Author: Fritz Pettyjohn

The article below was up at American Thinker yesterday.   I’ve got another one on the Assembly of State Legislatures meeting in June that I’ll be submitting in a couple days.

The Trump Brigade at AT are frothing at the mouth in the comments section, as usual.  These guys don’t use language that well, so they resort to the use of capitalization for emphasis.  They’re like people who can’t communicate in a foreign language who raise their voices trying to make themselves understood.  Some of them are a little unhinged.

Someone made the point, which I agree with, that all the wind came out of the Cruz campaign around May 1st, when Trump was harassed by protesters at the Republican State Convention.  That pushed Trump over the top in California, and all was lost.  Dr. Evil, George Soros, strikes again.  He funds these groups, and they have the effect he’s paying for.  Rep. Ken Ivory of the American Lands Council tells me he’s being stalked by them.   It was a Soros funded group that killed the BBA in Montana.  Well, at least we’ve got Rupert Murdoch on our side.  Oh, wait.

If Fox is a conservative network, why do they boycott any news about Article V?  I used to watch Special Report almost very day, and nary a word.  I’m starting to think it’s deliberate.

On a brighter note, I just joined seven million other Americans in cancelling my ESPN feed on Directv.  Altogether my new package is $33 less a month.  The firing of Curt Schilling pushed me over the edge.  Everyone who’s boycotting Target, and yet subscribes to ESPN, is missing the boat.  Every ESPN cancellation is a blow against the thought Nazis.

For once the Queen of the Hive, the NYT, is following, rather than leading in political coverage.  When Bob Woodward announced that Jeff Bezos and his WaPo had declared war on Trump, the Queen was forced to follow suit.  It’s still too early, as far as the Queen is concerned, but she can’t be left behind.  The juiciest stuff was supposed to be withheld until after Cleveland, when Trump will be formally nominated.  Starting in on him too soon runs the risk of exposing him as unelectable to the delegates, perhaps sparking a revolt.  But the WaPo isn’t waiting, so neither can the Queen.  She’s out with a piece describing Trump’s boorish private behavior with women.  Drip, drip, drip.  They’ll keep this up for six months.  There’s so much to work with.  New York politics is corrupt through and through.  It’s probably why Andrew Cuomo never ran for President.  Anyone in it gets dirty.  Trump enjoys wrestling with pigs, and he’s up to his ears in corruption.

Let the sun shine on in.

 

 

A New Federalist Coalition

The Reagan coalition is dead.  A new one is needed.  We’ve got four years to figure it out.

In 1979, as Reagan launched his second campaign for the White House,  Communism was still on the move.  After receiving a kiss on the ear from Leonid Brezhnev, President Jimmy Carter believed our fear of Communism was inordinate.  Then came the invasion of Afghanistan, and he changed his tune.  But if you wanted to stand up to the Soviet Union, it was clear you for Reagan.  Big Labor, under George Meany, was fiercely anticommunist, as was the Catholic Church.  Anticommunism was the glue that held the Reagan coalition together.  In defeating the Soviets, Reagan broke up his own coalition.

In 1980 Roe v. Wade was seven years old, and the religious right was in ascendancy.  Social conservatives were the second leg of the Reagan stool.  But this bloc of votes is dispirited, and has disintegrated.  Republicans have not only failed to reverse Roe v. Wade, they’ve been losing the culture wars on all fronts, from gay marriage to transgender rights.  When Cruz lost the evangelicals of the South, his path to victory became narrow and treacherous.  These voters, more than any other, gave Trump his eventual victory.  They care a lot more about Trump’s issues than the ones their Preacher is always talking about.

So we’re left with constitutional conservatives and libertarians.  But we don’t control the Republican Party.  The Chamber of Commerce controls the Republican Party.  These people are in it to line their pockets.  The first step to putting a New Conservative Coalition together is to take control of the Convention in Cleveland.  By doing so, we will write the Rules for the 2020 primary, and write them in our favor.  We also preserve our conservative Platform, and improve it.  Not only will we remain pro-life, we’ll also become pro- Article V, and pro-transfer of federal lands to the States.  Come 2020, these could both be powerful issues.  If Article V continues to make progress, as it will, the realization that the States, and the people, have a way to get control of the federal government will help us put our new coalition together.  And the transfer of federal lands gives us the bedrock of our new coalition  — the Far West.

We need a candidate with the courage to stand up for the bedrock principle of the Constitution  — equality before the law.  In fact, in America today, we are not equal before the law.  Some minorities are given privileges not available to their fellow citizens.  It’s wrong, and everybody knows it’s wrong, and counter productive, and destructive of harmonious racial relations.  But no one will campaign against it, because they’re afraid of being called a racist.

Donald Trump is an unabashed supporter of affirmative action.  If Ted Cruz had gone into the Southern primaries campaigning against him on this issue, he could have won the nomination.  People are very much against affirmative action in the South.  But he was afraid of being called a racist, so he kept quiet.  As did every other Republican running, for the same reason.  None of them had the guts to stand up for equality before the law.

If a political party and its candidate refuse to stand for that, I don’t want any part of them.  The most important accomplishment of my political career was defeating an effort to create an exception to the principle of equality before the law in the Alaska Constitution. I was called a racist, and anti Native. But if fear of being libeled as a racist paralyzes you, you’re not a leader.

The new coalition must be an anti-government coalition.  If you want to fight the federal government, and Congress, and the political class, then you’re with us.  Environmental extremism, over regulation, crony capitalism, and the IRS have combined to create the conditions needed for a revolt against the Washington cartel.  But being anti-government doesn’t mean being necessarily libertarian.  We’re just against the out of control federal government.  Every state can be as libertarian, or as evangelical, as it wants.  We’re a big tent.

For lack of a better term I’ll call it the Federalist Coalition.  It will not be led by neoconservatives, who are really warmed over Wilsonians, or American Imperialists.  The rise of Trump is, in part, a repudiation of foreign entanglements.  NATO is not really an alliance at all.  It’s simply an American guarantee to West Europe against the Russians.  It made sense when Russia was part of the Soviet Union.  But that ended a quarter century ago.  Today, the American people will not send their sons and daughters to die in a European war, and NATO is a dead letter.   Adventurism in the Middle East is also no longer on the table.  Lindsey Graham talks, but nobody listens.  With North America self sufficient in oil and gas, we no longer have a vital national interest in that part of the world, other than guaranteeing Israeli security.  The proper foreign policy for the Republican Party is the peaceful advancement of American interests around the world, in concert with our allies.  We do not seek world hegemony.  It was thrust upon us after world War II, but it was a temporary and unnatural position for a nation such as ours, with no natural enemies, and no desire to rule the world.

Trump’s strident opposition to illegal immigration succeeds because both parties have lied to the American people about this issue for 30 years.  Securing the border and adopting an immigration policy that puts the interests of the American people first is indispensable to the formation of an electoral majority.

Political coalitions come and go.  What must never change is our commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law.  This must be the glue which binds the new Federalist coalition.

2016 may be a disastrous year for American conservatism.  But if we listen to the voters, and heed their concerns, 2020 could be the year of conservative revival.

If not, the party’s over.

 

The differences between Trump and constitutional conservatives are irreconcilable.  Sometimes A is A, B is B, and the distinction between the two means there cannot be an AB.  If Trump is nominated, the GOP will have as its Presidential candidate a man who is at war with the essence of what the Party is, or should be.   Trump doesn’t own the Republican Party, nobody does.  It’s a propositional party, or was, and is dedicated to the Constitution, limited government, and individual liberty.  Trump’s not interested in any of that.  To him, the Party is a means of achieving power, and nothing  more.

We’re at this sorry state of affairs as a result of Bush Republicanism.  It didn’t start with Bush 1, but since 1988 his brand of wishy washy, kinder and gentler, compassionate “conservatism” has owned the Party apparatus and controlled the RNC.  The nomination rules were rigged, but not against Trump or a candidate like him.  They were rigged by Haley Barbour and other Bush Republicans to favor someone like Bush 3, a moderate, establishment candidate.   If Ted Cruz has anything to say about it, that changes in Cleveland.

I saw the same sort of thing happen, and was a foot soldier on its behalf, in San Francisco in 1964.  Goldwater’s nomination was the beginning of the Reagan Revolution.  We had to wait sixteen years for Reagan.  This time, we only have to wait for four.

The first rule must be one that neuters the RNC.  The Convention must set the Rules for 2020.  The RNC must not be given the discretion to change them.  The RNC is controlled  by the Bush wing of the Party, because that’s where the money is.  Money = Establishment in Republican politics, with some honorable exceptions.  But the Fortune 500 is where the bucks are, and that’s Bush country.  These people don’t want to limit government, they want to use it to line their pocketbooks.  We’ll see if the delegates in Cleveland have the courage of their convictions.  Ted Cruz has a vital service to undertake on behalf of constitutional conservatives, and he is just the man for the job.  He may not be a natural politician like Marco Rubio, but in this kind of infighting he should excel.  The outcome of the Republican nomination for President in 2020 may well be decided in Cleveland.

No Democrat should ever be allowed to vote in a Republican primary.  Allowing independents is a different story, and subject to discussion.  And, at a minimum, Colorado should replace Nevada in the primary calendar.  There is much that can be accomplished, and I actually am looking forward to watching the Rules Committee at work.  I’ll learn a lot.  The 2016 Convention of the Republican Party could be the most consequential of my lifetime.

In 1987 Ted Stevens had his ducks lined up.  He and Democrat Governor Steve Cowper were determined to overrule an Alaska Supreme Court decision which held that giving Alaska Natives a subsistence preference to hunting and fishing rights was a violation of the equal protection clause.  Stevens and Cowper wanted a constitutional amendment that would divide Alaskans into two classes, one of which would be given preference over the other.  They were the two most powerful politicians in Alaska, a Republican  and a Democrat, and they had every interest group in the State backing them, from the oil companies to the labor unions.

When it passed the Senate, 14-6, I was shocked.  My drinking buddy, Sen. Tim Kelly of Eagle River had sold his soul to Stevens, and killed his own political career, by providing the winning vote.  I was the leader of the sixteen member House Minority, and I could only lose two.  If I lost three, they had a 2/3 majority and victory.  I watched my members like a hawk, sniffing out any weaknesses.  There was a lot of pressure on this vote, as much as I’ve ever seen.  But we held, and beat it.

In July I was in Santa Barbara with Babbie and the boys when I got the call.  I had to immediately fly back to Juneau to take up the Amendment in a special session.  They kept us there for three days, and then finally held the vote.  We all stood together, and beat them again.  After the vote the Speaker, Sam Cotton, called me up to the podium and said that the Governor wanted to talk to me.  I said, “Why would I want to talk to him?” and we adjourned the next day.

A lot of people in Juneau didn’t like me.  That was fine by me.

 

If you’ve never seen South Park, you should check it out.  The most original character is Eric Cartman, a kind of third grade Donald Trump.  To get the flavor of the show, the first episode was “Cartman gets an anal probe.”  I’ve only seen 15 or 20 episodes, and went to wikipedia to get an accurate description of his character.  They describe him as “… a loud, obnoxious, manipulative, racist and obese literal psychopath.”   Often the plot involves conflict between Cartman and Kyle, who is Jewish and highly moral.

Jeff Bezos is not Jewish, but I suspect his parents instilled a strong sense of morality in him, and from what I know he’s led an exemplary life.  His father was much like Cruz’s father, a Cuban immigrant of high natural intelligence.  The story I read about Bezos is that he turned to his parents for the seed money for Amazon.  His father had worked his way through college after immigrating, and had a successful career as a petroleum engineer.  He wasn’t rich, but he gave his son what he had, and the rest is history.  Amazon is one of the few companies I know of which is so revolutionary in the way it alters the way people live and conduct commerce.  Sometimes putting your faith in your son is the best thing you can do.

Young Jeff spent summers at his mother’s family’s 25,000 acre ranch in South Texas.  I don’t know how a teenage boy can have summers like that and not come out of it with some good, Western values.  Bezos doesn’t do politics, although he recently gave a nice contribution to Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, for some reason.

Today Bezos’ WaPo is out a story that makes Donald Trump look like a very weird guy.  What kind of guy impersonates his own publicity agent?  A nut, that’s who.  Trump lied about it, of course, and the war is on.  If he’s elected, Trump will try to get the IRS to go after Amazon.  That’s serious business, and someone like Trump would actually do it.  Whatever motivation Bezos had in taking Trump on, it’s now personal.

If nothing else, this will be the first test of Bezos in the public arena.  He’s had the WaPo for about three years, and has yet to do anything with it.  His first project is a big one, with a Pulitzer Prize for the having.  This will be very entertaining to watch.  I broke down a couple months ago, and paid for an on line subscription to the WaPo.  I hated doing it, but did so with the hope that Bezos was a little different than the Hive. Maybe I was right.

I shudder when I think of how ugly our politics is going to be for the next two years.  Being President in such a political environment would be a challenge to Lincoln, and Clinton won’t be up to it.  Things are going to be a mess.  By the time she staggers toward the gate in 2020 she’ll be running on fumes.  Time for Reagan, part two.

Somebody needs to ask Paul Ryan, “Will you promise that there won’t be a government shutdown?”  He’d say yes, and then it’s all over.  Surrendering the power of the purse makes Congress irrelevant.  It’s all ugliness ahead.

It turns out that the pressure of events led the guys at American Thinker to put off my piece until tomorrow.  I hope there’s no conflict there.  Thomas Lifson, more or less the main guy, has gone in with Trump, and others disagree.  This kind of thing is happening all over, from the Eagle Forum to Republican State Conventions.  You’ll see it live, on TV, from Cleveland.

Hey, it’s entertainment.

Summer is here in the Gold Country, nice and warm.  Back in Alaska, it’s probably still breakup, with melting snow and ice.  My heart’s still up there, but it’s really a young man’s country.

Hypocrisy is the grease of politics, and today’s kabuki in D.C. was a beautiful example.  Everyone acted their part well, even the irascible Lindsey Graham.  The fact remains that Trump is not a conservative, didn’t win the nomination by pretending to be a conservative, and won’t run against Clinton as a conservative.  If you were forced to categorize him ideologically, he’s some kind of eccentric centrist.  He’s his own man, who will do things his way.  At a fundraiser in Long Island last night, after denigrating his defeated rivals for the nomination, he said of Clinton, “She got her ass kicked last night.”  I’m sure the sophisticates of New York ate it up.  Trump’s an old man, and he doesn’t want to learn any new tricks.  He’ll win, or lose, on his own terms.  This is exactly what endears to him to his cult, and he won’t change.

There’s no sign of interest in an Abbott run as an Independent.  It’s probably just as well, now that I think about it.  It would probably hurt his chances in 2020, when we really need him.  It’s a long ways off, but I’d sign up for Abbott in 2020 right now.  I went to GoDaddy and tried to reserve the web domain of abbottforpresident, but it was taken.  He’s 58, and a principled constitutional conservative and legal scholar.  A tree fell on him and broke his back when he was 27, and he’s been confined to a wheelchair ever since.  It didn’t prevent him from winning election as Texas Attorney General, and as Governor two years ago.

There are other possibilities, like Gov. Bevin of Kentucky and Sen. Sasse of Nebraska.  Cruz and Rubio may both want to run again, but I have my doubts that anybody who was running this year would be right for 2020.  I think we’ll want to start over.  But, at least tentatively, I have a candidate.  He spoke to the Texas Republican State Convention today, and spent a lot of time promoting the Convention of States and Article V.  With his active help, we should get to 34 next year.  He understands that the key to success for the Convention of States is the BBA.  At least, the Texas Public Policy Foundation understands it, and they’re tighter than ticks with him.   This bodes well.

I read somewhere today that Republicans have to repudiate Bush’s Iraq war in order to win any future election.  I couldn’t agree more.  It was a disaster.  It cost us the White House in 2008, and until we listen to what the voters were saying that year we’ll never win it back.  Our next nominee has to make clear that, in retrospect, Iraq was a colossal screw up, and we’ll never, ever, do it again.

For some reason they didn’t put my article out on American Thinker today.  Maybe tomorrow.  Today I was thinking about race relations when I was a kid, back before affirmative action.  I grew up in Richmond, went to high school and college in Berkeley, and had a fair amount of interaction with black people, only occasionally unpleasant.  Right after my 16th birthday, when I got my license and car, I went in to the black part of Berkeley to a liquor store where a lot of black guys used to hang out.   I parked my shiny white ’56 Ford, walked up to one that didn’t look particularly unfriendly, and asked him if he’d buy me a six pack.  He said, sure, so I gave him five bucks and asked for a six pack of  Lucky Lager.  He came out with the beer, and offered me my change, which I declined, and thanked him for his trouble.  I used to do that all the time.

Black music was so good back in those days.  I listen to oldies all the time, and some of those old black crooners had such powerful, velvety voices.  You don’t remember a guy named Ed Townsend, but you might recognize his best song, “For your love, I would do anything for your love.”

Blacks and whites just got along better when I was a kid.

On the morning of the Indiana primary, after Trump called his father an accomplice in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Ted Cruz finally said what I think he should have said months earlier.  Once Trump had the nomination, he said, the media would turn on him with a vengeance.  They’ve been covering for him, refusing to focus on his sordid business and personal lives, and disinterested in past or current scandals.  Cruz predicted, specifically, that Trump’s tax returns, and his secrecy about them, would all of a sudden become a big story.

I’m watching With All Due Respect with Heilemann and Halperin (how do you tell one from the other?  I just refer to them as the Germans, like Ehrlichman and Haldeman in the Nixon White House) and they’re talking about Trump’s statement to AP that he may not release his tax returns before November.  And I’ll be damned, it’s a big story!  One of them was absolutely outraged, saying it’s the job of everyone in the media, himself included, to beat him up every day until he relents.  Every day, another story on Trump’s taxes.  This guy made a vow not to let this go.  Well, Ted, I guess you called that one.

The worse Clinton looks, and she looks pretty bad right now, the more the focus will be on Trump.  Except it won’t be $2 billion of free publicity.  It’s $2 billion in attack ads, disguised as news stories.  All so predictable.

Progress on the Platform. after talking today to Jeff Fields of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (who sounds like a very bright and savvy guy).  He said David Barton, of Wall Builders, will almost certainly be the man from Texas on Platform, and he will almost certainly be supportive of inclusion of an Article V provision.  Barton carries a lot of weight in conservative circles, especially in the South.  With Texas on board, as well as Michigan, Georgia, and Alaska, we’re off to a good start.  The Platform Committee convenes two months from today, so there’s lots of time to line up the votes.

The contacts I’m making on Article V in the Platform will be very useful as we build support for a provision on the Transfer of Public Lands, or TPL.  That’s the new terminology out of the American Lands Council, which I’m adopting.  Getting both of these items in the Platform is very important to me, and I’ve got some time.

The media will cover the meetings of Platform, hoping to sniff out conflict between Trump and the delegates.  Trump has opposed Article V in the past, but only to curry favor with Phyllis Schlafly.  Now that he doesn’t need her, who knows what he’ll do?   Follow his gut, wherever it takes him.  The same with TPL.  He opposed it on the campaign trail, but that’s over, so he’ll go with his gut on that one too.  I don’t think he gives a damn about either one.

There’s one final item I want to see in the Platform  — an outright demand for equality before the law for all Americans, and the end of racial discrimination against whites and Asians.  The end of affirmative action.  The Romney Platform of 2012 was squishy, as Romney would like it.  It rejects affirmative action, except when it’s really necessary.  Not nearly good enough for me.  With me, this one is personal.  I was a poor white boy, who’d worked his way through Cal, and I was discriminated against in the law school admission process.  The only way I was admitted to UCLA Law was under a small experimental program (discontinued the year after I got there) that gave extra weight to your LSAT score.  My grades were mediocre, but the score was high enough to get me in.

I won’t be in Cleveland, but I know a lot of people who will be.  People on the Platform Committee.  If unqualified equality before the law can’t make it into the Republican Party Platform, I’ve got to find a new home.

I’ve got an article in American Thinker up tomorrow, and I encourage everyone to read it.  I get around to equality before the law.  Like I said, it’s personal.