CALIFORNIA THREATENS TO WITHHOLD TAXES FROM FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
For those regular readers here who have been following our friend and colleague Catherine Austin Fitts through the years, this story, shared by V.T. and K.M. with our gratitude, may invoke some memories. One of the things she has been emphatic about is the pressing need to restore constitutional process to the whole federal budgetary fiasco, both on the monetary and fiscal side of the mess. The current "Big Beautiful Bill" - or as I like to call it, the Big Beautiful Bait and Switch, or sometimes the Big Beautiscamful Bill - being the most recent case in point (q.v. this Wednesday's upcoming blog). The whole process is so out of control, and so patently wide of any constitutional transparent process, that she has advocated that states establish escrow accounts into which taxpayers pay their federal taxes, and there the money will stay until the whole mess is cleaned up and constitutional budgetary processes are restored.
Well, someone in California may have been listening:
Now, note that the California house speaker is advocating some sort of similar action, and for the following reason:
One of the most powerful Democrats in California is shooting his mouth off about breaking federal law after learning the Trump Administration might be about to drop the hammer on his state.
Multiple sources told CNN that the Trump administration is preparing to cancel a large portion of federal funding for California, which might begin as soon as today.
According to the outlet, Team Trump is specifically looking at entirely cutting off federal grant funding for the University of California and California State University systems.
...
Upon reading this, the speaker of the California State Assembly, Robert Rivas, erupted in anger and threatened various responses, including withholding federal taxes from the federal government.
“This is unconstitutional and vindictive,” Rivas wrote on BlueSky. “We’re the nation’s economic engine and the largest donor state, and deserve our fair share.”
“I’ll use every legal and constitutional tool available to defend CA — we must look at every option, including withholding federal taxes.”
Now, I'm not the least surprised that the center of this storm should revolve around that state's policy toward trans-gendered people. After all, during her ill-fated presidential campaign, cackling Kamala boasted that she saw to it that that state's transgendered inmates received the "health care" their "condition" required, including "the surgery" on the taxpayer dime. Meanwhile, many parents in that state are trying to defend their families against the full force of the bottomless, abyssal lunacy of the Sacramento nomenklatura.
But regardless of where one stands on all of that, the article contains a "something else" that is a warning for the future, and in my opinion, it's a future that is not that far off at all. In the ellipsis of the above quotation, there is a statement from a spokesman for the Trump Administration, and it's a "whopper doozie" if one thinks through its implications:
White House spokesman Kush Desai released the following statement Friday afternoon, slamming California but adding that no final decision has been made.
“No taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country. No final decisions, however, on any potential future action by the Administration have been made, and any discussion suggesting otherwise should be considered pure speculation.” (emphasis added)
No taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country." Fancy that. The corollary to that might be "no taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of the human race, or of his or her family and children", and so on. But to come to that position, we would have to acknowledge that the whole budgetary process is a mess, and it's a mess because it is not constitutional and transparent, and we're back to Ms. Fitts' square one. Indeed, this is not even our first time here, for we were here once before... remember that one?
If you don't, perhaps this brief refresher will prod your memory: back in the 1860s, with the Morrill Tariff working its way through a fractious congress, the southern states, which had long opposed high tariffs, walked out and seceded, leaving the tariff to pass the rump Union congress. To draw a loose analogy, one might say that the Morrill Tariff was that era's "Big Beautiscamful Bill". The South's response was entirely predictable, and understandable: they resisted a tax that, for them, amounted to the suicide of their states and culture.
So, after years of advocating her tax-escrow accounts to force the federal government back into constitutional compliance on budgetary processes, the subject has finally broken out into the open, though no one, I suspect, expected it to be over this issue, and from California, nor, I suspect, did anyone expect the principle behind it to be articulated, not by the speaker of that state's house of representatives, but by the spokesman for the Trump administration.
The genie is out of the bottle now, and while it may take some time to percolate through the public consciousness, I strongly suspect it will do so.
See you on the flip side...
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