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There are a large number of lawsuits filed against pharmaceutical companies which manufacturer opioid s / opiates . A few have rightfully been dismissed for lack of standing . Judge dismisses lawsuit implicating drug manufacturers in opioid epidemicNew Britain Herald - Judge dismisses cities' suit against drug companiesThe judges are correct . The plaintiffs do not have standing to sue . Opioid / opiate medications are legal products . They are approved to be used as indicated and prescribed by the FDA . The pharmaceutical companies did not and do not hold addicts down , force the addict to crush pillow and inject or use them nasally. They do not advertise the use of schedule 2 medication . It is not allowed . No one from doctors, pharmacists ,inparticular intractable pain patients who have become the target of Andrew Kolodny and other anti opioid zealots and fanatics such as PROP the once respected CDC, and now states looking to fill empty tax coffers .These are what is known as speculative litigation . The plaintiffs are hoping for a large judgement or settlement. Which the pharmaceutical industry is rightfully fighting .After the tobacco litigation which saw hundreds of millions in find a supposedly set aside for smoking cessation and preventing people especially young people from starting .Most states used the find a asset of their general fund . This is going to make any litigation extremely difficult.There are many problems with blaming everyone and everything but addicts for choosing to abuse medication or more often illegal heroin now adulterated with various unknown fentanyl analogues . These are made in China and are all but impossible to stop from entering any country . If you watch a seaport it becomes obvious why . Just watching the waiting to cross from Mexico into a less busy state such as New Mexico should make it obvious .The the vast very difficult to patrol coastline of the U.S . has been a long time favorite of drug smugglers. In fact the coastal areas from the rest lakes to both the entire eastern and western coastline with the gulf of Mexico . Where whare much of the alcohol was smuggled in during the failure known as the Prohibition. Nixon created the DEA and passed the controlled substances act , which should have been and should be ruled unconstitutional. The government has o place in the doctor patient relationship . If we can say the government should be limited in what it can do when a woman wishes about a pregnancy using abortion as a means of birth control . Telling people do suffer from intractable pain that fire not remit or reduces person to bring debilitated often living in endless torment is much more than invading our privacy and what we choose to do with our bodies often the advice of a highly educated and skilled physician.We hear zealots such as Andrew Kolodny ranting on about Perdue settling for a pittance . The plaintiffs knew they did not have a string casec. I believe it was Kentucky and West Virginia.While Perdue engaged in illegal marketing . They did not market to Addicts . Addicts discovered brush nd and snorting Oxy Contin when their heroin was temporarily hard to find . Usually a supply shortage, rarely does the government catch enough drugs to reduce supply to have much of a effect on the market .If there is a demand for a product legal or illegal there will be someone willing to fill that demand . Currently the supplier of drugs are criminals who will do whatever they want to fill the demand . Narcotrafficos , are sociopathic, Psychopathic like organizations which have terrorized Mexico and Central America along with Countries such as Colombia , Peru and Bolivia. They must be more than ecstatic about the chaos crisis in Venezuela .Lots of desperate people , prime land to grow poppies, and coca . Plenty of people with skills to help produce the drugs , launder money and develop new and ingenious ways to smuggle the drugs into the U.S. .China would e more than happy to help .They had been allowing chemists to make fentanyl analogues which can easily bring in millions and drain the resources of the U.S. . We waste billions in tax revenue to stop people from harming themselves and enriching violent criminal organizations and possibly Islamic extremists and terrorists who will use the drug money to inflict terror in us out of hated and recruits willing to die thinking they will get ,70 virgin to have endless sex with . Another discussion in itself .He we arrest and incarcerate mid and low level dealers who steadily replaced . With litt!e hope for a career , dead end low wage service industry jobs among the place of skilled kabkrv..A refusal to use law enforcement to investigate and arrest those those hire undocumented immigrants as a source of low wage labor which will not file law suit or go to OSHA, Will work long hours with out overtime. Do not get sick time or vacation time . How does a high school graduate begin to compete with that for a job that either begins their adult life as a employee or provide enough to survive in . Figure out how to change this and create new good paying employment opportunities . Along with reversing some other self inflicted wounds that will not heal .We have tried to arrest and incarcerate our way out of this crisis which we created by criminalizing drug . The dealers might go prison .There are ten more willing to take their place . Dealing drugs is far more lucrative than working at Wal-Mart Mart a fast food restaurant or other low paying long hours little advancement job .Before OXY Contin was on the market Janssen had been successful with Duragesicic Fentanyl patches which have been changed to !she abuse even more difficult . Though a addict will find a way to abuse any thing. The patches were not !marketed as non addictive or creating tolerance and depend by which are not addiction no!after how much a anti opioid fanatics wishes this so .Two brand name extended release version of Morphine have also been on the market at the same time as Oxy Contin . Kadian and Avinsa one is no longer available as it did not sell as well as the generic often called MS Contin or Morphine ER . Addicts did not seem out either drug often.If they use prescription morphome it is out of desperation . Ironically it is heroin mebolizing into morphine which provides a the high after the initial intense high of it or nasal heroin . Which is simply diacetalmorphine.These medications were not marketed to be used with out a breakthrough medication and have been allowing tens millions to have a semblance of a life and engage in activities Those with out intractable pain cannot imagine .The opioid hysteria affects every one . The cost of litigation will push all pharmaceutical products priced up often out of reach for many . The companies which manufacture opioid a also manufacture medication such as insulin , anti psychotic medication, medication for high blood pressure, anti biotics, anti seizure medication , birth control, bloodthinners, medication for heart disease, medication for HIV , cancer , you name it they make it .There are few companies which make opioids as their only product . That drug happens to be the opioid of choice for anti opioid and pain patients Andrew Kolodny it's called Buprenophine often commonly called Suboxone when combined with Naloxone . Which untill recent!y was made by Apriss whichhad fought to keep its monopoly in the drug .Which only gives addicts a false sense of safety .Naloxone is sold at incredible profit to municipalities .They then use it to receive addicts sometimes the same junkies will be revived two or more times in one day . Why are taxpayers responsible ? Though there is intense lobbying to force it to be sold to intractable pain patients and those of us who take opioid medication so we do not live in torment everyday No yoga ,CBT , acupuncture , The best fanatical pushed Kratom . Which is,highly toxic to the liver and can cause serious problems .It is not well understood and has not been studied as a medication . Mostly due to its high liver toxicity .Thousand the fact when prescription drugs are abused they are not used as directed . Doctors will tell you not to crush the extended release medication or eat Fentanyl patches. That's just asking for trouble. Most Doctors are not paid or in anyway compensated for prescribing any .education .This a serious federal felony and a felony in all fifty states Puerto Rico , Guam and other territories.The fact many addicts who are resuscitated have been given Naloxone many times . They make up about .0001 percent of the 330million in the US. If opioid a were really as bad as anti opioid zealots and fans claim nearly every one would be a junkie .The cruel , draconian , barbaric bill of rights shredding CD C and various laws and regulations and administrative punishment called euphemistically enforcement s or civil actions .Which were by written by members of PROP and their favorite parmacu pharmaceutical companies Indivor and Apriss . CDC opioid prescribing guidlines. Which appear to custom fit the Buprenophine pushers at PROP ,a fanatical anti Opiod organization which is made up of addiction treatment industry doctors who created the newly minted disorders Opioid Use Disorder, OUDs a nonsense disorder that a unethical or greedy addiction treatment doctor or psychologist can label any one who use a opioid with. The new!y created Substance use disorder SUDs Both are garbage diagnosis intended to effect the outcome of the opioid litigation as well as full up beds In drug rehab Which until 2010 When Kolodny a addiction psychiatrist who worked for later to be CD C director Tom Frieden. The primary used detainees awaiting trial In The NYC jail system who were not in a position to refuse . Along with severely mentally ill in NYC Psychiatric facilities.A very unethical way to treat the most vulnerable .Giving jails and psychiatrist $ 10,000 to push , Suboxone and SubutexThis and the fact over 20 million pain patients use opioid medication with out becoming a depraved addict is going to be a very high hurdle for any anti opioid plaintiff . The fact these same states used the tobacco strengthening as a slush fund to keep taxes low instead of preventing and tobacco ceasitation program will be brought up .The fact municiphad been missing revenue , alities did not bill addicts as they do motorists who need a EMT is also going to be a very effective defense .That's active as is,not requiring those who get help to pay off the cost of belong them often we just wake them up . They are notifying just nodding as addicts call it . I have a colleage who works in a moderate sized city maybe 800,000 or so . She sees this all the time I get overdoses about once or twice a month with the occasional transfer when a small hospital lacks space for the addict . I also am known to make sure they go from ER to jail . Which does wonders they bc me not to send them to lockup. Knowing hey cannot get thier drugs in a cell 22/7 with camera cover them making it hard to ha e a guard pass drugs . One tried . He is now a guest of the maximum security prison in Canon City and Florence.In like some places .My practice will bill the addicted then bring them to court when they inevitably refuse to pay the ,$100,00 to 1 million or on occasion even more . They then violate the courts order and we seize their assets I've yet to recover much . I do not expect it .However I am not a charity . I have a life , friends girlfriends (spinning places is essential in the current heterosexual dymanic s and doing market . I might earn a very good income. It took years of hard work . I am highly respected and want to do the best I possibly can for my patients . tHey deserve compassion ,dignity and respectful treatment . If it means I sign off on a addict being fit for incarceration instead o f coddling them with consequence free or responsibility avoids nd pain patient blaming Suboxone pushing rehab so be it . They had a better chance cleaning up unlock up while they await trial or a plea . As I work hard an d will try as best I can to measure a patient gets the right specialist . A medication or medications approved by insurance and take time to listen to them . To talk and maybe learn something that helps them and hosted I expect to be paid for my experience and expertise and time .So would everyone who works hard and does not expect something simply for showing up .I do not blame any one but addicts and their enablers such as Andrew Kolodny and his PROP or Jane Balentyne who is also a member of PROP .She has serious conflicts of interest .She was a consultant to Cohen Milstein, the law firm suing opioid manufacturers .Except Indivor which makes Suboxone . It can easily become highly addictive and is slaughtered by prison inmates , athletes who are subjected to drug tests .As Buprenophine is noground by inexpensive drug tests.Unlike less dangerous and milder hydrocodone which the Andrew Kolodny endOsCoPY lobbiedBias and Conflict of Interest in Opioid Guidelines Study“ Ballantyne is the President of PROP, the organization founded by Kolodny. At least four other board members of PROP, including Kolodny himself, served on various CDC panels that advised the agency during the drafting of the guidelines, a matter that the agency refused to disclose for several months. “Dysfunction, Lobbying, and Conflict of Interest in the Debate Over Opioids – InsideSources“Jane Ballantyne, President of PROP. Ballantyne has served as a paid consultant to the law firm Cohen Milstein, which was profiled by the New York Times late last year for its coaxing of state attorneys general to sign contingency agreements allowing the firm to file suit against potential targets it has identified by scouring the news media and public records. In what the Times suggests is a quid pro quo arrangement, the attorneys general receive substantial campaign contributions either right before or after they sign the contingency agreements. “This will become a serious problem in any legit court . She created what are arbitrary guidlines which but carry the force of law based on zero evidence . It is not possible to at minimum ethical test this idea. It would be little different than what the Nazis did to victims of their sick twisted so called experiments in Auschwitz Dachau, Majdank , Scachenhausen , Maunchuasen, and other concentration camps. The opioid hysteria is becoming strikingly similar to how the holocaust started .Blame a group who cannot fight back pain patients who often are living in SSDI or have limited income which is spent on their medical care. While addicts grt taxpayer funded rehab, section 8 housing.Junkies get moved ahead of disabled veterans and disabled people who worked hard often at jobs such as logging, farming , commercial fishing , construction, trash collecting and other dangerous jobs which keep the country running and you comfortable.Why are pharmaceutical companies which make medications which save lives and make your life beyyer. We love about 30 years longer-term just 100 years ago thanks to modern medicine and the medications made by pharmaceutical companies .Sure They make a profit That's capitalism and competition at work. It's not perfect but it sure is better than what China or the Former USSR call or called health care.Want to see your medications price skyrocket , ask your Attorney General to file more frivolous lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies.Which make far more drugs then opioid Which with a few exceptions are inexpensive genetics (we pay for the cost controls in Europe and a number of other nations which is I e reason a generic li!e Morphine which is,I've 200 years old ccodt about $ 60 USD for a 60 count 15 or 30 mg I R tab!yes . Hydromorphone a 80 year old medication is about the same for a 90 count 4mg tablet s . A who!e Newcastle . A!do a way to get pain relive should insurance deny extended release opioid medication as it can cost more even as a generic ..There is little profit in genetics compared to a new in patent drug Which is why Indivor Monosol product hopped Buprenophine with Naloxone.Alleged product-hopping, sham petition to delay generic sufficeThis article goes into more detail why these lawsuits are not sure byes and might even cost states billions . Which is possible if they are four d to be frivouous, perpetrating a fraud on the four for pecuniary gain and or a malicious prosecution .The planting is prosecuting the suit .Doing some research into law and how courts work . Hint they are nothing like the notoriously inaccurate and propaganda pieces Law and Order shows or any court drama on television.The opioid suits are also based on the premise every company did what Perdue did in its marketing scheme which was improper.I don't know any doctors who changed and wrote lots of RXs for Oct Contin based on a sales reps say so .A!so it is a felony in every state as well as federally prescribe medication in exchange for any fungible or tangible good funding or serviceThe idea doctors are paid to prescribe us based on PROP ,PROPagandaMost likely as The spurs continue and more more information is available to the courts and the pharmaceutical industry Which i will find all it needs to defend themselves from the fabricated data and belifes they do show held addicts down and injected them with heroin adulterated with a fentanyl analogue which might be unknown to chemists .It's very easy if you have the right precursor to alter any drug and create a similar product which might or might not work . We have no idea what is in the heroin addicts choose to abuse themselves with. The cheap tests a coroner uses will not even detect fentanyl .It requires a sophisticated GC ME panel !Only 7,000 o overdoses are due to a opioid /opiate alone . That's less thsn. 000001% of the 330million in the US . Only 15,000 or so due from using opioid s opiates/opioids combined with another drug . It is when they use a number of drugs that they fatally overdose .The Opioid Epidemic in 6 Charts Designed To Deceive YouA Overdose does not equal death . Often the addiction be discharged within 12- 24 hours u Dr their own power . Those that do not have taken a numbering drugs often with cocaine , alcohol, and a combination medication such as Hydrocodone with acetaminophen. Which can cause serious liver damage .As Acetaminophen is the number one drug seen in overdoses intentional and unintentional. Often by taking multiple OCT medication with acetaminophen fto. Cold and flu relief ,( a waste of money )then just acetaminophen and cat night acetaminophen and diphenhydramine (Benadryl)to sleep. Benadryl is used asanesthetic .This abuse can lead to many complications when used as a anxiolytic.A psychiatrist who had become caught up in a PROP members anti Benzodiazepine fanatisim is facing life in prison for using diphenhydramine in the place of a new such as Seroquel .This person also used Seroquel , Thorazine and typical and atypical antipsychotic medication for anxiety and depression. This can n deadly .Addiction is a behavior that is learnt . Sit is not a disease .It is not being weak Will d . It is a human response to inesvsb!e stress and other very difficult life situations.The best predictors for addiction are ; poverty,unemployment ,underemployment, single mothers raising a child , lack of opportunity which goes hand in hand with the latter . A pill is not going to create addicts . Social media economic factors are what primed a area and it's population for addiction .Not a pill patch or lozenges which twice pain and make a pain patient able to function with out debilitating push painAddicts behavior which is chosen causes overdoses and addiction .The dismissed by addicts and addiction treatment industry ,Rat Park experiments which have been reported only to be buried by the addiction treatment industry .Which claimed incorrectly that it would stigmatized addicts and if course cut off profits .The opioid hysteria and now litigation is history r repeating itself . We tried to prohibit alcohol in 1918 with h the repealed 18,amendment .We got organized crime and a more powerful and intrusive gobetm my and it's ever growing my list of an boxes using administrative law to restrict your freedoms that are inherent to all humans in theIr citizen ,resident even undocumented immigrants have rightsI his litigation is a blatant disregard for our rights by opportunistic politicians and zealots who have a financial stake in forcing rehab and Buprenophine in the form of Suboxone on more peop or .It is exempt from the cruel inhumane and Kolodny /PROP, anti opioid fanatics CDCguidlines which are causing a humanitarian crisis . Lawsuits will fail as the hey lack merit and hopefully Kolodn y ,Val maybe and the rest of PROP ,Spend the rest of the heir apparent existence in a hard core federal prison.You can read more here The breaking down of the misleading and outright fabricated anti opioid data is very interesting and tellingly the anti opioid zealots might end up in a giveN Up 12x7 cell for the first to push Buprenophine incisions causing dividend incredible sufferCNN: Opioid Overdoses Kill More humans suffering painful conditions. Nice roundTRIP ,CD C and assorted fanaticsSen. Ron Wyden Smears Opioid Task Force. Why?Wyden gets donations from the law firms dying pharmaceutical companies. Along with the unregulated supplement industry . The people go push so called natural remedies . Though in both Viagra and Cislis were found in their “all natural Erectile dysfunction treatments “ along withAmphetamines in weight loss supplements . Something to think abputA Little State Debunks A Big Lie: The DEA's Opioid Scam.A Little State Debunks A Big Lie: The DEA's Opioid Scam.

support for the creation of a now must figure out how to enact it. A prior nonpartisan analysis priced it at $400 billion per year — twice the state’s current budget. There appears to be no way to finance such a plan without staggering new taxes, making California a magnet for those with chronic illnesses just as its tax rates send younger, healthier Californians house-hunting in Nevada and big tech employers consider leaving the state.But Newsom is not alone. Other governors have made similar promises, and Newsom calls together the executives of the most ideologically like-minded states — Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland. What if they banded to create a sole unified single-payer health-care system, spreading risk around a much larger pool of potential patients while creating uniformity across some of the country’s wealthiest states?Fifteen end up forming an interstate compact, a well-established mechanism for working together, explicitly introduced in the Constitution. They sketch out the contours of a common health-care market: a unified single-payer regime with start-up costs funded in part by the largest issue ever to hit the municipal-bond market. The governors agree, as well, on a uniform payroll tax and a new tax on millionaires and corporations set to the same rate with revenues earmarked for health-care costs. The Trump administration has already proved willing to grant waivers to states looking to experiment beyond the Affordable Care Act’s standards — primarily for the benefit of those seeking to offer plans on their exchanges with skimpier coverage. But the states can’t act unilaterally: The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress must approve establishment of any compact claiming authority that previously resided with the federal government.Newsom pressures his friend House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi to introduce a bill that would give the compact all federal money that flows into its constituent states for health-care costs. Pelosi’s members from Arizona and Florida balk at the proposal, which they fear would enable their states’ Republican governors to gut Obamacare protections. But there are scores more from states looking to join the compact, and their governors marshal Democratic House delegations into a bloc. The bill passes the House, with the support of tea-party Republicans eager to strike a blow against federal power.When it reaches the Senate, the initiative comes from Republicans. In 2011, then–Texas governor Rick Perry championed a Health Care Compact Alliance, joined by eight other states seeking a “regulatory shield” against the Affordable Care Act and full control over their Medicare and Medicaid funds. By the time the Democratic bill passes the House, current Texas governor Greg Abbott has rallied more than 20 states, including North Carolina, Missouri, and Arizona, for a new version of the Health Care Compact. He also has the support of two prominent senators, Ted Cruz and Majority Whip John Cornyn. Republicans who had promised for nearly a decade to repeal and replace Obamacare can finally deliver on the promise — for 40 percent of the country.The president sees opportunity, too. While running for president, Donald Trump called himself “Mr. Brexit,” a boast tied to his apocryphal claim of having accurately predicted the British vote to leave the European Union. Now he’s convinced, thanks largely to a Fox & Friends chyron reading BIGGER THAN BREXIT?, that an even more significant world-historical accomplishment is within reach. Trump lobbies Pelosi and Mitch McConnell to combine their bills. Trump beams at the Rose Garden signing ceremony, calling it “the biggest deal ever” as he goads Pelosi and McConnell into an awkward handshake. Historians will later mark it as the first step in our nation’s slow breakup, the conscious uncoupling of these United States.Let’s just admit that this arranged marriage isn’t really working anymore, is it? The partisan dynamic in Washington may have changed, but our dysfunctional, codependent relationship is still the same. The midterm results have shown that Democrats have become even more a party of cities and upscale suburbs whose votes are inefficiently packed into dense geographies, Republicans one of exurbs and rural areas overrepresented in the Senate. The new Congress will be more ideologically divided than any before it, according to a scoring system developed by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica: the Republicans more conservative, the Democrats more liberal.Come January, we are likely to find that we’ve simply shifted to another gear of a perpetual deadlock unlikely to satisfy either side. For the past eight years, there has been no movement toward goals with broad bipartisan support: to fund new infrastructure projects, or for basic gun-control measures like background checks or limits on bump stocks. Divided party control of Capitol Hill will make other advances even less likely. For the near future, the boldest policy proposals are likely to be rollbacks: Democrats angling to revert to a pre-Trump tax code, Republicans to repeal Obama’s health-care law. By December 7, Congress will have to pass spending bills to avoid a government shutdown. Next March looms another deadline to raise the debt ceiling.Meanwhile, we have discovered that too many of our good-governance guardrails, from avoidance of nepotism to transparency around candidates’ finances, have been affixed by adhesion to norms rather than force of law. The breadth and depth of the dysfunction has even Establishmentarian figures ready to concede that our current system of governance is fatally broken. Some have entertained radical process reforms that would have once been unthinkable. Prominent legal academics on both the left and the right have endorsed proposals to expand the Supreme Court or abolish lifetime tenure for its members, the latter of which has been embraced by Justice Stephen Breyer. Republican senators including Cruz and Mike Lee have pushed to end direct election of senators, which they say strengthens the federal government at the expense of states’ interests.Policy wonks across the spectrum are starting to rethink the federal compact altogether, allowing local governments to capture previously unforeseen responsibilities. Yuval Levin, a policy adviser close to both Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, wrote in 2016 that “the absence of easy answers is precisely a reason to empower a multiplicity of problem-solvers throughout our society, rather than hoping that one problem-solver in Washington gets it right.” In a recent book, The New Localism, center-left urbanists Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak exalt such local policy innovation specifically as a counterweight to the populism that now dominates national politics across the Americas and Europe.Even if they don’t use the term, states’ rights has become a cause for those on the left hoping to do more than the federal government will. Both Jacobin and The Nation have praised what the latter calls “Progressive Federalism.” San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera has called it “the New New Federalism,” a callback to Ronald Reagan’s first-term promise to reduce Washington’s influence over local government. “All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government,” Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address. At the time, Democrats interpreted New Federalism as high-minded cover for a strategy of dismantling New Deal and Great Society programs. Now they see it as their last best hope for a just society.Some states have attempted to enforce their own citizenship policies, with a dozen permitting undocumented immigrants to acquire driver’s licenses and nearly twice as many to allow them to qualify for in-state tuition. Seven states, along with a slew of municipal governments, have adopted “sanctuary” policies of official noncooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Many governors, including Republicans in Massachusetts and Maryland, have refused to deploy National Guard troops to support Trump’s border policies, and California has sued the federal government to block construction of a wall along the Mexican frontier. After the Trump administration stopped defending an Obama-era Labor Department rule to expand the share of workers entitled to overtime pay, Washington State announced it would enforce its own version of the rule and advised its peers to do the same. “It is now up to states to fortify workers through strong overtime protections,” Washington governor Jay Inslee wrote last week.In California, officials who regularly boast of overseeing the world’s fifth-largest economy have begun to talk of advancing their own foreign policy. After Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, Governor Jerry Brown — he has said “we are a separate nation in our own minds” — crossed the Pacific to negotiate a bilateral carbon-emissions pact with Chinese president Xi Jinping. “It’s true I didn’t come to Washington, I came to Beijing,” said Brown, who is often received like a head of state when he travels abroad. Around the same time, Brown promised a gathering of climate scientists that the federal government couldn’t entirely kill off their access to research data. “If Trump turns off the satellites,” he said, “California will launch its own damn satellite.”Brown’s successor Newsom comes to office just as Californians may be forced to reckon with how much farther they are willing to take this ethic of self-reliance. Since 2015, a group of California activists have been circulating petitions to give citizens a direct vote on whether they want to turn California into “a free, sovereign and independent country,” which could trigger a binding 2021 referendum on the question already being called “Calexit.”During the Obama years, it was conservatives who’d previously talked of states’ rights who began toying with the idea of starting their own countries. “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it,” Rick Perry said at a tea-party rally in 2009, before adding: “But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?” Perry’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, met with members of the Texas Nationalist Movement on the opening day of a legislative session. Right after this year’s midterms, the would-be leaders of the breakaway republics of Texas and California met at a secessionist conference in Dallas.In 2012, the White House website received secession petitions from all 50 states; Texas’s was the most popular, with more than 125,000 signatures. (A counterpetition demanded that any citizen who signed one of the secession petitions be deported.) Two years later, Reuters found that nearly one-quarter of Americans said they supported the idea of their states breaking away, a position most popular among Republicans and rural westerners.Liberal regions have tended to go bigger with their secession fantasies: Why spin off one’s own state when you could split the whole country and gain the resources and manpower of like-minded compatriots? After John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 election, a homemade digital graphic migrated across the pre-social internet. On it, the states that had cast their electoral votes for Kerry were labeled “the United States of Canada”; George W. Bush’s became “Jesusland.” After Trump’s victory, those memes graduated into op-eds, including from others who would have to acquiesce in the fantasy. “Is it time for Canada to annex Blue America?” a columnist in the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s asked last year.The fact that anyone with Photoshop can cogently cleave the country in two is a credit to the hardening of a once-fluid political map. Over half the states have cast their Electoral College votes consistently for one party in every presidential election since 2000. In 2016, those states all picked Senate winners from the same party as their presidential picks as well. But as three British geographers concluded in a 2016 article about spatial polarization, that’s not just a feature of the Electoral College map. Whether measured by county, state, or region, the partisan divide has grown since Bill Clinton’s first election: Red places have grown redder (at least in their presidential votes), blue places bluer. In 1992, 38 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties,” which went for a presidential candidate by a margin of 20 percentage points or more, the Times has reported; in 2016, the number reached 60 percent.This partisan homogeneity is shaping state governments too. Thirty-six capitals are now dominated by a single party that controls the governorship along with both houses of a legislature; for the first time in more than a century, only one state legislature in the country, Minnesota’s, will be split between two parties. If we are already living in two political geographies, why not generate a system of government to match?Or so goes the fantasy. There’s no real groundswell of support for shrinking the United States. Surveys have shown that two-thirds of Californians oppose independence, and not only because the Calexit movement’s lefty critiques of Trump do not align with its righty origins. (A co-founder of the California Independence Campaign, Louis Marinelli, is a former anti-gay-marriage activist who last year sought permanent residence in Russia.) When a candidate from the Alaskan Independence Party, which had been founded with secessionist ambitions, actually won the governorship in 1990, he turned out to be tepid on the question of sovereignty. (Sarah Palin once attended an AIP conference, and her husband, Todd, became a member.) Local movements elsewhere, whether the left-leaning Second Vermont Republic or South Carolina’s right-leaning Third Palmetto Republic, have never transcended stunt. Among institutions, only the Libertarian Party has ever endorsed the position that states should be freely able to secede.History gives us few examples of successful peaceful secessions. In the ones we do have, national identity rather than ideological differences seem to be at the root of the fissure. (The Confederate States of America would have been a notable anomaly.) When states split in the 20th century, the Australia-based scholars Peter Radan and Aleksandar Pavkovic have pointed out, there were always deep underlying fault lines of language, religion, or ethnicity. None of the three multinational states created between the two world wars — the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia — survived until the end of the 20th century.Even with widespread fatalism about the American project, there is not an obvious way to dissolve our union. Rewriting the Constitution’s balance of power would require levels of political coordination that seem far beyond the country’s existing leadership. Chances of a civil war are remote, and it is hard to visualize a series of events that could prompt a peaceable dissolution of the union. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled that states have no right to unilaterally secede. The U.N. Charter recognizes the “self-determination of peoples,” but clearly intends the latter to mean well-defined racial or ethnic groups and not, say, a collection of persons who want stronger gun-control measures. Other countries might be wary of recognizing spinoff American states for fear of the precedent. Would China vote to admit California to the United Nations if it set up Tibet or Taiwan to demand the same treatment?And yet, if the desire to secede were to grow, recent votes in Scotland and Quebec have modeled the way that secession in a developed country during years of peace can become just another political question — one debated relatively civilly, voted on democratically, without attendant allegations of treason or sedition. (Spain’s government has been less forgiving of what it calls an unconstitutional independence referendum held last year in Catalonia.)There is at least one mechanism by which a sort of soft breakup may be imaginable — and it’s already found within the Constitution. The document introduces the prospect of one state entering into a compact with another. States have created interstate compacts to maintain common standards, like the Driver’s License Compact that 47 DMVs use to exchange knowledge on traffic scofflaws. Most have been used for neighboring jurisdictions to handle common resources, like the Atlantic Salmon Compact that permits New England states to manage fish stocks in the Connecticut River Basin. (Eleven states have signed on to a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, to disregard the Electoral College, but it would require a number equal to 270 electoral votes to take effect.)Interstate compacts have rarely been applied to controversial topics. Yet to a paralyzed Congress, and a president without any deeply held views about state-federal relations, they could prove an appealing vehicle to restless factions on both the left and the right. It may be time to take the country apart and put it back together, into a shape that better aligns with the divergent, and increasingly irreconcilable, political preferences of its people — or at least to consider what such a future might look like, if for no other reason than to test our own resolve. An imagined trial separation, if you will. Or perhaps in contemplating a future apart we might stumble upon a few ideas for some new way to live together after all.So let’s return to our hypothetical spring of 2019. After Governor Newsom’s successful health-care deal, lobbyists and think tanks promote compacts for all their pet issues, and Congress — which would be unable to find bicameral majorities for any other substantive legislation — obliges. The Public Lands and Environmental Compact Act gives the states huge leeway to set environmental regulations and manage national parks on their lands, and the Labor and Workplace Compact Act permits states to draft new workplace and employment standards. There’s a Housing Compact Act, an Immigration Compact Act, and an Agriculture Compact Act, which allows the states to take all the money that would come to their citizens as farm subsidies and food stamps as block grants with the ability to set their own rules. Trump giddily signs them all.While the states could generate new partnerships for each policy area, they choose to harden their alliances. As they link their safety nets, the Newsom-led states agree to fully synchronize their tax codes so that they could end a race-to-the-bottom competition for residents and companies. Once they do, Nevada pulls out from the compact, unwilling to implement an income tax on its citizens. Washington, on the other hand, quickly amends its state constitution to permit an income tax for the first time.Seeking his own symbol of integration, Abbott unveils the new Free States Open-Carry Permit, along with new laws ensuring the right to bear arms in schools, churches, and government buildings across his alliance. Newsom and Abbott jointly lobby Congress to grant them the right to manage the Social Security funds generated by workers in their regions. Abbott wants to allow citizens to control their retirement portfolio, while Newsom wants to experiment with moving some trust-fund money from the Treasury bonds to new public-investment vehicles that will support climate-friendly technology.To kick off the Federation Era, the two governors meet on the steps of the United States Supreme Court for a photo op. Shaking hands, the men and their attorneys general pledge not to support any legal challenge to the other’s authority for two decades. All sides have an interest in permitting their new experiment to play out for a while without any unnecessary uncertainty from the courts. The states can’t stop others from suing over the constitutionality of their moves, but they want to send a message to a conservative Supreme Court that state officials are channeling the political will of 250 million Americans, all with Congress’s express consent.The most vocal opposition comes from fixtures of the Washington, D.C., Establishment and permanent bureaucracy, which fear a permanent loss of power. Both Fox News and MSNBC, on the other hand, herald the New Era of Good Feelings. For the first time ever, Gallup records three in four Americans declaring themselves satisfied with the way things are going in the United States — a supermajority that cuts across partisan and demographic divides.Over the first two decades of the Federation Era, the alliances remained relatively stable, with only occasional changes in state status. Virginia quit the Progressive Federation of America early because it felt it would lose leverage to defend the interests of the federal employees who live there. Montana nearly pulled out of the Alliance of Free States when it looked like it might be forced to abandon its closed-shop work rules to match its right-to-work sister states. Florida’s internal politics are driven by perpetual debate over whether the state stood to benefit by joining either federation; Alaska no longer has a Democratic Party and Republican Party but has entirely realigned along a Pro-Fed and Anti-Fed axis.The states that did not join a federation remained governed by Washington, where largely status-quo policies from the early-21st-century remain in place. Some are in the neutral zone, as it is known, owing to principled independent-mindedness (New Hampshire), some by ideological paralysis (Wisconsin), and some because they are happy setting their own rules (Delaware). Power, however, resides in the neutral zone. Since each of the two federations cast Electoral College votes as a bloc, by tacit understanding, any viable national candidate has to hail from the unaffiliated states. (After producing four in a row, Maine changed its official slogan to “Mother of Vice-Presidents.”) Yet with the Legislative and Executive branches largely hobbled from policy-making for much of the country, this offers minor satisfaction. It is said to be a bleak joke around the White House that the only job of the president in peacetime is to inquire daily about the health of the Supreme Court’s oldest member.By 2038, the Progressive Federation of America is being run from a former administrative building on the campus of the University of New Mexico. The federation was initially governed by commissioners appointed by governors and state legislatures. To avoid establishing a permanent bureaucracy, the governors refused to establish a dedicated base, instead rotating its chairmanship across the members for a year at a time. Lobbyists loved having the capital in San Francisco, were less enthused when New York decided it could boost the local economy by chairing its meetings in Buffalo.The abandoned campus in Albuquerque is an inadvertent monument to one of the Blue Fed’s earliest successes. The federation’s state universities initially integrated to secure basic economies of scope and scale: linking their library collections and banding together in search of greater buying power for their energy needs. After a few years, the states agreed to set in-Fed tuition for all public universities to zero. New Mexico took the boldest step. It dismantled its public-university system after determining it was more efficient to cover travel expenses for New Mexicans studying in California or Colorado than to manage its own schools, even continuing to pay lifetime salaries for its tenured professors when they were placed in jobs at new sister schools. The New Mexico regents decided to deplete the remainder of the university’s $450 million endowment to dramatically increase teacher pay for the state’s primary-school teachers. New Mexico’s public high schools are now seen as some of the country’s finest.At first, the task of the Federation commissioners was framed as simple technocracy, implementing the will of state governments. They strengthened regulations to protect workers and set a uniform $18 minimum wage across the zone, with some cost-of-living adjustments to raise the sum in New York, San Francisco, and Boston. Federation taxes have steadily risen as federal rates fell to cover its reduced obligations. Many wealthy Blue Fed residents now pay more in annual taxes to the federation than to Washington. The high-quality cradle-to-grave services those taxes fund have come to define existence across the Blue Fed, from guaranteed public preschool to lifelong medical coverage with no co-pays or deductibles, and have incubated a highly skilled workforce and some of the most impressive life-expectancy rates in the world. (Dental care continues to depend on a system of private insurance.) It was a source of pride when the Blue Fed’s generous higher-education system started drawing large numbers of middle-class families to leave southern cities for northern ones.As soon as one crosses the border into the Alliance of Free States, whether over the Wabash River from Illinois to Indiana, or the grasslands that stretch across the Iowa-Missouri border, the difference between the two federations’ sense of identity becomes immediately visible. A popular decal showing an outline of the Red Fed’s borders — with a column of prairie states rising like an extended middle finger from the clenched fist of Texas — resides on bumpers and car windows as a defiant declaration of a newly defined region’s honor.Over the first decade of its existence, Red Fed leaders found their purpose unwinding the domestic reforms of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama and with them much of the 20th-century regulatory state. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration all saw their staffs gutted, left incapable of enforcing whatever rules did remain on the books. An alphabet soup of government agencies, Bill Kristol tweeted, had become a savory bone broth.The National Labor Relations Board withered in the Red Fed, along with New Deal rules that blocked companies from interfering in employee efforts to win collective-bargaining power. The shift set off a return to the fierce business-labor battles of the Gilded Age, most visible in the emergence of new firms founded by Blackwater and Black Cube alumni, known as the Blackertons, that specialize in aggressive digital surveillance and online-misinformation campaigns against union organizers.The effective elimination of most environmental and employment regulations proved irresistible to manufacturers. Boeing announced it would stop making capital investments in its Seattle-area factory and begin to shift jet assembly to a new plant in Covington, Kentucky. Factories relocated from China to be closer to the American consumer market and avoid import tariffs. Unemployment in parts of the Red Fed fell below 2 percent and the region briefly reached 5 percent growth — each several times better than Blue Fed indicators — leading conservative economists to praise the Red Miracle.It was not just manufacturing and resource extraction that boomed in the Red Fed. As soon as the Blue Fed established its single-payer system, medical specialists began taking their practices to states where they wouldn’t be subject to the Regional Health Service’s price controls or rationing. Sloan Kettering now treats New York as little more than an administrative base; the majority of its hospital rooms are in Texas. Johns Hopkins considered closing its medical school when nearly half the faculty decamped en masse to Baylor. Wealthy Blue Fed residents willing to pay out of pocket now invariably travel to Houston when they want an immediate appointment with a specialist of their choice. The arrivals area at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport is packed with chauffeurs from van services run by clinics supported by specializing in such medical tourism.Auctions of public lands across the interior west, along with the privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority, generated a quick gusher of cash. Vowing not to let the new government wealth create more bureaucracy, Red Fed leaders deposited it all in a Free States Energy Trust Fund that would pay out an annual dividend to every adult and child in the region — a no-strings-attached cash transfer of hundreds of dollars per year. The Southern Baptist Convention encouraged its members to tithe their dividend checks directly into new aid societies to help the least fortunate. The most popular charitable cause has been a relief society to aid religious conservatives in the Blue Fed seeking to migrate to the Red Fed.The boom in manufacturing and energy jobs on one side of the border and the guarantee of free government-sponsored education and medical care on the other created an incentive for families to split — with one spouse working (and paying taxes) in the Red Fed and the other, usually with children in tow, collecting benefits in the Blue Fed. (Remo, which pitched its app to investors as “Venmo for remittances,” became the fastest-growing tech company on the Fortune 500.) Sociologists are starting to worry that what they call the “split-family phenomenon” will become a hallmark of 21st-century life in North America, with its effects growing more pronounced as federation policies continue to diverge.Reaction to Blue Fed culture drives much Red Fed governance. When the Blue Fed opened a gleaming new visitor center at Yosemite, the Red Fed moved to privatize all the concessions at Yellowstone. The Blue Fed’s expansive affirmative-action protocols inspired the Red Fed to abolish all HBCU-specific education programs so that primarily white institutions could compete equally for the funds. After Illinois led a Blue Fed initiative to upgrade its rail service, the Red Fed ended all cooperation with Amtrak, even adjusting gauge size along the Mississippi River to prevent passage of passenger trains from one side to another. As a backlash to the Blue Fed’s net-neutrality rule, the Red Fed imposed the Online Fairness Doctrine, which permits internet providers to slow upload and download speeds for content they determined was in violation of “community standards” or that offends a company’s religious beliefs. Across large swaths of the Red Fed, the only way to log into Grindr is via VPN.These culture-war skirmishes instilled a strong sense of Red Fed identity, and the economy was doing so well that few noticed the slow exodus of tech entrepreneurs and high-skilled creative professionals who had once clustered in Austin and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Only when the Supreme Court ruled that a compact-wide abortion ban did not place an undue burden on reproductive freedom because Red Fed residents could travel for free services in the Blue Fed did it become evident that conservative social policy would impede efforts to diversify the Red Fed economy beyond natural resources and heavy manufacturing. Amazon’s list of candidate cities to house its HQ14 did not include a single one in the Red Fed.Each federation is the other’s largest trading partner, but they increasingly assume the posture of rivals. When the Blue Fed imposed a controversial excise tax on all products or services generated by companies that could not prove they paid their employees at least $18 per hour, the Red Fed saw it as a de facto tariff on its goods. It retaliated by placing its own excise tax on domestic wine, which led the Red Fed to deepen its trade ties with Chile and Argentina. That was a short-term diversion, but prompted a deeper examination of how economically dependent one federation had grown on the other’s internal policies. A Blue Fed requirement that certain freight classes travel only by all-electric truck fleets had nearly doubled the cost of transporting products to the interior west. Frequent work stoppages by West Coast longshoremen emboldened by their labor-friendly administration affirmed a strategy agreed to by titans of Red Fed industry: They needed their own Pacific port.Red Fed leaders negotiated a deal with Mexican authorities for operating control of the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, in Michoacán state, investing some of its energy trust funds. A new terminal, staffed by American Customs officials, connects directly with a spur of the Kansas City Southern railroad. There, nonunion laborers load ships with minerals mined through the American West, including lithium and soda ash, heading largely to East Asia, and unload bananas and smartphones from Ecuador and China heading for the landlocked states of the Red Fed without ever once passing through Blue Fed territory.And then came the first humanitarian crisis. When the families of West Virginia workers started overloading schools and hospitals across the border in Hagerstown, Maryland, the Blue Fed began to impose residence requirements for many of its social services. That didn’t stop the migrants, but it led them to cluster in border towns as they waited out the six months required for eligibility. The conditions were often dire. Tent cities around Palm Springs saw the first American measles outbreak in a generation, and in the Spokane bidonvilles, dozens of children froze to death during a harsh winter.Those tragedies set off a reckoning that has prompted an identity crisis for the Blue Fed’s leaders and citizens. On one side, fiscal experts say the Nordic-style welfare state that the Blue Fed has established is unsustainable if it just ends up as an unchecked provider of services to some of the Red Fed’s neediest cases. On the other side, some of the progressive activists who played crucial roles building early support for the health-care compact argue that the Blue Fed has an obligation to promote its values even beyond its borders. The debate rages across the region: What obligation do they have to other Americans who have democratically chosen to pursue a very different way of life?The federations had a gentlemen’s agreement not to drag federal authorities into their disagreements, but the nature of their conflicts made that impossible. Once the Blue Fed declared itself a “sanctuary region” and invited undocumented immigrants elsewhere in the United States to seek refuge, Red Fed leaders threatened to erect internal border controls on state lines. The Blue Fed backed down, publicly revoking its invitation, but only after the Red Fed agreed to jointly lobby Congress to create a series of regionally restricted work visas.The federal government remains the enforcer of the country’s citizenship laws, agent of its foreign affairs, controller of its national defense, and manager of its monetary policy. But it grew increasingly impossible to perform any of those roles neutrally, and many of the country’s democratic institutions were not designed to balance the competing interests of two geopolitical rivals.When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to stop the Red Fed’s economy from overheating, it pushed the rest of the country into recession, prompting the Great Lakes to lead the first successful campaign to have the Federal Reserve Board removed from office. When Hurricane Rigoberto came through the Gulf of Mexico, leaving large portions of Houston underwater for months — the first trillion-dollar natural disaster, at least when the cost of the subsequent malaria outbreak is included — the Red Fed demanded a bailout from the federal government. Blue Fed politicians said it would be “moral hazard” to do so, given that most of the damage was traced to a Red Fed decision to privatize the Houston Ship Channel and entrust the buyer, a Qatari sovereign-wealth fund, with upkeep of the Galveston Seawall and the levee networks of surrounding southeastern Texas counties.The Pentagon lost its authority to act as a nonaligned arbiter of the national interest. Once cartels seized control of the Red Fed’s Mexican container port, taking hostage 17 retired Texas Rangers working on a private security force, the Defense secretary mobilized West Coast National Guard units to support an Army Rapid Deployment Force, along with Marines and Navy seals. Oregon’s governor balked, announcing that he would not permit his troops to “be used as muscle for the Red Fed’s imperial adventures.” The Supreme Court ruled that National Guard units had to follow the commander-in-chief’s orders, and the Oregon guardsmen headed south, but the incident polarized foreign-policy positions in new ways. When, months later, intelligence agencies issued a report pinning the crash of the western renewable-energy grid on a North Korean cyberattack, Red Fed cities saw some of their largest mass protests in years, all against a rush to war. Nearly 100,000 people gathered in Indianapolis’s Monument Circle, chanting “No blood for solar.” By the time of the South China Sea Crisis, Congress had grown so paralyzed along federation lines that it was impossible to assemble a majority in favor of any declaration of war.Leaders overseas have become eager to exploit what they see as the United States’s political weakness. As concerns about climate change have grown more dire, other countries have become intent on punishing dissenters from the international order, and the Red Fed is now a global villain. The European Union agreed to pre-clear for entry all crops produced under the Blue Fed’s GMO-free agriculture policy, while Red Fed imports are subjected to a lengthy and costly quarantine. China announced most-favored-region trade policies that would give Blue Fed exporters an advantage over domestic rivals when selling into the Chinese market.These trade-related conflicts squeeze Illinois, which wants to export Caterpillar tractors to China under favorable conditions but lags behind West Coast and New England states in transitioning to GMO-free agriculture. Although a founding member of the Blue Fed, Illinois at times felt geographically isolated, surrounded by Red Fed or neutral states. Illinois withdrew from the Blue Fed and helped to form the Great Lakes Federation, which stretches from Philadelphia to Des Moines and up to Duluth, with a permanent capital in Chicago. As the 20-year judicial truce is about to expire, the Midwest controls the balance of power in a Congress that may be forced by the Supreme Court to revisit some of its earliest assumptions about returning power to the states.There is another real-life contemporary example of a semi-secession: Brexit. It, too, began as little more than a thought experiment. What if we could reject a far-off governing structure that no longer seems responsive to our interests in favor of local authority that can more closely match our aspirations and sense of identity as a people? There must have been something thrilling about getting to cast a vote for self-determination.Yet those who are now forced to make that reverie real are pulling back from their former self-confidence about it. Just last week, the Tory official serving as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union admitted he “hadn’t quite understood the full extent” to which British commerce was “particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing,” and that new trade barriers could impact the availability of consumer goods in stores. Instead of just leaving Europe, as he encouraged his compatriots to do during the 2016 campaign, Dominic Raab now insists on “a bespoke arrangement on goods which recognizes the peculiar, frankly, geographic, economic entity that is the United Kingdom.”As it was for a majority of Britons, it is easier to imagine breaking up the United States than figuring out how to make it work — whether through bold new policies or merely a functioning version of consensus politics. The seeming inelasticity of our system of governance also guarantees a security and predictability that we take for granted. Some of the lessons Europe is being taught under the stress of the Brexit crisis — that a single currency requires a unified economy, or that a lack of internal borders can’t work if no one can agree on what should happen at the outer one — are ones Americans might better learn from fantasy than from experience.

Great question! Hubert Humphrey was the VP under LBJ and would have added nothing to the ticket being from Minnesota. He certainly would have needed someone to balance the ticket. Someone from the South or West who was a conservative Democrat. The best choice may have been the governor of Texas, John Connally. He was shot when JFK was assassinated. He was from the conservative wing of the party. JFK had visited party leaders in Austin the day before he was shot to heal the rift between the liberal and conservative wing of the Democratic Party.Connally had a relationship with JFK.Nov. 22, 1963.Nov. 9, 1962Dictabelt recording of Oval Office phone call from President John F. Kennedy to John Connally on the morning after Connally was elected governor of Texas:JFK: "What about Dallas?"Connally: "Dallas? I lost the hell out of it. I lost it by 21,000 votes."JFK: "What did we lose Dallas by, do you remember? In '60?"Connally: "Yes sir, you lost [by] over 60,000 votes."JFK: "60,000 votes? Hell, I got uh ... you know, they're up there talking to me about, remember having that Federal Building down there and all the rest of that stuff. I don't know why we do anything for Dallas."Connally: "I'm telling you, they just murdered all of us. But, we're gonna change that now."Like reverse images of each other, John F. Kennedy and John Connally rode through the streets of Dallas, conversing little as they waved to the crowds and approached the climax of their mutual drama.Just three months apart in age and both blessed with movie-star good looks, the two possessed unquenchable ambition that had led them from open conflict to a correct, if not warm, alliance after Connally's patron, Lyndon Johnson, joined the 1960 ticket as Kennedy's running mate.The bullets that passed through Kennedy and Connally in Dealey Plaza did not consecrate the fragile coalition in blood. Instead, they shattered it in such a way that the pieces could never be reassembled. While Kennedy was canonized as a martyr, Connally recovered from his massive wounds. Following the horror of Dallas, he traveled a serpentine path that eventually led him into the inner sanctum of JFK's great nemesis, Richard Nixon. Connally died in 1993.Had Kennedy shared Nixon's penchant for enemies lists or his brother Bobby Kennedy's love of a grudge, John Connally would have been one of the first knights cast out of Camelot -- banished after the 1960 Democratic Convention. Instead, the tall and charismatic Texan -- a man Jackie Kennedy called too pretty to be handsome -- was given one of the top jobs in the Pentagon and parlayed it right into the Texas Governor's Mansion.With a recorded Oval Office phone call from Kennedy to a just-elected Gov. Connally, we have the audible signature of JFK as the cool realist who quickly assesses that this foe-turned-friend may hold the keys to Texas' 25 wavering electoral votes in his 1964 re-election campaign.On the phone with Connally, the president was genial yet analytical as both men dissected the Texas win. Clearly proud, Connally boasted about the strength of his victory -- "I carried 205 out of 254 counties" -- and Kennedy probed, particularly interested in Dallas and whether Connally received the endorsements of its two newspapers.The new governor's surefooted election raised his standing with the Kennedy White House as a political force in Texas. For the next year, Connally would be the focus of an Oval Office lobbying campaign to bring JFK to Texas and shore up uncertain support in a state that Lyndon Johnson could not guarantee for Kennedy's re-election bid in 1964.Back in 1960, even with the powerful LBJ on the ticket, JFK won Texas by a threadbare 46,233 votes. (In 1964, running without Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson carried Texas by more than 700,000 votes.)In November 1962, however, LBJ was a gelded, depressed and irascible vice president. His protégé Connally was on the rise, influential with Texas oil money and popular with moderates and Republicans, who were not naturally disposed to the Northeastern Kennedy. Most of the boilerplate narrative that JFK came to Texas to mend political fences was written after the assassination.Fate would place Kennedy and Connally so physically close together that minutes after the assassination, as doctors closed the bullet wound in the governor's chest, they searched in vain for a wound that would explain the copious blood and soft tissue coating his head.And then came the epiphany -- the red ooze was not Connally's, it was Kennedy's.In the eyes of history, John Connally is eternally linked to John F. Kennedy through the blood they spilled together in Dealey Plaza.Personal tragedyIn the summer of 1960, 43-year-old John Connally arrived in Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention at a crossroads. As executive director of Lyndon Johnson's campaign for president, he was shackled to a vacillating candidate more preoccupied with the consequences of losing the nomination than with the glories of winning it.Sorrow without solace had visited Connally and his wife, Nellie, the previous summer when their eldest child, a 16-year-old daughter, Kathleen, known as K.K., died a mystifying death from a shotgun blast, just six weeks after eloping with her boyfriend, Bobby Hale. The young man's explanation was that she was depressed and holding the gun to her head when he leaped for it and it went off.A post-mortem revealed that K.K. was pregnant."Most of her head was blown off," said the sheriff who called the shocked Connally to break the news.The 18-year-old Hale was cleared following a less-than-satisfying investigation.Then-Treasury Secretary John Connally, left, and his wife, Nellie, stand on the front porch of their ranch home in South Texas with President Richard M. Nixon and his wife, Pat, their house guests for the at night on Sunday, April 30, 1972 in Floresville.(AP)Living in Fort Worth, Connally had spent the previous decade as personal attorney for a man who, if not the wealthiest in America, was close -- the rough-hewn, low-profile Fort Worth oilman Sid Richardson.Through the 1950s, as Richardson's smooth, articulate representative, Connally sat on the board of the New York Central Railroad, kept a suite at Washington, D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel and had his hand in all Richardson's businesses, from California's Del Mar racetrack to uranium mines in Colorado and Oregon.But five months after K.K. Connally's death, Sid Richardson was also dead, leaving Connally largely as a consigliere without portfolio.By the summer of 1960, working again for his political mentor Lyndon Johnson, Connally had but one mission: to block the supremely organized, lavishly financed Kennedy campaign from seizing the presidential nomination.Getting a late start, Johnson railed against Kennedy's youth and inexperience and privately derided the younger man as "Sonny Boy," but he gained no traction. The only hope lay in proving JFK was unfit for office.Connally the sluggerThe Johnson camp was aware of one of John F. Kennedy's most closely guarded secrets: The dashing Massachusetts senator, so famous for his vigor, suffered from Addison's disease and might die without constant maintenance doses of cortisone.Even a small infection could turn fatal, as it almost had when Kennedy's back was operated on in 1954 and the incision site refused to heal.Word of the infection had quickly reached Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson."I find it hard to believe, but they tell me young Kennedy is near death," LBJ said to aide Horace Busby. "They tell me he'll be dead in a matter of a few weeks."But despite receiving the last rites of the church, Kennedy recovered and returned to the Senate. By 1960, Johnson had learned that Addison's had been the culprit. Connally believed that the time had come to use the information."Connally was a political heavyweight who was quick and deadly when it came to one-on-one slugging," the late Texas Sen. John Tower recalled in his 1991 memoir.A week before the opening of the convention, Connally and fellow Texan India Edwards, co-chairman of the Citizens for Johnson committee, called a news conference to announce Kennedy's Addison's disease.Connally had planned to make the charge himself, but Edwards, a veteran of Harry Truman's 1948 presidential campaign and a woman 22 years Connally's senior, held him back."My career was nearing an end whereas John was a young man just starting up," she remembered in her memoir. "If I had known then that he would become a Democrat for Nixon in 1972 and later a Republican, I am sure I would not have done anything to further his career."So with Connally by her side, Edwards told the press she was disgusted with Kennedy's "muscle flexing" and added that reputable doctors with a Boston hospital informed her that Kennedy would be dead without regular medication.An indignant Bobby Kennedy, JFK's campaign manager, replied that his brother did not have "an ailment described classically as Addison's disease. Any statement to the contrary is malicious and false."Regardless of the veracity of the allegation, it did nothing to slow the Kennedy momentum. What it did do was enrage the Kennedy camp.In his 1965 oral history for the JFK Library, JFK's press secretary Pierre Salinger said, "The India Edwards-John Connally press conference [was] about as low a blow as you will ever want to find in American politics."In a Texas hotel room the night before the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy told her husband, "I just can't stand Governor Connally."Years later, Edwards would recall, "[People] felt that I had made it sound as if Kennedy had syphilis."LBJ as VPMore than a half-century later, it's hard to see why the charge of Addison's disease was more egregious than two months earlier when Kennedy partisan Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. labeled JFK's then-challenger Hubert Humphrey a draft dodger during the crucial West Virginia primary.A fixture of Jackie and Jack Kennedy's inner social circle, the dissolute, disappointed son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt hoped to be named secretary of the Navy.Of the many epithets applied to him, lazy was the most common."We had assigned a fellow named Bob Dunn to Franklin for the full campaign," Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler recalled in his oral history for the JFK Library. "He had the responsibility to keep Franklin off his butt and on the campaign trail."When Kennedy won the 1960 nomination on the first ballot in Los Angeles, he left his ninth-floor suite and came down the back stairs to Lyndon Johnson's seventh-floor suite to offer him the vice presidency.The shock to Kennedy's liberal supporters and the conservative oil crowd backing Johnson came when the Senate majority leader, perhaps the second-most-powerful man in Washington, accepted the powerless VP spot."We had succeeded in finding a combination that the conservatives and the liberals equally disliked," Connally later wrote."The reaction from some of our close friends was very painful," Lady Bird Johnson would remember in a 1996 oral history interview for the LBJ Library. "I think John Connally got in his car with Nellie and started driving immediately back to Texas."Johnson's candidacy had been backed by oil-rich, communist-fearing Southerners whom Connally had scared for months with the specter of the liberal, Northeastern Kennedy. In the time that it took LBJ to accept the No. 2 slot, Connally had to tack and tell angry Johnson donors that their enemy wasn't Kennedy, it was his Republican challenger, the conservative Vice President Richard Nixon.And then he had to look cautiously over his shoulder at Kennedy's inner circle, ruthless Boston Irish Catholic political operators who were still fuming that the Texans had publicly labeled their man as diseased.Surprise appointmentFollowing JFK's general election victory on Nov. 8, 1960, FDR Jr.'s appointment as secretary of the Navy was such a certainty that Kennedy had leaked it to The New York Times, even though he promised his new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, complete autonomy to choose his people."Roosevelt was very anxious to obtain the position of secretary of the Navy," McNamara said in his 1964 oral history for the JFK Library. But McNamara absolutely refused, invoking Kennedy's pledge not to interfere in Pentagon appointments.After his own talent search, McNamara phoned the new president in Palm Beach, Fla., to say that he had found the perfect candidate for secretary of the Navy -- an able Texan named John Connally.Politically naïve by his own admission, McNamara would later say, "I didn't really realize [the] extent to which at one time there may have been considerable friction between him and President Kennedy."Amused rather than annoyed, JFK agreed to the appointment. "In a humorous vein, the full extent of which I didn't realize until later, [he] said that he wanted me to discuss it with two of his associates who were at hand," McNamara recalled.Kennedy passed the phone to let McNamara break the news to his elated house guests, Vice President-elect Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, both political godfathers to Connally.Reluctant hostHis 11 months as head of the Navy were followed by a successful run for governor and fresh attention from JFK, who began to lobby for a presidential visit to Texas."I had, frankly, been elected by the people that President Kennedy needed the most," Connally would later testify to a congressional subcommittee, "by the moderates and the conservatives of the state."Connally was not eager to begin his term by throwing his arm around Jack Kennedy in front of a home crowd.But Kennedy persisted. Pressure for a full swing through Texas climaxed after a June 1963 presidential motorcade in downtown El Paso. Connally entered a suite at the Cortez Hotel with the president, Lyndon Johnson and JFK's tough-guy appointments secretary, Kenny O'Donnell."Well, Lyndon, are we ever going to get this trip to Texas worked out?" the president asked."The governor is here, Mr. President, let's find out," LBJ answered."I knew at that point my string had run out," Connally recalled. "I knew we were going to have a trip to Texas."Resisting JFK's idea for a series of fundraisers, Connally mapped out nonpartisan visits to San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth and Dallas, followed by one fundraiser in Austin.On Oct. 4, 1963, the Texas governor was welcomed into the Oval Office, where he explained his plan to JFK. Sitting on a white sofa in front of the fireplace, he looked at the president gently moving in his rocking chair and suggested that the presence of Mrs. Kennedy would make the trip look less political."I agree with you," the president said noncommittally. He would invite her once she returned from overseas, where she had gone to lift her spirits following the recent death of the couple's 2-day-old son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy.On the same day that Connally outlined his plan in the Oval Office, Jackie Kennedy quietly boarded a 325-foot yacht in Athens accompanied by FDR Jr. and his wife, Suzanne.Welcoming the American first lady aboard was the yacht's owner, Aristotle Onassis, the future husband of Jacqueline Kennedy.A Boston Globe editorial promptly cried out, "Does this sort of behavior seem fitting for a woman in mourning?" Ohio Congressman Oliver Bolton publicly chastised both Mrs. Kennedy and Roosevelt for accepting the "lavish hospitality" of the shady shipping tycoon.Returning to Washington amid the bad publicity, Jacqueline Kennedy agreed to accompany her husband to Texas.A month before departing for Texas, both Kennedys escorted their friends, journalist Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, to the White House theater for a screening of the new James Bond film, From Russia With Love. As the foursome walked from the family quarters to the East Wing, JFK lamented the idea of Lyndon Johnson getting the Democratic presidential nomination in '68."Well, then who?" the first lady asked.According to Bradlee's account, JFK shot back, "It was going to be Franklin, until you and Onassis fixed that."Welcome matsWhile the Lone Star hospitality was not nearly so lavish as life on board the Onassis yacht, Nellie and John Connally had gone to some lengths to impress the Kennedys.Before departing the Governor's Mansion to join the Kennedys for the two-day tour, Nellie asked that the entry rug be cleaned before the Nov. 22 reception for the president, who would be flying in from Dallas.Jack Kennedy would not live to see the rug in the Governor's Mansion. But it was not Nellie and John Connally's last opportunity to entertain a president at home. On a later occasion, the couple readied their Picosa Ranch in South Texas for a visit from a different commander-in-chief.Planes of some of Texas' most prominent citizens were packed alongside the private Connally runway, 800 yards away from the ranch house. Hovering above the scene was the presidential helicopter, which scattered the reddish brown Santa Gertrudis cattle through the tall coastal Bermuda.Among the guests looking skyward as the chopper descended were Dallas oilman Bunker Hunt, maverick Dallas financiers John Murchison and Clint Murchison Jr., Fort Worth publisher Amon Carter Jr. and Sid Richardson's nephew and heir apparent, Perry Bass.Smiling as he ducked out the door of the big green aircraft was President Richard Nixon, accompanied by his wife, Pat."I'm sorry we scared your cattle," Nixon said as he shook hands with Connally, the Democratic Party star who was about to jump ship to become not just a Republican but one of the closest advisers to the infamously insular Nixon.Another face in that small ranch crowd was a Houston lawyer who could not have known that in less than two years, he would force Nixon from office -- future Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski.The moneyed, powerful guests discussed their common antipathy for Nixon's upcoming election opponent, George McGovern. Amid the din, no one heard the bell that was already tolling for the Nixon presidency. His sullen minions were frantically trying to conceal the White House connection to a recent Washington burglary.A year after the ranch party, the first domino of scandal fell when Nixon's pugnacious vice president, Spiro Agnew, was charged with accepting cash bribes and resigned his office. With Nixon's presidency becoming more precarious each day, he had to appoint not just a new VP, but his possible successor.The isolated president sat at Camp David and examined his list of four names. No. 4 was his eventual choice, Gerald Ford.Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a Democrat who had worked hand-in-hand with President Kennedy, warned that the Senate would not confirm someone who would be a strong 1976 GOP presidential nominee. That ruled out Nixon's No. 3 choice, Ronald Reagan, and his No. 2, Nelson Rockefeller."With all of the problems I was having with Watergate, I could not become embroiled in a massive partisan slugging match over the selection of the new vice president," Nixon later wrote.After some quiet checking, Nixon learned to his dismay that Congress would also never confirm his No. 1 choice.The name at the very top of Richard Nixon's list was John Connally.