Author: Fritz Pettyjohn

He’s been gone twelve years, and it’s time for me to move on.  I’ll never see another Ronald Reagan, nor will I see the political coalition he led, and I was a small part of.  Anti-communism got me into politics as soon as I was old enough to understand what communism was, which was at Saint Cornelius Elementary.  And Ronald Reagan was the ultimate, and winning, cold warrior.  When the Berlin Wall went down, and the Gipper went home to California, it was all over.

Ted Cruz tried to reassemble the Reagan coalition, and his failure to do so was not because of his flaws as a candidate, or because of Donald Trump.  A lot of people didn’t like Cruz because he came across as a Bible thumping religious zealot.  But it wasn’t these people who cost him the nomination.  It was the very people that persona should most appeal to  — Southern evangelicals  — who on March 1st gave Trump his path to the nomination, and blocked Cruz’s.

The evangelicals have pulled the Republican Party too far to the right on social issues.   Forget about the Hispanic vote, the one that matters for the future is the millennials, and they’re libertarian on the subject.  That’s where the Party needs to go as well.  The evangelicals will not abandon the Party, they might just not vote.  But they weren’t there when we needed them on Super Tuesday, and we’ll have to do without them.

I’m pro-life, but these pro-lifers have got to let it go.  They have to realize that voting for a person who is ambivalent, or even pro-choice, is not the end of the world.  I was reading some conservative on the internet who can’t bring himself to vote for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian, because he’s pro-choice.  Give me a break.   Talk about holier than thou.

There’s only one way for the Republican Party of California to revive itself.  Some smart, pro-choice Republican should fund a ballot drive to put a California Constitutional Amendment on the ballot, enshrining a woman’s right to choose in the California Constitution.  That takes the issue off the table in California.  Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, California would remain pro-choice.  And it is the abortion issue which makes the GOP toxic to so many people here.  Take that off the table and you can talk to them.  Otherwise, forget it.

We now have a jungle primary in California, which will result in the election to the Senate of a Blue Dog Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, one of the very few in the country.  This is not what the Democrats had in mind when they adopted the jungle primary.  It was designed as a way to replace hard core Republicans with moderates, to move the GOP to the center.  That way they could get the 2/3 they need to pass a State budget, with some moderate Republican votes.  But in practice, it’s not having that effect, instead it’s moving the Democratic Party to the center.  Oh, well.

When I was in the Alaska legislature we created something called the Constitutional Budget Reserve (CBR).  It was a savings account, to be used when the State government really needed it.  This was 30 years ago, and we knew it wouldn’t be used for a long time.  We had so much money coming into Juneau we didn’t know what to do with it all, and there were many fat years ahead.  We wanted to make it hard to get at this money.  This was money you only used in a sort of fiscal emergency, which is exactly what is facing the Alaska Legislature as I type.  Their revenue is only providing about a fourth of what they’re spending.  It’s a true crisis, one that’s been predicted to come since I was in the legislature.

Most people thought requiring a 2/3 vote to spend the CBR was sufficient to assure that a future legislature wouldn’t get to the money before they really needed it.  Not me.  I had 16 members of my Minority Caucus, and if any three of them bailed on me, they’d have their 2/3, and spend that money before they cut the budget.  I wanted that fat, bloated budget cut close to the bone before they got that money.  I insisted on a 3/4 vote, and that’s the problem they’ve got in Juneau right now.  They really need the money, but they can’t get a 3/4  vote.

So, my idea worked, right?  Wrong, emphatically wrong.  The people who won’t give them the votes are the Democrats, and they’re holding out because they want to spend more  money.  Exactly the opposite of what I intended.

Oh, well.  I didn’t know the gun was loaded, and I’m so sorry, my friend.  I didn’t know the gun was loaded, and I’ll never, ever, do it again.

 

Our case is new.  The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate.  We must disenthrall ourselves if we are to save our country.

Lincoln spoke these words in 1862, when the cause of the Union was still in doubt.  Americans North and South were slaughtering one another.  The country was tearing itself apart over slavery.  Our current divisions pale in comparison, but we are all fighting for our version of what our country stands for.  We dislike each other as much as Johnny Reb and Billy Yank did.  We just haven’t taken up arms.

If you look up “disenthrall” in Webster’s you won’t find it.  Lincoln made it up, because no other word fit what he wanted to say.  One is enthralled when one is spellbound, captivated.  Lincoln knew that to preserve the Union he needed to break the spell that limitations on the power of government were permanent and unbreakable.  He would soon issue his proclamation emancipating the slaves, and he knew he was on shaky constitutional ground. But he felt that it was necessary to win the war, and preserve the Union.  In modern parlance, he wanted people to cut him some slack.

When I got back in the political game in October of 2013 I smelled rebellion in the air, and I am, by nature, a rebellious man.  That’s why, when I was a freshman in ’62, I walked around the campus at Cal in my Goldwater sweatshirt.  A lot of people are uncomfortable in confrontational situations.  I kind of enjoy them.  When I was a junior at Cal I was walking back from work, a long slog before I got my motorcycle, and I walked by a car with a couple guys in it with an American flag on the radio antenna, hung upside down.  I walked over and tore the flag off the antenna.  This guy got out, looked at me, and asked me if he could have his flag back, so I gave it to him.  I was just a rebellious kid.

The rebellion I smelled was real enough, and it’s been building ever since.  But someone else smelled it besides me, and he’s got the Republican nomination.  The Republicanism of the Bush establishment is dead, and will not be revived.  Bush 3 got four delegates.  Ted Cruz was rebellious as hell, just not rebellious enough.  Add Trump and Cruz together and it’s 3/4 of the Republican Party.

Just because I was right to smell rebellion doesn’t mean I know where this one leads us.  What I failed to understand was just how powerful it is, strong enough to induce millions of Americans to rally behind a Manhattan Mussolini.  If this rebellion isn’t properly channeled, it could become dangerous to the Constitution and our liberty.

Trump is a dangerous man.  I underestimated him.  Anyone who can’t see through him is a fool.  He’s drunk with self love, and adored by millions.  He will be stopped, I have no doubt.  The forces aligned against him are too strong.  What I’m concerned about is what happens when he does lose, because in so many ways he’s right.  He’s right about political correctness, and NATO, and not going to war in the Mideast, and the border, and Muslim refugee immigration, and about a number of other things as well.  The American working man is getting screwed, and has been for a long time, and he doesn’t want to take it any more.  And he’s right.

We all need to be ready to pick up the pieces after November, and start over.  And this is where we must think anew, and act anew.  This country’s in trouble, and we don’t have forever.

I want people to think anew about the Constitution.  That’s a tall order in a Kingdom of Tweets.  But we’ve got to get the federal government under control, and we’ve got to use the Constitution to do it.

I wasn’t particularly popular with the ladies back in college.  Part of it was my aggressive attitude.  Between the time I left college and met Babbie, I had a lot of that knocked out of me.  Just in the nick of time.

When Bush 1 signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (allowing discrimination against whites and Asians based on statistics alone) he kicked the white working class in the teeth, and began the expulsion of Reagan Democrats from the Republican coalition.  Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is attempting to kick the white suburban middle class in the teeth.  She has a competing Amendment to one by Sen. Mike Lee, and they may be voting on it as I type.

Lee would stop a program known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) which empowers the federal government to go into middle class suburbs which are too white, and force them to adopt policies to correct the situation.  If they refuse, they lose federal funding.  These federal bureaucrats enforcing this policy are affirmative action fanatics, and have no problem jamming extremely expensive and disruptive remedies on totally innocent communities. They’re just too damned white.

Sen. Collins supports AFFH, and her amendment would allow it to continue.  This is what’s wrong with the Republican Party.  If you got a focus group together of people living in a community likely to be targeted by AFFH, and explained what it was to them, they would explode in anger.  Why the hell does the federal government need to come into our community and tell us how to run it?  But that doesn’t matter to Sen. Collins.  She’s for racial justice.  If some white people are discomfited  by it, oh well.  It’s for a higher cause.

I wonder how Sen. Murkowski will vote?  She follows Collins instinctively, but this is an election year, so we’ll see.

Donny Deutsch was on WADR today, and I have to listen to this guy.  I think he’s a straight shooter, and he’s smart as hell.  He was talking up Trump’s chances.  Let’s see what he has to say when Trump’s tax returns get leaked.  Things that can turn a general election in a Democrat’s favor tend to come to light.

But I can now see scenarios where Trump could win.  But they all involve him acting normal, so they’re all far fetched.  If we get another San Bernadino, God knows what happens.  And if anti-Trump protesters keep rioting, as they did in California, things could go weird.

Trump did a normal thing today, and to his credit came up with a fabulous list of potential Supreme Court nominees.  His problem is that he’s got to continue to be normal, and it goes against his nature.  But a New Hampshire poll cited on WADR says 80% of millennials can’t stand Clinton, and most of them prefer Trump to her.  Holy Hiawatha!  She is one terrible candidate.  But that number is a killer.  And, as Donny Deutsch pointed out, she really has no way to move it.  She’s stuck.

I swear to God, if it wasn’t for the stakes involved, this campaign is actually turning in to a comedy TV reality show.  Maybe this is the way campaigns are now won, by conducting competing TV reality shows.  For people who don’t read, it’s informative, and entertaining.  And it doesn’t require any thought.  Just watch the show.

I have long maintained that nobody knows anything, and that belief is fortified by events on a daily basis.

Institutions are crumbling and cracking.  Print journalism, publishing, higher education, and the law, too.  I’m a practicing lawyer for 42 years, and an active member of the Alaska Bar Association.  When I joined this guild, Babbie and I found the key to my modest personal fortune.  We started a debt collection business that you had to be a lawyer to do.  Anybody with medium intelligence could have done what I did.  But my guild, the bar association, had the power to prevent anyone but a member from performing this routine function.  Babbie did most of the work, which was secretarial, and intense.  When we came back to California she had to have her finger prints taken in order to become a notary public.  But she didn’t have any, and she flunked.  She’d typed the prints off her fingers.

I didn’t give out too much advice to my boys when they were growing up.  But I did tell them that the key to the whole thing was to marry well.

…have their holes and hiding places; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy only the light and the air.”  Tiberius Gracchus, 133 B. C.

According to Will Durant, “Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism.  When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.”

After the final and total destruction of Carthage in 150 B.C. the Romans ruled the known world.  They were the uncontested superpower of their time, sort of the way the United States was after we succeeded in destroying the Soviet Union.  Just seventeen years after this supreme triumph, Tiberius Gracchus led the attack on Roman Law which succeeded briefly, and then continued over the course of a century in fits and starts, with the Agrarian Revolt, the Social War, Sulla and finally Caesar.

Roman Law, or the Twelve Tables, was their Constitution, and the reason they were a Republic for over four hundred years.  When they lost their Constitution, the law was dead and so was the Republic, and Roman freedom.  All of this was very familiar to the Framers.  In Philadelphia they were duplicating and improving upon the work of the ancient Roman sages who wrote the Twelve Tables 2,466 years ago.  And they saw a fatal defect, which they remedied.  For the Twelve Tables were incapable of Amendment.  There was no mechanism within them that allowed the people to make fundamental change.  They had no Article V.

The election is a little more than six months away, and I’m starting to recoil in disgust.  It was always clear that a fight between Clinton and Trump would be a race to the bottom.  The gun has sounded, the race is on, and we’ve got six months of this stuff to put up with.  Two thoroughly disreputable people, wrestling in the gutter, for the Presidency of my country.  To me, this is the failure of politics, and the American political class, of which I am a member.  It’s embarrassing.

But Article V marches on.  We need it now more than ever.  If the people of this country, acting through their state legislators, take enough time away from the television set to demand change, it will come.  But watching TV is easy.  Getting involved takes effort.  If we lose our country, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

I’ve testified on behalf the Article V BBA before legislative committees in Utah, Montana, and Wyoming.  I try to make the point that Article V is the key to the restoration of federalism in this country, but I don’t think they believe or understand me.  It’s as though Article V is some weird part of the Constitution that’s never been used because it’s dangerous.  They’ve never heard of Article V before our Resolution came to their committee, and they don’t know what to think of it.

This is why the Assembly of State Legislatures meeting in Philadelphia next month is important, as well as inclusion of Article V in the Republican Platform.  It legitimizes Article V to these state legislators.  These guys aren’t constitutional scholars. They’re ranchers and small businessmen.  They need to be reassured that this is all legit.

We’re not Rome, we’re Americans, and we can avoid the fate of the Roman Republic.  People like Trump arise when there’s been a failure of politics, and the entire political class, and Trump/Clinton 2016 is proof of our collective failure.  As the political class of Italy, Spain and Germany failed in the early 20th Century, we got Mussolini, Franco and Hitler.

Maybe Trump isn’t another Mussolini, though he acts like him.  Look at some old footage of Il Duce, and see him strut and stick out his chin like the Donald.  It’s quite a resemblance, actually.

But Trump doesn’t aspire to be Il Duce.  He wants to be Vladimir Putin.  And he doesn’t really care about the Constitution.  He’s a fundamentally ignorant man.  He needs to lose.

I’ve despised Bill Clinton from the time I first saw him at the 1988 Democratic Convention.  The thing is, Clinton just raises the hackles on my back, like no other politician.  It’s personal.  I’ve actually fantasized about punching him out.  And he may be headed back to the White House.

But I expect to out live him, and I will piss on his grave.

We gotta head for higher ground, can’t come back ’til the water comes down, five feet high and rising.

Tick, tick, tick goes the debt bomb, but we’ve decided to ignore it.  Maybe it will just go away.  Adding a half a trillion a year doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about any more.  We can’t sell our debt to Japan, China, or any other creditor, but we can print money, so there’s no problem.  Anyone who thinks Speaker Ryan, soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and either President Clinton or Trump will get together and fix things is a believer in unicorns.  Things are going to get a lot worse in this country over the course of the next four years.  Medicare and Social Security are going broke, we can’t adequately fund our military, and the aging population will need more and more entitlement spending.  Taxes will surely be increased, but the revenue will be offset by the slowdown in economic growth they will cause.  Fundamental reforms are desperately needed, and neither a Trump nor a Clinton Presidency will be up to the task.

If it’s President Trump who is presiding over this stroll into an economic depression, the Republican Party may as well hang it up, like the Whigs.  Let’s just start over with a new one.  Republicans were tied to Hoover for over 20 years.  We won’t have 20 years.  Some people believe in Trump.  I think his Presidency would be a disaster, for him, the country, and the death of the GOP.

With Clinton it would be worse.  A Trump Supreme Court appointee would be a Chris Christie type, a moderate.  But no liberal, and that’s something.  Because Clinton would find another Sotomayor, and there would be a five vote majority to do a frightening amount of damage to the Constitution, for perhaps a generation.

Unless we use Article V.  If we have a successful Amendment Convention for the BBA, the code to the kingdom of Article V will have been broken, and the door left wide open for further Amendments.  One of the very best, in both Levin’s Liberty Amendments and the Texas Plan, would allow 2/3 of the States to overturn a Supreme Court decision.  What’s not to like about that?  I get a tingle in my leg when I think about it.  Another one in Greg Abbott’s Texas Plan would require seven votes on the Supreme Court to overturn a duly enacted statute.  I’m not as crazy about that one, but I could be convinced.

Forget the Supreme Court.  Article V is more important.  And if Trump’s elected Article V is dead.  He opposes it, and he’ll say it’s now unnecessary now that he’s in charge.  He doesn’t give damn about federalism, or the Constitution.  He’s a Mussolini.

If it’s President Clinton it will be full speed ahead for Article V.  We’ll probably get to 34 next year, and if it’s Majority Leader Schumer he won’t set the time and date of the Convention, which means we’d have to wait for the Republican takeover of the Senate after the 2018 elections.  From 2018 on Article V will be running on all cylinders, and whatever damage The Clinton Majority on the Supreme court can do, Article V can undo.  In case you haven’t looked into it, there’s literally nothing Article V can’t do, except reduce a State’s suffrage in the Senate.

And our candidate in 2020 will  be running against a haggard, scandal ridden, and thoroughly unlikable woman named Clinton, a failed President.  Exactly 100 years later, a second landslide of 1920 proportions.  And for the same reasons, under the same political circumstances.  I should write a book.  And what did the 1920 election produce?  The Roaring 20’s, in case you hadn’t heard.  By God, we can do it again.

The drought broke in the Gold Country this year, but only for one year.  The climate in this part of the country will be drier than it’s been.  We’re on a well, and some not too distant neighbors have had theirs go dry.  So our front lawn is going brown, and we’re off irrigating anything.   Except I’m trying to save a patch of green in the back, for the deer.  It’s not grass, it’s natural ground cover, which they eat.  This is deer country, and I have a little herd that hangs around the house a lot.  Ever since I lost Bud, my black lab, a few years ago, they feel right at home here.

I live in beautiful country.