Miscellaneous

Co-founder Darren is spending his weekend doing over the website. Big changes coming. We’re jacked.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to spread the word on the Reagan Amendment.  I’ll decide now, in the woods.

North Dakota will be 27, maybe as early as Monday, according to Guldenschuh.  South Carolina will be 28.  John Steinberger reports we passed out of the full Senate Judiciary Committee 15-6, with two D’s.  We could be on the Senate floor by the end of next week.  The House is wired.  In Wisconsin Lou Marin reports that sponsor Chris Kapenga is waiting on the special senate election to fill the seat of now-Congressman Glen Grothman, the blockhead who beat us last year.  Chris knows what he’s doing.  He’s fairly young, but he has skills.  Wisconsin will be 29, though it might not be ’til fall.

We came in to 2015 ten short.  We’ll almost certainly get five.  But 30 sounds a lot better than 29, and 31 sounds really good.  I’ll be in Boise on Wednesday, and I’ll stay until I get to talk to Bart Davis.  I’ll tell him about the Reagan Amendment, and what it could mean for the economy, for jobs, in his state.  Every Republican legislator I’ve ever known cares about jobs.  A lot.  It’s one thing that unites us all.  I hope he gets it.  Depending on the reaction I get from Davis, I may want to go to Oklahoma City in a few weeks to talk about what the Reagan Amendment would mean for Oklahoma.

Biddulph’s still talking about getting it done this year.  That would require special sessions in West Virginia, Wyoming, and either Montana or Arizona.  I don’t see that happening.  But if we go viral, anything’s possible.

The closer we get, the more focused.

Loren Enns will be doing a pledge campaign in Virginia.  The filing deadline for November’s legislative elections is getting close, if it hasn’t already passed.  The quicker those letters go out, the more effective they will be.  You never know.  Virginia could be 34 next year.

Some guy in California filed our bill.  I may have some free time in Sacramento at the end of next week.  If I do I’ll drop by his office and tell him that when California Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown ran for President in 1980 an Article V BBA was one of his principal campaign themes.  Jerry used to be a thinker, an innovator.  Maybe somebody should remind him of who he was, 35 years ago.  I’ll say this about Jerry.  If he was ten years younger he’d run against Hillary, and he’d beat her.  He smells weakness.

The Republican Party in California is dead.  A big reason is abortion, which is a religion to the women of this state.  If I run for Congress next year it will be as a Reagan Democrat.  I became a Democrat a year ago.  I’d call upon my fellow Democrats in Sacramento to place on the ballot a pro-choice constitutional amendment.  If Rowe v. Wade is overturned they’re going to do it anyway, so why not now?  Because, of course, they want the issue.  To beat Republicans up with.

Running for Congress might be fun. Hell, I know it would.

Or a lack thereof.  That’s why Article V is so hard.  The American people, as represented by their state legislators, don’t trust each other.  What kind of people elect a nonentity like Obama, and then, after four years of incompetence, elect him again?  What kind of people elect, year after year, the same set of fools and blowhards we see in Congress?  Can this electorate be trusted anywhere near the Constitution?

We have no choice.  If the people, acting through their state legislatures, can’t be trusted with the Constitution, then it’s game over.  We lost the country.  The Supreme Court won’t save us.  Chief Justice Roberts made that clear when, in a tortured opinion, he upheld Obamacare.  Nothing will save us.  All we’ve got is an old piece of paper, with some famous names on it.

A republic, if you can keep it.  Truer words were never spoken.  When the basic structure of the Constitution has been so distorted, by a hundred years of “progress”, a free people does something about it.  We’ve forgotten a few things in the last hundred years.  We forgot that the Federal Government is not the sovereign in this country, the people are.  We forgot that when the states gave up a portion of their sovereignty to form this country, they reserved the right to take it back.  As long as they act collectively, according to the procedures of Article V.

We are in dire straits.  You get the feeling that if we don’t do something soon we’ll lose it all, our entire heritage.  The Framers foresaw this day, and gave us a clear way out.  Do we have the courage, do we trust each other enough, to go there?  I believe we do.  I got off the couch eighteen months ago because I saw, with my own eyes, a turning of the tide.  The rollout of Obamacare.  The low water mark.  The moment the tide turned flood toward freedom.

Is that what happened, a year and a half ago?  We will find out soon enough.  When people get to understand the Reagan Amendment, they’ll either like it, or they won’t.  Politics is an unforgiving business.  You either win, or lose.  But it is a business.  I either know it, or I don’t.

When my son Darren and I started the Reagan Project, it was about building trust.  That’s what the Reagan Amendment Summit is about.  If we can begin to form a community there that trusts itself, a community determined to grow, there is no limit to what it could accomplish.  All while balancing the budget.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in on a jail break.

Seattle, obviously.  What was I thinking?  The annual meeting of NCSL starts August 3rd in Seattle.  The Denver meeting is just the Executive Board.  There will be ten or twenty times more legislators in Seattle.  It occurs two months later, but who cares?  It just gives us more time to set it up.  I’ve been on Facebook with Greg Moon, one of the leaders of the Seattle Tea Party Patriots.  I hope to be able to meet him on Tuesday.  He told me about Westlake Park, in downtown Seattle, close to the Convention Center, where we can have a noontime Reagan Amendment Rally.

One of the speakers I’ll want at the rally is John Carlson of KVI, the big talk show host in Seattle, and Washington.  Actually, I’ll invite him to MC it.  If he promotes this on his show we’re guaranteed a good crowd.  Another possibility is Sarah Palin.  That’s a decision we don’t  have to make for three months.  She’d get media attention, and draw a crowd, but it would turn into a Sarah Palin event.  I’ll want to hear what everyone else thinks.  I’m betting we can get a Presidential candidate, and if we do we won’t need Palin.  Another speaker will be Utah Rep. Ken Ivory, President of the American Lands Council.  He will have the most substantive part of the rally.

I’ll be in Seattle Monday, and check out the park.  I’ll be at the Grand Hyatt, which we may want as the venue for meetings and a possible awards dinner.  I need to put together a budget for all this, and raise the money.

Senate President pro tem Curt Bramble is one of the heroes of Utah.  He carried our bill in the Senate.  When Curt Bramble agrees to put your bill through the Senate, it gets through the Senate.  As incoming President of NCSL, he’ll have a big say in what happens in Seattle.  I’ll be talking to him, soon, about coordinating the Reagan Amendment Summit and his show.  It would be nice to somehow be on the official NCSL agenda.

The goal, of course, is press coverage.  Maybe in the next four months we’ll have spread the word on the Reagan Amendment enough so that there will be some interest.  Actually, we need a gimmick of some kind.  Maybe.  Maybe a Presidential candidate would be enough.  We’ve got time to think this through.  I’m thinking as I type.  That’s not good.

Time for a beer, and a walk in the woods.

That’s the federal government, if you couldn’t guess.  Over the last ten or twenty years the American people have rendered judgment on the blob.  They don’t like it.  In one recent poll it was rated the number one problem facing the country.  It’s turned into a national joke.  Now the EPA wants to regulate the length of your shower in hotels.  That’s why regulatory reform is so popular.  It would also, of course, reduce the burden on business, resulting in more economic activity and more tax revenue for the Treasury.

The REINS Act, introduced by Senator Paul in 2013, would require every new regulation that costs more than $100 million to be approved by Congress before it takes effect.  Heritage says there were 130 such rules in Obama’s first term alone, imposing $70 billion annually in costs.  I would amend it by requiring any regulation that costs more than $1 has to be approved by Congress.

Congress won’t like that, but they’ve got nothing to say about it.  The states can put that in the Constitution with Article V, and Congress can go fly a kite.  It’s not that Congressmen are lazy.  Many are dynamos of activity, but their energy is focused primarily on raising money for their campaigns, and paying off their contributors with favors.  I remember one guy from a few years ago made a vow to spend no more than one half of his work day to raising money.  His buddies in Congress probably laughed at him, a goodie two shoes.  I don’t think he’s still around.

Reviewing regulations would be a lot of work, and they don’t like too much of that.  That’s why the gave these agencies the power to issue regulations, so they wouldn’t have to do the work themselves.  And, of course, to make themselves look good by giving vague, lofty sounding goals for the agencies to pursue with their regulations.

Congress should also be given the power to repeal any regulation by majority vote in each chamber, with no veto allowed.  There’s a lot of bad ones on the books that need to go.  You might also want to sunset any regulation, so that they automatically expire after, say, ten years.  If they’re really important, issue them again.

These will all be topics of conversation at the Reagan Amendment Summit in Denver on June 3rd.  The Amendment Convention will have the final say, but it’s worth talking about right now.  The Convention will probably be held about one year after the Summit, so it’s not too early.  Dave Biddulph is going to talk to John Aglialoro about being the sponsor.  At one time he said he was ready to put $100 million into Article V.  The Summit would be cheap.  If we had the bucks, I’d like to pay for every legislator’s plane fare and hotel.  I want representatives from 50 states there.  If not 50, 38.  If not 38, 26 will do.

From Louisiana I’d like to get Senator Elbert Guillory.  He’s black, from a poor district, but he figured out that his people need jobs, not handouts.  So he’s a Republican.  He cut an ad last fall that tore Senator Mary Landrieu a new one.  I like this guy.  I’d like him to talk about what an honest to God economic expansion would do for his people.

Ideally, I’d like a Democrat from West Virginia to talk about what federal regulation is doing to his people, the economic devastation being visited on his district.  I read last week that unemployment is up in every county in West Virginia.  I know this is Appalachia, and these Scotch-Irish hillbillies aren’t the right sort of people.  But they are Americans.  And the feds are killing them.  It’s a national disgrace.

I was 12 when “The Blob” came out.  It was Steve McQueen’s first leading role.  The double feature with it was “I Married a Monster from Outer Space”.  They don’t make them like that any more.  The blob was this slimy pink thing that kept growing and growing.  That’s why it reminds me of the federal government.  The best part of the movie is when the blob seeps into a movie theatre  through the heating vents, and eats the whole crowd.  Me and my friends really liked that part.  They finally figured out that it couldn’t take the cold, so they froze it and parachuted it into the Arctic.  Could we do that to the Federal government?  Under Article V, we can do anything we want.

Yes we can!