As some of you may have noticed a couple of days ago, I managed to make it over the hill to Laramie, Wyoming despite some questionable weather conditions to attend the 2018 Wyoming GOP Convention as a lowly guest this time — not the delegate I was in 2016 thanks to multiple schedule conflicts earlier in the process.
One of the primary objectives of this convention was to come up with a method of selecting Republican presidential nominees that is actually compatible with the National rules but I don’t recall this objective actually being met and if it did, which plan was chosen. As a guest, I was kinda operating in the blind and it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on among the amendments to the amendments to the resolutions prohibiting amendments, the debate over whether or not the Preamble should consist almost entirely of a complaint against the college’s restriction of the concealed carry of handguns and the bylaw calling attention to rogue rumble strips on Wyoming’s highways — turns out this is apparently a serious issue. Or was that a platform item? I forget…
Despite the above oddities, the convention was fairly sensible. The biggest disappointment wasn’t the anti-Convention of States resolution — I expected it since we didn’t have time to finish business in 2016 and this was one of the items pulled out. The disappointment was in just how much support this resolution had and the paranoid conspiracy theories used to justify maintaining the status quo path toward destruction at the hands of an increasingly bloated government. No wait, that wasn’t NEARLY as disappointing as the fall-back argument “Congress doesn’t pay attention to amendments anyway so why bother?”
So, why bother doing ANYTHING? Why bother voting? Politicians are all corrupt and they’re just going to do whatever they want. Why bother attending a political convention? Politicians don’t care. Conventions are apparently nothing more than a gathering of attention whores with no hope or intention of accomplishing anything. Heck, for a second there I thought I was watching the Libertarian Convention again. I was waiting for someone to use a Point of Personal Privilege to interrupt party business with a harmonica solo or a delegate to tear his clothes off and run around on stage, then the party intentionally chooses a candidate that is guaranteed to lose because who the heck cares — nothing we do makes a lick of difference and we’re having fun doing what we’re already doing. [insert Neil Young’s Prisoners of Rock and Roll]
Okay, enough of the cynicism. Some of us do care. We do have hope and our intention is to succeed. It’s taken over 100 years for the nation to get this far off track, so it’ll probably take about 20-50 years to get it back on track if we don’t give up. We’ve made good progress and chosen a few good politicians. Some that have made it to Congress quickly realized they weren’t going to fix the problem at that level and have joined the Grass Roots efforts instead. Some are still in Congress trying desperately to stay the course.
Right now, I trust most state legislatures to recognize the difference between an open call to amend the Constitution willy nilly, a call to amend the Constitution based on criteria set forth by any number of leftist or big-government groups, or calls to amend the Constitution in a manner that will restore the checks and balances the States once had and the fiscal responsibility Congress hasn’t seen since well before World War I. If the 3/4 of the states that it would take to ratify these amendments wanted that bad to take our rights away, they would have done it a long time ago.
Rant completed… Enjoy!