Freedom First Society

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Blockbuster New Resource!

Dear FFS Leaders,

Just FYI, in case you get some questions from online members over the holidays.

We have just implemented an exciting new feature on our website, which will be introduced to members in our January Action Report, still a couple of weeks out. Here is the pertinent info from that upcoming Report:

Blockbuster New Resource!

We are excited to announce a powerful new resource that, with your help, can truly put our online scorecard and Freedom First Society on the map.

Andrew Carver has developed a convenient option for anyone online to create a printed version of a legislator’s scorecard. Printed copies allow you to hand or mail our scorecards to those with whom you do not communicate via email.

You will notice a somewhat different format for the printed version since, unlike the online version, it contains no links to more information. Instead, the report seeks to interest recipients in visiting our online site. There they can find additional information about the scored votes and advice on how to communicate effectively with their rep and senators. They can also print their own legislator scorecards.

To use this new resource, just select the legislator’s online scorecard page and click on the green “Download PDF” button to view the new report. Once the report comes up, merely use the print function in your browser to print the report or save the report as a PDF.

*****

In the meantime, have a blessed and Merry Christmas!

Regards,

Tom Gow

P.S. When you have a moment, you may wish to check out our analysis of the House vote on the long-term CR to fund the federal government through April 28.

December 2016 FFS Action Report

Dear Member,

Here is a link to our December Action Report.

For your convenience, here is a link to last month’s Report: November 2016 Action Report.

To assist you in navigating our website, we are also including here some convenient links to items mentioned in this and recent Reports.

Convenient Links to Discussed Resources:

Topic: Urgent: Lame Duck Danger!

“Action Request re the Lame Duck” (November 11 email to members)

“No Omnibus in the Lame Duck” (FFS posted article)

www.house.gov (Contact your congressmen)

Topic: Media Collusion!

“The Great American Swindle” (August 2007 report)

Media-Controlled Delusion (64-page booklet)

Topic: Save our Constitution!

BBA Task Force website (map)

“Expose the Article V Con-con Fraud” campaign page

Model Article V Con-con Rescission-Resolution

“Talking Points” alert email

“Dagger in the Heart” Campaign Action Report

“The Danger of a Convention of States” by Don Fotheringham

Topic: Campaign for Decency — Curb the Courts

“Campaign for Decency” page

Model Resolution (downloadable PDF)

Topic: Website Promotion

Freedom First Society website (home page)

We encourage all members to share these alerts with interested personal contacts, while adding their own comments.

If for any reason you wish to be removed from Freedom First Society’s email network, just reply to this message and place REMOVE in the subject line. Your name will be removed immediately.

Action Request re Lame Duck

Dear Member,

Congress will convene in a lame duck (post-election) session for several days during November and December (House members will meet as early as Monday, November 14). This lame duck will include more than 50 representatives and 11 senators who will not be part of the 115th Congress when it convenes in January.

With so many congressmen no longer accountable to their constituents and none facing re-election for at least another 2 years (when they can count on voter outrage fading), the decisions made in this lame duck are especially hazardous.

There are several damaging actions that a lame duck Congress might try to sneak through — ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to name just one.

However, our particular concern with this email is with the ongoing threat of uncontrolled federal spending. The threat is particularly compounded by the fact that Congress has passed only one of the 12 full-year appropriations bills for the current 2017 federal fiscal year and a continuing resolution funding the others expires on December 9.

We have described this situation and the responsible course for “true constitutionalists” in a posted article “No Omnibus in the Lame Duck.”

Please read that argument and share it with your congressman (if you wish, you can paste a link to the article in a message left on your congressman’s web page). Insist your congressman not support any omnibus spending measures.

Assault on Our Girls

In our November Action Report, we also urged members to contact their congressmen to protest the drive to require women to register for the draft. (The Senate version of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act contains this revolutionary step and the House-Senate conference version may come up in the lame duck). Express our outrage that something so unworthy of a civilized nation has any support at all.

We encourage all members to share these alerts with interested personal contacts, while adding their own comments.

If for any reason you wish to be removed from Freedom First Society’s email network, just reply to this message and place REMOVE in the subject line. Your name will be removed immediately.

Action Request re Lame Duck

Dear Member,

There are several damaging actions that a lame duck Congress might try to sneak through — ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to name just one.

We have described this situation and the responsible course for “true constitutionalists” in a posted article “No Omnibus in the Lame Duck.”

Assault on Our Girls

We encourage all members to share these alerts with interested personal contacts, while adding their own comments.

If for any reason you wish to be removed from Freedom First Society’s email network, just reply to this message and place REMOVE in the subject line. Your name will be removed immediately.

November 2016 FFS Action Report

Dear Member,

Here is a link to our November 2016 Action Report.

For convenient reference, here is a link to last month’s Report: October 2016 Action Report.

To assist you in navigating our website, we are also including here some convenient links to items mentioned in this and recent Reports.

Convenient Links to Discussed Resources:

Topic: Breaking Our Will to Resist

Henry Austin (1858-1912), “Perseverance Conquers All”

Media-Controlled Delusion (64-page booklet)

Topic: Save our Constitution!

BBA Task Force website (map)

BBA Task Force list of target states

“Expose the Article V Con-con Fraud” campaign page

Model Article V Con-con Rescission Resolution

“Talking Points” alert email

“Dagger in the Heart” Campaign Action Report

“The Danger of a Convention of States” by Don Fotheringham

Topic: Campaign for Decency — Curb the Courts

“Campaign for Decency” page

Model Resolution (downloadable PDF)

Topic: Website/Scorecard Promotion

FFS Analysis: H.R. 2646, “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2016”

Freedom First Society website (home page)

We encourage all members to share these alerts with interested personal contacts, while adding their own comments.

If for any reason you wish to be removed from Freedom First Society’s email network, just reply to this message and place REMOVE in the subject line. Your name will be removed immediately.

Session 2 (2016), 114th Congress

Dear Member,

America desperately needs leadership to build a Congress that votes according to the Constitution. With your help in putting our no-nonsense Scorecard “on the map,” our Scorecard can play an important part in that effort.

We have just recently scored U.S. Representatives on several significant votes for Session 2 (2016). Please check out those votes and also check to see how your representative voted on these measures.

Most importantly, please ask others to do the same by sharing links to the roll calls and/or a Representative’s individual scorecard page.

For your convenience, here are links to our analyses of:

Global Food Security Act of 2016

Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2016

Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act

To reauthorize and improve the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act

Note: Session 2 of the 114th Congress was filled with an unusual concentration of roll calls of minor significance or just plain GOP posturing (votes on measures that even the GOP-controlled Senate was unlikely to take up.)

Nevertheless, there were significant roll calls in Session 2, where Congress had an opportunity to reverse the course of unconstitutional programs and, as expected, failed to do so. We will be posting more such votes before Session 2 ends, including the lame duck.

Freedom First Society website (home page)

Congress: Just Vote the Constitution! (campaign page)

We encourage all members to share these alerts with interested personal contacts, while adding their own comments.

If for any reason you wish to be removed from Freedom First Society’s email network, just reply to this message and place REMOVE in the subject line. Your name will be removed immediately.

Special No-Con-con Action Request

Dear FFS leaders,

I’d like to update you as to where your members can, right now, best help the no-con-con effort in states beyond their own. (This assumes they’ve written / called their own state legislators already.)

There are four states I’d like you to focus on. Let me list those, each with some reasons for why I picked it. Below that, I’ll provide some links and other info pertinent to contacting relevant legislators.

First of all though, I would like to give you my sense of the “state of play” in this conflict, and the two overarching concerns that guided my selection.

34 calls is the magic number of state calls needed to trigger an Article V Con-con. There is only one Con-con “topic” or model resolution that has anywhere near that many: the BBA (Balanced Budget Amendment).

The BBA Task Force claims, I think accurately, that already they have 28 states with valid calls to Congress for a BBA Con-con. So, we should naturally be concerned mostly about states where a BBA call is likely.

Also, it has been clear for some time that various Con-con promoters have been, before each session, targeting specific states. In fact, BBA Task Force publishes what states they’re targeting (http://bba4usa.org/report/). It’s also clear that such targeting, with pre-corralling of legislators’ support, has paid off. So, we must consider which states will likely be targeted next session.

The Four Focus States

In alphabetical order (not order of importance), the states on which I’d like you to focus are:

Arizona

In 2015-16, all three of Arizona’s Con-con measures started in the House; one was a BBA call, one a Compact for a Balanced Budget; and the other was a Convention of States call.
All were introduced Jan. 2016, yet all three had passed the House by March! That strongly suggests an organized assault, despite the difference in topics. We can expect new calls to be introduced in the House in 2017.

(We know that Convention of States has started coordinating with BBA; e.g., in Oklahoma they passed one measure that had a call for each!)

Minnesota

This state is one of 11 that the BBA Task Force targeted explicitly in 2016. And, it had companion calls for a BBA active in House and Senate (although, fortunately for us, neither was introduced until April of this year).

Texas

Seldom has a state been so obviously targeted: A clearly well-funded, well-organized rally occurred at the State Capitol on Sept. 13: http://www.empowertexans.com/quicktakes/convention-of-states-supporters-flood-texas-capitol/ ); this rally coincided with a certain important out-of-session hearing: http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/84R/schedules/pdf/C4602016091311001.PDF.
Moreover, the governor and lieutenant governor have both just recently demanded the legislature issue a Con-con call.

Virginia

This state’s Con-con measures will all carry over to 2017. (This is true only of Virginia and New Jersey.) There are two balanced budget Con-con calls, in the same Senate committee.

Please find attached hereto a PDF file listing the Con-con “talking points” that Tom Gow sent out by email in July. You might well find it helpful to print out copies of this (if you have access to a printer) for your members to refer to for communicating with the legislators.

Below, please find my contact advice for these states.

If any questions arise, please let me or Tom know. Don’t worry about coordinating with other leaders, as to who should handle what states; just pick some states that sound doable, as many as you think your members can do — and go for it! Also, if you can find the time to let us know what your members will be doing, that would be great.

Many thanks, and

Best regards,

Andrew Carver

Detailed State Information

Here is some additional info particularly relevant to contacting these states’ legislators re a Con-con. (All these states have finished their 2016 session; some have still some activity, though.)

Arizona

Since all the Con-con measures last session originated in the House, I recommend focusing your efforts there (on the 62 representatives). Note: No email addresses are available for Arizona legislators (so to email them, you must fill out a webform).
See http://www.azleg.gov/MemberRoster.asp?Body=H for the House members’ telephone numbers (try to leave a voicemail, at least).

Minnesota

Since it had companion BBA calls in both House and Senate, contact both (by telephone or email).
There are 134 House members: http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/hmem.asp, and
67 Senate members: http://www.senate.mn/members/index.php

Texas

No email addresses are available for Texas legislators (so to email them, you must fill out a webform).

Please note, there are no specific measures active or under study; but the committee that had the well-publicized, Sept. 13 hearing studying these matters was the House Select Committee on State & Federal Power & Responsibility. If you want to phone its 7 members, go to:
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/Committees/Membership.aspx

and in the dropdown list next to “House Committee,” select “State & Federal Power & Responsibility, Select” and click on “Go.”

In the page that comes up, there are links for each committee member: Click on one to get that legislator’s phone number.

To phone any other Texas legislators, for representatives go to http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/Members/Members.aspx?Chamber=H, and for senators go to http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/Members/Members.aspx?Chamber=S.

Virginia

Email addresses are available for the Virginia legislators. The two BBA calls currently live in the same Senate committee (which will carry over into 2017) are HJR90 (which has already passed the House) and SJR42. The Senate committee considering the two calls is the Senate Rules Committee ( https://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?161+com+S10). The Committee has 15 members.

October 2016 FFS Action Report

Dear Member,

Here is a link to our October 2016 Action Report.

For convenient reference, here is also a link to our September 2016 Action Report.

To assist you in navigating our website, we are also including here some convenient links to items mentioned in this and recent Reports.

Convenient Links to Discussed Resources:

Topic: “Police Brutality”

“What You Won’t Hear on Fox”

Media-Controlled Delusion (64-page booklet)

Topic: Save our Constitution!

“Expose the Article V Con-con Fraud” campaign page

“Talking Points” alert email

“Dagger in the Heart” Campaign Action Report

“The Danger of a Convention of States” by Don Fotheringham

“State Legislatures Information” page (FFS)

“Top Constitution Scholars Weigh in on Article V”

Topic: Congress: Just Vote the Constitution!

“Congress: Just Vote the Constitution!” campaign page

Link for monitoring Congress (helpful government sites page)

“Current Federal Legislators”

Topic: Campaign for Decency — Curb the Courts

“Campaign for Decency” page

Model Resolution (downloadable PDF)

Topic: Special “Fall” Appeal

Website Promo Flyer

Freedom First Society website (home page)

We encourage all members to share these alerts with interested personal contacts, while adding their own comments.

If for any reason you wish to be removed from Freedom First Society’s email network, just reply to this message and place REMOVE in the subject line. Your name will be removed immediately.