Senate Majority Leader · United States Senator for South Dakota
Dear Senator Thune,
I am not your constituent. I am a Texan by birth and a registered Texas voter, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. Computer Science, 1987), and a lifelong Republican voter. I have never cast a ballot for a Democrat. I am asking for a few minutes anyway.
Senator, I have no claim on your attention. I am writing to you anyway, because somebody counted me wrong and wrote the wrong count down where it will follow me for the rest of my life, and because every office built to catch that has declined to look.
One other thing, since it is the only near-miss we have in common. I almost went to Biola. I did not learn about the school until after college, so it was too late, and a friend of mine was at Dallas Theological Seminary, so that is where I went instead. I studied Greek there for two years, trying to read the text in the language it was written in. Your brothers went from Biola into ministry. I went a different direction too. But I take the book seriously, and that turns out to matter to what I am about to ask you.
I am also writing because you have, more than once, chosen the country over the moment. In January 2021 you voted to certify Joseph Biden's electoral victory, against significant pressure from your own party's outgoing president. You have written publicly, and well, about Mount Rushmore as the "Shrine of Democracy" and about George Washington as "the father of our country." You grew up under that mountain.
Senator, I want to talk about your father, and I hope you will forgive a stranger for it.
Harold Thune flew the F6F Hellcat off the USS Intrepid — more than sixty missions with Fighting Squadron Eighteen. Over Formosa in October 1944 he shot down four enemy fighters in a single engagement and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Then he came home to Murdo and taught school and coached ball for the rest of a long life. He died in August of 2020, one hundred years old — four months before you told the truth about an election and the President of the United States promised to end your career for it.
A Navy pilot lives by his instruments. In cloud, over open water, at night, in flak, the panel is the truth: altitude, airspeed, attitude, fuel. The gauges are not opinions and they are not loyal. That is their entire value. A pilot who flies by what he wishes were true does not find the carrier, and every man on the Intrepid knew it.
A country has instruments too. Inspectors general. Career officials who will say an order is unlawful. The Congressional Research Service. Courts. A Senate. They tell the man flying where the country actually is, as opposed to where he would prefer it to be. Look at what has happened to the panel this year. Seventeen inspectors general removed in a single night — more than every previous president combined. Career Justice Department officials fired for declining unlawful instructions. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — a career combat pilot, your father's kind of man — removed, and the Pentagon handed to a weekend television host who had publicly called for his firing. And an organization reviewed fifty-seven of the President's judicial nominees — lifetime appointments — and found not one willing to say aloud that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. All but one reached for the identical word: "certified."
Covering a gauge leaves a pilot blind. Replacing the gauge with one that reads whatever altitude he prefers leaves him confident — and confidently wrong is how planes go into the water. Fifty-seven instruments, each selected because it will show the reading the pilot wants, is not a judiciary. It is a panel wired to please the man in the seat, with a country strapped in behind him.
Your father would have had a word for a man who flew like that. I doubt it was a long one.
Senator, I am going to ask you the question a stranger is allowed to ask, because the people around you cannot.
Why are you putting up with this man?
He called you "Mitch's boy." He called you a RINO. He said South Dakota "doesn't like weakness," announced your political career was over, and went looking for someone to run against you. He conducted a war without your chamber's authorization and sent the notification letters afterward. He took $1.776 billion out of an appropriation your body never votes on. And this month he announced he would withdraw a nomination and park his man in the job until two of your senators are gone — telling the United States Senate, in public, that its consent is a scheduling problem.
You are the Majority Leader of the United States Senate. There is no higher office in the legislative branch. And he treats you like staff.
Now here is the part I would most like you to sit with.
"Mitch's boy" and "RINO" are not descriptions. They are predictions — and only you can make them true.
You are "Mitch's boy" only if you never become your own man in that chair. And you are a Republican In Name Only only if you decline to defend the thing the party was named for. Constitutional restraint on executive power is not a peripheral Republican position; it is the founding one. Washington's Farewell Address is a document about restraining power, written by a man who voluntarily surrendered it. By any definition older than this decade, the Republican who defends the check is the actual Republican, and a President who dismantles it is the impostor.
So he has handed you the two names, and left the verdict with you. Move the articles and both names die on the day you do it. Leave them sitting, and he will have been right about you — not because the words were fair, but because you will have furnished the evidence.
And now, Senator — permission to rib you a little. A certain congressman once needled a freshman on Main Street about the one free throw he missed, and the needle was the message: somebody watched you play, and remembered. Nobody does that for powerful men anymore; everyone around you is far too careful. So here is what I, a Texan with nothing left to lose, would say to him from your chair — and I suspect it sits within a few words of what you would like to say yourself:
"No, Mr. President — I am a true Republican, and I can prove it to you.
Republicans believe in checks and balances. Republicans believe in the Constitution. That is the thing the party is named for. So to settle for good whether I am a Republican in name only, I have spoken with the conference, and we have agreed on the most Republican act available to us. We are impeaching you.
You will never have to use the word RINO on us again. Because true Republicans don't take shit from a person like you. We just send him home. And that is exactly what we are doing.
While I have you: you are not above the law. Mr. Blanche will not be confirmed, and the SAVE America Act will not be passed for your convenience — because saving America is no longer a matter of doing what you say. Saving America is sending you home, where you will answer for all of this in a courtroom, like any other citizen.
Good day, Mr. President. I have papers to prepare.
Oh — and about the ballroom. Your attorney is quite right that stopping construction now would waste the money already spent. So we will finish it. We are simply going to call it something else. The Biden Ballroom has a ring to it. So does the Impeachment Ballroom. You may choose."
I am joking, Senator. Kind of. Say it your own way, or say none of it — but if you ever want a hand getting the papers ready, you know where to find me. (That is also a joke. Mostly.)
And underneath the ribbing, the true thing, delivered the way your old mentor delivered it: nobody else has had the nerve even to joke with this President about the elephant in the room — no Grand Old Pun intended. Men where you come from talk to each other this way. So do men where I come from; any Texan who reads that speech will laugh, or will work very hard not to. But something in that register, said once, plainly, in your own words from the Leader's desk, would do more for this country than anything else on your calendar this month. And nobody else in America can say it, because nobody else holds that gavel.
If you do say it, record it. I would like to see it, and so would about three hundred million other people. I think you would be surprised what it does — not just to the mood of the country, but to its economy, because relief is a market condition too, and there has not been a day like that in this country in a very long time.
In December 2020 you were asked whether the Senate would overturn the election. You said the effort would "go down like a shot dog." It was blunt, it was South Dakota, and it was correct.
The President answered you in public: "RINO John Thune, 'Mitch's boy,' should just let it play out. South Dakota doesn't like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!" He asked your governor to run against you. She declined. And when the filing deadline came, not one Republican in South Dakota had put in against you. Your career was not over. Four years later, your conference handed you the gavel.
And there is an older dog in this story, Senator. The last congressman who stood up to the man whose portrait now hangs in the Oval Office — David Crockett, against Andrew Jackson — wrote that he would never "fetch and carry at the whistle of the great man in the White House." He knew what Jackson's party wanted him to be: a retriever. He refused, they took his seat, and he went to Texas and into eternity. You compressed the same choice into one sentence, the Dakota way: it would go down like a shot dog. That is the whole choice in front of your conference right now — fetch at the whistle, or put the thing down. You chose right once, in December 2020, with your father four months in the ground. Choose right again.
Senator, you are the living proof — inside your own conference, at its highest level — that telling this President no is survivable. That the threat is noise. That South Dakota does not punish a man for saying a true thing plainly.
Which is why the silence now teaches a lesson you know to be false. Every senator watching concludes that if even Thune — who said no once and lived — will not say it from the Leader's desk, the threat must be real after all. Your survival taught them courage costs less than advertised. Your caution is teaching them the opposite. Only one of those lessons is true, and you are the man who proved which one.
My father's mother was a Baptist, and her people came up through Mississippi. What she taught me was the Golden Rule. I have spent a long time since then testing it, and I have come to believe it is not merely a devotional saying. It is the most rigorous ethical standard I know of, and it does not require anyone to share my faith to hold it.
Here is why. The way I act sets the standard by which I can be treated. If I treat a man with contempt, I have asserted that treating a human being with contempt is permissible — and I have given up any principled objection when it is done to me. If I deal honestly with someone, I am entitled to expect honest dealing back, because that is the standard I have established by my own conduct.
That principle is not sectarian. Confucius: do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself. Hillel: what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Jesus in Matthew 7. Immanuel Kant arrived at the same place by pure reason and called it the categorical imperative — act only on a rule you could accept as universal law. Four traditions with no contact between them, and the same answer.
So I want to apply it plainly to what is happening in my home state right now.
If a legislature redraws district lines to reduce the voting power of its own citizens for partisan advantage, it has asserted that reducing a citizen's voting power for partisan advantage is acceptable. Having asserted that, it has surrendered every principled objection when the same thing is done to it.
That is not a policy disagreement. It is a logical consequence. And no one drawing those maps would accept them if they were drawn against him.
Texas is doing this at the request of the President. Texas also calls itself a Christian state. I do not know how to hold those two facts in the same hand, and I am asking a man who studied at Biola whether he does.
After seventeen years of Lyme disease, Bartonella, Babesia, and documented mold toxicity, I asked my family for something specific. I asked them to let me stop chasing physical treatments for a while and address what was emotional — which is real, even though it does not show up on a lab panel. I said it honestly and in writing.
And I said one thing more, for the first time in my life: I told my father the truth about his own part in my story — that I would not carry the whole blame so he would never have to look at his share. That is why what came next came. 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. When, months after Dell, I reminded my father that he was the one who taught me to tell the truth, his written reply — June 21, 2025 — was that "there are times, from my life experience, when not telling the truth is better." I have voted Republican my whole life. My father is a Republican. And I am now doing to the party what I did to him at fifty-seven: telling the truth, uninvited.
What I got instead was an ultimatum: attend a psychiatric evaluation or lose financial support. The evaluation cost $15,000. Dell Medical School's own signed report documents the coercion in its own words, and they proceeded anyway.
What follows is not my characterization. It is what the same institution's own paper says:
Honest errors scatter in both directions. Every one of these moved the same way.
The chairman of that department is Dr. Charles Nemeroff. Senator Grassley investigated him in 2008 over $1.2 million in undisclosed pharmaceutical payments, and wrote to NIH about him again in 2012. Your colleague knows exactly who this man is — my letter to him is posted beside this one.
I have filed with the Texas Medical Board, the UT Austin Ethics Office, the UT System General Counsel, the accreditor, the Office for Civil Rights twice, and the HHS Inspector General. Six institutions. Not one has corrected it. The only apology I have received in nineteen months came from my mother — the person with the least institutional power in the story.
I am telling you this not to ask you to fix it. I am telling you because it is the small version of the thing I am actually writing about. Someone with power counted a person wrong on purpose, wrote it down, and every mechanism that exists to catch that has declined to look.
And I have to tell you what the unresolved version of that does, because it is measurable and it is happening while you read this. Dr. Nemeroff's own published research established that chronic, uncontrollable stress elevates corticotropin-releasing factor, drives inflammation, and produces disease. A false record I cannot correct, infections I cannot treat while fighting it, and offices that will not look is precisely that stressor — uncontrollable by design, because every mechanism built to make it controllable has declined to act. The men who could end it — the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the General Counsel of the University of Texas System, and the Majority Leader who controls what the Senate takes up — are, by not acting, maintaining it. Professor Amos Guiora, whom the UT System's own General Counsel once brought to Texas to lecture, has a word for a person who knows harm is occurring and does nothing, and it is not bystander. It is enabler, and his finding is that "both bear responsibility for their plight." I am telling you in writing that harm is occurring. You now know.
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
"The spirit of party... agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption... Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."
Washington warned specifically that party loyalty could be used, over time, by "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" to subvert the people's government. That warning is 230 years old. It is also, this week, on your desk.
Todd Blanche was Donald Trump's personal criminal defense attorney in three criminal cases in 2023 and 2024. He is now nominated to be U.S. Attorney General — the office charged with prosecutorial oversight of his former client.
As Acting Attorney General, Blanche signed the orders creating a $1.776 billion fund out of public money — out of the Judgment Fund, a permanent appropriation Congress never votes on — and permanently barring the IRS from pursuing existing tax claims against the President and his family, in the settlement of a lawsuit the President filed against agencies he oversees, in which the government's own lawyers never entered an appearance. Federal Judge Kathleen Williams found the parties "worked in tandem and were never actually adverse." Thirty-five retired federal judges, including the Reagan appointee Michael Luttig, called the Department's justification "laughable" and asked whether a fraud had been perpetrated on the court. A man with nothing to answer for does not need permanent immunity from being asked. The clause is the confession.
As I send this, the committee is set to vote Tuesday at nine in the morning, after Senators Cornyn and Tillis announced Monday that a deal satisfied them. Read what the deal actually is, Senator: the fund order rescinded — while the pre-existing claims process that can pay the same January 6 claimants stays open — and the audit immunity "narrowed" not by any new signed order but by Mr. Blanche's own interpretation memo of the May 19 order, whose text still reads "FOREVER BARRED." Three weeks of holding out for the written record, settled for a characterization of it. Which means the last man between this nomination and the Department of Justice is now you — the Senate Majority Leader who decides whether and how it reaches the floor.
Because the pattern I documented at the University of Texas is the same pattern now advancing in the confirmation of Todd Blanche.
An institution covering the words on its own tower. A university covering the true scores of one of its own alumni. A Senate committee chairman covering a whistleblower's testimony by attacking her instead of the man who fired her. An Attorney General who cannot tell the President no.
The same act, at four scales.
You are, at this moment, the Republican in the highest institutional position in the United States Senate with the personal history of choosing country over party — the 2021 certification vote is public record, and senators of your own conference have publicly said they are grateful you are willing to push back.
I am asking you to push back once more, on this vote, in the Washington tradition you have written publicly about.
There is one more thing, and it is the part I understand least.
Military action was taken against Iran without authorization from the body you lead. The notification letters were sent to Senator Grassley as President Pro Tempore — the Constitution routes these things through the Senate for a reason. In March, this chamber voted 47 to 53 to reject a war powers resolution that would have required congressional authorization going forward.
So the President made war without your body's permission, and your body then voted not to require his permission-seeking in the future.
And now, on the nomination: the President has said publicly that if the Senate will not confirm Todd Blanche, he has "no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd's name" and putting it back "after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office." Withdrawal does not remove Blanche from the building. He simply continues as Acting Attorney General — indefinitely, with no confirmation vote at all.
Senator, that is a plan to keep the man in the job while removing your chamber's power to weigh in on him, and then to run the vote again when the arithmetic improves. Advice and consent becomes a formality that operates only when the President expects to win it.
You are the Majority Leader. You decide what reaches the floor. If the Senate's power can be routed around this easily, I do not understand what is left of it — and I do not understand why the man who holds it is not saying so.
Senator, I want to put two things beside each other, because I cannot make them fit.
You brought the SAVE America Act to the floor and stood there explaining, with charts, why every American should have to produce documentary proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to vote. You said proof of citizenship and voter ID "shouldn't be controversial." Whatever one thinks of the policy, notice what it is: a new burden, placed on the citizen, in the name of protecting the integrity of American self-government.
And in that same season, the President conducted military action against Iran without authorization from the body you lead — the notification letters arriving after the fact — and your chamber then voted not to require his asking next time. He sued agencies he controls and took $1.776 billion out of an appropriation Congress never votes on. He announced he would withdraw a nomination and keep his man in the job until two of your senators are gone.
So the ledger reads like this. A retired schoolteacher in Sioux Falls must find her birth certificate before she may vote. The President of the United States need not find your permission before he goes to war.
Senator, if the integrity of American self-government is the concern — and I believe it genuinely is yours — then the burden is being placed on the wrong end of the transaction. Requiring more paper from the voter while requiring nothing at all from the executive does not protect the system. It protects the man who is bypassing it, at the expense of the people who are not.
That is treating a symptom while the source goes untouched. I know that difference intimately, because it is exactly what was done to me: Dell Medical School spent $15,000 examining the man raising the objection instead of the objection he raised. The paperwork was thorough. It was pointed at the wrong person.
You once said an effort to overturn an election would go down like a shot dog — plain, correct, and Dakota. But there is another dog in this story. When David Crockett refused Andrew Jackson, he wrote that he would never "fetch and carry at the whistle of the great man in the White House." Every senator now stands somewhere between those two animals: the one that puts a thing down, and the one that fetches.
Adding proof-of-citizenship requirements at a President's convenience, while declining to move articles of impeachment already drafted and filed, is fetching. Not from cowardice — I do not think you are a coward, and your record says otherwise — but because it treats the symptom while the source keeps working.
I am asking you to treat the source.
Let me put it the way it would be put in any boardroom in South Dakota or anywhere else.
A board exists to hold a chief executive accountable on behalf of the people whose futures depend on the enterprise. It can survive a bad quarter and a failed strategy. The one thing it cannot survive is a chief executive who reports falsely to it, because a board cannot govern what it cannot accurately see.
In March the President reported that Iran's Navy was gone and its Air Force was no longer. In May the Congressional Research Service — your own institution's audit function — documented dozens of American aircraft lost since February. In June an Iranian drone brought down an Apache, which the President confirmed himself. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since March — a fifth of the world's oil and gas moves through it in peacetime, roughly 1,550 vessels sit stranded in the Gulf with some 22,500 mariners aboard, and Brent crude is above $90. At the G7 in June, arriving late to a meeting of the heads of the seven largest democracies, he joked: "I'm the boss."
He is not the boss. That is the entire premise of the office he holds — and of the one you hold. He is a chief executive in a system where the legislature declares war, holds the purse, confirms officers, and removes him when necessary.
Any board in this country would act on a discrepancy like that. Not out of anger — because they could no longer rely on what they were being told, and a board that cannot rely on the executive's reporting is not governing. It is signing off.
And every director knows the second half of it: a board that keeps an executive after documented misrepresentation is not being loyal. It is in breach. When it surfaces, the shareholders do not sue the executive alone.
You are on that board, Senator. You chair it. The report came from your own researchers.
George Mason objected at the Virginia Ratifying Convention that a President should not hold an unreviewable pardon power, because he might "pardon crimes which were advised by himself." James Madison answered him: the House can impeach him. Madison did not offer that as one option among several. It was his answer to the objection — the reason the design was safe. The check exists because someone uses it.
Roughly 1,500 pardons for the attack on the Capitol — including 169 who pled guilty to assaulting police officers, plus commuted sentences for men convicted of seditious conspiracy — is the scenario Mason named, almost word for word.
And the remedy Madison pointed to is not theoretical this year. Articles of impeachment are filed in the 119th Congress — H.Res. 353 and H.Res. 939. They sit in the House, where the remedy begins. But here is why this letter comes to you and not only to the House: if the House moves, your chamber's own standing rules require the Senate to take the articles up at one o'clock the day after they are presented — and from that hour, everything runs through your desk. The organizing resolution that shapes the trial. The schedule that gives it meaning or starves it. A trial can be real or it can be a burial, and the Majority Leader is the difference between them.
And here, Senator, I want to quote you back to yourself — not to corner you, but because I think February 2021 is the most underrated thing you ever did, and its own logic has now come due.
You voted to acquit. And then you said, in your own official statement, that your vote "should not be viewed as exoneration for his conduct on January 6, 2021, or in the days and weeks leading up to it." You called what he did to undermine faith in our elections and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power "inexcusable" — your word, in writing. You said you were open to censure — accountability by another instrument. And when your own party moved to punish the seven Republicans who voted to convict, you defended them: "There was a strong case made. People could come to different conclusions. If we're going to criticize the media and the left for cancel culture, we can't be doing that ourselves."
That was a balanced man's record, and I am not here to mock it. I am here to point out what it preserved. You kept the verdict unexonerated. You kept the conduct named — inexcusable. You kept the door to accountability open and defended the men who had already walked through it. The only thing you declined was the instrument, and the ground for declining it was jurisdiction — no power over a former officeholder.
He is not a former officeholder now. The jurisdictional objection is gone. The censure road was never taken. The inexcusable conduct is still unexonerated — by your own written word. Everything you balanced in February 2021 has been sitting on the scale for four years waiting for its other half, and balance is not a resting place, Senator. It is a scale. You loaded one side yourself.
And I understand why the articles sit, because I watched the same arithmetic run in my own family for four years: to act now is to admit the last decision was wrong, and every year of not acting makes the admission larger. But that is precisely where your 2021 record rescues you — you never said he was innocent, so moving now admits nothing. You are not reversing yourself. You are completing yourself. My family could not say three words — we were wrong — and it cost them more than the truth ever would have, and it cost me my health. You do not even have to say those words. You wrote yours in February 2021. All you have to do now is act like the man who wrote them. Washington gave the warning in 1796. Mason asked the question and Madison answered it in 1788. The remedy is filed. The rules are ready. The floor is yours.
My father could not hear a truth about himself; his answer was an evaluation of me. The President cannot hear one either — ask the seventeen inspectors general, the National Science Board members he removed, or Bolton and Comey, prosecuted for putting truths about him on the record. You proved in December 2020 that you can tell him a truth. The remaining question is whether you can hear one about yourself, and here it is: you do not like being bypassed on a war or outwaited on a nomination — and you, more than any man alive, hold the power to end it, and have not used it. So your inaction is now part of the cause. The offices that would hear a citizen like me stay closed because your chamber lets him keep them closed. The stressor Dr. Nemeroff studied and inflicted is sustained, today, in my twentieth year of illness, by the party you lead in the Senate — and not only on me: on every closed file in this country, on the servicemen over the Strait, on Iran, on the world recalculating what American law is worth. My father got this truth with no warning and failed. You are getting it in writing, in advance. Answer it differently.
I am not asking you to litigate my case. I am asking four things:
Washington closed his Farewell Address by asking his fellow citizens for one thing: that "the free constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained." Not by loyalty to a party. By loyalty to the constitution itself.
You grew up under the mountain with his face on it. You have called it the Shrine of Democracy in your own writing. The man carved sixty feet tall above your hometown left one warning about how this republic would be lost, and it is the one sitting on your desk this week. You have chosen the country over the moment before, at cost, and the cost turned out to be smaller than promised. I am one American, from Texas, writing to South Dakota, to ask you to choose it once more.
The complete documented record is at bowandvector.com. My letters to Senators Cornyn, Tillis, and Grassley are posted there as well.
Respectfully,
Arthur Brent Porter
B.A. Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, December 1987
Native Texan and registered Texas voter
Lifelong Republican voter
bowandvector.com