Austin Constitution Meetup 2010/10/25

good evening this is the october 25th 2010

meetup of the austin constitution meetup i'm john rowland

and tonight we're going to be discussing several things i have been asked to talk about a little

bit about health care so

i'm going to do that by referring to the current state

of the

healthcare litigation

that has been launched

attorney general mccullum of florida uh file the initial

petition in federal court there

and 19 other attorney state attorney

generals signed on to it which might sound like a fairly

powerful array of people backing it

however there are some problems

the litigation

was drafted by an acquaintance of mine

david rivkin uh basically a libertarian lawyer

and he had drafted it based upon the state of the litigation

i mean of the legislation before it was adopted

while was still being debated in congress so he tried to get ahead of the game

expecting to file a lawsuit on it immediately after it was adopted

and unfortunately the way it was written up was not for

the bill that actually got adopted so

we have a problem in that sense

congress has last the last couple of days

before the bill passed

changed a couple of things

and what they change is significant because what they did

is they made two introduced two provisions one of which

forbade the irs which is the collection agents

for the mandatory health insurance to levy

and the second of all it forbade them to lean on taxpayers in order to collect the

insurance premiums now usually when

people contemplate the irs collecting money from people

they think in terms of them either living or leaning now to explain

the difference for those who will be viewing the video and may not be familiar with the difference

the levy process basically is taking the money out of

your bank account and the leaning process

is putting a lien on your property especially real property

and then foreclosing on it

however if they can't use either method

to collect and of course the question immediately arises

well how can they collect on the insurance premiums

and the answer is that they can't collect directly

they can't send an agent out to collect the premium from you

all they can do is to

if they have money of yours that they've already collected is to not give it back to you

so for example if they have your employer collecting money

as withholding and he has

sent the money into the irs and you've filed your taxes

without paying the insurance premium as part of your

1040 return

the ri of what the irs would do is send you a notice of deficiency

saying you still owe this amount of money which would probably be about 800 if you paid everything else that in

the normal course you think you would owe look you're looking generally around

seven to eight hundred dollars maybe a little more for the insurance premium

so if you said that well the insurance premium is

unconstitutional i don't want it i'm not going to pay for it and it says well we've already you've

already paid for it we got the money now we're going after your regular taxes

and they're in law what you a person can do

in that situation you can sue to get the money back but you have to pay everything they claim you owe

so you would have to pay the additional 800 that they're billing you for

but if they decide to tack on interest and penalties and a bunch of other stuff

they could run up a six thousand dollar tax bill say

to sixty thousand you know that's a matter of a few strokes of a pen

so suddenly you're having to pay not six thousand dollars but sixty thousand dollars

plus attorney's fees to sue to get eight hundred dollars back

so that's the way the game is played now when a lot of

state legislators state doors that were

thinking about doing leo berman for example drafted a bill

for the state rep house which would make it a crime for a

irs agent to come into the state to collect a insurance premium

well obviously that's not going to work first of all

if was struck down instantly by a federal court

if somebody tried to enforce it they'd be arrested for interfering with a federal officer

um and secondly they and finally the irs agent

even if you wanted to collect the uh insurance premium wouldn't have to send

an agent into this into the state at all he could do it from out of state

or texas without jurisdiction maybe from martinsburg west virginia for

example um

so if we we can look at

here we go here's a summary

of the key points

there were six what are called claims for relief

in the in the litigation in the original petition

uh the first one was the individual mandate and concomitant penalty exceed

congressional authority under the commerce clause and violate the ninth and tenth amendments

now first of all i'll commend rifkin for bringing in the ninth amendment that's gonna

the ninth amendment has very seldom argued in federal court

on any case and it will be useful to bring it in

okay that one was not dismissed

you can't see the uh the right part of the text there slide the scroll bar over

well it looks different on mine yeah let's see this

okay there we go now

so that one survived at least at this stage

uh the second one which was dismissed the individual mandate and penalty violate substantive due process

under the fifth amendment that was dismissed

the judge gave his explanation why and we'll go into it right now you can

the opinion is right here you can click on it and read the whole thing

number three was dismissed as moot and i was arguing if the penalty i

imposed for failing to comply with the individual mandate is found to be a tax

it is an unconstitutional unapportioned decapitation or direct tax

in violation of the u.s constitution article 1 section 9 clause 4

and the 9th and 10th amendments it was dismissed as mood because

basically the penalty had not been assessed to anyone

yet so the the way the courts handle

uh claims is that for claims for

actual actions by government officials

the actions have to have already occurred or be or be imminent

and these are not imminent until about uh 2012 to 2015

so they're not anywhere close number four

this one was not dismissed the act coerces and commandeers the states with

respect to medicaid by altering and expanding the program in violation of article 1 and

the 9th and 10th amendments now this is the one

claim that allows the attorney generals to stay in

so that's the only thing that these hope that they've got going for them in this case

and it's not clear that they're going to be able to effectively argue

that the states are commandeered when medicaid itself

is optional state doesn't have to accept it

and the court is very likely to conclude that well you can avoid

the coercion and commandeering by just not accepting medicaid just opt out of the medicaid program

number five which was dismissed it coerces and commandeers with respect to the health benefit exchanges in

violation of article 1 and the 9th and 10th amendment and he explains why

he dismissed that and then number six was dismissed the employer mandates

interfere with the state's sovereignty as large employers and in the performance of government functions

in violation and so forth again this was dismissed

because essentially the judge is saying let's decide this case on

claims number one and number four only

now what is the problem with number one i indicated why i thought number four was not going to

survive with number one we run into the problem

of whether or not the pen it is the penalty is a penalty in other words a kind of criminal

uh sanction or whether it's a tax

it says it's a penalty in the act but just because it says it's a penalty

doesn't necessarily make it one uh

so are you saying that they modified the legislation just at the 11th hour so

that they could avoid um being unconstitutional well to avoid the levy yeah to avoid

these avenues of attack on the constitutionality so maybe they had access to this text

they anticipated this text that's why the videos changes at the 11th hour even though well they kind of jumped through hoops

by doing this well they didn't require them to spy on uh

david in his study uh these the strategy was being openly

discussed on the internet and in forums okay you know for months leading up to this so

that's why they did the convoluted approach to try to get the money in a weird way

right so they can avoid this right the obvious even though

so those are doing it to us the the court could decide that it's not a penalty that it's

really just a tax on on not buying something so the question becomes

if the courts interpret what congress is doing in spirit even

though they might have might have gotten away through it through it with a loophole

if the courts will enforce it in the spirit of the law in the spirit of the constitution the

courts would still strike them down what they're doing right well they might if they're if it's an honest court if

it's an honest court now the judge vincent in this case did a pretty

good job of writing the opinion obviously he put a lot of work into it

uh it is not a half-assed piece of legal scholarship

but what it does it does point to the way in which the whole case is likely to be

dismissed because if

the irs simply withholds the penalty

and this may have to wait for an actual case for it to happen and there are some individual plaintiffs

of this as well as state attorney general it's not just a state attorney general

see there's an old case from 1923 massachusetts is female

it's a companion case to frothing and vimela the two cases got

merged in the final opinion the issue in farthing ham was whether or

not a person had standing

to sue if he had not been personally injured and the court ruled that it he did not

that was the beginning of both the standing doctrine and the cases and controversies doctrine

under which the court refuses to hear cases unless somebody's either actually

injured or is facing injury if massachusetts femalin

the private citizen was being represented in court by his state

in that case massachusetts the doctrine under which this was done

as an ancient doctrine going back to hundreds of years is that a state can go to court

representing the rights of an individual the doctrine is called empires

patriai and the court struck that down as well

he said the state cannot represent an individual he has to come into court on his own

with his own lawyers representing himself now that wouldn't necessarily repeat the

state paying for his lawyers but for

essentially what it means was the the eye the individual the private party

has to appear as the party directly and not undercover of his state

so what this is likely to be if we knock

out four here then all that's going to leave is one

and i'll probably be essentially knocking out all the state attorney generals

and then they will knock out for the individuals because they haven't actually been penalized yet

but even if they are um

if the irs collects the money from the employer through withholding

then as i explained earlier they now have the

money the guy files his 1040. it does not include the the penalty

saying that he doesn't owe it and the irs just

gives him a notice of deficiency it's okay you still owe

800 bucks not for the penalty you paid that you now owe it for for

for taxes regular taxes

and in order to get the 800 back

he would have to pay the deficiency on his tax bill

and there by that time they're liable to load on a bunch of interests and penalties and so forth which they can

easily do you know very quickly to large numbers so a guy could start with a six thousand

dollar tax bill uh leave out eight hundred dollars

they would collect the six thousand charge them for the additional 800 as

unpaid taxes and then run up the bill to 60 000 and make him pay that

before he could sue to get the old amount back with the 800 800 dollars

and of course we don't know if these are people who could afford to pay the whole thing before they sued

to get it back so this is the way

the game is stacked against taxpayers by the way i should mention that an

excellent book on the income tax judicial tyranny on your income tax by

jeffrey dickstein i've put it up previously

on my website but now i've also made it a kindle book

so if you have a kindle or if you have a kindle app on your smartphone

you can read the book it's an excellent book it it's

uh not too inaccessible for layman although it does

of course it is intended largely for lawyers and accountants and people like that

professionals but you can see how

the court cases proceeded from case to case and never ever at any point

established wages or compensation for labor to be

income subject to taxation they carefully avoided doing that

so his argument and it's pretty good one given the

documentation of the cases he provides is that compensation for labor is not income

definitely get into it but similar arguments could be used for uh

estate inheritance taxes and uh things of that sort

so uh it only takes cases up to 1990.

uh jeff has been under some duress i haven't heard the results but

he was supposed to appear in florida today on a contempt of court action

the judge is trying to put him in jail for six months for making the argument

that the the income tax on compensation for labor

is unconstitutional just for raising the issue

so that's where we are right now i'm i'll probably find out later tonight whether jeff's in in jail for six months

or or what but in the meantime i put his book online and

we're generating hopefully generate some income from it to pay some of his costs

so he just get an example of a of a patriot lawyer one of the few who's willing to

virtually give his life to defending the constitution and the rights of the american people

and he deserves our support does he have a wife and children

uh i'm don't think so i think they're all grown in a way okay

because he had the funds available to no he's having to borrow money just to get to florida

so he's a tough situation yeah fine as well

jeffrey dixty yeah i have an email on the subject

on the assa website does he have friends or family though

well he has friends but most of them are not able to help him

here is the notice on

on the book

okay now what i've been saying

and i didn't have time to prepare for this evening uh how i would have written that lawsuit

i know pretty well how i would write it it would not prevail

but as attorney general they probably wouldn't throw me in jail for contempt of court if i made the argument

hopefully if they tried to we might have a little

standoff for the texas rangers or who knows what might happen

but what i have advised

lawyers close to the case is that they need to have a plan b as it

were that challenges the whole issue

of income tax and withholding

now i don't think we're going to be able to go after income tax on compensation for labor

being unconstitutional but we may be able to challenge

withholding being used in that way i don't follow the difference

well in effect you're using employers to collect insurance premiums

and the the idea would be to attack

not all withholding but just withholding of insurance premiums

and if an insurance premium formed any part of

the money that irs would keep out of the amount withheld

they would have to refund it in other words

they can collect it they might try to collect it directly they can't do it through the employer

it would be a little bit like saying well

let's say that somebody owe the government money

let's say for a parking ticket in a national park

and he had a job okay would it be constitutional

for them to take the with parking the fine for the parking ticket

out of what was withheld by his employer applied to paying this fine and then go

after him for the unpaid taxes

now the way this argument would work is a little bit subtle and i

it'd be difficult to go into all the subtleties in a meeting like this

but it gives you an idea of the way in which

a person has to strategize litigation in order to have a chance to

get a favorable outcome sometimes you'd be very creative

it's a kind of cat and mouse game where you're trying to anticipate everything that the opposition could do

they're trying to anticipate what you would do and you try to anticipate what they would do if they anticipate what

you would do and you keep trying to find ways past

whatever barriers that they might erect in their in their move

now of course eventually you want to run out of moves but at this stage at least there are still a

few moves left now the litigation would primarily be

for political theater the courts are not

going to rule against the government on income taxes or on any of anything else that

the irs tries to collect from people if the irs wants to collect for

child support or uh student loans or

anything else they might want to collect on we face the same problem

so the question is can they commandeer a private employer with that matter state employer because

that's one of the issues here and make him

pull money out for these other obligations

so let's say for example that uh this employer withholds just enough to cover

the regular tax on his compensation for labor

and the irs says no you didn't withhold enough you didn't withhold enough to cover the

insurance or trial support or that parking ticket fine or student loans

or whatever yada yada yada so we're gonna

find you and penalize you maybe throw you in jail for not having without

having held that money

so

the angle that has to be taken then is to examine

that alternative but again you're not going to be able to explore that

until somebody's been injured you actually have to have an employer

who has refused to withhold and been penalized for it and then you have

to he has to go to court there are not very many employers who are going to want to do that

especially either they're too small to fight the government are so big that the

government is one of their customers and they're afraid of losing business

when i worked for home depot i got a pretty strong indication

that somebody probably representing the government

suggested that i be terminated

uh or home depot might lose these big contracts with the government

now i don't know if i got anywhere because i left home depot on a disability

before anything could have come of that but it does illustrate the way these

things can work

so we've discussed a little bit the problem of

litigating this medical bill

now let's discuss a little bit my approach of

nullification now with members of the state

legislature and several nullification proponents

mainly that the 10th amendment center have been advocating is just legislators

passing bills opposing

this that or the other provision of the health care bill or any other federal legislation that they

want to try to nullify well if all the bill does is simply

express disapproval or objection that accomplishes nothing

if you try to arrest a federal agent that's not going to work

for example what happens if let's say a federal agent

commits a crime within a state he uh

let's let's say he pulls his gun and accidentally shoots an innocent bystander

and maybe he wasn't so unintentional maybe was the guy was his rival for this girl or

somebody to decide to eliminate his rival anyway he's suspected of murder

so the local local va arrests has him arrested

tries to prosecute him now what's going to happen in that case

well before the agent even hits the jail

a department of justice lawyer is going to file a

notice of removal in state court

that's a very simple pleading it just says removal

and to the federal court and i've done it myself

i've removed a case from state court to federal court just you just file it it's automatic

at that point the state court is stuck it cannot do anything more with that case

so then you have to wait for federal court to decide what he wants to do with it

well the federal court can either hear it or they can remand it back to

the state court or they could dismiss it in state court in other words they could say it's

a invalid case you know it's dead but it was killed in federal court not a

state court

but federal courts regularly do with federal agents is they

dismiss the case on grounds that the agent was on duty

and therefore enjoys official immunity

now at that point if he did commit murder who's going to prosecute it

well the u.s attorney could under 18 usc 241 and 242

but he probably won't it's more likely he got a ripper brand says yeah

you know you've got to be more careful get some training in this use of your weapon

you know don't go around shooting people that you know might be rivals for your girlfriend you know

and maybe or maybe give you a one-week suspension with pay

that's the way the federal government works that's what they did with lon horiuchi

who killed wiki vicki weaver and her child

uh in the in the ruby ridge incident the guy

was a sniper he pulled the trigger

killed vicky the local d.a

tried to prosecute him removed to federal court and immediately dismissed

so this kind of thing happens all the time so you're saying that's what's going to

happen to a nullification approach if it was taken well to attempt to arrest the federal agent

okay that approach will not work and if somebody tried to do it

they could be arrested for obstruction of justice five to ten years in the federal penitentiary

so needless to say that's an avenue of redress that isn't

really going to be available

the only thing that can really be done is for people

in a state to refuse to cooperate

with federal agents when they try to do something unconstitutional

um they can for example refuse to talk to them

don't answer any of their questions they can uh if they sit on a jury refuse

to convict if they are

state officials or contractors

they can refuse to cooperate with the feds saying we don't we're not going to give

you any information we're not going to talk to you we're not going to work with

you we're not going to go on uh raids with you we're not going to have

any fusion centers with you okay if you want to pursue this you're going

to do it entirely on your own and oh by the way uh our public owned utility is no longer

going to be providing you with electricity water sewer or gas

if you want to have an op and office here in texas i guess you're going to have to truck

all those things in

and we're not going to keep any of your prisoners in our jails uh

yeah we just we're just not gonna work with you and if they did that's enough of that

sort of thing very diligently eventually

the feds would probably have to back down they cannot really afford to do most of

what they do without the cooperation of local people

at some point it becomes untenable

unless it's a really really important issue the chances are that

nullification of the federal income tax and collection of it

would probably be too big of one to tackle when the feds might very well sending

the army and the marines and you know tanks and uh

bombers and some something like that if if the income tax were in the issue

but for most other lesser issues probably not

so you gotta pick your battles now

what i have proposed and i'm having trouble getting support for frankly

is what i call a federal action review commission

now the problem with that name is that it's the acronym is farc which is the

name of a guerrilla group in colombia he would otherwise make a good a good

acronym call it nullification commission for for

sure the idea is to create a grand jury

23 members but selected not just at random from a

population but after a screening process they would select for

people with some legal education but not lawyers not judges

not government employees and not somebody people on pensions

so what the nullification commission would be

empowered to do would be to hear citizen complaints about federal actions being

unconstitutional and they wouldn't necessarily have to be

injuries that they had suffered it could be prospective injuries it could just be

general violations of the constitution that hadn't affected anybody yet

the grand jury can hold hearings on anything

anybody can testify to word one on any issue whatsoever

there are none of the restraints that courts seem to feel they have

so and of course a grand jury does not have to

reach a decision on the basis of a single complaint

they can hear a complaint and a few months later hear another complaint on the same subject

each time gathering some more evidence and then another and another another and gradually build up a case file

on this issue and at some point they might feel it's appropriate

to come up with a finding a report for grand juries called a resentment

in which they might say something like you know we have reviewed the evidence and find that

uh such and such an act activity on the part of the federal government

is without constitutional authority

now under the commission proposal that would trigger

non-cooperation by the entire state

state officials agents and contractors would at that

point all be forbidden to cooperate with the federal government on the exercise of that power

they would be shielded from any kind of reprimand or

reassignment or firing or anything else for violating

a federal statute in that situation if that's what it involved

private citizens would also be encouraged not to cooperate

and part of the proposal is also to create a fund

state senator king call it a kind of civil defense fund which would pay the lawyers for any

private citizen who tried to stand up to the feds on that issue

so even if he lost and went to jail or whatever at least his

lawyers would be paid his kids would be taken care of

his law his mortgage would be paid you know his basic expenses would be met he'd be supported

the state couldn't go in representing him but he could do everything short of that and pay all of his bills

so with this kind of comprehensive

system in place we could begin going after

all kinds of unconstitutional federal actions i would recommend

starting small i'm not sure that health care itself

is even the first one you'd want to start with but obviously if a lot of people are demanded that

you know we could could hardly avoid it but uh

what you want to do is to pick pick at a few

get the feds to back down on those then nibble you know keep nibbling away

at them you take a bite out here bite out there

you keep biting back you keep biting biting biting until they're pushed back and

back and back and back anyway that's my approach to the matter

basically it's civil disobedience but organized at the state level

who convenes grand juries well once appointed they convene themselves

who appoints grand juries normally a court appoints a grand jury

but not necessarily it could be convened by a sheriff or other official what my proposal contemplates

is grand juries being selected by previous grand juries

so you'd have an initial grand jury whose only job would be to convene the real grand jury

and each one thereafter would supervise the convening of the next one

so what i the process that i envisioned

would start out by having the grand jury of each county

because normally they're organized by county some some counties have more than one

the district court each has one but for each grand jury in the state

nominates one person to be in a pool for the

nullification commission and uh

so now we've got at least 254 or more maybe 300 maybe 400

uh nominees into this pool within texas within texas

and what they would do in turn is conduct a sortition process

to narrow their numbers down to some smaller number let's say 200

230 some such number and they might though the surviving ones might decide

among themselves you know who is the best qualified to

sit on this commission who knows the law best but is you know

has no connections uh that could be used to you know and duly influence him

and finally you whittle it down to about 230 and select the last 23 at random

and those are your grand jury which initially

a third of them would serve for

four months a third for six months and a third for eight months

and then thereafter they would go on a rotating cycle with a third being selected every six months

so if there'd be a certain amount of turnover all the time and they would have a staff they'd be

able to hire assistants to assist them in the workload

and other than that they'd be completely independent they could issue their own subpoenas

enforceable by any court and

keep their own records their own meeting times and places they can meet

electronically if they wish to uh but whatever was convenient with them

but the important thing was that everybody would know how to contact them and how to bring a complaint to them

needless to say if we could get something like this instituted in

at least 10 or 12 states we would begin to have a serious roll

back of federal use for patients

after a while a few states saw it being you know working out well for them

you could have it catching on people in every state demanding we want a nullification commission too

so it can build on itself to build momentum that's the key to any such reform

we're never going to be able to win elections on constitutional subjects

people are just not going to educate themselves to the extent they would have to to do that

people relate to personalities not to complex issues

so that's a good point so we have to find ways to leverage

uh reform that doesn't depend on either

the public being broadly educated or on a special interest group

driving the process and the way you do that is you create an

institution with a dynamic of its own

now of course he would undoubtedly face opposition there'd probably be a pretty strong movement to

to kill it that's one reason that i proposed making it a constitutional amendment

so not not a u.s constitution but a state constitutional amendment

so you try to entrench it that way to keep it from

being killed because it would face intense opposition

we're talking about a you know creating a force for reform that

uh could revolutionize this country

i i really like that idea because it's basically taking the grassroots movement and putting it

inside the actual judicial channel which is where justice is supposed to be realized when it's actually leveraging

the channel appropriately but it's just leveraging the power of the grassroots movement in that channel and starting it

at the state entity levels are really going down yeah really right i mean we might have to work out some kinks but i really do think that is an

area that hasn't really been leveraged i i really do think that's a good idea how do you fund it though

that's the hard part well the key factor is you'd have 23 people

who have been a pinch could fund themselves but i do contemplate they'd have a

budget if they cut off their budget

they can still function all they got to do is hold meetings and issue reports

they can issue subpoenas with you know write it out on a piece of paper and and hand it to the with modern

technology you can actually do it remotely which makes it even tougher to fight it you know that's right

environment so you can leverage it that way

yeah well that would be pretty hard to do yeah the internet is designed to resist

a new thermonuclear war yeah even if the government tried to take it down

they couldn't do it yeah i don't think the government's actually confident no it's not that's a matter of confidence

the internet will always reroute around any interruption well i mean they could they could

they could infiltrate for a long time and identify a whole bunch of ips and make it tough but still

if you the source and destination are going to know who they are and they can always tunnel other ways so you're right i mean the internet basically is a peer

reviewer network so you can always get to one way or the other yeah i'm working with several groups now

we're developing mesh networking now mesh networking is a technology in

which you have a number of independent nodes these could be wireless nodes that's

what's contemplated and whenever two of them are in within range

of one another they establish a local area network automatically

and if the third joins in he gets connected to one of them and they are able to relay packets

through these nodes on the network to get between any two of the nodes on the

network and in principle you could have a mesh that spanned the entire continent

so you could have a wireless replacement for the

trunk the trunk backbone backbone uh internet

now it would be bandwidth limited yeah i don't think you'd want to try to send video over it

but uh for email or texting or you know things of that sort it would

work but we're we're taking several different approaches we have one that's used local

group here that's using we're using ham have a m-band

and others that are using 801 802 11

bands so they're you know wi-fi yeah so there are different approaches to it

but eventually we'll you could take a computer like this one set up with it

and he would be computed communicating with another computer without the trunk interlock net being in

between them just passing back to the packet to pack it or as far as until they are no longer

connected getting back to your original proposal

do you have have you documented that or developed it to put it online anywhere

which one well regarding convenient grand juries or commissions oh yeah

but i've been sending messages to the this forum or since i developed it back in i think

february i guess you're not reading them out of the messages

i guess not well i got it i'll probably have a few here

right here have you shared that with any of the state legislatures i mean

because yeah the texas constitution amendment yeah i mean feedback from

well uh i think that's a nice language berman is the only one whose

vermin and chisholm are the only two that have respoiled my king did too

the problem is getting them to sit still long enough to explain it to them yeah all right these are not

you know let's face it uh our best and brightest

they could take a lot of explaining well then listen if you get voters behind it so if you get a crowd behind it then all

of a sudden they start paying attention yeah that's how they operate so there's a little catchphrase

well what i'm trying to do now is to form a crowd of constituents

so we can start with your own members of the legislature or anybody any of them that you know any

people you know who are constituents of likelihoods the main li

the main ones that are likely is the conservative coalition

i've been mainly working on those on those guys that's a formal group it's a formal group

they have their own website talk with the nationwide no of the state of texas

senator king is one of them uh leo burma is another

you know he's easy enough to find them i don't let's see uh

let's just find them right now let's see here

i have a page of local search engines here

i think they call it a coppice

that is cold asian okay

here phil kane lindar brown dan flynn

are the senators are they reps those are ribs

here i'll hear the board of directors wayne christian linda harper-brown

ken paxton leo berman warren chisholm brandon creighton

dan flynn brian hughes phil king jody

morrison tan parker and larry taylor

so those are the kind of people i've mainly been approaching they seem to be the most receptive

uh i've discussed it with democrats too but obviously they're not gonna

you know be receptive well i think it's a pretty good idea and of

course i don't have to discuss it with libertarians they're all you know they're immediately on board with

pretty much anything i propose but well the problem with republicans is is

they're going to say there was something and they're going to do nothing maybe yeah so

it's a mixed bag yeah our i as the uh

attorney general candidate and kathy glass as the governor candidate are already pushing

this idea but of course she does it in fairly general terms she doesn't try to go into details

you know doesn't have time when i get the chance i try to go into details

well as i've got to leave just a couple minutes on the state but uh

on your next meeting can we at least part of the meeting just maybe kind of follow up on on this a little

bit but yeah which in the action islands but i want to look at this a bit more personally

for already specific actions

their a group a conservative group is trying to focus all these different groups and you

know into action on in the legislature and so they might

be helpful to this cause well send me an email with the details

anywhere i guess well it's on the website well yeah if nothing else i'll do some circulating on that idea once i

find the best remember you can always find me on the internet justice be as long as you know my name

or constitution society or constitution at least on your campaign or something

yeah yeah i'm not hiding under a rock

got my cell phone number right on the home page of the internet

okay any further questions now right now

how about you you've been kind of quiet oh sorry i'll come up with something in a second

put them on the spot well how about can you put up any signs for me yes how many of you need

as many as you can i need i need them put up at

preferably at intersections that were you can't help but see it

with more than one party's signs so that it's kind of you want to take the other parts down

no it's just it's so it's obviously unregula uncontrolled territory

somebody's letting anybody put up signs there yeah it probably isn't going to be a good

idea to put them next to um early voting sites

that's where everybody puts them anyone can put them but you're supposed to come back and take them down

so if you were to put them up there you don't want to be sure to make a job and keep notes of where you put them so you

could go get them later i put one at my office

okay that's

good right nice to have you

is the health care thing voluntary no

no well they're trying to pretend that it's voluntary by saying oh you can keep your existing

system but it's careful it's cleverly designed to

drive the insurance companies out of the health care insurance business

and drive employers out of the business of providing health care insurance for their employees

so basically it's a clever way of hurting everybody toward the single-payer system the government

system they don't call it that they claim that's not what they're trying to do but

the reality is that's about the only thing that can work

uh if the statute is continues to be in operation

what i haven't read the bill i'm sure there's tons of penalties built in

what i i've got my personal employer says he's probably not going to

partake in this thing he'd rather go bankrupt or quit you know leave the country whatever

well well of course some of them are you know there's a penalty involved the penalty is not that much now

initially so a lot of the employer is going to say yeah with it i'll just pay the penalty

i don't think he's going to pay the penalty either because it sounds like it sounds like a

non-volunteer contract you know indentured servitude or

you know you're forced into a contract and i don't know about you i've not

taken many law classes i've taken two but i understand forced contracts are frowned upon in this country

and even if they say it's law like you know you know

what the big law is you know you have to pay taxes that's voluntary well an interesting thing to compare it

to is our uh auto liability insurance programs in the state

yeah now that's been challenged in court the way that they avoid the challenge

it says well this is not really forcing people to buy insurance because you always have the option of

putting up a bond otherwise proving you know that you are

financially able to pay for to cover your liability

so it's really proof of of financial

capability and you have other ways of proving it

so if congress had done something like saying okay we want everyone to

show proof of um ability to pay your health care bills

we don't care how you do it you can have insurance but if you have a government government program

whatever you like but or you can put up a big sum of cash or

buy a bond you know it shows that you've got it in case it's the money is needed

um that would be that might survive the challenge that

auto liability insurance has and can't has survived

the congress didn't do that uh they mandated insurance

so you don't have the option of proving that hey i'm a billionaire

if i get sick i can pay my own bills no they don't allow for that

even a billionaire has to be covered by insurance or a government program

so that's one way in which the congress screwed up

now of course there's a general problem that they're using as their authority

the commerce clause

and in combination with the necessary and proper clause

and if we really wanted to do some good we should try to roll back on that

because that's that especially the precedent in wickard b filburn is the basis for almost all federal

criminal legislation gun control drug control

you know all this stuff because it has a substantial effect on

interstate commerce think lane you know 1942

if you check the messages to this forum i have a message on the subject

which takes you back to my blog which has a bigger message on the subject yeah

my two cents on it is if there's an unconstitutional law which there's a lot

of them how can they be respected

i mean i i don't think i will respect an unconstitutional law i just i'm sorry i'm a free citizen

you know i'm a citizen of texas or whatever but you know that's what the law says to do

is to ignore it and the unconstitutional law does not exist never has never will you can write

anything you want it just does not have authority yeah and that would be what you'd be doing is engaging in civil

disobedience sure the problem is engaging in civil disobedience without being surrounded by

a lot of other people engaging in the same civil disobedience on the same issue well i don't know i

think you would have uh see if they can they can pick you off one at a time if you're in isolation

yeah that's why the nullification commission is to put the whole state

on the same page of civil disobedience so all of a sudden you're not standing

alone you're you've got all of your fellow texans standing beside you

most people are not very brave in isolation

i mean even guys who go off to war very few of them

are able to go into battle alone in a suicide mission

unless they have seriously bonded with their teammates

and when they do that they're doing it for their team they're not doing it for their country or their constitution or

any other abstraction they're doing it to protect their buddies

and even if so if their buddies didn't support what they did

with with words of praise and affection and uh approval

they they probably wouldn't do it the guy who is prepared to stand alone

against the disapproval of the world is very very rare

i know because i've done it a lot but one thing i tell a lot of people

and everybody already knows is the government's bankrupt and i think we've got that as an asset

because eventually it's a rather grim asset because it means we're all bankrupt yeah i mean the federal reserve

notes the monopoly money we use doesn't make any it's not worth the salt it's not worth the paper it's printed on yeah

and i really i don't know it's eventually i'm like i'm very excited

about california being bankrupt because they're going to be the case study for what's going to happen when

one government fails big time because as i understand they they have

enough money through the end of the month and after that like whitman may have to be

financing the state out of her own pocketbook if she wins

yeah i don't know how that's going to work well right now jerry is leading

the the voters of california continue to amaze us all by their

foolishness but if they elect brown i'd say let's invite

meg to come to texas she may need to well i mean if the government can't

fulfill its other financial obligations basic obligations you know paychecks

which it looks like the federal government's going to eventually hit that wall

because it just takes one snap of the world you know someone in china someone in hong kong to call in their notes

and that's going to hit big problems and i think that you know it's good to

watch the case study in california just predict what's going to happen in the future because i really i don't know my boss

and i are debating on what's you know is there going to be social anarchy which that's what he's

suspecting i'm not quite sure because it's hard to cash in iou to pay your

rent to buy groceries of course if everybody's in the same boat then

you can say okay my paycheck bounced

i don't have the rent what are you going to do evict me i mean the constables

quit too because he hasn't been paid you know yeah

well eventually if that happens here the irs collectors you know the jailers

the peace officers you know eventually won't get paid granted texas has got its own balanced

budget but some of the other states in the union don't yeah well texas is about the only

part of the world of its size that's self-supporting and resources yes

if push comes to shove we can shove the rest of the world into the ocean and still survive

what are the steps it takes to do that because most law professors i've spoken to

don't want to get into details on it because i think they're uneducated on the topic well

not since the civil war has a subject come up well i think it's going to eventually rise i hope so

well what is likely to happen is with the collapse of the banks

and you know the first big problem is going to be food

getting food from far from the farm or ranch to the people who need to eat it

so we're going to be having to set up some sort of barter system now some of us are already

working on an alternative to the federal reserve notes

the technique is called loom lwm

and basically what it involves is creating digital certificates

for something it could be gold silver

bushels of wheat hours of labor you know whatever you want

so if you've got it you can create a digital certificate for it

and let's say for example that it's uh an ingot of copper

so you have got an ingot of copper uh you issue

the in the digital certificate to somebody for that ink of a copper you

still keep the ingot because you're now serving as a kind of a

repository for it but somebody else can take get your

digital certificate and it's and exchange it for somebody else's

ingot if he wants what he wants or traded for some a digital certificate

once up back by something else but each certificate is backed by something

you can't duplicate it it's peer-to-peer it's totally secure

and it's basically the idea is that we

create digital certificates for all everything of value that we can

and then start trading them and that could serve as a as the

currency for a new economy of course people would have to have

computers in the internet to make use of this but as long as we've got that

we should be able to sustain a com an economy of commodities and services

but of course only a few people are aware of it now so if if we suddenly found ourselves having to

you know switch to it most people wouldn't know how to do it i personally am not concerned about

bartering i've done it a lot still do it today

i think that's a vital option my big concern would be

i don't know amongst other things um more like fema

i think would be a big concern well of course they might not be being paid either yeah that's what i'm hoping

although the problem is the guys with the guns are probably going to get fed

but of course we have guns too exactly and that's maybe what may be what it

comes down to could it feasibly happen to

get the state removed from the union well i don't think it's worthwhile to

just say we succeed why is that i think it's more a matter of

pulling in the ways in which we are dependent on the

central government or even on other states sort of withdrawing into ourselves

taking care of our own and then if others want to join us in doing that we can cooperate on a

case-by-case basis but in fact it would be

localizing the functions of government and the economy

well that's what the constitution says well and it would be what we would have to do in practice

so eventually it wouldn't be there wouldn't be formal secession there would just be a central

government left there you know you know you know

of writing checks to each other that nobody could catch

while the rest of us would be leading our lives

and maybe we could organize tours to go back to washington d.c and uh say gee

this used to be the seat of government the united states of course they don't have any nobody

pays any attention to them anymore but uh uh uh here they are

you know walking around the the former national capital because of course they can't get gas or

operate any vehicles but here they are walking

my senator representative that covers me is sent me a letter

saying that he wants to get in compliance with the federal government and that scared the hell out of me

because when as a texan said i want to do this to the uh

you know give a thumbs up to dc i've never met one i mean maybe there's a liberal in

austin that i've not met yet but i was trying to think why he would want

to give compliance with the federal law and what the reason i guess there's a barter exchange of money or something

that the commerce clause probably provides i guess transportation dollars or something

was it possible to get instead of would it be feasible to create instead

of employers withholding tax money and sending it directly to the irs to

send it to the state of texas no

not at all no that's they're set up to collect it directly yeah but couldn't you set up an operation to send it to

the states themselves and then send it to the irs well if you send it to the state

state wouldn't first wouldn't know what to do with it and then secondly the feds would just say you haven't paid us

we don't care if you send your money to the state of texas that's your money you do

you know if you do if you want to do that you can but you still owe us

that doesn't help you one bit

i was wondering that could be used as bargaining power before the individual states no

the state can't make you pay them instead of the feds

yeah there are a lot of people come up with a lot of ideas that because they don't really understand how

the system works and they can waste an awful lot of time

you know being excited about let's face it uh bad ideas

you really have to know what you're doing that's why ultimately it comes down to

and if you're not prepared to do all the work of understanding these systems

yourself then you've got to identify someone who does and get behind in

and in all the modesty i don't know of anyone else who understands these things

as well as i do even a lot of my fellow reformers lawyers and scholars and

you know the press the best and brightest in this country most of them are weak on the details

yeah they have not really thought it through but you didn't go to law school didn't

you no i held your mind i thought myself

my formal training is is a math physics and computer science

and i find interestingly enough that it is people with my academic background

who usually get it first

it's not the ones who went to law school

there is no really good substitute for the kind of skills one acquires

as a scientist especially in the hard sciences

mathematics engineering computer science where you're having to

think every day in very rigorous ways most people do not think very rigorously

they're thinking it's very fuzzy and you can't solve these problems with

fuzzy thinking

i'm really curious though like i know our state is superior to the rest because we are we

have a an okay economy and we've got a balanced budget and i'm really wondering if a few other states

have to get bailed out what would happen if the federal even has the power to do

that i don't think we do well eventually they run out of money because that would be private sector

they can only print so much money yeah right now they're into an orgy of printing money yeah and then the

quantity it's not truly printing it's crazy it's created individually yeah yeah digitally yeah

but it's still i don't i don't understand like at what point will the central banking system fail

because it looks to me like it's already failed but then again

it's running essentially on psychology

so the uneducated masses in other words the emperor has no clothes but people are still telling the emperor's

got clothes yeah there are few people who are saying telling the emperor he doesn't have any

clothes but at this point he's saying well maybe i don't but i don't want to admit

it to anybody so all you people just keep telling me i've got clothes and i'll keep telling

you that i've got clothes and don't listen to that fella over there

during the upcoming legislative session i don't know much about texas politics

besides what i study in college because there's a lot not about 90 days

that they're actually 140. okay 140 days that they're they're playing

how feasible is it to get a law passed like how much

effort does it take like if i wanted to get a law proposed and get it to go through the

house well the answer is that if it's just a small thing

like one clause and there's no opposition and you get the support of a key

committee member that may be all it takes

on the other hand if those conditions are not met especially if

you get down to the end of the session i remember this is a redistricting year

yeah so they're there it's going to be very hard for them to get around to your thing

it may slip in or you may have to go through several sessions could take a decade or more

so it can be done but you know if you either have a huge

amount of support or the support of just a team member and no opposition

the trick is having influence with that one key member how do you get that either by

influence or do you have to run elbows appropriately a variety of ways i mean the main guy i

was going to use his high school classmate

and he married a high school classmate of mine so it's like it's an old crony yeah

um i actually know a lot of people in state government i've just been around for so long

and that's part of what works it's just knowing them you know seeing them again and again and

again and again chatting with them and knowing their families and their you know going to

church with them and going golfing with them and you know just these personal relations relationships

they feel confident with you they're more likely to do something for you

of course if you raise enough money to get them elected they are even more comfortable with you yeah

and we're going to have to leave here pretty soon they want us out by 845 so

if you could push that red button there right here in the back yeah