Month: November 2016

South Carolina State Senator Shane Massey is barely 40, and he’s been in the Senate for ten years.  He has resisted the imperial rule of Senate President Hugh Leatherman from the start, at times without any backing from even one colleague.  Finally he’s reached a point where he may be able to dislodge Leatherman from absolute power.

The ridiculous Rules of the South Carolina Senate are why we haven’t gotten South Carolina for the BBA.  Essentially, only a few bills a year are allowed to pass with a simple majority.   And Leatherman gets to decide which bills get this “preferred treatment”.  Everything else requires a 2/3 vote.  We’ve never been given the opportunity to pass our Resolution with a majority.

No one is even sure if Leatherman even opposes the Article V BBA Resolution.  He won’t say.  He doesn’t have much to say to anyone.  Even the members of the Senate Republican Majority can’t get a hearing.  If I was a South Carolina State Senator I wouldn’t put up with it.  And now, apparently, something close to a majority of the Caucus has screwed up the courage to defy an 85 year old man.  What the hell took them so long?

If Massie succeeds, by either deposing Leatherman, or forcing a rule change, we’ll get through South Carolina in a New York minute.  Well, let me take that back.  They operate at a pretty slow pace.  But we’d get it, and it could be our 34th.

As far as I know the exact date of the Nashville Convention hasn’t been determined, and I have a suggestion. Start it off on August 23rd, two days after the Great American Eclipse.  Nashville is directly in line for a full eclipse, and a lot of people, especially from the South, will be going to Nashville to see it.  If you tried to book a room for August 19th, 20th, or 21st you’d have trouble.  But by the 23rd the eclipse watchers will have gone home, and the accommodations should be available.

And if you’re a delegate from a part of the country that won’t see the eclipse, which is most of it, maybe you want to kill two birds with one stone.  Come to Nashville early, see the eclipse, and then go the first Convention of States in 155 years.

Why haven’t we done this before?  I was a State Legislator for eight years, and if it had occurred to me, I would have gotten a few States to join Alaska in having a Convention of States.  It’s easy to do.  You just do what Tennessee is going to do, and then you convince some other States to join in.  It’s a piece of cake.  And it hasn’t been done in 155 years.

Part of it is because of the language of Article V. All the people at Philadelphia knew what a Convention of States was.  Many of them had just been to one in Annapolis.  So they just assume everybody knows what one is.  But we’re so ignorant of the principles of federalism in this country that we can’t even speak its language.

Article V was designed by Madison and Mason with two goals in mind.  First, to recognize and formalize the sovereignty of the States.  Second, to force passage of the Bill of Rights.  Mason had insisted on a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, but lost.  So he walked out of the Convention and refused to sign the Constitution.  And he told them that he would oppose passage in Virginia, and thus doom the whole enterprise.  Without a Bill of Rights, Mason didn’t want the Constitution.

Madison, ever the diplomat, figured a way out.  Allow the States to amend the Constitution directly, as set out in Article V.  He then promised the delegates at the Virginia Ratification Convention that the First Congress would amend the Constitution by adopting the Bill of Rights.  And if that promise was broken, the States could get a Bill of Rights at an Article V Convention.  All these promises were made to the delegates elected in 1788.  It worked, barely.  Ratification passed in late June, 89-79.  Madison and Mason saved the day.  Without Virginia, no Constitution.

If if it wasn’t for Article V, we wouldn’t have a Constitution.  And Article V is how we’ll save it.  Starting in Nashville.

 

My latest at the American Thinker has ruffled some feathers, and Mark Levin is supposedly going to tear me a new one on his show this afternoon.  Too bad.  I’d like to come on and explain to him what is, and is not, a Convention of States.  He’s confused.

Trump is the crude reincarnation of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.  In my first campaign, for Goldwater in ’64, he was our opponent.  After Goldwater defeated him in the California primary, we didn’t see any more of Rockefeller Republicans, until Trump.

Rockefeller and Bush 1 were rivals in the V. P. sweepstakes after Nixon resigned and Ford became President.  Bush was the conservative alternative to Rockefeller, and it got down to the two of them.  Rockefeller had more money, so he was named V.P.  So the Bushes are not Rockefeller Republicans.  They’re conservatives with no balls, and that’s different.

I like Trump less than I liked Rockefeller.  He’s from Manhattan, and he’s all about  money.  Those are the “New York values” that should worry us.  Trump and Rockefeller are big spenders, lavishing huge amounts of government money into massive building projects.  That’s all Trump really cares about, building things.

So who’s going to stop him?  It won’t be Congress.  They all love spending  money.  No, it will be the States, using Article V.  And it begins this summer in Nashville.  This will all become clear the afternoon of Wednesday, November 30th at the Grand Hyatt Washington.  For the first time since 1861, a State will announce the Call of a Convention of States. It’s one of those things that if you say it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.  It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy.

The Article V movement was started by Lew Uhler’s National Tax Limitation Committee, some 35 years ago.  November 30, 2016, is when the final sprint begins.  And 2017 is when we finally pull it off.

When Barack Obama was reelected in 2012 I went into a funk for a year.  How the hell could that have happened?  It was crazy, but there it was. I figured we’d lost the country, for good.  Obamacare would be another big federal tit, and there would be plenty of suckers.  With over half the people on the tit, the government would have political control of the country.  The party of Government, the Democrats, was on its way, partly because of demographics, to becoming a permanent majority.  What was supposed to be a party of the People, the Republicans  — the so called conservatives —  had lost their way.  The Supreme Court wasn’t going to stop them, and the Democrats would consolidate their power through their control of federal agencies, like the Justice Department, the IRS, the FEC etc.

There was only one hope, and it was faint.  The Democrats would misinterpret the election, and it would mislead them to their doom.  And that’s what happened.  They thought Obama’s win was some kind of vote of approval, and acted accordingly, full speed ahead.  And they pushed it too far. They got so far ahead of themselves they got shafted by Donald Trump, of all people.  How did this jerk get elected?   He’s the F. U. candidate, and the Democrats pushed people so far and fast that’s exactly what people were looking for.

Here’s my theory.  The Queen of the Hive decided Clinton would lose to any normal Republican.  That was the smart bet.  So they latched on to Trump, and protected him, and helped him, improbably, get the nomination.  Then they turned on him, in a fury.  They’ve had that Access Hollywood tape for years, and they wanted to hold it until the very end, when it would come out so close to the election he wouldn’t be able to recover.  But the WaPo got the story too early, and jumped the gun.  I’ll give the WaPo this much credit.  They don’t take orders from the Queen.  And because that story came out too early, and Trump had a chance to recover, and the people were so pissed off, that he drew to his inside straight and filled his hand.  By a nose.  If that Access Hollywood tape had come out a week later, he would have lost.

This is bad news for the Queen, and all her Hive.  I hope their fate isn’t as bad as the German industrialists who decided to use Hitler for their own purposes.  All of them lost everything because of that miscalculation.  Many of them lost their families.

Trump is no Hitler, don’t get me wrong.   We’re Americans, not Germans, and we don’t salute anybody.  Trump’s a reality TV star, period.  An extremely bright, and therefor a potentially dangerous, man with some kind of messianic streak in him, but who knows?   What I do know is that he’s ignorant about the Constitution.  He’s dyslexic, and it would be hard for him to understand, so I’m sure he’s never read it.  If you asked him what federalism meant, he’d give you a blank stare.

A little less than half the country still can’t stand Trump, and never will.  It’s personal, with a lot of people.  I’m one of them.  This is the base, or part of it, of the Term Limits movement.  They’ll oppose anything he proposes, and there are enough of them to stop him.  So we don’t want any part of him.  We don’t need him, and we don’t want him.  He’s not welcome in this movement.

Or, the Reagan Project, as I’ve called it from the beginning.

We’re not done with the Clintons yet.  We shouldn’t prosecute them, though.  It sets a terrible precedent.  Nixon committed crimes, but was pardoned.  It was the right thing to do, for the country.  Half the people in this country violate federal law.  I do it all the time, because federal law is a joke.  If a ham sandwich can get indicted, so could every former President.  Let this crime family twist in the wind.

But we do want to destroy their political machine, and Ed Gillespie is the man to get it started.  He’s running for Governor of Virginia in 2017, to replace the snake Terry McAuliffe, one of greatest Clinton suck ups in the country.  Virginia is alone among the States in not allowing a Governor to have a second term, so McAuliffe is ineligible.  But he’ll have a surrogate for the Democratic nomination, almost certainly his Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, who has declared his candidacy.  All the other big name D’s (Kaine, Warner, Herring) have declined, so the nomination is probably Northam’s.

Northman is a moderate Democrat, and will be a formidable candidate.  He’s a pediatrician, so women like him.  He’s been elected to the State Senate twice, and is a VMI graduate.  In 2013 he won by eleven, 55%-44%, while McAuliffe won by two, 47%-45%

By election day, in November of 2017, a Convention of States will have been held, and if Project 2017 ( a joint effort of the National Tax Limitation Committee and Bill Fruth’s Balanced Budget Amendment Inc.) has succeeded, 34 States will have passed BBA Resolutions.  Congress will set a time and place for the Amendment Convention.  I’m hoping the Convention of States recommends Richmond as the place, and late November or early December the time.

The beautiful Capitol at Richmond is absolutely the perfect place.  It was designed by Jefferson, and has recently been completely refurbished and modernized.  In the Rotunda is displayed Houdon’s bust of Washington, an American treasure.  The Virginia Legislature commissioned Houdon, who was the most renowned sculptor in Europe.  He sailed to the United States, and Washington sat, patiently, while Houdon modeled him.  It’s the greatest work of art to come from the Founding Era.  I think it’s the greatest work of art ever produced in America.

If Virginia is not to be the place for the first Amendment Convention in our history, what State is?  Virginians created the Constitution.  It was their idea, and they largely wrote it.  Madison is the Father of the Constitution, and Mason is the Father of the Bill of Rights.  Washington presided at the Convention, and the Presidency was designed with him in mind.  It was Virginians, especially Madison and Mason, who insisted that Article V be included.

So if we convince the Delegates at the Convention of States to recommend Richmond, then Richmond it shall be.  The chair of House Judiciary is Bob Goodlatte, a Virginian and a friend of Lew Uhler’s.  It will be Richmond.

Now all Project 2017 has to do is explain all this to the sitting State Senators of Virginia.  So far, despite the entreaties of Virginia Speaker Bill Howell, they have ignored us.  But Ed Gillespie is a very bright guy, and a smart politician.  I’m sure Lew knows him.  He is the unopposed candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary, and I’m sure some of these high and mighty State Senators will hear him out.   The only question is, are they smart enough to understand what he’s talking about?