Where Accountability Goes to Die
How Moral Language, Budgets, and "Reform" Protect Power— Guest Opinion by Alicia Boothe Haggermaker
Guest Opinion by Alicia Boothe Haggermaker
There is a reason people attack messengers instead of grappling with the message.
It’s not because the message is weak.
It’s because the messenger has seen how the system actually works.
When a recent Alabama opinion writer was dismissed as “a criminal,” the intent was likely to undermine his credibility. In reality, it strengthened it. Because if you want to understand corruption—not as a theory, but as a practice—you don’t learn it from campaign speeches or moral slogans. You learn it from people who have been inside the machinery, watching accountability quietly disappear.
Former public corruption prosecutor Matt Hart described this clearly when he shared what he called the NUMBER ONE RULE of crooked politicians:
Nobody goes to jail.
Hart recounted a meeting between two political adversaries—one Democrat, one Republican—both corrupt, both under investigation. Publicly, they attacked each other relentlessly. Privately, they agreed on the only rule that mattered: no consequences. Over decades of prosecuting corruption at both the federal and state level, Hart observed that this rule operated consistently across parties and institutions. It was the one thing corrupt politicians could always “reach across the aisle” on.
Once you understand that rule, much of what looks like chaos begins to look very organized.
Budgets enforce priorities, not values
If Hart’s rule explains why corruption persists, budgets explain how it is enforced.
Recent federal funding decisions make priorities unmistakable. Tens of billions of dollars are directed toward enforcement initiatives—particularly immigration enforcement—often through new programs that are harder to audit, harder to track, and harder to challenge.
At the same time, Alabama faces cascading consequences:
- Education funding pauses push schools toward collapse
- All funding for fresh fruits and vegetables in schools is eliminated
- Medicaid changes threaten coverage for hundreds of thousands of people
- Rural hospitals face closure
- SNAP changes jeopardize food security for hundreds of thousands more
The cost to feed children and support local farmers was a rounding error in the federal budget. The money existed. It was simply allocated elsewhere.
This is not fiscal responsibility.
It is selective investment in control.
Enforcement budgets grow. Oversight shrinks. Social infrastructure erodes. Because enforcement does not threaten the NUMBER ONE RULE. Oversight does.
Moral language does the work
We are told these decisions are about safety, security, and responsibility.
That is moral language.
But the outcomes tell a different story. Children disappear from school rolls out of fear. They reappear in child labor headlines. Families lose healthcare and food access. Communities hollow out.
And still, enforcement budgets grow.
Moral language allows harm to be framed as necessity and accountability to be framed as impractical.
Offshore “safeguards” and the illusion of protection
The same machinery is visible in foreign policy. Under the banner of “protection” and “stability,” Venezuelan oil revenues have been routed through Qatar—removed from direct public accountability and placed in a jurisdiction chosen precisely because it is difficult to audit, difficult to litigate, and insulated from democratic scrutiny.
This choice is not neutral.
Qatar is often described as a “safe” intermediary. In practice, that means operational opacity. Financial arrangements are harder to challenge. Oversight is constrained. Elite actors are well protected. These same jurisdictional features have long complicated investigations into exploitation and abuse tied to extreme wealth.
The point is not that oil money funds abuse.
The point is that systems repeatedly choose environments where abuse is hardest to see, hardest to prove, and easiest to deny.
Once again, moral language does the work. Funds are said to be “protected,” but what is actually protected is control without consequence.
When veterans become a substitute for reform
This same pattern appears closer to home in Alabama’s approach to education reform.
I have written publicly about integrating veterans into education as part of a broader framework for civic literacy, mentorship, and accountability. That vision was never about filling staffing gaps or bypassing structural investment. It was about intentional integration within a system that was also being repaired.
What has emerged instead is a workaround: a temporary certification pathway that allows leaders to say they acted without addressing why teachers are leaving, why classrooms are underfunded, or why education policy has been hollowed out.
Veterans, in this model, are not being empowered.
They are being deployed.
Their credibility is used to stabilize a failing system while the forces undermining education remain untouched. The idea is absorbed, stripped of its accountability layer, and redeployed as optics.
This is not reform.
It is managing decline without fixing it.
Institutions first, people second
Hart warned that the NUMBER ONE RULE no longer protects only crooked politicians. It now protects institutions themselves.
We see it everywhere:
- Prosecutors sidelined
- Ethics “reforms” that legalize misconduct
- Pardons issued for political convenience
- Oversight dismantled while rhetoric about “cleansing” intensifies
Nobody goes to jail.
Nobody at the top.
The public is encouraged to argue about personalities instead of mechanisms.
When the cost becomes unavoidable
This pattern holds wherever systems are supposed to protect the vulnerable.
In child protection systems, agencies are shielded from liability, whistleblowers are marginalized, and “best interest” language blocks transparency. Abuse becomes a procedural failure instead of a crime.
Protect the institution.
Protect the narrative.
Protect the budget.
But not necessarily the child.
Where moral language must stop
What ties all of this together—political corruption, budgets, offshore “safeguards,” hollow reform—is not ideology. It is method.
Systems under pressure do not fix what is broken. They reframe it, reroute it, and rename it. They borrow good ideas, strip out accountability, and redeploy them symbolically.
The end is always the same: protect the institution, preserve the narrative, and ensure that nobody at the top ever pays a price.
When that machinery reaches child protection, the cost is no longer abstract.
It is paid by children.
That is where moral language must stop.
And law must begin.
Editor’s note: A longer version of this essay is available on Substack.
Alicia Boothe Haggermaker is a lifelong resident of Huntsville, Alabama, and a dedicated advocate for health freedom. For more than a decade, she has worked to educate the public and policymakers on issues of medical choice and public transparency. In January 2020, she organized a delegation of physicians and health freedom advocates to Montgomery, contributing to the initial draft of legislation that became SB267.
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Sources:
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