Thread by @AliAdair22

How many states do "they" have resolutions from in order to call a Constitutional Convention? There are several organizations pushing a call for a ConCon & they don't agree with each other. In fact the main one, Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force doesn't even agree with itself!

In 2016, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) uncovered infighting amongst the many organizations. This resulted in Nick Dranias, a lawyer and former director of policy development at the Goldwater Institute, to be ousted from his job as Director of Compact for America.

Because he argued with the BBATF about the count.
prwatch.org/news/2017/08/1…

And the attorney for Compact for America, Jeff Kimball, claimed they had at most 11—and possibly only 9.
billmoyers.com/story/alec-con…

David Biddulph, Co-Founder of the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force (BBATF) wrote the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has ties to the Koch Brothers, accusing Dranias with launching a "full-on assault of the traditional Article V process."

Because he questioned their count!!!

Then it was 27, now it is 28 (according to BBATF) since Wisconsin passed the resolution in November of 2017.

Then Mark Meckler, President of Citizens for Self-Governance, another pro-ConCon group: "Mr. Dranias is attacking the legal aggregation of the BBATF's applications, and is making ridiculous claims about the alleged cost of a traditional Article V Convention as proposed by COS."

Nick Dranias insisted that ALEC's questionable robust count was important & warned of the risk that Congress would disregard some states' resolutions if not addressed.

"If there is no legal theory that can justify BBATF's position, I personally do believe it would be morally wrong to propagate it—especially to the exclusion of other efforts." Morally wrong? ALEC? Nick Dranias is a constitutional scholar, by the way.

From CMD's General Counsel: "Compact for America's analysis flags important differences in the multiple versions of austerity resolutions passed by the states, and calls into serious question how close the Koch machine is to getting a crack at rewriting the Constitution."

Arn Pearson, CMD's General Counsel, continues "Even if Congress was willing to add them all together, a convention call based on this hodgepodge would be bogged down by court challenges." #NoConCon

Heartland Instiute's policy advisor David Guldenschuh also questioned the old resolutions passed in the 1970s & 1980s. "There exists the question of whether these 16 applications passed primarily between 1976-1983 will aggregate with each other and with modern-era applications."

After David Biddulph and Mark Meckler complained about Nick Dranias, he was conspicuously missing from the July 2017 44th ALEC Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. Was he eliminated?

Nope, still here. Nick Dranias is now a policy advisor and research fellow for The Heartland Institute and president and executive director within the Office of the President of Compact for America Educational Foundation, Inc. but I guess he is quieter.
heartland.org/about-us/who-w…

Meanwhile, BBATF has been stealthily re-passing resolutions in states that originally passed them in the 1970s and 1980s.
But why? They say they have 28!

They don't even believe they have 28! If they are to comply with Nick Dranias, Jeff Kimball, Arn Pearson and other attorneys, they still have to re-pass a lot of resolutions: #Texas, #Colorado, #Nebraska, #Iowa, #Kansas, #Missouri, #Arkansas, #Mississippi, #NorthCarolina...

and #Pennsylvania. Well, we know they are currently trying to pass resolutions in a few of those 10 states.

So, they don't even agree with their own count...28!

ALEC, The Heartland Institute, Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, & the Goldwater Institute have Koch Brothers connections. Compact for America and Citizens for Self-Governance have Tea Party Connections.
sourcewatch.org/index.php/Gold…
sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hear…
sourcewatch.org/index.php/Amer…

The Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch funded the Tea Party movement. David Koch ran for Vice President in 1980 on the Libertarian Party ticket which called for the abolition of Social Security and many other government agencies. "He hasn't changed."
nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opi…

And the Koch Brothers are ticking off their list, one by one:
Highlights: Abolish Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid.

If you want more information about a Constitutional Convention, please check out my pinned tweet:

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At the end of the thread, there are 2 shorter versions: ConCon 101-EZ and ConCon 101-EZ+. #NoConCon