Letter to Senator Thom Tillis

Dear Senator Tillis,

I am not your constituent. I am a Texan, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. Computer Science, 1987), a lifelong Republican voter, and — at 61 years old — someone who has spent the last fifteen months documenting exactly the same principle you and Senator Cornyn have been defending this week.

I am writing to ask you to hold the line.

You have insisted that a written settlement cannot be modified by verbal assurances. That what is on the paper is what is true. That Todd Blanche's spoken testimony that the "Anti-Weaponization Fund" is "dead" does not change what the settlement document itself still legally permits. You are right. And you are one of two Republican votes standing between this nomination and the floor.

I am writing because I have been standing on the same principle at a smaller scale, and the pattern I have documented is the same pattern that should concern you about Blanche.

The Parallel

First, one sentence on why that evaluation happened at all. At fifty-seven, I began telling my father the truth about his part in my illness — and my family answered the way powerful men answer truth-tellers: they moved to discredit me, and the evaluation was the instrument. When I later 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. Facts often prove what was said truthfully to be wrong." Hold that sentence next to every verbal assurance Mr. Blanche has given your committee. It is the same doctrine — the spoken convenience over the written record — and you already know what it is worth.

In December 2024, at Dell Medical School of the University of Texas at Austin, I was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation that Dell's own signed report acknowledges in writing was performed under financial coercion — my parents' documented ultimatum that I complete the evaluation or lose financial support. Under APA Ethical Standards 3.10 and 9.03, that voids informed consent. UT's institutional response has been to insist verbally that their evaluation was sound while their own signed paper documents that it was not.

The same contradiction you are being asked to accept from Blanche and the DOJ regarding the Anti-Weaponization Fund, I have been asked to accept from UT regarding a coerced evaluation. In both cases, the paper says one thing. The verbal reassurance says another. And in both cases, the correct principle — the one you are defending this week — is that the paper controls.

Why This Matters for the Blanche Vote Specifically

Todd Blanche, as Acting Attorney General, signed the orders creating a $1.776 billion fund out of public money 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." The Justice Department's own release states the plaintiffs receive "a formal apology but no monetary payment" — an apology from the government to the President, issued by the department he runs.

That is the answer to the question of whether Todd Blanche can tell Donald Trump no. He cannot. He has demonstrated it on the record. He fires the career DOJ officials who try to.

An Attorney General who cannot tell the President no is not an Attorney General. He is the President's attorney. That was Blanche's role in three criminal cases in 2023 and 2024. If confirmed, it will be his role from inside the office of U.S. Attorney General, with prosecutorial authority over the same client.

And now the news of this Monday, which is why I am sending this today instead of tomorrow: you and Senator Cornyn have announced you are satisfied, and the committee votes at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. You held the line until they handed you paper. Senator — read the paper. The audit immunity was not narrowed by any new signed order; what you received is Mr. Blanche's interpretation memo of the May 19 order, whose actual text still reads "FOREVER BARRED." And rescinding the fund order does not close the pre-existing claims process through which the same January 6 payouts can still flow. The written record still says what it says. What changed is only the characterization on top of it — which is precisely the thing you spent three weeks refusing to accept.

He Said Your Name

Senator, I want to make sure one fact is not lost in the noise of this week, because I think it is the most important fact in it.

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." Meanwhile Blanche simply continues as Acting Attorney General — indefinitely, with no confirmation vote at all.

Read what that is. The President of the United States announced, in public, that his plan for the nation's chief law-enforcement office is to wait until you, personally, by name, are gone. Not to persuade you. Not to meet your condition, which would cost him one signature. To outwait you.

A man who will not sign a paper saying the fund is dead, but will announce a plan to outlast the two senators asking for the paper, has told you everything: the fund was always the point, your chamber's consent is an obstacle rather than a requirement, and the Constitution's appointments power is, in his understanding, a scheduling problem.

You are not in a policy dispute, Senator. You are being waited out by name. Which means what you do between now and January 2027 is not the tail end of a career. It is the thing the whole seat was for.

The Freest Man in the Senate

Last June, on a Saturday, you voted against advancing a bill because you had done the arithmetic on your own state and could not make it come out honest. You stood on the floor and asked: "What do I tell 663,000 people in two years, three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore?"

The President's answer came within hours: "Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!" — and a public threat to back a primary challenger against you.

The next day, you announced you would not seek re-election. And in your statement you said two things I have not been able to stop thinking about. That leaders "willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species." And that you looked forward to serving out your term with "the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit."

Senator, I want to tell you what that sequence looks like from where I sit. I come from people who started with nothing — a great-grandfather who sharecropped corn in Oklahoma, another who ran out of a Tennessee orphanage at sixteen with his little sister so he could raise her himself. You started in trailer parks, one of six kids, and took your college degree at thirty-six after years of earning your way to it. Men who start there do not scare on schedule. When the threat came, you did not spend a week polling it. You handed back the one thing he could take — and kept the one thing he wanted.

Because here is the arithmetic of your chamber as an outsider sees it: every senator's caution has a name, and the name is their next primary. Yours is gone. You already paid the full price, voluntarily, on principle, over 663,000 people most senators will never meet. There is nothing left for him to threaten you with. That does not make you a lame duck, Senator. It makes you the freest man in the United States Senate — and in a chamber governed by fear, the free man is the most powerful one in the building.

You promised the pure freedom to call balls and strikes. This letter is one citizen asking you to call the whole game.

What Inaction Does

I have to say something plainly, because softening it would misrepresent what is happening to my body while you read this.

Dr. Charles Nemeroff — chair of the department that evaluated me, the man Senator Grassley investigated in 2008 and again in 2012 — built his career on a single finding: chronic, uncontrollable stress elevates corticotropin-releasing factor, which drives systemic inflammation, which produces disease. Apply his own science to my situation. I have a false psychiatric record I cannot correct, documented tick-borne infections that remain untreated, and a bipolar code in my file that the same report says had no evidence behind it. Every avenue has closed: the Texas Medical Board declined, the Office for Civil Rights will not investigate, the Inspector General has not answered, the University's General Counsel has not replied. That is the textbook definition of the stressor his research describes — serious, ongoing, with no available means of resolution, uncontrollable by design, because every mechanism built to make it controllable has declined to act.

So the harm is not something that happened to me in 2024. It is happening today, and every office that declines to act is part of the mechanism — the committee chairman, the Majority Leader, the senators holding this nomination, the General Counsel of the UT System. Professor Guiora's finding about enablers is not that they are unhelpful. It is that "both bear responsibility for their plight" — the perpetrator, and the one who knew and did nothing. I am telling you in writing that harm is occurring. You now know. Resolve the record and the stressor ends. That is the treatment. It is the only one I have not been able to start.

The Symptom and the Disease

Senator, you drew your line at the fund, and tomorrow morning you plan to vote to confirm the man himself. So let me say the thing my letter was always going to say, now with the proof attached: the fund was the symptom. The disease is a President who cannot be told no and is dismantling, one office at a time, every instrument that could say it — seventeen inspectors general in one night, career Justice officials fired for declining unlawful orders, and now an Attorney General selected precisely for his demonstrated inability to refuse. The fund is just what that disease produces when it reaches the Treasury.

George Mason warned at the Virginia Ratifying Convention that a President might "pardon crimes which were advised by himself." James Madison answered that the House can impeach him — not as one option among several, but as the reason the design was safe. Roughly 1,500 pardons for the attack on the Capitol, including 169 who pled guilty to assaulting police officers, is Mason's scenario almost word for word. And Madison's remedy is filed, this year, in this Congress: H.Res. 353 and H.Res. 939 sit in the House now.

In February 2021 the Senate acquitted, and the ground much of your conference stood on was jurisdiction — no power over a former officeholder. He is not a former officeholder now. I understand why the articles sit: to move them is to admit 2021 was wrong, and every year of not moving makes the admission larger. I watched that same arithmetic run in my own family for four years, and it cost them more than the truth ever would have — and cost me my health. The three hardest words in the language are "we were wrong." You, Senator, are one of the few men in your chamber who has already proven he can say the hard thing and absorb the cost. That is precisely why it matters that you say this one.

Can You Hear a Truth About Yourself?

My father could not hear a truth about himself; his answer was an evaluation of me. The President cannot — ask the inspectors general, the NSF board, Bolton, Comey. Of every man in your chamber, Senator, you have come nearest to passing this test: you heard the truth about 663,000 people and said it out loud, at the cost of your career. So you have earned the right to hear the last one plainly: holding the line on the fund is necessary, and it is not sufficient. As long as the man himself goes unchecked, the offices stay closed, and the stressor Dr. Nemeroff studied and inflicted on me is sustained — in my twentieth year, spasms and all — by a party you still caucus with, in a chamber that still holds the remedy it will not use. You have already proven you can absorb the cost of a truth. This one costs you nothing at all. Say it whole.

The Ask

I am not asking you to consider my case in your vote. I am asking you to consider the pattern — and to use the freedom you announced.

1. Before nine o'clock tomorrow, apply your own test one last time. The audit immunity has not been voided by any signed order — only characterized by an interpretation memo. The paper still says "forever." If the paper controls — your principle, and mine, and the whole of this website — then the condition you set has not actually been met, and your vote should say so.
2. Say publicly that the plan to outwait you is illegitimate. Withdrawing a nomination to preserve an indefinite acting appointment — announced, by name, as a plan to outlast two senators — is the appointments power inverted. You are the named target; nobody has more standing to say it.
3. Call the whole game. As a member of the Judiciary Committee with nothing left to lose, say what the fund is a symptom of, and say that H.Res. 353 and H.Res. 939 deserve to move. You do not have to promise a verdict. Say the process the Framers designed should run.
4. Between now and January 2027, say all of it. You gave up the seat to keep your voice. A voice kept and not used is the one outcome that makes his waiting strategy correct. Walk out in January 2027 having said everything — so that the record shows the free man used the freedom.

And let me tell you what is actually on the table in these last months, because Texas taught me both endings. My state is covered in schools named Crockett, Travis, and Bowie — men who, having nothing left to lose, spent it anyway. Schools are not named for the men who held a line quietly and went home. I lived in North Carolina for a time, Senator, and I can imagine a Tillis Elementary. Shakespeare gave this choice its permanent words the night before Agincourt: "From this day to the ending of the world… we in it shall be remembered — we few, we happy few, we band of brothers." Right now the band is two — you and Senator Cornyn, one of you retired rather than bow, the other voted out for asking a question — which makes you the two freest men in the chamber, and the only ones already past the price. What you do with that freedom decides whether these months end as mail, or as a name on a wall children walk under.

And I will say the dark half plainly, because you have earned plain speech. The alternative to the school is not obscurity — it is the other kind of remembering: one of the last men who held the constitutional power to stop it, and watched. No senator would choose to be known as the man a bully rolled on his way out the door while the country's freedom went with him. Better mail than that entry. You have already refused to bow, Senator. Refuse also to merely leave.

If a general counsel of a state university, a committee chairman, and an Attorney General nominee all operate on the same principle — that verbal reassurance overrides written record when convenient — then the paper trail that defines American accountability breaks at every level simultaneously. You are defending the boundary at the highest level this week. I have been defending it at the local level for fifteen months. We are on the same side of the same fight.

Please hold the line. And then move it forward.

The complete documented record of my case, including the parallel to the Blanche pattern, is at bowandvector.com. My letters to Senators Cornyn, Thune, and Grassley are posted there as well.

Respectfully,