George Soros and the Koch brothers are political amateurs who waste enormous amounts of money on politics. Neither one of them has any idea what they’re doing. Half the time their efforts turn out to be counter productive. With Soros, that’s a good thing. He’s Dr. Evil. The Kochs are conservatives, and mean well. They’re just dopes, when it comes to politics.
It all goes back to their Dad, and hero, Fred. After graduating from MIT in 1922 he invented a new fracking method, which made turning oil into gasoline far more efficient. All the major oil companies wanted to use it, but they didn’t want to pay him to do so. So for over ten years Koch and his partners were embroiled in 44 different law suits with big oil. He prevailed in every one of them, except for one where the judge was bribed. In the mean time he had no employment in the American oil industry, and went to the Soviet Union to train a new generation of Russian petroleum engineers. His four years in the USSR made him a fanatical anti-communist.
Back in the USA he got back into the oil business, and made a great fortune. He was a brilliant engineer. But over the course of my life I have learned one important thing about engineers. They are, uniformly, politically incompetent. They think in straight lines, and a solution is either right or wrong. There are not a lot of grays in engineering. In politics, that’s about all there is.
So in 1958 the ferociously anti-communist Fred Koch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, and preached its doctrines to his four sons. The Koch brothers learned about the dangers of Article V sitting around the dinner table, from a man they admired above all others — their dad.
In 1958 if you’re a chemical engineer, who thinks the Communists have infected much of American society, maybe being afraid of Article V made sense. You really don’t even understand why Article V is in the Constitution. Few people do. But you do think there is an active conspiracy in this country to subvert the Constitution, and Article V would be one way to do it. So you oppose it, period. It must be off limits. The communist conspirators might get control of an Article V Convention, and we’d lose it all.
But this is 2016, not 1958. Communism, as a movement and a conspiracy, is dead. Republicans control 2/3 of our State Legislatures, and these are conservative Republicans, every damn one of them. I’ve met a lot of them personally, was one myself for a while, and I know what I’m talking about. The idea that these patriotic, intelligent men and women would allow any harm to come to the Constitution is crazy.
You’d think, here in 2016, the Kochs would be willing to take another look at Article V, but they won’t. The reason this Article V movement has taken as long as it has is due to the Kochs. They have resisted us, both in the open and covertly, every step of the way. All to honor dear old Dad, and his devotion to the John Birch Society.
Utah Senator Mike Lee’s father was a big man in the Birch Society, and for a long time he opposed us as well. But he changed his tune, and that’s how we got Utah, maybe the toughest State in the union for us to get. The win in Utah was huge, giving us momentum, and credibility, in all the Mountain West.
Before the 2015 session of the Utah Legislature, Sen. Lee attended a Republican Caucus in Salt Lake City. He was asked by our sponsor, Rep. Kraig Powell, if he still thought Article V should be off limits. He told Kraig, and the caucus, that his father would be rolling over in his grave, but he’d changed his mind. Under current circumstances, Article V should be used.
Mike Lee could admit that he, and his father, had been wrong. Times change. But the Kochs? No, they’re engineers. It’s all black and white, just like Dad told us.
If the Article V movement ever got any money behind it, it would take off like a rocket. In the mean time, we carry on.
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