Month: July 2017

Long before the Inupiat and the Yupik of Alaska proved themselves as capitalists, they excelled at politics.   After I was elected to the State Senate in 1982, I got to see it with my own eyes.

The Thirteenth Alaska Legislature, to the outsider, looked like an even split between Republicans and Democrats, 20-20 in the House, 10-10 in the Senate.  But there was a “third party” which controlled both chambers  —  the Bush caucus.

To Bush legislators, Native or non-Native, party affiliation meant nothing.  One Republican and two Democrat Bush Senators constituted the Senate Bush caucus, and they controlled the Finance Committee, and the chamber.  They put a regular Democrat in the President of the Senate’s chair, but they ran the show.

The six Bush members of the House were led by Finance Chair Al Adams of Kotzebue, and they made a Republican from Anchorage the Speaker of the House.  But Al Adams ran that show, and everybody knew it.

It took me a while to figure this all out.  I really didn’t know very much about Alaska, which I wanted to use as a stepping stone to the United States Senate.  At this time, in Washington, President Reagan was in the middle of his first term.  He was determined to win the Cold War, and that’s what really interested me.  I just wanted to get back there and lend a hand.

My Senate district in South Anchorage was mainly recent arrivals from the lower 48, who’d come up in the oil boom.  Most of the new real estate development was in the unpopulated south part of town, and these people were my constituents.  They thought the Natives were getting more than their share of the money pouring into Juneau from Prudhoe.  Regardless of what I thought privately, that had to be my position as well.

So I was opposed, politically, to the Senate Bush caucus, and its leader, Frank “Fergie” Ferguson, an Inupiat from Kotzebue.  But I liked Fergie, personally, and I think he liked me a little too.  He and I were with some other legislators having a few drinks at the Baranof Hotel bar one night, and Fergie got a little tight.  I had quite a few beers myself, and I guess I was being a little cocky.  Frank leaned over to me and smiled and said, “You’re not coming back.”

I was up for reelection in 1984, and I was making damn sure I was going to get reelected.  I didn’t have any money behind me, but I knew what I was doing, and I was determined to “come back.”  So I said to Fergie, “You can’t beat me!  Who have you got that can beat me?”  He just smiled and took a sip of his drink.

A month later Alaska Supreme Court Justice Jay Rabinowitz announced that he’d changed his mind.  He had tentatively ruled that the Hammond legislative reapportionment plan, under which I’d been elected, was constitutional.  Now he decided one odd district in Southeast Alaska was unconstitutional, and the new Democratic Governor would have to reapportion the state.  And he’d have the authority not only to fix the one unconstitutional district.  He got to reapportion the whole state.

Fergie knew what he was talking about, and I was one and done in the State Senate.  But I wanted revenge, and I came back after all.  I wasn’t in the Senate any more, but I was in the House.

There I got to know one of the finest men I met in politics, Al Adams.  Like Fergie, Al was an Inupiat from Kotzebue, but he had a wonderful, friendly personality.  Everybody liked Al.  And everyone respected him.  Every year he was in Juneau, from his freshman year in 1981, he wrote the operating budget for the state of Alaska.

It was an enormous amount of work, and a great responsibility, and called for a high level of political and financial skill.  Al performed superbly, year after year.

He didn’t drink during the session, but when we finally gavelled out he’d relax and party with the rest of us.  We were all on the fifth floor of the Capitol, whooping it up one year, when somehow a couple reporters got into the room.  Al had way too much to drink, so I grabbed him and took him down the fire escape, and away from those reporters.

The year before Babbie and I left Alaska we were down at Alyeska Ski Resort for New Year’s eve, and we ran into Al and his lovely wife Diane.  We had a nice dinner together, and talked about old times.  He was a lovely man.

 

 

Mainly, it’s bugs.  If you look at a topographical map of the Arctic plain north of the Brooks Range, you’ll see that it’s flat, and it’s covered with thousands and thousands of small lakes.  Minnesota brags about it’s 10,000 lakes.  There are over 3 million lakes in Alaska over 20 acres in size.

When the long summer days come, and a little warmth with it, these wetlands produce one of the great insect blooms of the world.  There are swarms of them, and the caribou avoid them at all costs.  They’re bloodthirsty mosquitoes, for the most part, and caribou are forced to flee to snow covered ground to escape them.

The ultimate punishment in Alaska Native culture is banishment, and to be banished in mosquito country, without clothes, was a death sentence.  It was almost never done.  It was a terrible way to die.

The great flocks of migrating birds come north not just to escape predators.  They come for the bugs.  Chicks can get big and strong in a hurry when they can eat bugs 24 hours a day.  In order to make the long return flight, a chick must mature very quickly.  Bugs are the perfect diet.

Ten or fifteen years ago a big magazine, The Atlantic, I believe, sent a reporter to ANWR to report on all the wildlife he expected to find.  As I recall, he spent a week looking for an animal, and all he ever found was a tuft of caribou fur.  But this little tuft sent him into seventh heaven.  He was communing with the wildlife of ANWR as he held it.

The environmentalists say ANWR is the Serengeti of the North. It is, in only one respect.  The bugs.

 

When the BBA Task Force was formed in 2010, sixteen states were on record with the requisite Article V BBA Resolutions.  Eighteen more were needed.  Work began in 2011, and here is the year by rear score card:

2011  —  Florida and Alabama

2012  —  New Hampshire

2013   —  Ohio

2014  —  Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Michigan

2015  —  North Dakota, Utah, South Dakota

2016  —  Oklahoma, West Virginia

2017  —  Arizona, Wyoming

Alerted to our progress, the George Soros wing of the Democratic Party counterattacked. The Resolutions which had passed in the 1970’s in Delaware, Maryland, Nevada and New Mexico were rescinded by the Democratic majorities in their state legislatures.  The Task Force tried to argue, on the merits, against these rescissions.  No Democratic state legislator in any of these states was interested in listening.

We now have 27 Resolutions, and Republicans control our seven targeted states.  If we fail to reach 34 next year, we risk losing control of more state legislatures.  If Democrats in the 2018 election get control of a state with a BBA Resolution, it will be rescinded in 2019.  That would mean our path to 34 would be blocked by Democratically controlled legislatures.  Checkmate.

Getting to 34 means getting seven states in one year.  The Task Force has never won more than four states in one year, so this hill looks too steep for us.  Especially because every one of those seven targets is going to be a fight.

So David Biddulph and others on the Task Force sally forth, yet again, to raise the funds we need.   They’ve been trying to raise serious money for seven years.  They’ve tried to do it on the merits, but the money people haven’t been interested.  The attitude was, essentially, who are you guys?  You’re going to amend the Constitution?  You?

Representative Ken Buck of Colorado is going to do all he can for us, and God bless him for it.  But the key may be the Phoenix Convention of States.  This is a Bill Fruth production, although it is now firmly under the control of the Arizona legislature.  The Task Force came up with this idea, and when the first national Convention of States since 1861 convenes in Phoenix,  maybe the people with all the  money will take us seriously.

A phoenix was a bird which burned itself on a funeral pyre, and rose from the ashes with renewed youth to live again.  The Phoenix Convention will convene three weeks after the Great American Total Eclipse of the Sun.

Maybe it all means something.  We could use some help.

 

Running for public office is a family decision.   If you do it without the full support of your spouse, you will either lose your marriage or your campaign.  It’s the same as far as running for reelection.   You have to have your family behind you, or you’ll lose them.

Getting inside the head of Donald Trump is above my pay grade, but some things about him seem clear.  For one, he’s devoted to his family, and its welfare.  How is his Presidency affecting them?  More specifically, is life in the White House in the best interest of Barron Trump?

Right now, he looks like a normal eleven year old kid.  If Trump runs for a second term, his son will spend his juvenile and high school years under an intense, never ending spotlight.  That sure doesn’t seem like fun to me.

I was a fairly normal eleven year old boy.  The next seven years of my life were, let us say, eventful.  At the end of the road I met and married Babbie, so I didn’t turn out too bad.  But it was a rocky road.  If everything I did  —  just the stuff I got caught at —  had been of interest to a media looking for ways to inflict pain on my family, I would have been in trouble.

But Barron has been raised in a Manhattan penthouse, as I assume his older half-brothers were, and those two make their Daddy proud.  So maybe growing up in a fishbowl is what this boy has in store for him, no matter what.  Being the son of the President has its advantages.  But I’ll bet when he’s fifteen he’ll have had enough of it.

And then, of course, there’s Melania.  I think she’s perfectly capable of telling her husband that one term is all he gets.  She kept Barron in Manhattan for six months after the inauguration, because that was best for him.  To hell with what the President wants.  If she decides that Barron’s best interests are served by leaving the White House, and living in Manhattan or somewhere else, that’s what’s going to happen.  Trump hates living without her and Barron, and he’d go with her.

A lot of people who grudgingly admire Trump, and strongly support his entire agenda, wish it were one and done.  Trump seems to have more energy than Reagan did, but when almost any man passes his mid-70’s, you’re not as quick as you once were.  In Reagan’s case it may have been early Alzheimer’s, but you don’t want to take chances.   Trump would be 78 when he finishes a second term.  I think that’s too old.

Ideally, Vice President Pence would succeed him, and serve two full terms.   That would essentially be twelve years of a Trump administration, the last eight of which were headed by his hand picked man.  In the history books it would be like the Harding-Coolidge years of the 1920’s.  The Trump-Pence era of American politics.  Accent on the Trump.  That ought to be enough to satisfy any man’s ego.

Most one term Presidents were failures.  Tyler, Fillmore, Arthur, Andrew Johnson, Carter, and Bush I come to mind.  And then there’s James K. Polk.  Few Presidents have taken office with a bigger agenda than Polk.  He had four goals, and he achieved them all, including a settlement of the dispute over Oregon, and the acquisition of California.  I know of no President who was so completely successful.  He was one of our greatest Presidents.  He served one term.

Trump won’t admit it, because it turns him into a lame duck.  But in 2020, he’s going back to what he wants to do, at this stage of his life.  Enjoy himself.

The American west was taken from Mexico because of the illegal immigration of American settlers.

The Mexican government at first welcomed American settlers into Texas, because they couldn’t get enough Mexicans to settle it.  As a result, the few Mexicans there were constantly raided by bands of Comanche, Navajo, Apache and other warrior Indian tribes.  Their cattle, sheep and horses were stolen, crops were destroyed, men and women killed or taken prisoner.  The Mexicans wanted the Americans to help fight off the Indians.

It worked, all too well, and the government in Mexico realized they had admitted a Trojan horse.  The incoming Americans were taking over the territory, and the government in Mexico City ordered it to stop.  But it was too late.  The Americans kept coming, illegally, and finally in 1835 they rebelled, and the following year the independent Republic of Texas was formed.

When Texas formally joined the Union in 1846 it included present day Texas, the eastern half of New Mexico, the Oklahoma panhandle, southwest Kansas, central Colorado, and a part of southern Wyoming.  America profited mightily by the illegal immigration of its citizens into Mexico.

California was won in much the same way  — illegal immigration of American settlers.  Mountain man Joe Walker led the way, crossing the Sierras in 1833, but the real action began in 1841, with the Bartleson -Bidwell party.   Its principal significance is that it included seventeen year old Nancy Kelsey, and her year old daughter Ann.

The story of this party meandering from Missouri to the eastern base of the Sierras, and crossing it on horseback and on foot, is available many places.  The best I’ve read is The California Trail: An Epic with Many Heroes. , by George R. Stewart.  As they descended from ten thousand foot Sonora Pass, Nicholas Dawson, a young man in the party, later wrote, “I looked back and saw Mrs Kelsey a little way behind me, with her child in her arms, barefooted, and leading her horse  —  a sight I shall never forget.”

Nancy Kelsey, and a few other American women who came after she did, sewed the first flag of California, the Bear Flag, the one that was flown in the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846.  California was taken from Mexico as the spoils of  the Mexican-American War.  But the war wasn’t really necessary.  There were a lot more where Nancy Kelsey came from, and they weren’t going to be stopped.  The discovery of gold in 1848 meant that the entire war had been unnecessary.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans were on the way now, and California was going to be theirs.

Some Mexican-Americans talk about the Reconquista, or how they are going to overwhelm the Anglos with illegal immigration, and take the west back from the Americans who took it from them.  If left unchecked, that’s exactly what they’d do.  Americans realize that, and elected Donald Trump to stop it.

Which he is in the process of doing.  Elections matter.  If you won’t defend your country, it will be taken from you.