Month: February 2016

At this point in a campaign everybody has ideas for ads.  This is mine.

On the radio a woman a Christian woman says the following:  “I am a proud Christian woman, a wife and mother, and the fact that Donald Trump is obviously not a religious man doesn’t bother me.  What does is that he claims to be a practicing Christian.  He brags in his books about all the married women he’s slept with, and yet says that, even though he’s a  Christian, he’s never sought God’s forgiveness because he’s never done any thing wrong.  This means either he doesn’t feel adultery is wrong, or is not honest about his faith.  Either way, he’s not a man I could ever vote for.”

This was inspired by a focus group I saw on MSNBC’s “With All Due Respect”.  These were South Carolinians who were undecided, and they said they didn’t mind that Trump was not a man of faith, but they really wouldn’t like him lying about it.  When they were shown Trump dropping the “f” bomb last week in New Hampshire they were horrified.  It looks as though Trump has the solid support of around a third of the Republican electorate.  If these people can’t be pried from Trump, the goal has to be to stop him from growing.  His character flaws may be what do him in.

Babbie and I spent five days in Charleston last spring, and all the people, black and white, were polite and friendly.  They were all pretty much Christian, of course, but that didn’t come up.  I don’t think these people are going to like Donald Trump, once they get to know a little more about him.

Babbie, son Brendan and I saw “Hail Caesar” last night and I wrote a review for American Thinker, which may be up tomorrow.  My sons and I are fanatical Coen brothers fans, and we weren’t disappointed.  Classic Coen, and that’s saying something.

I just heard about Scalia.  This is terrible news, on a number of fronts.  We won’t win another high profile 5-4 decision until he’s replaced.  And if we don’t win, and Hillary gets to name the replacement, there goes all the Heller decision second amendment rights.  The stakes on this election just went up, and they were already sky high.  The fact that Trump has talked about putting his liberal sister on to the Court doesn’t sound so funny anymore.  A new line of attack on Trump just opened up.

Scalia was a great guy, and a damn good justice.  But what we really want is another Clarence Thomas, and I think Cruz should say so.

I’ve got to say I feel a little vindicated already.  Almost two and a half years ago, on this blog, I said 2016 was going to be wipeout of historic proportions.   I felt a turning of the tide in October of 2013, and ever since the tide has strengthened, to where it’s now  becoming obvious.  Back then I thought the tide would be so strong that it would take us to an Article V Convention.  That’s when I joined the Task Force.

And that tide is still running strong.

Rep.Raul Labrador is one of the leaders of the hard core House Freedom Caucus, and he’s apparently causing us trouble in Boise.  Typical runaway nonsense.  Labrador was supporting Paul, and I have little doubt that he’s now on the Cruz team.  We need to tell Rep. Labrador that Rand Paul testified before the Kentucky Senate in favor of our bill, and that Ted Cruz not only supports us but signed a pledge to do so.  What does Labrador understand about the Constitution that Cruz and Paul don’t?  We’ll have a cc on Idaho with legislative leadership tomorrow.

We got out of committee, 8-7, in the Virginia House, and are up for a floor vote Monday or Tuesday.  At the moment our whip count is a few votes short.  Delegate LeMunyon expects to get to the magic number of 51, but we’ll see.  We’re going to try to get Admiral Owen, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs, call some Virginia legislators to explain the necessity of a BBA to national security.

Kasich gave a speech to the Charleston, South Carolina Chamber, and told them to tell their state legislature to pass our bill.  John Kasich has certainly done his part.  We’ve got an event in the Capitol on the 24th, and Fruth will go and spend a couple days with John Steinberger trying to figure things out.  The South Carolina legislature is a bizarre institution.

The West Virginia legislature just overrode the Governor’s veto of their right to work law.  Actually, in West Virginia the Governor has only a symbolic veto, since one can  be overridden by a simple majority.  Senate President Bill Cole is leading a political and economic revolution.  He says if it comes to the Senate it will pass.  We’re up in a House subcommittee next week.

Sen Chris Kapenga in Wisconsin walked away from our bill in a dispute over the proper way to conduct the Amendment Convention.  So we’re out of luck this year.  If we can get a special session, the votes will be there.

I’ve been thinking about the politics of calling a special session.  Actually, from a Governor’s standpoint, they’re quite good.  This holds true for all of them in our target states.  They’re all Republicans , except Virginia, West Virginia and Montana.  So let’s say we’re three short.  In a joint announcement, Governors Walker, Ducey and Haley call their legislatures in to special session, all for the same purpose:  our bill.  They justify the expense by explaining the role of Article V in our federalist system, and the absolutely urgent need to put some restraints on Congress’s out of control spending.

Those are good politics.  Especially if it’s done in conjunction with the Republican Presidential nominee.  It’s good politics for him, too.

No, not good. Gold.

Unless we get Loucks’ vote in the Wyoming House Revenue Committee we’re probably dead this session.  We’d have to convince Gov. Mead to call a special session, or have the legislature call itself back.  Difficult.

He gave us a vote to get out of committee last year, but voted against us on the floor.  Bill and I both testified in front of him last year, and he asked us why couldn’t we get Congress to propose a BBA. I recounted the thirty-five year history of attempting to get one through Congress, beginning with Reagan, and including periods when we had the House, the Senate, and both the House and Senate.  I told him we’d been trying for 35 years.  What I should have said, and didn’t, is that if we sit around and wait for Congress to fix our problems we’ll go bankrupt within the decade.  Congress is the problem, for Pete’s sake.

I just found out the hearing has been postponed until Monday, so I will be able to make it.  Fruth called this morning and asked me to appear at an 8:00 a.m. hearing in Cheyenne tomorrow morning.  All the flights were booked, so I wasn’t going to make it.  But NFIB’s Tony Gagliardi was able to secure a continuance.  His wife needed him tomorrow, and the Chairman extended him a professional courtesy.  Having lobbyists is good.

So it’s back into the world of the Wyoming legislature.  Good people.  Like last year’s sponsor, Tyler Lindholm of Sundance.  He’s lineman and a small rancher with a growing young family.  About 6′ 8″, 190 lbs.  First time I met him he was wearing a big white cowboy hat.  We got along just fine.  So it’s off to Cheyenne on Sunday. It gets cold in Wyoming in the winter.  But not like Alaska.

I’ve been thinking about Bernie Sanders and Barry Goldwater.  When I hear Bernie talk about starting a political revolution it’s sort of like what we did with Goldwater in ’64.  We took over a party.  We didn’t win the election.  In fact, most of us knew damn well we weren’t going to win the election, just like the Democrats are not going to win this one, no matter who they nominate.  The point was to take over the party.  We did that, and Ted Cruz is doing that today, though, of course, he’s also going to win the election.  So all this talk about electability should fall on deaf ears. Those Sanders kids are not going to be denied.  When they were at the victory party in Des Moines, and Hillary came on to ball room TV, they all spontaneously broke into a chant, “She’s a liar!”  You think Hilary is going to turn those kids around?

The point is that Bernie may very well win the nomination, and if he does he’ll run like Goldwater ran, not so much to win as to set forth a set of political principles on which he stood.  The stars are aligning, I’m telling you.

I’ll never forget Everett Dirksen’s nomination speech in the Cow Palace.  I snuck in somehow.  “The Peddler’s Grandson” is what he called it, talking about Barry’s grandfather, an immigrant Jew, who peddled goods to the Indians across Arizona.  It was a great speech, delivered by a great man.

One of Everett’s sayings was, “I am a man of principle, and one of my principles is compromise.”

My article “Five Seats at the Final Table” is up at AT.  Looking at the comments, I’m led to believe that resistance to Trump is gathering steam.  People are starting to take him seriously, and are getting annoyed at the juvenile antics of the cultists.  People like me, who’ve been waiting for the second installment of the Reagan revolution for 30 years, are not going to allow this hijacking of our movement to take place.  Populism unmoored from the Constitution is a threat to traditional American liberty.  The campaigns of his rivals aren’t going to take him down.  Outfits like Our Principles Pac are set up to do the job.  We all need to pitch in.

Hillary is hillarious.  She’s blaming her staff for her troubles.  Everyone agrees her messaging is off.  But no one has any idea what the message should be.  The logical extension of Obamaism is socialism.  That’s where the Democrats have been heading since FDR.  The Clintons believe in socialist-lite, for prudential reasons.  But passion beats prudence, and incrementalism is for weaklings.

It’s not that Hillary doesn’t have a message.  It’s the non-socialist Democratic Party that lacks a story.  What will Joe Biden’s message be if he gets in?  Stay the course?

This is all part of the historic opportunity that 2016 presents.  We can’t blow this one.

We successfully passed the 2/3 threshold for further consideration in the Wyoming House, and are now before the Revenue and Taxation Committee.  We may have a problem there because of sabotage from Nick Dranias, the prime advocate of using the State Compact method of achieving an Article V BBA.  Dranias failed to get a hearing in the Wyoming Senate last year, and he knows that if the Task Force succeeds in making Wyoming its 28th state, his entire project is doomed.  He’s fighting for his own personal survival.

A few years ago, when it appeared the normal Article V process wouldn’t work for achieving a Balanced Budget Amendment because of fears of a runaway convention, Dranias and other think tank deep thinkers came up with the idea of having 38 states agree in advance on the actual language of the Amendment, and enter into a compact that would result in an Amendment Convention that would rubber stamp what had already been agreed upon.  This requires extremely complicated legislation, which many state legislators refuse to take seriously.  It contorts the simple concept of a BBA and pretzels it into something so convoluted it’s ridiculous.  For this, and many other reasons, Dranias has only four of the 38 states he needs, despite years of time and a lot of money.  I suspect Dranias will prove to be no more than a speed bump in Wyoming, but this sort of thing can no longer be tolerated.  If he keeps this up he needs to be drummed out of the conservative movement.

We hear he’s telling Wyoming legislators that many of our Resolutions are invalid, and that we have far less than the 27 we claim.  Apparently he got some backwoods lawyer somewhere to look at them, and that’s his opinion.  It is decidedly not the opinion of Bob Goodlatte, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, or Senator Mike Enzi, Chairman of the Senate  Budget Committee, or Rob Natelson of the Independence Institute, the foremost legal scholar on Article V in the country.  I could go on.  It’s total B.S., Dranias knows it, and we’re all very disappointed in him.

On a lighter note, Greg Casey of BiPac is as good as his word.  Back in December he shook my hand at Lew Uhler’s reception, and promised me he would take care of the Idaho Senate.  And that’s apparently exactly what he’s done.  It’s nice to have a guy who does what he says he’s going to do.  Life would be a lot simpler if there were more of them.  Rep. Christy Perry is in the process of whipping the House, and when she gets the votes the bill will be introduced, passed, and sent to the Senate.  There’s always one key guy in every state. In Idaho it’s Greg Casey.

Fruth’s in Oklahoma, having given an address to a group of House members.  Bill takes the whole idea of above and beyond the call of duty to a new level.  Senate President Bingman assures us we have the votes in the Senate.  Our sponsor, House Majority Whip Gary Banz has laid it all on the line.  He’s term limited out, and he’s been working on the BBA for years.  This is one he really wants.  His new helper is Kylee Williamson, Chair of the University of Oklahoma Young Republicans.  Working with Rep. John Michael Momtgomery, she’s doing absolutely everything possible lobbying for us.  A gem.

I’ve been thinking about New Hampshire.  I can no longer deny that Trump has a chance, however small.  But it can easily be prevented, and it will.  My confidence is undiminished that it’s one of the Cubans, though I give Cruz a big edge.  I submitted my cogitations to American Thinker and they should be up tomorrow.

Thomas Lifson started AT around ten years ago, and it’s a great success.  Since I consider myself an AT regular now, I was pleased to see a Rubio TV ad which featured a quotation from an AT article, with American Thinker being given attribution.  Go team AT!

Chris Christie’s moment in the sun is gone.  It lasted 72 hours.  For that three day period, people seriously considered him a possibility as President.  It’s not much, but it’s more than most ever get.  Next time he sees Obama he’ll get a nice big hug of condolence.