United States Senator for Texas
Dear Senator Cornyn,
My name is Arthur Brent Porter. I am a Texas native and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, B.A. Computer Science, 1987. I watched you stand on a principle — that a written record cannot be overruled by verbal assurance, that what is on the paper is what is true — and I watched what standing on it cost you. This letter is about both: the principle, and the cost, and what a man does after he has already paid it.
Before I show you the record, you deserve to know why it exists — because nobody ends up in a $15,000 psychiatric evaluation by accident.
When I was twelve, there was a mouse in our garage. It charged me, I jumped back, and my father killed it. Later I told a neighbor boy that we killed the mouse. My father overheard, corrected me on the spot — "No, we didn't kill it. I did" — and drove me to that boy's house and made me knock on the door and say it right, while the family sat bewildered at their lunch table. That is the man who taught me the truth is not negotiable. It is the most Texan lesson there is, and it took.
At fifty-seven, after seventeen years of illness, I finally used the lesson on the man who taught it. I told my father the truth: that the story of my sickness had more than one author, that his part in it was real, and that I would not carry the whole blame anymore so that he would never have to look at his share. He did not like it. And men who cannot be told the truth have a method for the people who tell it — the President demonstrates it weekly: fire them, sue them, or discredit them. My family chose discredit. The $15,000 evaluation was the instrument, and the report duly declared that the problem was the man who had spoken.
After Dell, I wrote my father and reminded him of the mouse. His written reply, June 21, 2025, word for word: "Indeed, there are times, from my life experience, when not telling the truth is better. Facts often prove what was said truthfully to be wrong." The man who drove a twelve-year-old across the neighborhood over the difference between "we" and "he" — renouncing truth itself, in writing, rather than hear one about himself.
But here is what he did not count on, and what the men like him never count on: I am still standing, and I am still telling it. And the road from my father's door, followed honestly, runs all the way to the top — to a President with the identical method, and to the party that protects him. My father's party. The party I voted for my whole life, until I saw in it exactly what I had finally named in him. So understand what this website is, Senator: it is me doing to the Grand Old Party what I did to my father at fifty-seven — telling it the truth, whether it likes it or not.
In December 2024, at Dell Medical School under Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, I underwent a psychiatric evaluation my family paid $15,000 for. Dell's own signed report states, in its own Chief Complaint section, word for word:
"The patient indicated that his parents had provided him with an ultimatum of either completing the evaluation or having him cut off of financial support. He acquiesced to their request."
That is the institution's own account of financial coercion, written down before a single diagnosis was recorded. Under APA Ethical Standards 3.10 and 9.03, coercion voids informed consent. It was void before it began. They proceeded anyway, and issued Narcissistic and Histrionic Personality Disorder among the results.
The paper says what it says. And the pattern repeats every time their report is checked against their own numbers:
I filed with the UT Austin Ethics Office, May 30, 2025. No response. A Cure Demand to UT Health Austin, January 24, 2026. No response. The Texas Medical Board declined to investigate. The federal Office for Civil Rights, which had been engaging with my complaint, informed me in December 2025 that it would not investigate after all. Every one of these is a case of verbal claim contradicting written record — the exact contradiction you refused to accept from the Justice Department. I am asking you, as a Texan and a UT alumnus, to see it inside your own state.
Dr. Nemeroff built a forty-year career on one finding: that chronic, uncontrollable stress raises corticotropin-releasing factor, which drives inflammation, which produces disease. It is why Texas put him in charge of an institute studying exactly this. Apply his own science to the man he examined. I have a false psychiatric record I cannot correct, documented tick-borne infections that remain untreated, and every avenue for correcting the record has closed. That is the textbook stressor his own research describes — serious, ongoing, uncontrollable by design, because every mechanism built to make it controllable has declined to act. The harm is not something that happened to me in December 2024. It is happening to my body today, and every office that declines to act is part of the mechanism — including, until January 2027, yours.
I am not accusing you of intending this. Professor Guiora's research on institutional wrongdoing does not deal in intent — it finds that "both bear responsibility for their plight," the one who did it and the one who knew and did nothing. Seven physicians at Dell did not invent what my family wanted. They executed it, and it could not have happened without them. I am telling you, in writing, that harm is occurring. You now know.
A pilot flying through cloud cannot see the ground. He flies on instruments — altitude, airspeed, attitude. The gauges are not opinions. A pilot who does not like what the altimeter says and covers it has not made the reading wrong. He has only made himself unable to see it.
Inspectors general, career officials who decline unlawful orders, courts, and a Senate willing to ask hard questions — those are a country's instruments. Seventeen inspectors general were removed in a single night this year, more than every prior president combined. That is the altimeter, covered. But there is a second half, and it is worse: installing a gauge that only shows the reading you want leaves you confident — and confidently wrong is how planes come down. General CQ Brown, a career combat pilot and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was removed; the Pentagon went to a television host who had called for his firing. The nominee for Attorney General is the President's own former personal defense attorney. And Demand Justice reviewed fifty-seven of this President's judicial nominees and found not one willing to say aloud that Joe Biden won the 2020 election — all but one reached for the identical word, "certified." Fifty-seven instruments, each selected because it will show the reading the pilot prefers, is not a judiciary. It is a panel wired to please the man in the seat.
I know this pattern from the inside, at the smallest scale. I brought my family a reading off a gauge — this plan is not working, here is a cheaper alternative I researched. They did not check the reading. They treated it as an attack and spent $15,000 on a document declaring the instrument itself defective. The reading never stopped being accurate. They simply arranged never to have to look at it again. It cost them four more years, and it cost me my health.
I went back and read the Farewell Address closely, because I wanted to know if I was reaching. I was not:
"One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown."
The forms all remain. The energy has been drained out of them. The Office for Civil Rights still exists; it simply will not investigate.
"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism."
Whatever the form. Elections continuing is not the test he gave us. Whether power is actually divided is.
"The necessity of reciprocal checks... constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others... To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them."
That is the Senate's assignment, in his own words — not to cooperate with the executive, but to guard against him.
The same refusal to hear an objection does not stop at a family's door. In March the President announced Iran's navy and air force destroyed; by May his own chamber's researchers had documented dozens of American aircraft lost, and the Strait of Hormuz — a fifth of the world's oil — has been closed ever since, while Congress voted not to require its own authorization for the war. Escalation ends only when backing down becomes cheaper than continuing, and for a man who has never had to back down, that point does not arrive — someone else pays. In 2024 that was me; right now it is servicemen and women.
He sued agencies he oversees, in his personal capacity, over an unrelated tax leak — and days after filing, he told reporters: "I'm supposed to work out a settlement with myself." He said it out loud. Plaintiff and defendant, weigher and seller, the same man. The government's own lawyers never entered an appearance. Judge Kathleen Williams found the parties "worked in tandem and were never actually adverse" and called the suit "nothing more than a pretext" — then jurisdiction was stripped before she could rule. The settlement moved $1.776 billion out of the Judgment Fund, an appropriation Congress never votes on, resolved his grievances over the Mar-a-Lago and Russia investigations, and quietly added language barring the IRS forever from its existing tax claims against him and his family. Thirty-five retired federal judges, including the Reagan appointee Michael Luttig, called the justification "laughable." The Treasury Department's General Counsel resigned the day Treasury was required to certify the payments. The man who signed the order was the President's own former defense attorney — in the very case the settlement resolves.
A man who has nothing to answer for does not need permanent immunity from being asked. The clause is the confession. And the name — the "Anti-Weaponization Fund" — is the inversion that explains everything else: once being investigated is redefined as an attack, everything that protects the country reads as an attack on him, and everything that protects him reads as patriotism. The purpose of the country is America. He has substituted himself for that purpose — "I'm the boss" is the short version — and a Republican who defends the separation of powers gets renamed a RINO by the man dismantling it. By any definition older than this year, the senator defending the check is the actual Republican.
In November 2020 I asked my mother if we could change the plan. Costa Rica for twenty days instead of a six-month Dallas lease — researched, priced, cheaper than what they were already spending. Her answer: not now, Brent — stick with the plan. In November 2024 I asked again. Stanford instead of Dell, where Medicare would have covered most of the cost. Same answer. No. Go, or we stop supporting you.
It took me a long time to understand what was actually being refused. It was not Costa Rica. It was not Stanford. What they could not do was have been wrong. Changing the plan in 2024 would have meant the plan was wrong in 2020, and four years of treatment had been wrong, and none of them could hold that. So they stuck with it. I got sicker. It cost $15,000, a false medical record, and nineteen months of my life. Sticking with a bad plan is never the cheaper option. It is only the more expensive one, later.
Senator, the same arithmetic is running in your chamber. In 2021 the Senate did not convict; the stated reason was jurisdictional. Since then: roughly 1,500 pardons for the attack on the Capitol, including 169 who pled guilty to assaulting police officers; a war conducted without your authorization; $1.776 billion committed through a lawsuit with no opposing party; and a President who has now threatened your body over a nomination. Articles of impeachment are filed in the 119th Congress — H.Res. 353 and H.Res. 939 — and they sit, because to move them now is to admit 2021 was wrong, and every year of not moving makes the admission larger. That is not strategy. It is the three hardest words in the language — we were wrong — stuck in a party's throat, at the scale of a republic. My mother could not say them, and I am still sick because of it. Can your party?
Senator, you are a Texan, so let me tell you a Texas story properly — because I think you are living inside it.
On May 26, 1830, the House of Representatives passed Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act by five votes. One congressman from Tennessee — Jackson's own state, Jackson's own base — voted no. David Crockett. He said the vote would "not make me ashamed in the Day of Judgment." Jackson's machine answered him the way such men answer: it funded his opponent and turned the newspapers on him, and Crockett lost his seat. He wrote afterward that he would never "fetch and carry at the whistle of the great man in the White House," no matter who he was. And when they finished him in Tennessee, he told them: you may all go to hell — I will go to Texas.
He came here, Senator. To fight for a free government where no man — not Jackson, not Santa Anna — stood above the law. He died at the Alamo for it, beside Travis and Bowie. We put their names on the schools and the streets of every city in this state. We say "Remember the Alamo" at ballgames. But do we remember what they died opposing? A strongman who could not be told no, and the men around him who would not say it.
Now look at your own year. The President who hung Andrew Jackson's portrait in the Oval Office on his first day back endorsed your opponent — a "true MAGA warrior," he called him — and on May 26, 2026, one hundred and ninety-six years to the day after the Removal Act passed over Crockett's objection, Texas Republicans removed you. The first Republican senator this state has ever primaried out. That was punch number one, and it was thrown for the same reason Jackson threw his: you had asked a question the great man does not permit.
Punch number two has already been announced. If the Senate will not confirm his attorney, he will withdraw the name, keep the man in the job as Acting Attorney General, and renominate him "after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office." He is not negotiating with you, Senator. He is telling you, by name, that you are a scheduling problem — that the consent of your chamber operates only when he expects to win it. That is the schoolyard, conducted from beneath Jackson's portrait, against the United States Senate.
Here is what I have learned about men like this, at the cost of my health: the method never stops on its own. It stops when someone sets a limit and holds it. My own father ran this method on me — words when I was young, and force in 2024, when naming his behavior is what sent me to Dell to be declared the problem. I finally stopped being silent at 57. I am still standing, and I am still fighting it, all the way up the chain to the President his party protects. So believe me when I say I know exactly how much it costs to swing back, and exactly what it costs not to.
If I were in your chair — and I say this as what I would feel, a free man's words offered to a free man, for you to temper as you see fit — when he announced his plan to outwait me, I would want the record to show I answered him like a Texan:
"Go ahead and withdraw the nomination, Mr. President. But understand one thing. You will not be renominating him after I am gone — because you will be gone first. The Congress of the United States has had enough of being bypassed, and this time it will use the power the Framers gave it. When my term ends in January 2027, you will not be President. That is a promise."
Cocky? Yes. Fighting words? Yes — because this is a fight; he has made it one with every man and woman who ever told him no, the way my father made it one with me. And here is what makes those words more than bravado: every part of them is simply the Constitution, said out loud with the tone it deserves. The House has the articles — already drafted, already filed. The Senate has the trial power. And an impeachment proceeding carries its own investigative authority on the strongest constitutional footing there is — subpoenas and discovery that run on Article I's power, not the Justice Department's permission, which means the one process in America that an Acting Attorney General has no lawful means to smother. The evidence you could not get any other way, impeachment goes and gets.
You could land the knockout, Senator — not just for yourself, but for the country, and for every citizen like me whose small case sits closed because the big one does. You have the standing: he already took your seat, so he has nothing left to take. You have the grounds: they are documented on every page of this website and in your own committee's record. You have the instrument: Madison named it, at the founding, as the answer to exactly this man. The only power the GOP is abusing now is the one it refuses to use — locked in a closet, with the party guarding the door.
So my question is the one I have been asking every institution in my life for six years, and it is the whole letter: Why not?
Senator, as I finish this letter the news says you have struck your deal and will vote yes tomorrow morning. So let me apply your own test to it — the test this whole letter borrowed from you: the paper controls, not the characterization of the paper.
On the fund: the order is rescinded, but the pre-existing claims process through which the same January 6 payouts can flow remains open. On the audit immunity — the part you called the red line — there is no new signed order narrowing anything. What you accepted is Mr. Blanche's interpretation memo of the May 19 order. The order itself still reads "FOREVER BARRED."
Senator: an interpretation memo layered over an unamended order is the exact thing you refused for three weeks — a verbal assurance in written costume. The paper still says forever. By your own principle, your condition has not been met; only its description has. You taught the country this distinction. Tomorrow at nine, the country gets to watch whether you still believe it.
One more thing, Senator, and it is the test underneath everything above. My father could not hear a truth about himself — his answer was an evaluation of me, and later a written renunciation of truth itself. The President cannot hear a truth about himself — ask the seventeen inspectors general, the National Science Board members he removed, or Bolton and Comey, who put truths about him on the record and got prosecutors at the door. You already know what hearing truth about him costs: it cost you your seat on May 26. But the harder question is not whether you can tell a truth about him. It is whether you can hear one about yourself.
Here it is. You do not like being bypassed on a war. You do not like being outwaited by name. And you — your chamber, your party — hold the power to end it, and have not used it. Which means your inaction is now the operative cause: the offices that would hear a citizen like me are closed because he closed them, and they stay closed because the Senate lets him. The stressor Dr. Nemeroff studied and then inflicted on me is sustained today by the party protecting the man who protects the system that protects the doctor. I am in my twentieth year, still having spasms — and the part of the cause that remains, Senator, is yours. Mine is the case I can document. Multiply it by every closed file in this country, and then by a strait and a war.
My father got this truth with no warning and failed it. The President fails it daily. You are getting it in writing, in advance, from a man with nothing to gain but the record — the same way you got the truth about the settlement, on paper, where it could not be talked away. You honored the paper then. Honor it now.
Crockett's rule was simpler than Washington's, and he left it for every Texan who would come after him: "Be always sure you are right — then go ahead."
You are sure, Senator. The paper says what it says. Go ahead.
The complete documented record is at bowandvector.com. My letters to Senators Tillis, Thune, and Grassley are posted there as well.
Respectfully,
Arthur Brent Porter
UT Austin, B.A. Computer Science, 1987
Native Texan · Great-grandson of an Oklahoma sharecropper who farmed corn
Lifelong Republican voter
abporter@gmail.com · 405-301-4786