and pointed at that faction’s opponents, it becomes the most dangerous weapon a government can hold.

What happened in Chicago is a warning. It is the third such warning in seven months, and the warnings are getting louder.

The Republican Party, which now controls every elected branch of the federal government and the agencies that report to them, has chosen to look the other way. There has been no serious congressional oversight hearing into the Comey grand jury misconduct. There has been no serious congressional oversight hearing into the Abrego Garcia vindictive prosecution finding. There will almost certainly be no serious oversight hearing into the Broadview Six misconduct, despite the fact that a federal judge has now told a United States Attorney, on the record, that what his office did was conduct she had never seen before in thousands of grand jury transcripts.

The Democratic Party, which controlled the Department of Justice for the four years before this, has also failed. The conditions that produced this moment, including the deep politicization of senior leadership and the steady erosion of public trust in the line prosecutors who do the actual work, did not begin in January 2025. Both parties have spent years treating the Justice Department as a prize to be captured rather than an institution to be defended. The Republicans simply went further with what the Democrats had built, and the result is a system that produced four indicted American citizens whose only proven offense was protesting in the wrong place, in front of a grand jury that was rigged because the first grand jury said no.

The fourth principle of the Centercratic Party, One Law for All, is not an abstraction. It is the difference between a republic and a regime. A grand jury that can be reshuffled until it gives the prosecutor the answer he wants is not a grand jury at all. A transcript that can be redacted until the judge cannot see what happened is not a record at all. A Department of Justice in which career prosecutors are pressured to bring cases that career prosecutors believe should not be brought, and in which the only thing standing between an American citizen and federal prison is whether a single federal judge happens to insist on reading the unredacted record, is a Department of Justice in name only.

The 45 percent of Americans who belong to neither party have no structural reason to look away from what Chicago is showing us right now. They are not Republicans defending an administration. They are not Democrats hoping the next election will fix what the last election broke. They are citizens who understand that One Law for All is supposed to mean exactly what it says, and that a country in which prosecutors can stack the grand jury and hide the evidence is a country sliding toward something the founders fought a revolution to prevent.

That has to change. And it will not change from inside the parties that built this system. It will change when the center decides it has had enough.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Kelvin Lovejoy worked for the Blue Hills Civic Association for 18 years. He helped run the youth summer employment program that placed hundreds of Hartford teenagers in jobs every summer, keeping them off the streets and building their futures. On the night of April 8, 2025, a message arrived in his inbox telling him he was fired, effective immediately. No warning. No severance. No explanation beyond the words “unforeseen financial challenges.”

“We were like, this can’t be real,” Lovejoy told the Connecticut Mirror.

It was real. And the reason Blue Hills Civic Association, a 62-year institution in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Hartford, collapsed overnight is now the subject of a federal grand jury investigation, a forensic audit that used the words “pervasive fraud,” and a growing political scandal that has cast a shadow over Connecticut’s Democratic Party and the one-party government that made all of it possible.

Built on Nine Principles. This Story Breaks One of the Most Fundamental.

The Centercratic Party was founded on nine governing principles, and the fourth of those principles is this: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.”

That principle is built on a simple premise: that no person in public life, regardless of how long they have served, how many votes they have delivered, or how well-connected their friends are, gets to use the machinery of government as a personal financial instrument. The law that applies to everyone else applies to them.

What you are about to read is a story about what happens when one party controls every lever of state government for two decades, there is no meaningful political competition to force accountability, and a senator learns that the candy store is open and he has the keys.

The Senator, the Nonprofit, and the Pass-Through

State Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, has represented Hartford’s North End for more than 20 years. He sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which gives him the power to direct money from the state budget to nonprofit organizations in his district through a process called legislative earmarks. Most citizens have never heard of an earmark. It is the mechanism by which an individual legislator can write a specific organization’s name into the state budget and send them taxpayer money, often without a public hearing, a competitive bid, or any formal explanation of what the money is for.

Between 2022 and 2025, McCrory used that power to direct more than $11 million in legislative earmarks to the Blue Hills Civic Association. Blue Hills was a beloved community institution with a 62-year track record of serving Hartford’s North End. But under McCrory’s influence, it quietly became something else: a pass-through account for state taxpayer money, flowing to organizations and individuals of McCrory’s choosing, managed with his instructions, and largely invisible to the public.

Internal records reviewed by the Connecticut Mirror show that Blue Hills executive director Vicki Gallon-Clark described the organization in one email as a “conduit” through which McCrory could “funnel more funding” into the community. Meeting minutes show McCrory personally meeting with the Blue Hills board in September 2023 to explain his plans to use the nonprofit to distribute millions of dollars to other organizations. Board members later testified that those decisions were “determined with Sen. McCrory.”

He once walked into his own legislative office with a community nonprofit leader, called Gallon-Clark on the phone, and wired $10,000 to the nonprofit on the spot. He organized a campaign event at which he presented a giant novelty Blue Hills check to a local organization during a competitive Democratic primary. He spent $21,000 of state grant money to rent out Hartford Stage for a play premiere he attended alongside his close associate Sonserae Cicero. He spent another $20,000 on an event he co-hosted called “When Black Men Lead.”

None of that money was McCrory’s. It belonged to the taxpayers of Connecticut.

The Consulting Firm Nobody Could Justify

Of all the pass-through payments McCrory directed from Blue Hills, the ones flowing to Cicero’s consulting firm drew the most scrutiny and ultimately led to the FBI.

Cicero is the founder of the Society for Human Engagement and Business Alignment, known as SHEBA. Between 2021 and 2025, businesses controlled by Cicero received a total of roughly $3.4 million that flowed through Blue Hills and other state-funded programs connected to McCrory.

Blue Hills’ own outside auditors raised the alarm internally. In March 2024, an accountant named Matthew Burry emailed Gallon-Clark to warn that awarding Cicero’s company $600,000 without a competitive bidding process was a serious problem, that the contract of that size, funded entirely with state money, should have been put out to bid, and that it was unclear how Blue Hills could “justify a $600,000 consulting expenditure.”

Five minutes after receiving that email, Gallon-Clark forwarded it to McCrory.

There is no record of what McCrory said in response. What is known is that the payments continued.

The forensic audit released in January 2026, commissioned by the state Department of Economic and Community Development and conducted by a certified accounting firm, found that SHEBA was paid $14,000 to train Blue Hills’ board members. When auditors interviewed the board members, they found no evidence that any training had taken place, in any format. The audit concluded that multiple programs Cicero was paid for had left “no evidence” of having occurred.

The audit’s overall conclusion about Blue Hills and the entities connected to it was not ambiguous. It found “pervasive governance failures, systemic internal control weaknesses, and a pattern of conduct that strongly suggest potential fraud and misappropriation of public funds.”

The Cover-Up That Kept the Money Flowing

In October 2024, $300,000 of state grant money was stolen from Blue Hills through a fraudulent wire transfer. When that theft was discovered, the Blue Hills executive director did not notify the state agency that had sent the money. She did not notify the nonprofit’s own board of directors. She notified Sen. McCrory.

Internal records show that McCrory was told about the stolen $300,000 weeks before state officials and the Blue Hills board learned what had happened. The forensic auditors who later reviewed those records wrote that they were “unable to determine the rationale for informing Senator McCrory prior to DECD,” which is the state agency responsible for the funds.

During those weeks, the state continued sending federal dollars to Blue Hills, unaware that a fraud had already occurred and unaware that the senator they trusted to oversee these funds had known about it all along.

When the state finally discovered what happened, it froze all funding to Blue Hills. The nonprofit, which had $11 million flowing through it just months earlier, ran out of money. On April 8, 2025, every employee received a termination notice by email. The North End senior center shut down. The youth summer employment program that had placed hundreds of Hartford teenagers in jobs every summer disappeared overnight. The city of Hartford had to scramble to replace programs that McCrory’s influence had built and then destroyed.

The people who paid the price were the residents of Hartford’s North End. The people that McCrory had represented, and the public had trusted him to serve, for more than 20 years.

The Ghost Nonprofit and the Candy Store

McCrory’s operation was not an isolated incident. It was a window into a broader pattern.

In October 2025, Connecticut’s Republican minority leaders held a press conference and revealed that Connecticut’s budget included $18.9 million in earmarks to 289 nonprofit grantees through a single state department, with minimal vetting and almost no public disclosure of who requested the money or why. One earmark listed in the state budget was $250,000 for “Sports Academy Est. 2013 Inc.” When Republicans tried to find the organization, they could not. Investigative reporters at Inside Investigator later confirmed that the only entity matching that name had been legally dissolved years before the money was allocated.

Another nonprofit that received $75,000 was recently founded by the sister of a sitting Democratic state representative. Its listed headquarters is their parents’ home in Norwalk.

Republican Senate Leader Stephen Harding was blunt: “Essentially, what is going on here is the candy store is open in the state of Connecticut with our state employees and different organizations that are receiving these grants within our state budgets. The Democrats and the one-party rule they have are doing nothing about it.”

House Republican Leader Vincent Candelora connected the McCrory case to a pattern: “From the State Pier debacle to the CSCU Chancellor scandal to this week’s Diamantis trial, the disrespect for taxpayers’ money is widespread in Connecticut state government. Mismanagement. A lack of oversight and accountability. Money wasted.”

Republicans had been raising alarms since 2025. They were in the minority. They were ignored.

The Party That Protected Its Own

When the forensic audit landed in January 2026 and the details became public, Governor Ned Lamont called on McCrory to step back from his leadership roles. Senate Democratic Leader Martin Looney refused. His explanation: McCrory had not been “directly accused of a crime.”

McCrory is running for re-election. As of the 2026 legislative session, Democrats hold a 25-11 majority in the Senate, a 102-49 majority in the House, the governorship, and a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers. Connecticut has not elected a Republican governor in more than 20 years. There is no electoral pressure on Democratic leaders to act. There is no competitive opposition party with the power to force the issue. There is only the FBI.

The House eventually passed an earmark transparency bill on April 9, 2026, by a vote of 141-0. Unanimous. Not a single Democrat voted against it.

That vote is itself a story. The Democrats who voted unanimously for transparency are the same Democrats who controlled every committee, every budget process, every earmark decision, and every oversight mechanism for the past 20 years, while $11 million flowed through a single Hartford nonprofit with no public accountability, no competitive bidding, no formal justification, and no disclosure of which senator was directing where the money went. They voted for transparency in April 2026 because the FBI showed up, not because they chose to.

The earmark reform bill passed the House unanimously. As of this writing, its fate in the Senate is uncertain.

Once Again, Our Parties Have Failed Us

Douglas McCrory has not been charged with a crime. He denies wrongdoing. The grand jury is active and the investigation is ongoing. Those facts deserve to be stated clearly, and they are stated here.

But the forensic audit is not a grand jury indictment. It is something more immediately damning: a certified, public accounting of what actually happened, conducted by professionals hired by the state, reviewed by no one’s political allies, and released for anyone to read. It describes a senator who used a 62-year-old community institution as a personal checking account, paid friends for services that were never delivered, covered up a $300,000 theft from taxpayers, and organized campaign events using state grant money, all while the party that controlled every lever of state power looked the other way until federal investigators made looking away impossible.

The Centercratic Party’s fourth principle, One Law for All, was not written for Washington. It was written for Hartford. It was written for every city and every statehouse in America where the same party has held power so long that accountability has become optional. It was written for the Kelvin Lovejoys of the world, the community organizers who gave 18 years of their life to a nonprofit that existed to serve their neighbors, and who found out via a late-night email that the institution they trusted had been hollowed out by the politician who was supposed to be its champion.

Connecticut is one of eight states where one party holds a veto-proof supermajority in both legislative chambers. The citizens of those states, regardless of which party controls them, deserve to know that power without competition produces arrogance, arrogance produces opacity, and opacity produces exactly the kind of arrangement that destroyed Blue Hills Civic Association and the North End community it served for 62 years.

The 45 percent of Americans who belong to neither party have no structural reason to look away from what Connecticut is showing us right now. They are not Republicans defending a senator. They are not Democrats protecting a majority. They are citizens who know what one law for all is supposed to mean, and who are watching, again, as the people in charge of enforcing it decide it does not apply to them.

That has to change. And it will not change from inside the parties that built this system. It will change when the center decides it has had enough.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

In January 2022, somewhere in Honolulu, a sitting Hawaii state lawmaker described in federal court documents as “influential” accepted $35,000 in cash from a man who was simultaneously the subject of an active FBI bribery investigation. The money changed hands in what prosecutors later described, matter-of-factly, as a paper bag. The entire exchange was recorded on video, captured by a fellow lawmaker who was secretly wearing a wire for the FBI.

That was more than four years ago. The public still does not know who that lawmaker is. Nobody in Hawaii’s government is in a hurry to tell them.

Built on Nine Principles. This Story Tests One of the Most Important.

The Centercratic Party was founded on nine governing principles. The fourth is this: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.”

The fifth principle is equally direct: “Protect Election Integrity. Guarantee transparent, fair, and nonpartisan elections.”

What you are about to read is a case study in what happens when those principles are not just absent from the room, they are actively pushed out of it.

The Scene of the Crime

To understand this story, you need to understand the man who set it in motion.

Former Hawaii state Representative Ty Cullen served on the House Finance Committee, where he held the Vice Chair seat. Between 2015 and 2021, he accepted more than $25,000 in cash and roughly $22,000 in casino poker chips from Honolulu businessman Milton Choy, in exchange for steering legislation favorable to Choy’s wastewater business. When federal agents caught up with him in October 2021, Cullen made a decision. He would cooperate.

He became a walking surveillance operation. Cullen made recorded phone calls, attended contrived meetings, and gathered information for the FBI on the broader corruption network operating inside the Hawaii legislature. His assistance was substantial enough that prosecutors asked for a lighter sentence than standard guidelines recommended, and he ultimately served two years in federal prison.

On January 18, 2022, while wearing that wire, Cullen met again with a man he knew to be under federal investigation for bribery. That man gave Cullen $3,000. Two days later, on January 20, the same man handed a sitting Hawaii lawmaker $35,000 in cash, described in court documents as purportedly intended for an “existing campaign.” Cullen was there. The FBI had its recording. The money had a recipient.

More than four years later, the recipient of that $35,000 has never been publicly identified.

The Person the Evidence Points Toward and What She Says

Before proceeding, it is important to state clearly what is known, what is alleged, and what remains unresolved. No charges have been filed in this matter as of the publication of this article. The Hawaii Attorney General’s investigation is ongoing, and the attorney general has said she will not comment on an active investigation.

With that context firmly in place, here is what the evidence shows.

In February 2026, Lt. Governor Sylvia Luke, the second-highest executive official in the state of Hawaii, acknowledged to Civil Beat, the investigative outlet that has led coverage of this story, that she could be the lawmaker referenced in the federal court filing. She did not admit to accepting $35,000. She has denied that emphatically. But she acknowledged that the dinner meeting described in the court documents may have been a dinner she attended with Cullen and a lobbyist named Tobi Solidum in the same week the $35,000 changed hands.

Here is what she also acknowledged: she received two $5,000 checks at that dinner, one from Solidum and one from his stepdaughter, and never reported them on her campaign finance disclosures. When Civil Beat asked about the missing donations four years after the fact, Luke’s office filed amended reports, describing the omission as a staff error. She also said that a $5,000 refund check she attempted to send after Cullen was arrested had never been cashed, a fact her campaign said it only discovered after Civil Beat inquired.

Governor Josh Green issued a statement saying, “This situation is deeply concerning and accountability is essential. No one gets a free pass.” He has made no further public comment since.

Luke herself said only that the attorney general has a process and “we’ve got to respect the process.”

The Legislature’s Response: Bury It

When more than 900 Hawaii residents signed a formal citizen petition demanding the legislature investigate the $35,000 transaction, the Hawaii House of Representatives had a choice. It could hold hearings, hear testimony, and let the public see what its elected officials know. Or it could make the petition disappear.

On April 22, 2026, the House voted 39 to 11 to “file” the petition, a procedural maneuver that, in plain language, means killed without debate. The vote was taken with just two hours’ notice, added to the agenda moments before the floor session began. When Representative Della Au Belatti asked for the matter to be deferred by a single day so it could receive proper consideration, House Speaker Nadine Nakamura called a recess while Belatti was still speaking. When the House returned, Nakamura told members there would be no questions, called the vote, and that was that.

“This was simply a clear move by leadership to kill this petition, have no debate and sweep this under the rug,” said Alexander Silvert, the attorney who drafted the petition and watched from the gallery as the vote occurred.

Belatti, a lawyer who once served on Hawaii’s campaign finance commission, said she had “never seen” anything like it in 20 years at the legislature.

“If we run away,” she said from the House floor, “we are ignoring the call of the public for transparency and accountability.”

The Senate had already filed its copy of the petition in January without taking any action. Hawaii’s entire congressional delegation, both U.S. senators and both House members, declined to comment when directly asked about the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office, when asked directly whether the legislator who accepted the $35,000 is still a sitting officeholder, did not answer the question.

The One-Party Context That Makes This Possible

Hawaii has been governed by the Democratic Party since just before statehood in 1959, a run of more than six decades without interruption. Today, Democrats hold the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, both U.S. House seats, and supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, controlling roughly 90 percent of all legislative seats. There are no Republican trifectas in Hawaii’s history.

This is not a criticism of Democratic governance in Hawaii as a concept. But it is a statement of fact about what happens to accountability when there is no meaningful political competition. In a state this thoroughly dominated by one party, the same people who would need to expose possible corruption are the same people who run the institution where that corruption allegedly occurred. The incentive to investigate is in direct tension with the incentive to protect the institution, and when those two forces collide, the citizens’ petition is the thing that disappears.

Civil Beat’s Sam Small, a Maui community organizer who signed the petition, put it directly: “They’re afraid to open Pandora’s box. They have no idea how deep into the establishment it’s going to go, and so they don’t want to investigate anything.”

Camron Hurt, state director of Common Cause Hawaii, said the House’s decision to table the petition tells voters it is “business as usual” in the state capitol.

The Clock Is Running

Here is the part of this story that is not hypothetical. The statute of limitations on state bribery charges in Hawaii is six years. The $35,000 transaction took place on January 20, 2022. Basic arithmetic puts the deadline in January 2028. Representative Jarrett Keohokalole has introduced legislation to extend the statute of limitations to nine years, but the bill’s fate is uncertain. There is a particular irony in the possibility that the lawmaker whose identity is being concealed might have a vote on whether to extend the clock on their own potential prosecution.

The attorney general’s office has said the investigation is proceeding, that 18 individuals have been interviewed, multiple subpoenas have been issued, and thousands of pages of documents reviewed. What the public does not know, because no one in authority in Hawaii will say, is whether anyone will ever be charged, and whether the identity of the “influential” lawmaker will ever be publicly disclosed if no charges are filed. Under standard practice, if an investigation closes without an indictment, the files stay sealed.

Silvert, the attorney behind the citizen petition, has said that is precisely why a legislative investigation was also necessary, because the legislature has its own authority to discipline its members and its own obligation to make facts available to the public, independent of whether a criminal charge is ever filed. That avenue has now been closed by a 39-to-11 vote taken on two hours’ notice.

What Principles 4 and 5 Were Written For

The Centercratic Party’s fourth governing principle — One Law for All — does not say that one law applies to some people and a different process applies to the politically connected. It says the law applies equally, and that independent courts and independent oversight exist to make that real.

The fifth principle — Protect Election Integrity — includes the premise that campaign finance laws mean something, that unreported contributions undermine the transparency that fair elections require, and that the public has a right to know whether the money flowing through political campaigns is clean.

What is on display in Hawaii is not a theoretical failure of either principle. It is a concrete one. A sitting official accepted cash at a dinner meeting and did not report it to the state campaign finance commission until a reporter asked about it four years later. A paper bag full of money was recorded changing hands inside a federal bribery investigation, and the recipient has never been identified to the public. A citizens’ petition demanding transparency was killed without debate by the very legislature it asked to act.

You are reading these facts. You are capable of drawing your own conclusions. What you should also know is that the structure that is supposed to force transparency — the criminal law, the campaign finance commission, the legislature’s own ethics obligations, the political opposition that would have every incentive to expose a rival’s wrongdoing — is not working as it was designed to work. In a state where one party controls everything, those mechanisms work only as well as the people who control them are willing to let them work. Right now, they are not working.

Once Again, Our Parties Have Failed Us

This story does not require partisan commentary, because it is not a partisan problem. It is a structural one. When any political party, Democratic or Republican, controls an institution so completely that accountability becomes optional, the citizens who rely on that institution for honest government are the ones who lose.

The people of Hawaii did not sit still. More than 900 of them signed their names to a petition and asked their legislature to do its job. They were answered with a gavel and a recess call while a colleague was still speaking.

They deserved better. So does the rest of the country, because what you have just read is not unique to Hawaii. Every state in the nation, controlled by either party, has some version of this architecture, where the rules that are supposed to create accountability are administered by the very people those rules are supposed to constrain. Hawaii’s version involves a paper bag and a six-decade lock on political power. Other states have their own versions, just as carefully constructed and just as resistant to being opened.

A governing system that is truly accountable does not bury a citizens’ petition on two hours’ notice. A governing system that takes election integrity seriously does not allow unreported campaign contributions to sit unaddressed for four years. A governing system built on the principle of one law for all does not allow the identity of a public official to remain hidden inside a federal bribery investigation because the institution that public official belongs to has decided it would rather not know.

The center of this country, the 45 percent of Americans who belong to neither party and owe nothing to either one, is the only constituency that has no structural reason to look away from what Hawaii is showing us right now. That is not a small thing. It is the only reason any of this gets better.

The clock is running. The center must hold.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Built on Nine Principles. This Story Violates the First One.

The Centercratic Party was founded on a simple and increasingly radical idea: that the people elected to govern this country should actually govern it, for the people who sent them there, not for the donors who funded their campaigns or the private clients who pay their legal bills.

To make that idea concrete, the party built its entire foundation on nine governing principles. Not a platform that gets rewritten every four years to suit the consultants. Nine permanent principles that define how the party operates, how its members are expected to behave, and what it means to govern with integrity in a country where both parties have spent decades demonstrating that integrity is optional.

The first of those nine principles is this: Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.

What you are about to read is a case study in what American governance looks like when no one in the room is held to that standard.

A Law Was Passed. A Client Was Signed. The Timing Says Everything.

The West Virginia legislature ended its 60-day session on March 14, 2026. Two days later, on March 16, Roger Hanshaw, the Speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, filed paperwork with the state’s Intermediate Court of Appeals. He was not filing as a legislator. He was filing as a private attorney. His new client: Fundamental Data, a Delaware company trying to build a massive power plant and data center complex in Tucker County, deep in the mountains of rural West Virginia.

The session Hanshaw had just finished presiding over included the passage of the implementation rules for a 2025 state law that deregulated the data center industry in West Virginia. Hanshaw personally steered that original deregulation bill, House Bill 2014, through the legislature in 2025. He championed it. He shepherded it. He made it law.

Then, 48 hours after gaveling the 2026 session to a close, he signed on to represent the company trying to profit from it.

Under West Virginia law, that is perfectly legal. Read that sentence again.

What the Law Does, and Who It Helps

To understand what Hanshaw built for his eventual client, you need to understand what House Bill 2014 actually did.

Before that law passed, local communities in West Virginia had meaningful tools to push back against large-scale industrial projects being dropped into their backyards. Data center developers had to navigate local permitting, local zoning, and local opposition. Tucker County residents, whose home sits in one of the most scenic and rural corners of the state, organized against the Fundamental Data project. They raised concerns about air pollution, water use, noise, and the environmental impact of a gas-fired power plant intended to run an industrial computing complex around the clock.

Hanshaw’s 2025 law stripped much of that local authority away. It handed the regulatory reins to state-level agencies and made it significantly harder for communities to block data center development. The spokesperson for Tucker United, the local group fighting the project, put it plainly: “Hanshaw was the architect of HB 2014, which took away local control in data center developments. Hanshaw’s counsel of Fundamental Data makes it crystal clear that he values out-of-state developers over his own constituents.”

Three United States senators sent Fundamental Data a formal letter warning that the company’s proposed power plant would release nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and benzene into the air surrounding the project. The letter warned of asthma, heart attacks, stroke, reproductive issues, and cancer for the surrounding community. The mayor of Davis, West Virginia said he was “thrilled” that federal senators were paying attention, adding: “It is surprising to see the federal government show more interest and inquiry regarding the Ridgeline power plant than the state of West Virginia.”

The state of West Virginia was not paying attention because its most powerful legislator was about to become the company’s private attorney.

The Loophole They Built for Themselves

Here is where the story becomes something beyond one politician, one law firm, and one client.

West Virginia has a rule called Rule 49. Fifty years ago, the legislature passed it with a clear purpose: when a lawmaker has a personal financial interest in a bill, they must announce it and step aside from the vote. A reasonable rule. A basic rule. The kind of rule that exists because conflict of interest is not a concept that requires explanation.

In the years that followed, the legislature watered it down. Then in 2017, three years after Republicans took control of the House, the rule was quietly redefined. A lawmaker can now vote on legislation that affects their personal interests as long as those interests are shared by a class of five or more similarly situated people. In other words, because multiple data center companies exist in West Virginia, Hanshaw could vote on every piece of legislation regulating the data center industry, including the law that stripped local communities of their power to fight projects like his client’s, and he was never required to step aside or say a single word publicly about his interests.

Craig Holman, a government ethics expert with Public Citizen, called the arrangement “an obvious conflict of interest” and said the five-person class exemption is a “huge loophole”. He was direct: “He’s pulling in a fortune just representing that one client. At the same time, he’s going to be working on legislation to benefit that client.”

Julie Archer, deputy director of West Virginia Citizen Action Group, said what most people watching this story are already thinking: “Even if it’s not illegal, it should be, and it looks really bad.”

It is not illegal. Let that keep sitting with you.

The Bills That Would Have Exposed This. And Who Killed Them.

During the 2026 legislative session, a Republican state delegate named Henry Dillon introduced a modest transparency bill. It would have done one simple thing: when a West Virginia lawmaker used the electronic voting system to flag a personal financial interest before a vote, that disclosure would be recorded and made publicly available, exactly the way a vote itself is recorded.

Under the current system, those disclosures vanish. They are buried in the House Journal, requiring a citizen to know the exact date of the vote, find the specific bill, and manually search the document. Dillon said there had been sessions where more than half the members of the House flagged a financial interest before a vote, and the public never knew.

His bill went to the House Judiciary Committee. The chair, Del. JB Akers, never put it on the agenda. When asked why, Akers said his committee had focused on child abuse and neglect cases, that he did not see “a systemic problem” with ethical behavior in the House, and that when issues arise, they should be handled “case by case”.

There was also a bill requiring a waiting period before legislators become lobbyists. A bill barring candidates who owe back taxes from running for office. A bill cracking down on nepotism in government appointments, introduced for multiple sessions running, that its author called the “Say No to Good Ole Boys in Governance” bill. Not one of them made it through. Meanwhile, the legislature rolled back campaign finance transparency rules that had been on the books.

The Speaker of the House refused to respond to any media inquiry about his arrangement with Fundamental Data. His communications director said he “does not intend to respond to media inquiries about the private clients of Bowles Rice.”

The man who controls the House floor, decides which bills reach a vote, and personally championed the deregulation law his new client depends on does not believe the public is owed an explanation.

What Principle #1 Was Written For

The Centercratic Party’s first governing principle says this: Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.

That principle was written precisely for moments like this one.

What Roger Hanshaw did was not compromise. It was domination. A single-party legislature, operating without meaningful opposition in the committee rooms where legislation lives or dies, passed a law deregulating an industry that its Speaker was about to enter as a private attorney. When a colleague introduced a transparency bill that would have made that kind of arrangement visible to the public, it was buried without a hearing. When ethics reform bills came up for the second consecutive year, they went to committee chairs who saw no systemic problem and took no action.

This is what governance without compromise produces. It produces a system so comfortable in its own authority that it stops asking whether its actions can withstand public scrutiny. It produces legislators who write the rules, benefit from the rules, and then kill the bills that would require them to tell anyone about it.

Principle 1 also calls for rejecting extreme tactics by special interests. Fundamental Data is a Delaware corporation building an industrial power plant in a rural West Virginia county whose residents organized, testified, and fought to protect their community. They lost, not because their arguments failed, but because the man presiding over the legislature that governed their fate was already on his way to the opposing side’s law firm.

That is the extreme tactic. Not a protest. Not a lobbying campaign. A Speaker who writes the law, then charges by the hour to navigate it.

This Is Not a West Virginia Problem. It Is an American Problem.

West Virginia is the most visible example this week, but the structure on display here exists in legislatures across the country, in states controlled by both parties. The specific mechanism varies. The essential transaction does not. A politician with power over legislation that affects an industry takes private money from that industry, votes to expand its reach or reduce its accountability, and then argues that the arrangement is entirely appropriate because the rules they themselves wrote permit it.

What makes Hanshaw’s case particularly striking is the precision of the timing. He did not wait months to signal that the session’s results had value to a private client. He waited 48 hours. That is not a coincidence. That is a demonstration of exactly how the game is played by people who are confident no one is watching closely enough to stop them.

The people of Tucker County were watching. They organized, testified, petitioned, and fought. They lost, because the man presiding over the chamber where their fate was decided had already decided which side he was on.

The Clock Is Running. The Center Must Hold.

The people who wrote these rules did not make a mistake. They made a choice. They chose a system where financial interests do not have to be disclosed, where conflict of interest is legal as long as it is shared, and where transparency bills die quietly in committee while the public never knows they existed. They built this architecture carefully, over decades, because it serves the people inside the building, not the people outside it.

Principle 1 of the Centercratic Party is not a slogan. It is the specific, daily alternative to what you just read. Govern through compromise, not domination, means that no single party gets to write the disclosure rules for its own members and then bury every bill that would make those rules meaningful. Reject extreme tactics by special interests means that a Speaker of the House does not get to champion deregulation for an industry and then immediately join that industry as a paid private attorney without the public knowing a word about it.

The 45 percent of Americans in the political center are not asking for a revolution. They are asking for the floor. They are asking that the people elected to write the laws not personally profit from the laws they write, that when a politician has a financial stake in legislation, they say so out loud, and that the rules governing public officials actually serve the public.

That is not complicated. And until we elect people who hold that floor as non-negotiable, the Roger Hanshaws of both parties will keep setting their rates, writing their laws, and telling the rest of us there is nothing to see here.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

A Convicted Felon Walks Free. The Story Behind the Story Is Worse.

On the morning of May 15, 2026, a press release went out from the Colorado governor’s office. Buried in a list of 44 pardons and commutations was the name Tina Peters, the former Mesa County Clerk who had been sitting in a Colorado prison since her conviction in 2024 on seven criminal counts, including four felonies, for allowing an unauthorized individual to access county voting machines in a failed attempt to prove the 2020 election was stolen.

Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, announced he was commuting her sentence from nearly nine years to the time she had already served. Peters will walk out on parole on June 1. The governor was careful to say he was not issuing a pardon. He called her election fraud claims “dangerously incorrect”. He said she “deserved to be a convicted felon”. He insisted the decision was entirely his own, driven by a belief that the sentence was excessive for a first-time nonviolent offender.

Then ask yourself this: why did it take a yearlong federal pressure campaign, millions of dollars in withheld funding, and a personal phone call from President Trump to produce that conclusion?

What Tina Peters Actually Did

It is worth being clear about what Tina Peters was convicted of doing, because the way her allies describe her case and what a jury actually found are two entirely different things.

Peters was the elected Clerk and Recorder of Mesa County, Colorado. In May 2021, she invited an outside computer technician — later identified as a Lindell-affiliated operative — into the secure room where her county’s Dominion voting machines were kept and allowed that person to make an unauthorized copy of the election management software. The sensitive data, including voting system passwords, later appeared online and on a conservative website. Peters knew what she was authorizing. She covered it up. She misled her own staff about what had occurred.

A jury from Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, deliberated and found her guilty on seven of ten counts. The prosecutor who brought the case was a Republican. The judge who sentenced her called her out directly from the bench: “You are no hero.” He sentenced her to eight and a half years. No fraud was ever found in Mesa County’s elections. The machines were never proven to have been manipulated. Peters’ entire criminal enterprise produced nothing except a security breach and a series of conspiracy theories that spread across the internet.

That is what Governor Polis set aside on May 15.

The Pressure Campaign That Was “Not” the Reason

Here is the timeline that makes Polis’s stated rationale collapse under scrutiny.

Shortly after taking office in January 2025, Trump issued a legally meaningless federal pardon for Peters. Since she was convicted of state crimes, the federal pardon had no effect. Trump then escalated. He called Polis a “scumbag” on Truth Social. He told Polis in a private phone call that Peters needed to be released. Then the federal government began systematically starving Colorado of funding.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture sent Colorado a one-page letter in December 2025, demanding that five counties recertify more than 100,000 households for food assistance within 30 days or face the loss of millions of dollars in SNAP funding. A federal judge later found that the letter “did not arrive in a vacuum” and that it appeared to be unconstitutional retaliation against Colorado officials for refusing to free Peters. The judge specifically wrote that the Trump administration’s actions were “about punishment and nothing more”.

The punishment did not stop there. Trump withheld Colorado’s federal disaster relief funding for wildfire and flood recovery in communities that had voted for him in 2024. His administration moved to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, one of the world’s leading climate science institutions, triggering a federal lawsuit. Transportation and transit funding were threatened. Colorado Senator Michael Bennet went on television in March 2026 and told Polis directly: “Trump is retaliating against Colorado, and yielding to his political pressure will not enhance the safety or strength of our state”.

Polis held firm. He said he would not be pressured. He said Peters would need to demonstrate “appropriate contrition and apology” before he would consider clemency. He said, as recently as March 2026, that free speech must be supported in this country while making clear that Peters’ claims about the election remained false.

Then, on May 15, after completing less than two years of her sentence, Tina Peters was released. And Trump, flying home from his Beijing summit with Xi Jinping, posted “FREE TINA!” on Truth Social.

His Own Party Said He Got It Wrong

The reaction from Colorado Democrats was swift and unambiguous.

Senator Michael Bennet posted to social media: “I vehemently disagree with Gov. Polis’s decision to commute Tina Peters’ sentence. She broke the law, undermined our elections, and was convicted by a jury of her peers”. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser called the commutation “mind-boggling and wrong,” pointing out that Peters was in prison because she broke the law and received an appropriate sentence. Colorado’s Secretary of State, the state’s top elections official, had spent years pushing back against Peters’ conspiracy theories and publicly opposed the commutation.

CNN’s fact-checking team published a detailed analysis on May 18, concluding that Polis defended his decision with “a series of false and misleading” assertions, and that he incorrectly separated Peters’ situation from what were, in fact, deliberate attempts to subvert the 2020 election.[^19]

It is also worth noting that the Colorado Court of Appeals, which ordered Peters’ resentencing in April, upheld her conviction entirely. The court’s ruling narrowed only the basis for her original sentence, finding that the trial judge had improperly factored in Peters’ ongoing election fraud claims as an aggravating factor in sentencing. The appeals court was clear: Peters’ crimes were “not her beliefs, however misguided.” Her crimes were “her deceptive actions aimed at gathering evidence” of alleged fraud she could never prove. The conviction stood. The felonies stood.

Governor Polis used the appellate ruling as cover for his decision, implying the appeals court had found something fundamentally wrong with her sentence. The court had found no such thing.

What Actually Happened Here

Let us be direct about what this story is, because the people who committed it are going to spend the next several weeks telling you it is something else.

A convicted election fraudster — tried by a Republican prosecutor, convicted by a Republican county jury, sentenced by an independent judge — was set free after the president of the United States ran a systematic federal extortion campaign against an American state, withholding disaster relief, threatening food assistance, and attempting to dismantle a world-class scientific institution as leverage to spring a political ally from prison.

A federal court found that the extortion was unconstitutional. The governor told a U.S. senator and the American public that he would not yield to that pressure. Then, after a personal phone call with the president whose administration had been conducting that campaign, he commuted the sentence and denied that the pressure had anything to do with it.

CNN called his stated reasons false and misleading. His own senator called it vehemently wrong. His own attorney general said she was in prison because she broke the law and received an appropriate sentence.

Both parties do versions of this. Republicans shield their own from accountability and weaponize federal power to protect their political allies. Democrats promise to stand firm, invoke the rule of law, and then fold when the pressure becomes too costly to maintain. Both behaviors corrode the same thing: the idea that the law means the same thing for everyone, that courts and juries deliver outcomes that cannot simply be undone by the governor’s office when a president with leverage makes a phone call.

A jury of ordinary citizens sat in a Mesa County courthouse, weighed the evidence, and did their duty to this country. They did not ask whether it was politically convenient. They asked whether it was right. That is all any of us have ever asked of the people we elect, and it is not a complicated standard. It is the only standard that matters. What happened on May 15 was a reminder that neither party is capable of meeting it. One party runs the extortion. The other party folds under it. Both of them call it governance. It is not. It is a disgrace.

But here is what did not fold. The people of Mesa County who sat in that jury box. The state officials who called this decision wrong the moment it was announced. The Americans in the center of this country, 45 percent of us, who do not need a pollster or a party to tell them when something has gone deeply wrong. That instinct, clear-eyed and unaffiliated, is not a small thing. It is the foundation of everything worth building in this country. A governing center that answers to evidence, holds to principle, and cannot be leveraged away in a phone call is not a dream. It is a demand. And the people capable of making that demand have never been more ready to make it.

The Clock Is Running. The Center Must Hold.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party.

Visit centercratic.party

A Mailer Arrived. It Said a Lot.

Somewhere in the 21st Assembly District of California, which stretches across parts of San Mateo County on the San Francisco Peninsula, a glossy political mailer arrived in mailboxes earlier this year. On the front, in large bold type: “Assemblymember Diane Papan. Making California Affordable.” On the back, a thank-you note praising her for “leadership and commitment to keeping Californians housed.”

It looked like a campaign piece. It read like a campaign piece. And it was paid for by an organization called WWW.CAANET.ORG, better known as the California Apartment Association, whose Sacramento address sits prominently in the return label.

Here is what the mailer did not mention: Diane Papan never voted for anything. On January 13, 2026, when the California Assembly Judiciary Committee took up AB 1157, a bill that would have lowered the state’s annual rent cap and expanded tenant protections to cover single-family homes and condominiums, Assemblymember Diane Papan was present in that hearing room. The bill needed seven votes to pass. It received four. Papan was one of five Democrats who declined to vote at all. No yes. No no. Nothing. She sat out the most important housing vote of the session, and three months later, the California Apartment Association rewarded her with a full-color mailer sent to her own constituents telling them what a hero she is.

That is the story of California politics in 2026, delivered right to your front door.

What AB 1157 Was, and Who Killed It

To understand what happened, you need to understand what was at stake. California has approximately 17 million renters. Under the current state law, known as AB 1482, landlords can raise rents up to 5% plus the local inflation rate, with a hard ceiling of 10% annually. That law is also set to expire in 2030 unless the legislature acts. AB 1157, introduced by Assemblymember Ash Kalra of San Jose, would have lowered that cap, expanded protections to renters in single-family homes, and made the protections permanent.

The bill was supported by tenant advocacy organizations and labor groups. It was opposed, loudly and expensively, by the California Apartment Association and the California Association of Realtors.

In the committee hearing, the bill drew a packed room and passionate testimony from renters across the state. It received four yes votes and three no votes from Republicans. The five Democrats who could have passed it chose to do nothing. Rebecca Bauer-Kahan. Blanca Pacheco. Diane Papan. Catherine Stefani. Rick Chavez Zbur. Five Democrats. Five abstentions. One dead bill.

The Sacramento Bee called them out publicly for not “even being bothered to vote.” Tenant advocates described it as a betrayal of the very constituents these legislators represent. But Assemblymember Papan, at least, did not have to wait long for her reward.

Who Is the California Apartment Association, Exactly?

The California Apartment Association describes itself as “the nation’s largest statewide organization representing the rental housing industry.” What it does not advertise as prominently is how it actually operates.

The CAA functions as what researchers and advocacy groups have called a political go-between for some of the largest corporate landlords in the country. Companies like Equity Residential, AvalonBay Communities, and Essex Property Trust deliver large sums of money into one or more of the CAA’s four political committees. The CAA then distributes that money to elected officials, campaigns, and political groups across California. According to research compiled from state campaign filings, the CAA and its allied corporate landlords spent at least $233 million in political contributions and lobbying across three legislative sessions. In 2024 alone, the CAA’s independent expenditure committee spent $3 million on political candidates and groups.

That $54 million raised to defeat Proposition 33 in November 2024, the ballot measure that would have expanded rent control? Eighty percent of it came from just 14 corporate landlords, all of them channeling money through the CAA. Those same corporate landlords use the same strategy, over and over, in city halls and the state Capitol: fund the CAA, let the CAA fund the politicians, let the politicians protect their ability to charge whatever the market will bear.

Politicians like to say that campaign contributions do not influence their decisions. The CAA and its corporate landlord backers apparently do not believe them either, because they keep writing the checks.

The Shell Game in Plain Sight

What makes the Papan mailer so remarkable is not just what it says. It is the raw transparency of it.

A political donor paid to mail a piece of campaign literature to every household in a lawmaker’s district. That literature credits the lawmaker with an achievement. The achievement is that she did nothing. She did not vote to protect renters. She did not vote against protecting renters. She simply stood aside while a bill that might have helped hundreds of thousands of her constituents died in committee. And for that, she received a taxpayer-mailbox-delivered endorsement from the very industry she chose not to cross.

This is not a coincidence. This is how the transaction is supposed to work. The California Apartment Association and its corporate landlord members do not need politicians to vote for them. They simply need politicians to not vote against them. The abstention is the product. The mailer is the receipt.

In California, the law governing independent expenditures allows outside groups to spend unlimited amounts on political communications as long as they do not formally coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. The CAA is experienced at operating within these rules. It has run independent expenditure campaigns worth millions of dollars in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and up and down the state. The Papan mailer is simply the latest version of a very old arrangement.

One Party, Two Factions, One Set of Donors

California is a one-party state in the most literal sense. Democrats control the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, a supermajority in the State Assembly, and a supermajority in the State Senate. There is no functioning Republican opposition capable of blocking anything the Democratic Party decides to do collectively.

Which means that when the Democratic Party fails to act on housing, there is no one else to blame. And it has failed, repeatedly, on housing.

What the AB 1157 vote revealed is that the party is not a unified institution. It is a coalition of two factions that are in open, if rarely publicly acknowledged, conflict with each other. Progressive Democrats, largely representing urban districts with dense renter populations, push for stronger tenant protections. Moderate Democrats, often representing suburban or coastal districts with significant homeowner and small landlord constituencies, resist those protections. Both factions run under the same banner. Both compete in the same primaries. And both are heavily funded by outside interests that have every reason to keep the fight unresolved.

The progressive wing has its own donors, primarily labor unions and tenant advocacy organizations. The moderate wing has its own donors, primarily corporate real estate interests and business lobbies. The two factions fight their battles in committee hearings and floor votes, rarely openly, usually through procedural maneuvers like a well-timed abstention. And then the donors reward whoever served them best, through direct contributions, independent expenditures, or a glossy mailer sent to your house.

This is not unique to Democrats. Republicans in other states run the same internal divisions with the same donor architecture, just with different industries writing the checks. What is notable about California is how invisible the conflict is allowed to remain. The state presents a unified progressive face to the country while quietly allowing its most powerful industries to shape policy from the inside, out of sight of the voters who thought they were electing people to represent them.

The People Caught in the Middle

While Sacramento plays these games, the people of California’s 21st Assembly District are dealing with a real housing crisis. San Mateo County, which Papan represents, has some of the highest rents in the United States. The median one-bedroom apartment in the county costs well over $2,000 a month. Working families, teachers, nurses, retail workers, and the people who make the peninsula function are being priced out of the communities where they work.

They received a mailer this spring. It told them their assemblymember is a hero of affordable housing. It was sent by the landlord lobby.

The people who depend on their elected representatives to stand up for them deserve better than this. They deserve legislators who vote on their behalf, who make their positions known, and who do not accept third-party thank-you campaigns from the industries they were supposed to be holding accountable. They deserve a political system honest enough to at least be clear about who is representing whom.

Once Again, Our Parties Have Failed Us

This particular story is set in California, but there is nothing uniquely Californian about it. The mechanics on display here, the donor money, the abstention as a product, the manufactured public image, the shell game between politicians and the industries that fund them, operate in every state, in both parties, at every level of government.

Republicans in state legislatures across the country do the same thing, protecting oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and private insurers through quiet procedural moves that never generate a negative headline. Democrats in California do it for the real estate industry. The names change. The structure does not.

What is being lost in all of this is something that used to be fundamental to the idea of representative government: the belief that the people you elect are actually working for you. That when you send someone to Sacramento or Washington or your state capital, their primary obligation is to the voters who put them there, not the donors who financed their campaigns or the industry groups who will reward their loyalty with glossy mailers and the promise of future support.

That belief has not disappeared entirely. It lives in the voters who packed that Judiciary Committee hearing room on January 13 and testified about what high rents are doing to their families. It lives in the reporters who called out five legislators by name for refusing to vote. It lives in the people who look at a political mailer from a landlord lobby and know, immediately and instinctively, that something is wrong with what they are seeing.

The question is whether we are willing to do something about it. Both parties have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they will not fix this from the inside. The donor relationships are too valuable, the incentives too well-established, and the accountability too weak.

The only force that has ever changed this calculus is an organized political movement that does not owe anything to either party’s donor network. That is not a fantasy. That is how political change has always worked in this country, when it has worked at all.

The clock is running. The center must hold.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party.

Visit centercratic.party

When Fighting Fraud Looks a Lot Like Running for President

There is a moment, in any political theater, when the curtain slips just enough for the audience to see the scaffolding behind it.

That moment arrived Thursday afternoon at Bangor International Airport, when Air Force Two touched down in Maine and Vice President JD Vance stepped out to tell a crowd of a few hundred cheering supporters that their state is “one of the worst in the union” when it comes to Medicaid fraud. He told them that Maine Democrats “are quite fond of fraudsters.” He demanded accountability. He demanded cooperation. He put on a show.

And then, before leaving the stage, he told the crowd to send Paul LePage to Washington.

If you needed any further evidence that this trip was about politics at least as much as it was about fraud, there it was.

What Vance Actually Said, and What the Numbers Actually Show

The vice president did not arrive in Maine without ammunition. He came armed with a federal audit showing $45.6 million in improper Medicaid payments made by Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, primarily for autism services provided to children. He cited $1.7 million in alleged overbilling by a healthcare organization connected to Somali immigrants. He warned that his task force would find “hundreds of millions more” if it kept looking.

Here is what he did not say: the federal audit did not allege intentional fraud. Independent policy analysts and state officials both noted that the $45.6 million figure reflected documentation and compliance issues, not a criminal enterprise. Maine’s own Medicaid payment error rate, according to the most recent federal review, sits at 2.4 percent, meaningfully below the national average of 3.2 percent. In a program delivering $4.7 billion per year to hundreds of thousands of Mainers, that is not a system in collapse. That is a system performing better than most of the country.

Vance did not mention any of that.

What he mentioned instead was that fraud has “festered” in Maine because Paul LePage is no longer governor, and that the solution is to elect more Republicans. Maine’s Governor Janet Mills responded with a statement pointing out that Vance said nothing about lowering costs, improving health care, building housing, or fixing child care, all of which were the topics Mainers most wanted to hear about, particularly as the Iran war has driven heating oil and gas prices through the roof.

She had a point.

The Political Architecture Behind the “Fraud Czar” Tour

None of this happened by accident. President Trump personally tapped Vance to chair the White House anti-fraud task force, established by executive order in March, and dubbed him the “fraud czar.” That task force includes roughly half the Cabinet, the head of a new Justice Department fraud division, and the Federal Trade Commission.

On Wednesday, the day before the Maine trip, Vance held a press conference and announced that the federal government is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California because, in his words, the state “has not taken fraud very seriously.” The White House simultaneously reported that the task force has withheld a total of $1.4 billion in federal Medicaid funding nationwide, targeting California, Minnesota, and others. The states being targeted have one thing in common. They are all governed by Democrats.

As the Associated Press reported Thursday, Vance is widely viewed as a likely 2028 presidential candidate, and those inside his orbit see the anti-fraud campaign as the central platform he may ride into that race. The same day he said this effort would be “free of political bias,” he flew to Maine’s 2nd Congressional District to campaign for a Republican candidate in a competitive House race. Senator Susan Collins, Maine’s senior Republican and one of the most recognizable politicians in the state, was notably absent from the event and remained in Washington.

Draw your own conclusions.

The Real Question Nobody in Washington Is Asking

Here is what the entire Vance tour, the press conferences, the California funding freeze, the Bangor airport rally, never once addressed: how do we actually fix this?

Medicaid fraud is a real problem. It exists in red states and blue states. It costs American taxpayers billions of dollars every year. It steals from the children and seniors and people with disabilities who depend on these programs to survive. Anyone who tells you it does not exist is lying to you.

But cutting off funding to a state before fraud has been proven, before a proper investigation has concluded, before a single criminal conviction has been handed down, does not protect the people who depend on those programs. It punishes them. The 400,000 Mainers on MaineCare did not commit fraud. The children with autism whose services triggered this audit did not commit fraud. If the federal government withholds their healthcare funding in the name of fighting fraud, the people who get hurt are not the fraudsters. They are the families.

A vice president who genuinely wanted to protect taxpayers would be working with state attorneys general, both Republican and Democrat, to strengthen oversight systems, prosecute fraud more aggressively, and build the kind of bipartisan accountability structure that could survive beyond the next election cycle. He would be building something. Instead, JD Vance flew to Bangor, held a rally, endorsed a congressional candidate, and flew home.

That is not governance. That is a campaign stop dressed up as public service.

Once Again, Both Parties Have Let Us Down

By now, this story should feel familiar, because it is.

Yesterday in this space, we reported how the Democratic Party in Minnesota presided over $9 billion in government fraud, silenced the public servants who tried to stop it, and then had the audacity to call the whistleblowers racist. That was a profound betrayal of the people Democrats claim to champion.

Today, the Republican Party is doing something equally corrosive, just in a different direction. Instead of building real accountability, it is weaponizing the idea of accountability for political gain. It is using real fraud, and in some cases inflated fraud, to freeze funding for vulnerable Americans, to campaign in battleground districts, and to position one politician for a presidential run in 2028.

Neither party is actually trying to fix the problem. One party let it fester. The other is harvesting it.

And somewhere in Maine tonight, a child with autism whose family depends on MaineCare for services they cannot afford any other way is caught in the middle of a fight that was never really about them.

We have watched both parties play this game long enough to know exactly how it ends. The fraud never fully gets prosecuted. The programs get weakened. The politicians get reelected. And ordinary Americans are left holding the bill.

That is not the country we were built to be. And if we do not find the courage to build something better, something that is accountable to outcomes instead of ideology, we will keep watching this happen until there is nothing left worth protecting.

The clock is running. The center must hold.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party.

Visit centercratic.party