Author: Fritz Pettyjohn

A year ago John Kasich decided to fly around the country and campaign for the Article V BBA.  He even named his private jet “Balanced Budget Forever”.  He didn’t reach out to the Task Force, but Fruth went to Columbus and explained to Kasich’s staff what we were doing.  They realized we were the people to work with,  and we coordinated our efforts until recently, when he started concentrating exclusively on his Presidential campaign.

There are two distinct if related parts of our campaign: 1) the Balanced Budget Amendment and 2)  the use of Article V to achieve it.  Kasich was all in on the BBA.  But he seemed ambivalent about Article V.  He just wanted to use it to pressure Congress into passing a BBA itself.

I think Kasich’s plenty smart, so what this means to me is that he’s an elitist.  Either that or he has a complete lack of imagination.  He’d rather have Congress write a BBA than an Amendment Convention.  He doesn’t completely trust a Convention.  He trusts Congress more.  He either doesn’t like or doesn’t understand Article V, so he’s never promoted it.  He’ll talk all day about the need for a BBA.  He has never, to my knowledge, explained to people how Article V works, and praise it as the ultimate safeguard of our liberty.

Based on my experience explaining Article V to people, it’s a very attractive proposition, politically.  Everybody, and I mean everybody, hates Congress.  It’s corrupt beyond redemption.  The federal government is viewed by half the people in this country as the greatest threat to their freedom.  We’re $19 trillion in the hole, but they party on.  When you explain to people that the States, under Article V, have the power to amend the Constitution without Congress being involved, they go, “Really?”  And then you say we’re getting close to passing a BBA this way, they’re amazed.  “You can do that?”

When I got started on this two years ago I explained what I was doing to my granddaughter.  She was nine.  She understood, and she’s not a prodigy.  This is an issue to run on.  It’s really not hard to explain.  And we’re not a bunch of crackpots.  We’ve got 27 states, and a clean shot at 34 next year.

People like hearing about Article V.  A lot of them realize how farsighted the Framers were when they included it.  For a Republican, running for President, right now, this is one to run on.  Kasich has chosen not to do so.  The ball is lying on the ground.  All someone needs to do is pick it up and run with it.

Because Article V is all about federalism, and federalism is all about tolerance.  The people of California can have the most pro-choice laws in the country, as far as I’m concerned.  Just as long as they let the people of South Dakota have their pro-life laws.  Toleration, federalism.  Live and let live.  We’re a big and very diverse country.  Why don’t we just leave each other alone?

I think a lot of people would like to be left alone.  By the government, especially.  A republican candidate should talk about that, about how we’re losing our privacy.  Rand Paul did it,  but somebody else needs to carry that torch.

Is an Article V Convention a pipe dream?  50 years ago when I got into politics we were all in on the Captive Nations Amendment.  The Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were taken by Stalin in WW II, and we didn’t think this should be accepted.  This was 1965.  A quarter century later the Captive Nations were free and independent.

Big things do happen.

The 7,000 or so state legislators in this country have a power, and a responsibility, that most of them neglect.  The Framers of the Constitution selected this body of elected officials as the ultimate defenders of our liberties.  The power granted them by Article V is virtually limitless.  They could, if they so chose, return this country to the Constitution, or even write a new one.

This neglect is the result of ignorance.  State legislators don’t even know they have this power.  When they realize its extent, many of them get nervous.  They revere the Constitution and the men who wrote it.  They know that our current political class, including themselves, cannot bear comparison with the Framers.  The magnitude of the power cries out for caution.

Especially because Article V has never been used.  What would a Convention look like?  How would it function?  What rules would it operate under?  How would voting be conducted?

In order to address these concerns 100 or so state legislators met in Mt. Vernon almost two years ago, and under the title the Assembly of State Legislatures has met twice since.  On Wednesday in Salt Lake they meet again to consider adoption of a set of Proposed Rules for the Convention.  30-35 states may be represented.  It is expected that final action on the Proposed Rules will take place at this meeting.

The ASL’s executive committee has a proposal which will be considered first.  Unfortunately, it contains provisions which require supermajorities for actions to be taken.  This is in violation of the absolute one state, one vote principal which has been the operating assumption of everyone I’m aware of in the Article V movement, from Lew Uhler on down, for the last 35 years.

The leadership of the Idaho and Wyoming legislatures will be in attendance.  If this supermajority rule is adopted, it is highly unlikely that we’ll get through either state.  It’s that important.

On the other hand, if a set of rules is adopted which is strictly one state, one vote we have a political winner.  We can go to our target states, explain all the work which has been done by the Assembly of State Legislatures, and present them with the Proposed Convention Rules.  Believe me, this will help.  Fruth thinks this will get us to 34, but then he’s prone to bouts of wild enthusiasm.   If we get this set of rules, hats off to the ASL for a big, important job well done.

Ever on the prowl for contrary indicators I read a piece from the Guardian by deep thinking Democrat Stanley Greenberg.  This guy’s as old as I am, and has been thinking deeply for a long time.  He’s a hard core partisan, so I want to hear what he’s got to say.  Demographics.   That’s it.

People, I’m telling you, that’s all they’ve got.

And then I run across a piece by Matthew Iglesias at Vox  which is right on the money.  This guy gets it, and he’s a lefty, I believe.  The Democrats are just flat out screwed.  It’s amazing.

Social issues are supposed to hurt us.  That’s questionable on gay marriage, but not on transgendered rights.  On that issue, and it’s the hot one right now, we’re on the right side.  The motto is real simple  “No confused men in women’s bathrooms.”

What’s wrong with these people?  The whole thing is crazy.  It’s hard to figure out what’s going on in the left right now.  They keep getting nuttier and nuttier.  What’s causing this?  Do they think that this is as far as they’re going to get, that they are at the peak of their power, and they have to use it while they’ve got it?  Or is it somehow like the madness of crowds?  It’s disturbing.

Politically, though, it only strengthens the tide.

A guy called Sundance has a website, Conservative Tree House, where he elaborates on his conspiracy theory.  He thinks the RNC and all the mainstream candidates are conspiring to elect Jeb.  Kasich, Christie, Cruz, Rubio etc. aren’t really running for President, they’re all in it only to help Bush and stop his man,  the Donald.

In support of his theory he’s gone to considerable lengths in studying the minutia of delegate selection procedures in each state.   Depending on  when the selection takes place, it’s either proportional or winner takes all.  He makes a pretty good argument that the deck is stacked for a well financed “establishment” candidate to prevail over an insurgent.   Bush 3 was going to have the resources for the long haul.  Less lavishly funded candidates might do well in the early, proportionately awarded states.  But they wouldn’t have the money to transition to the more important winner take all contests.  This is where you start building your delegate totals.

Cruz is ready for this.  He’s going to keep going until the SEC primary on March 1st, where he’s campaigned extensively.  He’s got enough money, he’s got organization, and he’s got some momentum.  He’ll continue to do well in debates.  He’s a finalist.

Rubio’s got the hot hand, but he needs to turn it into money and organization.  He’ll get the money.  We’ll see what kind of campaign he’s got.  If they’re good, they’ll put an organization together.  (I don’t envy these people.  This is a lot of work.  And they’re just getting started.  They’ve got a year of this ahead of them.)

So coming out of March, I think they’re both in it, with the possibility of others as well, of course.  Here’s where Marco has the edge.  Most of the delegates available after March are in bluish states.  Republicans in these states are not the red meat types you see in the South.  They’re more toward the center.  Advantage, Rubio.

Back in January Nate Silver put out an interesting piece about these blue state Republicans.  This piece at 538 elaborates.  They have vastly disproportionate power in the Republican nomination, and bear a large part of the responsibility for McCain and Romney.  Take a Republican in the blackest, most Democrat Congressional district in the country.  That district will send three delegates to the Convention.  4,000 votes could win it.  Take the most Republican district in the country.  It gets three delegates.  To win them, you may need 80,000 votes.  This is an extreme example, but blue states send delegates, even though there may be damn few Republicans in them.   And these are more Rubio than Cruz type people.

I dislike a lot of people, none more than Paul Begala.  But he is what passes for a strategist among the left, so I read what he says.  He has a column out today, in which he says the Republicans are crazy.  That’s it.  That’s the column.

This is a tell.  He has nothing to say.

Bush 3 stupidity continues to astound.  He’s saying “he can fix it.”  What a bunch of morons.  I swear to God, that is the single most idiotic thing I’ve seen so far.  What, he’s going to “fix,” the IRS?  We don’t want it fixed, you dumb bastard.  We want it burned down.

Nate’s new take is up in the New York Times.  He says it could be Rubio.  And he didn’t use even one regression analysis.  Way to go.  I’ll never call you Numbers Nate again.

Kentucky was the last holdout in the South.  But the tide runs strong, and it’s a red state now.  Sam Youngman is a well respected journalist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, and he says yesterday’s election “.. might well have been the end of the Democratic Party …” of Kentucky.

This is extraordinarily important news.  In all likelihood, to get to 34 we’re going to need additional target states to emerge from the 2016 election.  I was convinced we were going to take out Democratic Kentucky House Speaker Greg Stumbo last year.  But this guy is a survivor, and a warrior, and he won’t go down easy.  But with a Republican Governor who hates his guts, a Republican State Senate, and two powerful Republican U. S. Senators lined up against him, I can’t see how he maintains his majority.  Every Republican in the state has the same goal  — take out Stumbo.  At Bevin’s victory celebration they were chanting, “Flip the House.”  A lot of people really don’t like this guy.

In 2016 Kentucky will go for the Republican Presidential candidate 60-40.  How can Stumbo withstand all of this?  He can’t, we get the Kentucky House, and we get Kentucky for the BBA.  The State Senate passed it a few years ago, and it will sail through the legislature in 2017.  If you doubt that, look at what Fruth was able to do in Tennessee  —  three no’s in the whole legislature.

Say this for Stumbo.  He’s the last Democratic presiding officer of a state legislative chamber in the South.  That’s something he can hang his hat on when he loses the Speakership.

We held our own in the Virginia Senate, which was all we could realistically hope for.  McAuliffe put everything he had into beating us, and we were seriously outspent.  Now McAuliffe is a lame duck, and we still have a shot in Virginia.  This is going to be a hard one.  This is going to take an actual campaign, as opposed to lobbying and grass roots.  We have to get the public behind us.  This has to become an issue.  This is going to take money that we do not have.  Someone with some money is going to have to step up if we’re going to get Virginia next year.  It could happen.  Our momentum is building.  But it’s a short session, ending on March 5th, and we don’t have a lot of time.  Biddulph and the Task Force gave it all they had earlier this year, and they didn’t get that close.  If we don’t get Virginia this year it will be available in 2017, when the BBA will be an issue, and we will have the public behind us.

One of the keys to the Republican wins in Kentucky was  County Clerk Kim Davis, who went to jail for refusing to issue a wedding license to gays.  Bevin embraced her, literally, and she was all for him.  She’s a Democrat.  Not for long.

Because Sam Youngman knows what he’s talking about.  Kentucky Democrats are blue dog Democrats, and they’re going extinct.  There are only a few left in the whole country.  When County Clerk Kim Davis switches her party registration she’ll be joined by a lot of her tribe.  I think it’s almost like a tribe, these Scotch-Irish parts of Appalachia.  They’ve been solidly Democrat since before the Civil War, and shrinking all the while.  There’s not that many of them left, and their loyalty to one another is important to them.  They’ll go en masse to the Republicans.

It could start on January 5th of next year.  That’s when the legislature convenes.  If five House Democrats switch parties, Stumbo’s out of the chair.  This could very easily happen.  It happened in the Kentucky Senate a few years back, engineered by Mitch McConnell.  It’s happened all over the South.

These House Democrats are not stupid.  They can see the handwriting on the wall.  There’s no future for the Democratic Party in Kentucky, or anywhere in the South.  They can stay Democrats, and lose next year.  Or switch, and survive.  These good old boys will do what’s best for them.

So, we may have Kentucky as a target come January.  Depending on the self preservation instinct of some very old school southern politicians.

And the tide, rolls, on.

Numbers Nate Silver and the guys at 538.com publish their political bull sessions, where they sit around and B.S. after a hard day crunching the numbers.  I can see them with their feet on their desks, sipping their double cappuchino lattes.  Today they’re trying to decide if either party will have an advantage next year.  They think the R’s might possibly have a teensy weensy advantage.  They can’t decide to call this a 54-46, 52-48, or 51-49 advantage.   Nate himself rejects the idea of Obama being a negative because “… running a regression model based on an n of four is inherently kind of ridiculous.”  As you can imagine, that penetrating insight shut everyone up.  Nate knows how to cut a guy down, hard.  He goes on to say that any Republican advantage will be offset by a teensy weensy Democrat advantage in the electoral college, which is a regression model based on an n of two (2008 and 2012).  Nate just has better regression models, I guess.

They do get around to talking a little about what I think about exclusively:  politics.  They call this the elephant in the room.  No shit, Sherlock.  They accept the idea that a Hillary-Marco match up doesn’t really look that good for the D’s, but they really don’t want to speculate.  I like these guys.  They do try to keep their liberal political opinions out of their analysis.  Nate absolutely nailed the 2012 outcome.  He’s obviously a very bright guy.  But the reason the Republicans almost have this thing in the bag doesn’t show up in any statistic or numerical data point.

After a few beers down in Cabo I wound up in a political conversation with Ryan, a thirtyish North Carolinian who’s moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in apps.  Uber is an app, so you never know.  I don’t think Ryan spends a lot of time thinking about politics, so I said the election next year is real simple.  It’s who you got.  We got Marco Rubio.  You got Hillary. You’re screwed.

Think about it.  A Cubano version of Jack Kennedy, without the baggage, against a stunningly unattractive shrew

Nate and the boys might point to the new WSJ/NBC poll that shows Hillary beating Marco.  That poll is meaningless.  Show me a poll after the American people have had a chance to see these two together on the same stage.  Marco will have to struggle not to appear a bully, it will be so one sided.  But since I can’t prove that with a regression analysis, Nate dismisses it.  See you in September, Nate.

I have a hard time believing we’ll get to 34 next year without Virginia, and they’re having their legislative election today.  I haven’t followed this at all, and really don’t know who’s favored, though the R’s sound confident.  One State Senate seat in Virginia could be the difference between getting there or not.  Biddulph and others on the Task Force have been trying to help in selected races.  If the tide is with us, we should be O.K.

At the end of the evening in Cabo we’re around a bonfire on the beach, and this young fellow asks me what song to play on his little device.  So I say, “What a fool believes, he sees.”   He hadn’t thought about the meaning of that title, and said the reverse was true as well.  But it’s not, as I explained to him.  A fool does not believe what he sees.  He only sees what he believes.

In politics, as in most things, seeing is believing.  And as for Nate and I?

We’ll see.