Month: November 2016

Over 40 years ago Lew Uhler, a Reagan man through and through, founded the National Tax Limitation Committee.  He turned 83 yesterday, and he’s still going strong, though his son Kirk is now assuming more of the duties at NTLC.  Lew won’t be at ALEC, and Kirk will be.  Lew has a family obligation.

I first met Lew and his lovely wife in 1989 at an ALEC meeting in Orlando. I made a presentation to an ALEC Task Force in which I urged my fellow State Legislators from around the country to pass a Resolution calling for an Article V Amendment Convention for the purpose of proposing a Term Limits Amendment.

I had introduced such a Resolution in the Alaska House, but I knew it wasn’t going anywhere.  Sen. Ted Stevens was against it, and I was in the House Minority.  I hoped someone from another State would pick up on the idea, but no one did.  At long last, U. S. Term Limits has decided to go the Article V route.  Howard Rich formed USTL in 1991, and rejected the use Article V.  He chose a legally dubious strategy instead, which was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Now that John Aglialoro has teamed up with him, they’re finally using Article V.  They’ve got one State, Florida.  But when we have a successful BBA Convention, their effort will take off.

This Convention will be the product of 40 years of work by Lew Uhler.  He kept the movement alive out of sheer will.  Alaska was his 32nd State, and he was getting close  Then Tip O’Neill and Al Gore teamed up with Phyllis Schlafly and started a rescission  movement.  Lew was powerless to stop it, and by the time they were done Lew had only 17 States left.  But he didn’t give up.  He knew he was right.  He knew that the time for Article V would come, and those 17 States would be the building block of a new campaign.

And he was right, and now we’re at 28, and we’ll get to 34 next year  A full half of those States will be the work of one man, Lew Uhler.  When that Convention convenes it will be his Convention, and he should be a delegate from California, a citizen delegate.  The California Legislature will probably appoint three State Senators and three Assemblymen.  The six of them can agree on the seventh, tie breaking delegate.  Why shouldn’t it be Lew Uhler?

 

 

 

John Steinberger reports from South Carolina that Trump may appoint Nikki Haley to the UN.  It would make so much sense, it’s hard for me to believe that he wouldn’t. She’s a fine looking, intelligent and conservative Indian-American.  In the United Nations she is the perfect face for her country.

Steinberger also says that if this happens, Senate President Hugh Leatherman would become Lt. Gov.  He’d replace the current Lt. Gov., who is an elected state wide official.  As Lt. Gov., Leatherman can preside over the Senate, just as the Vice President presides over the U. S. Senate, but he only votes in case of a tie.  If you haven’t noticed, the Vice President has no power in the U.S. Senate, and never has in 229 years.  If you don’t have a vote, you don’t count, and Leatherman will have no power in the South Carolina Senate.

40 year old Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey will become the new power in the Senate, and according to Steinberger, “he’s all in.”  That’s a quote.  South Carolina may get our Resolution passed in the first few weeks of their session.  If the Senate President wants to, he can make that happen, if he’s got a solid majority behind him, and Massey will have that, in spades.  And no, there are no black Republican State Senators, in case you’re a racist.

The path to 34 is now clear as a bell.  AZ, WY, ID, WI, KY, and the 34th, SC.  And it could happen fast.  Passing our Resolution is going to be very popular, politically.  The only reason its popularity hasn’t helped us before, is because no one knew anything about us, and Article V.  But that’s going to change on Nov. 30th, and it’s going to change fast.

I feel very thankful right now, and it’s almost Thanksgiving.

U. S. Grant was a mediocre President. He’s on the $50 because he won the Civil War.  In the process, hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting under his command, and hundreds of thousands of Confederates died fighting against him.  The Union won, the South lost, and having his face on the $50 is a reminder of the worst tragedy in American history.  Let’s put all that behind us, and put a woman in the place of honor.

I’ve given my idea to a couple State Legislators in Tennessee and South Carolina.  If they’re interested, they’ll pursue it.  If this idea is to be put in effect, 2017 is the year to do it.  Congress and Trump will go along, if enough State Legislatures pass Resolutions of support.  I’m going to push this thing at ALEC next week.

There’s been talk of replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 with someone like Harriet Tubman.  But Andrew Jackson was one of the Founding Fathers.  He was the one man who made Manifest Destiny real, palpable.  He fought the British at New Orleans, and ratified, in blood, the Louisiana Purchase.  One of his lieutenants, Sam Houston, brought Texas into the Union, and another, James K. Polk, took California and most of the western United States from Mexico.  Polk also brought in the Oregon Territory, and the Northwest.  George Washington and the other Founders wanted a continental empire of liberty, and it was Jackson who made it happen.  So Jackson stays on the $20.

No offense to Tubman, but I think a pioneer woman should be on the $50, one of those brave and hardy wives and mothers who settled this country.  And I’ve got one in particular in mind.

In 1765 she came with her family to the Waxhaw region on the border of the Carolinas.  They were poor Scotch-Irish, and couldn’t afford good land, and her husband worked himself to death within two years, trying to scratch out a living.  She was carrying his third son, which she named for him.  She moved in with her cousin Jane Crawford, who had eight children of her own.  Jane was unwell, so she did the work of two women, taking care of the whole family.

When the Revolutionary War came to the Carolinas her oldest boy, Hugh, rode with William Richardson Davie at the Battle of Stono Ferry.  He died from exhaustion right after the fight.  He was 16.  Her remaining sons rode with Davie at the Battle of Hanging Rock, then became guerillas, and were captured and imprisoned at Camden with 250 other men.  They were dying of starvation and disease when she rode the 45 miles to see them.  She pleaded with the British to let her boys go, and they were finally released in a prisoner exchange.  When she got them home they were in desperate condition, and after two days her middle boy, Robert, died.  He was 15.  She nursed her youngest, 13, to a semblance of health, and then rode with two other ladies to Charleston to nurse and comfort the Americans being held on prison ships there.  Some of them were her kin.  She contracted cholera and, shortly after the great victory at Yorktown, died and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Her sole surviving son became a truly ferocious man, an American lion.  He was his mother’s son.  She gave birth to him on March 15, 1767, and next year we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of that day.  If she’s not the Mother of this country I don’t know who is.  Let’s all honor the life of Elizabeth Jackson on that day.  And let’s put her on the $50.

A Fourth Branch of Government was created by Article V of the Constitution, superior to the other three.  It consists of 7,382 voting members, distributed in the 50 States.  In order to act, this Fourth Branch of Government, which I call the Federal Assembly, must organize itself into a 2/3 supermajority of the States in order to make a proposal.  Majorities in both Houses of a State Legislature in 34 States must agree on the subject matter which will be addressed by an Amendment Convention.  Once the Amendment Convention agrees on the language of the proposed Amendment, an even more challenging 3/4 supermajority of States is required to adopt it.

It’s hard, and it’s never been done in the 229 years we’ve had the Constitution, not until now.  By using their Article V power, in 2017, the States, and the people, will for the very first time, exercise their sovereignty.  And it is full sovereignty, plenary, unlimited.  Aside from not reducing the equal suffrage of the States in the Senate, the Federal Assembly can do anything the people want it to do.  It’s popular sovereignty.  It’s the people showing the federal government who’s in charge.

Two of the other three Branches of Government, the President and the Supreme Court, have no role to play in any of this.  The federal courts do not have jurisdiction over the States when they are exercising their Article V powers.  And the Third Branch, Congress, has only a ministerial role to play.  The only discretion Congress has is in selecting the time and place of the Amendment Convention, and of choosing the method of ratification — by State Legislatures, or by State Conventions.

In order to organize a 2/3 supermajority, the States may choose to meet in a preliminary Convention of States.  This was last done in 1861, in Washington.  State delegations assembled to try to avert the Civil War, but they didn’t have enough time, and they failed.  The previous Convention of States, held in Nashville in 1850, was more successful.  It helped form the Compromise of 1850, which stopped the movement toward secession.  But the Dred Scott decision overturned the Compromise of 1850, and the Civil War soon followed.

There will be a Convention of States dealing with the Balanced Budget Amendment this summer.  It will be the first in 156 years. We have been so conditioned into thinking of ourselves as a nation that we’ve forgotten that we have another political identity.  I live in California, so I’m a Californian.  And California has rights under Article V, and I am going to personally ask  my Assemblyman Frank Bigelow and State Senator Tom Berryhill  to introduce an Article V Resolution calling for an Amendment Convention for the purpose of adopting a Congressional Term Limits Amendment.  And you should do the same with your state legislators.  We’re going to  get a Balanced Budget Amendment, so what’s next?  It is obviously Term Limits.

The campaign for Congressional Term Limits  is completely bipartisan.  Every Bernie Sanders voter would be for it.  They all hate Congress.  Everybody hates Congress.  The only people who don’t like term limits are politicians, because it interferes with their careers at the public trough.  U. S. Term Limits, founded by Howard Rich in 1991, and the U. S. Term Limits Foundation, headed by John Aglialoro, only have one State, Florida, of the 34 needed for a Term Limits Amendment Convention, but that’s going to change, in a hurry.  Once State Legislators become aware of the power of the Federal Assembly, they’ll want to use it again and again.  The Balanced Budget Amendment comes first, followed by Term Limits.  The third priority of the States will be discussed, informally, at the Convention of States.  I suspect it will be another of the Liberty Amendments, popularized by Mark Levin.

Levin has played no role in the Balanced Budget Campaign.  He supports a competing proposal, called, misleadingly, “The Convention of States.”  This proposal calls for what would be a wide open Amendment Convention, with the authority to propose a series of Amendments, in an all out assault on the Federal Government.  But this approach has a fatal flaw, and despite spending millions of dollars, has only eight of the needed 34 States.  What Levin doesn’t understand is that there are different political coalitions which support different Amendments.  The coalition which is succeeding with the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force is different than the coalition supporting Term Limits.  Including both, within one Article V Amendment Convention, doubles your opposition.  Some State Legislators want a Balanced Budget Amendment, but not Term Limits, and vice versa.   It’s Politics 101, but Levin is a lawyer, not a politician, and he doesn’t understand politics.

The great value of this summer’s Convention of States is educational.  People will wonder, what is a Convention of States?  And some of them will even read Article V of the Constitution to figure out what all this means.  While they’re at it, they might want to look at the Bill of Rights, and read it, all of it, including the 9th and 10th Amendments.  What do those words mean?

The Convention of States of 2017, will happen in a historic location, one which played a central role in our history.  It’s a place identified with our greatest President, except Washington himself.  It will be on the 250th anniversary of his birth.  And it will be in his honor, and that of his mother, the Mother of her Country.  She, not U.S. Grant, should have her likeness on the $50 bill.  And that too may happen.

Man of mystery Steve Bannon is peaking out of the shadows at the Hollywood Reporter.  This is my kind of guy, smarter than hell.  A little rough on the edges, but aren’t we all?

Normal America and the coastal elites live in two different worlds, and are not fond of one another.  The Media Hive, led by its Queen, the NYT, convinced their public, and the Clintons, that Trump could never become President, so no worries.  But outside of their little castles, and thus unbeknownst to them, Donald Trump was speaking to the American peasantry in their own language, and they were going to deliver him the Rust Belt, and the election.

Bannon had this all figured out.  And it wasn’t racial.  Scott Adams of Dilbert fame points out an article (hat tip, Instapundit) that proves that.   Trump improved on Romney in every racial category, not just whites.  Actually, his improvement in black, Latino and Asian voting percentages was higher than his improvement among whites.

But I do believe the number of whites who strongly identify themselves as White Americans is increasing.  Whites are a solid voting bloc in the Deep South.  They’re all Republicans, and in places like Alabama and Mississippi the Democrats are basically the black party.  This attitude is spreading north, and partly accounts for our pickup of the Kentucky House.  White Democrats are an endangered species in almost all of the South now.  This attitude is seeping into Missouri, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio.  If it spreads any further north, into the heart of the Rust  Belt, the Democrats are in big trouble.  Demography may be destiny,  but the destination may turn out to be different than the deep thinkers thought.

Bannon’s a history buff, and compares himself to Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.  Thomas Cromwell served Henry VIII, and is responsible for what is known as the Tudor Revolution.  This was a radical centralization of power, in which the traditional power of the Church was eliminated, royal supremacy over Parliament was strengthened, and the king ruled as a virtual tyrant.  If that’s what Bannon has in mind he may wind up, figuratively, like his hero, Thomas Cromwell.  Henry had him beheaded, and had his head placed on a spike on London Bridge.

There will be no centralization of power under Trump.  Quite the opposite.  Article V is going to succeed in 2017, and that’s a decentralization of power.  There’s a lot going on in Article V World, and it’s just about ready to pop.

I mentioned seeing Art Laffer predict a political era lasting 1,000 years.  Bannon thinks 50, which is more realistic.  But he doesn’t know anything about Article V, so he’s off by half..  Trump’s a figurehead, in some ways.  The reform this country needs will come from the States, and the people, not Donald Trump.  All he has to do is stay out of the way.

I identify with Bannon.  He’s nine years younger than I am, and from a very similar background.  He’s had an interesting life, as have I.  But I’ve got one up on him.  Babbie, my wife of 45 years.

I got married to the widow next door

She’s been married seven times before

And every one was an ‘Enery

Wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam

I’m her eighth old man, I’m ‘Enery

‘Enery the Eighth I am, I am

‘Enery the Eighth I am.