Month: April 2018

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have waged all out warfare against each other for at least 25 years.  To arm themselves, they both need massive amounts of campaign cash.  If you don’t compete with money, you have unilaterally disarmed.

Both parties have sold their souls in this competition, and the losers are the American people.  So it is that we have permanent trillion dollar deficits.  Throwing the bums out just means a different set of bums in charge.  In that sense, this year’s elections for Congress mean next to nothing.

It’s not Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi.  They could be St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Teresa of Avila.  The parties they lead, in the institution in which they both serve, are beyond redemption.

Article V was supposed to fix this.  But first we’ve got to fix Article V, with the Mason Amendment.  And then we can save our country.

The story of my family really doesn’t begin with a Pettyjohn at all, but with an immigrant from Ireland named Tom Brennan.  He was a deputy sheriff in St. Cloud, Minnesota, married an immigrant from Germany named Dora Schmidt, and bought a farm in northern Minnesota.  They scratched out a living on its poor soil and had four children, including my grandmother, Lottie.

She met and married a big, handsome lumberjack named Jules Achenbach after he came home from World War One.  They had three daughters, Mary, Harriet and Rachel.  He ran off on her at the beginning of the Depression, so she took her girls to Minneapolis, and went to secretarial school. Returning to Bemidji, she got a job at the County Court House and was able to support herself and her daughters.

When she was eighteen my mother Harriet married Phillip Pettyjohn, one of nine children of a local road contractor named F. S. Pettyjohn and his Irish immigrant wife, Mary MacNamara.  They had a daughter, Antoinette Marie, in 1941, and in 1944 my father enlisted in the army.  Before he was shipped to Europe my mother took a train from Richmond, California to the east coast for a conjugal visit.

I was born six weeks after the Japanese surrender, and named for my grandfather, F. S.  Pettyjohn.  But my mother got confused, and my birth certificate reads Frederick Phillip Pettyjohn.

When my father returned from the war he had $10,000 that he had made on the black market in Germany.  He left my mother and two children and bought a new Buick convertible.  He paid her $50 a month in child support.

I was raised in low income housing in Richmond by my mother, my grandmother and my Aunt Mary.  My mother and Aunt Mary were retail clerks.  We were devout Catholics, and my sister and I attended St. Cornelius grammar school.

So that’s where I come from.

 

 

 

 

I broke two of my ribs a couple days ago, and went to the emergency room.  They tried a couple different pain killers on me, which didn’t work.  Then they gave me some oxycodone,  Percodan.  That worked.

My prescription is only good for five days, and I’m going to need this stuff a lot longer than that.  This is an opiod, and it’s not freely prescribed, because it can be abused. But if you’ve got the kind of pain I have, this is what you need.

In cracking down on opiod abuses, we should bear this in mind.  Some people really need this stuff.

In the last few weeks the readership of this blog has increased 30%.  I assume it’s because of what I’ve writing about, fixing Article V with the Mason amendment.  You may think it’s an interesting idea, but what is he, or can he, do about it?

What I’m going to do is something that virtually all of you can do as well.

With only a few exceptions, every seat in every  State House will be on the ballot this November, and half the seats in every State Senate.  You’re a voter, and now is the time when you can get the attention of candidates for the state legislature.  They may be campaigning door to door, or having “meet the candidate” events.  They’ll all have a campaign office with a phone number.

Some time between now and election day, I’ll be talking to the legislative candidates in my district in California.  I’ll tell them that I support the balanced budget amendment and campaign finance reform.  Neither one of them will get through this Congress, or any Congress.  So the only way they’ll happen is with Article V.

The campaign for a BBA has 28 states, and is currently stalled.  Wolf-pac’s Article V campaign  for campaign finance reform is stuck at five states.  This is because Article V doesn’t work, and needs a technical amendment  — the Mason amendment.

I’ll explain that the Framers, Mason in particular, wanted the states to have the same freedom to propose constitutional amendments as Congress does.  But Congress has proposed 33 such amendments, the states none.

This is because Article V Convention requires a 2/3 supermajority for a quorum, though  a bare majority of the states to  vote for proposing the amendment.  That’s backwards.  Just like Congress, Article V conventions should only need a majority for a quorum, and 2/3 to propose.

If the candidate agrees with this idea, ask them to introduce the Mason amendment when they go into session next year.  If they agree, email me at fritzpettyjohn@gmail.com.  I’ll want to keep track and make sure they follow through, as you should.  I’ll also send them the language of the Mason amendment.  If they refuse, tell them they won’t be getting your vote.

I know this works from personal experience.  When I was going door to door, campaigning for the Alaska State Senate, a voter asked me If I supported the death penalty.  When I said yes, he asked me what I was going to do about it.  I told him I’d introduce a bill, which I did.

This bill wasn’t going to pass, as everyone in Juneau understood.  And some of my colleagues were angry, thinking that I was showboating.  They opposed capital punishment, but didn’t want to alienate the majority of their voters, who supported it.

I told them I’d promised a voter that I’d do it.  I wasn’t showboating, even though my bill was very popular in my district.  I was just keeping my word.

This is genuine grass roots democracy, and it can work.  Let’s give it a try together.

 

When my friend and mentor Bob Ziegler of Ketchikan received a nasty letter from a constituent, he’d write back.  He explained to the author that someone was using their name, and sending him crazy letters.  He was doing them the courtesy of telling them about it.

“In the first place, God made idiots.  That was for practice.  Then he made school boards.”  Mark Twain