Miscellaneous

The Balanced Budget Amendment Convention can not propose an amendment that does not clearly and directly help to balance the federal budget.  If it does anything more, it’s a “runaway”.  The Federal Lands Commission, created to transfer federal land to the states, with the feds retaining a beneficial interest in the proceeds of that land’s development, clearly fits the bill.  It would generate tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars to the Treasury.  Serious regulatory reform would have an even greater impact on the Treasury.  The economic expansion which would result from such a reform would provide so much revenue to the Treasury that we would not only balance the budget, we could start paying down the debt.

So, how do we do that?  Lew Uhler’s been giving it a lot of thought.  He’s 83, but he is still a very intelligent and informed man, with vast experience at the upper levels of policy making.  We talked at length today, and he’s assembled a bundle of reading material for me. I told him I’d ordered Philip Hamburger’s “Is the Administrative State Unconstitutional?”  Some of the material he’s sending me is from Hamburger.  We agree with Hamburger, and a growing body of conservative legal scholars, that it’s all unconstitutional.  A regulation is, for all intents and purposes, a law, except it was not introduced, no Congressional hearings were held, no legislature debated and voted, and no chief executive signed it.  In creating the EPA and other federal agencies, Congress unconstitutionally delegated its law making power.  True regulatory reform would simply eliminate such rule making authority from all federal agencies.  If the EPA wanted to regulate something, it would have to ask Congress to pass the regulation in the form of a statute.

That’s the elegant way to do regulatory reform.  It would do wonders for the economy, and thus for the Treasury.  It fits within the call.  The problem is not legal, it’s political.  I was hoping to find something in Hamburger’s book that might help us frame this thing, politically, so it doesn’t scare the horses.  I need the support of the gal down at the 7-11.  Would this scare her?  If I asked her, she’d say no.  I have a pretty good idea of where she comes from.  But what would our opposition say?  That we’re radicals?  Reactionaries?

Are the American economy, and the well being of the American people, dependent on the rule making power of federal agencies?  Is our modern society so complex, and in such need of regulation, that it can’t function without constantly being regulated?  What, exactly, is being regulated, and why?  Is the need for regulation so great that Congress would be unable to cope?  I don’t know the answer to all these questions.  I’d like to have some answers before the August 3rd Legislative Summit in Seattle.  I have no intention of composing a draft Amendment for consideration, and that will not be the product of the Summit.  But when we talk about regulatory reform I want to know what I’m talking about.  The Federal Lands Commission is pretty straightforward, and the impact it would have is easily predictable.  What I want to do with regulatory reform  — declare the rule making power of federal agencies to be unconstitutional  —  is also pretty straightforward.  Its impact would be enormous.  How would it work in the real world?  What would actually happen if it were adopted?  Someone, somewhere, has thought about that, and written about it.  I want to hear what other people think.  And then I want to really think this through, politically.

My first campaign was for class President of the third grade at St. Cornelius in Richmond, California.  None of us had the slightest idea of what being a class President meant, but Sister Mary Joseph wanted to have an election.  This was one of the sweetest women I’ve ever met in my life.  She was only in her early twenties, and very petite.  There were 54 of us in her classroom every day, and she never had a disciplinary problem.  We were well behaved little Catholic boys and girls, in uniform.  Sister Mary Joseph liked me, but she liked to bring me down a peg or two.  For my own good.  I think that’s why we had the election.  I lost to Don James, a chalk board monitor.  But I learned something in my loss, which has been of great value.

Most of the girls voted for me.

It’s not blue.  It’s purple, for the purposes of Article V.  The legislature is split, Republican House, Democratic Senate.  Biddulph has made contact with a Minnesota mega-donor who bankrolled last year’s Republican victory in the House.  This guy put in a call to the Speaker and asked him to meet with the Task Force.  We’ll have a cc with the Speaker and the Majority Leader later this week.  We’ll urge him to adopt the Maine strategy.  There they have a split legislature as well.  The Maine Senate will try to pass our bill, and dump into the Democratic House, where it will die.  If all goes according to plan, this will be an issue in the 2016 legislative elections.   There’s always the possibility, however remote, that a chamber controlled by the Democrats would even pass it.  It hasn’t happened in 30 years, and pigs don’t fly, but you never know.  I’ll be on the call mainly to encourage the Speaker and Majority Leader to be at the August 3rd meet in Seattle.  I want as many states there as possible, and these guys could learn a lot about Article V.

Politics is simple.  It’s arithmetic.  But you have to know what you’re counting.  In Presidential elections, you don’t count votes, you count the electoral college.  Under Article V, population doesn’t count.  States count.  And state legislatures count.  Right now, when you’re talking about an Article V Convention, there are 31 red states.  That total includes five states that most people think of as purple.*  There are seven purple states, including three that are normally thought of as blue.**  The last twelve are blue.

This means that a 2016 Amendment Convention would be completely controlled by red and purple states.  This is why a fear of a runaway is so misplaced.  It simply couldn’t happen.  Do the math.  Add up the numbers.  And it’s why we should be able to propose the Reagan Amendment at the Convention.  It is in my opinion entirely possible to put together a 26 state coalition to do it.  If Congress plays ball it will be ratified at state conventions.  This will be the biggest hurdle.  It’s impossible to know in advance how it would turn out.  But if the delegates are elected in a low turnout special election, it’s very winnable.  You’d even have a shot at some of the twelve blue states, like Maryland, Illinois and Oregon.  It would be tough in purple places like Maine, Washington and Minnesota.  But it could be done.  It’s just politics.  You run a campaign, as does the opposition, and the people decide.  Win or lose, you live with it.

It could fail, but that won’t be the end of Article V.  An orderly Amendment Convention will have convened, elected officers and adopted procedural rules, deliberated, voted on a proposal, and adjourned.  No runaway.  No talk of a runaway.  Article V is now in the political mainstream, available to liberals and conservatives alike.  The delegates from the 50 states will have enjoyed the entire experience.  They will have made history, win or lose, and they’ll want to do it again.

And they will.

*Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

**  Washington, Minnesota, and Maine.

It’s a luxury good.  How much is enough?  We should decide that democratically, but Congress unconstitutionally delegated its power to decide to a bureaucracy, the EPA.  That agency is under the control of environmental fanatics.  They are totalitarians at heart, and believe we should all learn to live with less.  Property rights mean nothing to them.  All must be sacrificed before the goddess Gaia.  The earth is their religion.

These are the people who will fight the Reagan Amendment the hardest.  With its promise of opening up large areas of the West to resource development, it is anathema to them.

To secure ratification of the Reagan Amendment, a political campaign will need to be conducted.  It will have to be, in scale, equivalent to a Presidential campaign.  The stakes will be just as high.  Actually, higher.  Because the Reagan Amendment would represent a turning point in American political history.  And everyone will know it.

I’m not qualified to run such a campaign.  There are true professionals who are.  I just hope to get my two cents in.  Who will run this campaign?  The Koch brothers?  I hope not.  They mean well, but they get taken in by political hustlers like Karl Rove.  Come to think of it, no one will run it.  Everybody will have to pitch in.  There will be no real coordination.  The energy industry will come up with the money.

I hope they spend it wisely.  We have a good story to tell.  In Alaska, selling the development of ANWR is easy.  Everyone’s afraid Alaskans will ruin their environment with their greed.  Bullshit.  No one cares about Alaska like the people who live there.  Trust me.  Look at the Pebble Mine, the largest concentration of undeveloped mineral wealth in North America.  It’s a mountain of gold, and it won’t be touched.  It lies at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, one of the great fisheries of the world.  The people who live there don’t want this mine, and it’s not going to happen.

And that’s their decision.  That’s the way such decisions should be made, not by some pencil pushing nerd in Washington.   That’s the story we have to tell the American people.

It’s a matter of communication.  And in the age of the internet, the truth gets out.

Rep. Gary Banz intends to put our bill on the Senate floor a week from tomorrow.  Up or down.  They’re getting Article V fatigue in Oklahoma.  CoS is very active there, and has made as much progress as we have, amazingly enough.  There was talk of combining our two Resolutions.  A State Senator supported their bill in committee, but not ours.  There really is no rational reason to do that.  It’s a way to force us to combine with them, which is a very bad idea.

Dave Guldenschuh is going to Oklahoma City to try to help clear all this up.  When CoS started out, I didn’t think they’d get one state.  Dave was instrumental in passing CoS in his native Georgia, but has since become disillusioned with them, and is now on the Task Force.  Gary says he thinks things have been moving our way. It’s time to find out if he’s right.  We all have a lot of confidence in him, and in Dave G.  This will be a very big vote.  The Birchers are very strong in Oklahoma.  A win there would be a huge boost.

The Capitol rally in South Carolina is the day after to morrow, featuring potential Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, a very impressive man.  We’re hoping Senator Leatherman will see him.  We’ve asked Carson to invite Leatherman to the rally.  Carson’s black, which might mean something to Leatherman.  He’s got a lot of blacks in his district.  He may not run again.  He’s 85 and in failing health, falling to sleep occasionally on the floor.  But he may not have decided yet, and being seen in public with a black man of Carson’s stature, and appeal, might interest him.

The Clinton juggernaut is underway.  What a spectacle.  What a joke.  These people are absolutely amazing.  Hillary goes to the Dominican mansion of fashion magnate Oscar de la Renta in order to decide if she wants to run for President, on a platform of bashing the rich.  The week of her announcement she puts her extremely homely daughter on the cover of ultra sophisticated Elle magazine, decked out like a fashion queen.  In the interview inside, she talks of her new found dedication to the poor.  It’s hilarious.  Now she’s “cut her ties” to the Clinton Foundation, as if that meant something.

You don’t know where to begin with these people.  Where do you start?  I’m going with Paula Jones, but the other 90’s Clinton scandals, while legitimate, are stale.  The Clinton Foundation is fresh, and more importantly, it involves Bill.  Direct attacks on Hillary are dicey business, because she can always get weepy, that everyone’s being mean to her.  It’s worked for her before, and she’s probably been practicing her technique, knowing she’ll need to use it again.  Her gender is really the only rationale for her candidacy.  Clinton Foundation money is dirty money.  Even people on the left are aware of that.  That’s our first target  — Bill’s foundation, not hers.

I sincerely hope she meets her goal of raising $2.5 billion.  Suck the money out of these dumb bastards, I say.  It doesn’t matter.  The story of the Madison Avenue executives meeting to find out why their elaborate ad campaign was such a bust is a good one.  One of them asked, “Maybe it’s the God damn dog food?”  Hillary Clinton is bad dog food.  They won’t be able to sell her.

There’s a big lesson to be learned from all that Arab money going to the Clinton Foundation.  They’re trying to buy influence.  They didn’t need to do that as much in the past.  But today the American people are thoroughly fed up with the Middle East, and everyone in it, except the Israelis.  We’ll make sure Israel is O.K., but that doesn’t mean we need to get in the middle of all the insanity there.  We want out.  It’s cold hearted to say this, because there are a lot of innocent women and children in the Middle East.  But there are a lot of innocent women and children all over the world.  It is not the job of the American military to save them.  That’s up to their menfolk.

The fracking revolution made the Middle East unimportant to us.  It’s still important to the Europeans and Asians.  That’s why it’s their problem, not ours.  We’ve fought wars in the Middle East for oil.

Never again.

At the time of the Revolution, most Americans didn’t really want a central, or federal, government that had any power over them.  Virginians were happy to govern themselves, and so was everyone else.  They tried going without one for six years, but it just didn’t work.  The states began fighting among themselves, and there was no real way for them to resolve their differences.  New York, for instance, believed that the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont were squatting on its land.  The title they received from New Hampshire was invalid, but Ethan Allen would go to war to keep it.  Washington, especially, was very concerned.  He knew what it was like to try to field an army, and fight a war, without a central government, and a reliable source of money.  There was every reason to believe that the Revolutionary war would not be our last.  If we were to become a continental nation, we might very well have to go to war again with the British, or the Spanish.  How could we do that without a central government?

The Constitution was a collection of political compromises between the states, principally between big states and small.  To protect their rights the small states got the Senate, and equal representation there, regardless of population.  They also got Article V.  The Constitution would not have been ratified by the small states without it.  They were deeply mistrustful of a Congress where the House of Representatives, dominated by the populous states, would have so much power.  If the Constitution needed to be changed, the small states wanted a method which empowered them.  An Article V Convention would give them equal power with the large states, and assured them they could assert their rights on an equal footing.

So if an Article V Convention is called, 26 states, representing a minority of the population, can control it.  This strikes some as unfair somehow.  There has even been a suggestion that no amendment should be proposed that does not have a supermajority of states in the Convention supporting it.  I think that’s a bad idea.  It will make it harder to come to an agreement, and a good amendment might be watered down.  And it’s entirely unnecessary.  Nothing goes into the Constitution without the support of 38 states.  Delegates, in drafting their proposal, will always bear that in mind.

The meeting in Seattle is to begin the organization of the Convention.  We’ll need 26, and only 26.  I believe we can get 26.  When a legislative body organizes itself, creating a majority organization to control it, legislators don’t wait until they convene in the State Capitol.  They formally organize right after the election.  They informally organize even before the election, making certain assumptions about who will get elected.  That’s what we’re trying to do in Seattle, except around an agenda, not leadership.  Leadership can be decided down the road, once everyone has had a chance to get to know each other.  It probably isn’t that important.  It’s the agenda that counts.

Sports are meaningless, I know.  But I like to watch the final round of the Master’s golf tournament, and today it was especially gratifying.  Older people worry about the young, wonder if they’re going to be capable of keeping this country going.  21 year old Jordan Spieth won today, setting some records.  He seems like one of the finest young men I’ve seen in a long, long time.  A wonderful family, and loyal friends.  He may be another Tiger woods.

In golf.