COS Live! Ep. 243: Michael Farris Rallies in Raleigh

Hello and welcome to COS Live. You can watch the original video of World Cast Live on Tuesdays at 6PM to visit convention mistakes dot com slash pod to learn more. And now here's COS Live. Hello COS supporters. Welcome back to another edition of COS Live. My name is Andrew Lucian. I will be your host for this episode. As you might see Rita Peters, my co-host, also the Senior Vice President for Legislative Affairs. It's not with me today. She is very busy with some very important legislative matters. She'll be back next week. We have a excellent show lined up for you today. First, let us know where you're tuning in from, what state are you watching from, drop us a link in a comment, let us know what your favorite thing about Article 5 is and what you hope to see come out of the convention. We love hearing from all of our supporters. And while you're at it, please send out a share wherever you're viewing from. That's how we help grow the show and how we bring more awareness to Article 5, which is the secret weapon that the Founding Fathers gifted to you and me to reign in and out of control federal government. Well, we have an excellent show lined up. We're going to be listening to a very inspiring speech by Michael Ferris, who is the senior advisor for convention of states. And he's also one of the co-founders. He gave an excellent speech at Raleigh, North Carolina. And we're going to get to that in a few moments. We also have our trivia giveaway with COS Vice President Mike Ruthenberg, which is always excellent. And we are going to go to that first before we get to the speech from Michael Ferris. So Mike, take it away with our Article 5 trivia. Hey, Andrew, it is great to be here. Thanks so much for making this happen today. It's another great week in the life of COS. And it's going to be a really great show. Of course, any time we get an opportunity to hear Michael Ferris speak is a wonderful thing. And it's actually going to be the topic of our, or at least part of the topic of our trivia today. And I don't know if you noticed, but it's a little bit chilly here in Southern California still, but I'm wearing my nice COS fleece. And I'm going to give one away. These things are great. And if you, you know, you still have a little cool spring weather and you want to stay warm, even when it gets a little wet, then you should have one of these. And you can win one if you get the answer to our trivia question right and you get it right first. It's going to be a great question. And many of you, it should seem like incredibly easy. So sharpen your fingers and get them ready to put on the keyboard to type your answer, not just so you can possibly win this cool jacket, but also so you can stimulate conversation that happens as we are doing our live production. And then that means people that you know are more likely to be able to see what's going on here and join in on the fun. So here we go. By the way, and if you don't win, just go to shop, COS, shoot me shopconventionstates.com, shopconventionstates.com, and you can pick up one of these sweatshirts as well. All right, so let's jump into our question of the week. And recently, Convention States co-founder and senior advisor, Michael Ferris, has been speaking at town halls and rallies for COS. And he's been touting two amendment ideas that are absolutely germane under our three pronged Article 5 resolution. The first is a single subject amendment, limiting all congressional legislation to a single subject, which is what most states have, which ends the corrupt practice of omnibus bills. I'm sure you know how ominous omnibus bills are to our freedom. The other idea is an amendment that would require all treaties governing the internal operations of the country that so they could not take effect without three quarters of the states agreeing. So those are the two amendment ideas that Michael has just kind of pro-offered. Remember that it will be the convention that determines what actual amendments come. But these just get your juices flowing. But the question, the question of the day is which prong of the Convention States Article 5 application with these two amendment ideas likely fall under? Remember, stopping a single subject amendment and requiring three quarters of the states to agree to treaties. Which prong, and I'll give you a multiple choice, so it'll come even quicker to you. A, term limits. B, limits on federal power and C, fiscal restraints. So hopefully that answer has already come to you. There's a little bit of intuition there that might make it even easier for you to intuit the answer. But anyway, we're going to let you guys figure that out during the broadcast. And at the end, I'll come back and give you the answer. And hopefully you have won this cool, cozy COS sweater. Anyway, I will be back shortly. Back to you, Andrew. Thanks, Mike. Today we are going to show you a recent convention of states rally in North Carolina that featured Mike Ferris. He gave a very rousing speech. He really got the crowd ignited there. And as you may know, North Carolina is so close to becoming the next state to pass the COS resolution. He was there on April 20th in Raleigh, North Carolina for their surge day and for their rally. So he had a very, it's a very interesting amendment ideas that we could possibly see in a convention when we get to 34 states. Very interesting ideas that would put very strong limitations on the federal government. Because as you know, the federal government has gone well beyond its scope and is doing far more than what the founders ever intended it to do. Let's take a look at this speech on April 19th in Raleigh, North Carolina. But Michael Ferris, I think he is, he's the doer of the impossible. He talks about that sometimes. Nobody thought it could be legal in all 50 states to homeschool. That guy proved him wrong. Start at the homeschool legal defense association. Many of you here that are homeschoolers, you should know that name. So he started the homeschool legal defense association. He's the founder of Patrick Henry College. I saw an article on Fox News a while back how Patrick College, Patrick Henry College is growing tremendously as a conservative Christian alternative to the Ivy League, basically. And so I'm sure, I'm sure Michael would talk, talk to you further about his effort there. And then he co-founded in 2010, no, 22,013 or so, I guess, approximately with Mark Meckler. So Mark Meckler came out of the Tea Party movement, co-founded the Tea Party Patriots. Michael Ferris educated Mark on the benefit of Article 5 and a partnership was born that launched Convention of States. And then in about 2017, I guess, Michael, obviously still a supporter, but went on to become the CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom. And if you don't know who they are, you should know who they are because they wrote the law in Mississippi that got the Bog's case to the Supreme Court and got Roe v. Wade overturned. So like I said, Michael Ferris is the doer of the impossible. And now he's back as a senior advisor to COS, the first of this year, we are all so happy to have Michael Ferris back until I want to introduce Michael Ferris. Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to make sure that everybody can hear me because we feel they're having a little trouble here and everybody over here, we're good. You all here? Are we good? Good. How many of you are baptized? I won't raise your hand no matter what. Okay. All right. Okay. I got that. If you make Baptist jokes, that's okay because I am one. God bless you for being here today. We are here to do something that should have been done a long time ago, a hundred years ago, 150 years ago. I liken the process of Article 5 to raising kids. And I know something about raising kids because my wife and I have 10 kids. Now, we didn't buy them off the street or anything. We had, you know, it was not a blended marriage or anything. It's just we had one kid at a time and we have 10 kids and we have our 30th grandchild on the way. You take over America your way. We'll take over America our way. But if you raise a kid to 18 years old and never once disciplined them, you'd have a mess on your hands. And that's what's going on in the United States today because Article 5 gave the parents, which are the state legislators, the ability to discipline their child, the federal government. The federal government has never been disciplined under Article 5 in the history of this country. And we have a mess in Washington, D.C. We've let Washington, D.C. return to being a swamp because we've never had the state legislators exercise their parental authority. With authority in the Constitution, I contend they have a moral responsibility to do so. You can't have a mixture of responsibility without authority or authority without responsibility. They have the authority and therefore they have the responsibility. If some problem is going on in the federal government, you can blame collectively, not just North Carolina. You can blame the legislators in all the states for failing to do their job under the Constitution. With the authority comes the responsibility. So let's just talk about some current examples of misuse of authority. And I'm going to take you a little deep into international law, which I know none of us want international law controlling the United States of America. I helped kill the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child being ratified in the United States because I didn't think that family policy should be decided by the UN. Americans should make the law for America. Rick Santorum and I, along with Senator Mike Lee, basically killed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, not because we have any animosity toward disability disabilities and laws in that regard, but we think Americans should make the law on disability, not the UN. Should not make the law for us on that subject. But the Biden administration partnered with the World Health Organization to try to bring us a new treaty. I've gone to the UN website. I have a degree in public international law from the University of London, so I can read these treaties and tell you exactly what they mean. I don't blow smoke. I don't exaggerate. I've gone to the not some website from some, you know, blog person or something. I went to the UN's website, printed the treaty, read the intra-it treaty myself, and this is how it works. A treaty becomes the supreme law of the land under Article 6 of our Constitution, and the agency that adopts the treaty gets the authority to enforce the treaty. And so if the United States enters into a treaty on how we do pandemics, it's the federal government that's entering the treaty, and the federal government therefore has the authority to implement the treaty. And so we saw throughout the pandemic of COVID, the states doing various things on COVID response. Some states pretty much followed the advice of Dr. Fauci when he was doing what we call Yada's. That's a fancy term. It means you ought to do this, you ought to do that, you ought to do that thing. So Dr. Fauci would give his Yada's. They'd change by the hour. You know, don't do a mask. Do a mask. Don't do a mask. You know, it's nonsense. It's nonsense. But the states had a choice. The treaty will say, you know, the states that got it right, like Florida did a really good job on on the pandemic, for example. That'd be gone. The federal government would have the entire authority under the general supervision of the World Health Organization, a UN agency. How can we stop this? Because Biden doesn't intend to send this treaty to the US Center for ratification. The United States enters into about 200 treaties every year. And on average, five of them go to the Center for ratification. Five of them. The rest are adopted by what we call the executive agreement process, which Franklin Roosevelt and that era made up out of thin air. And the Supreme Court and the Franklin Roosevelt era accepted that as constitutional. That the president alone by his signature can enter into a treaty that binds the entire country. And they're never going to send it to the Center for ratification. There are two ways to stop this. One is a lawsuit by 34 Republican senators that would challenge the constitutionality of this. It requires to reverse at least one, but perhaps two Supreme Court cases. I've been involved in reversing two Supreme Court decisions in my life. I've tried a lot more, but I've succeeded in reversing two. Row and employment division versus Smith by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. But it's not an easy thing to do. And so we'll try. I'll try personally to do this and to litigate that issue. But we can stop not just this treaty, but we can stop all the use of the executive agreements to override the United States Constitution by the Convention of States. It is the only legitimate way that we can do it and be certain that it's done forever and gone away. We should be saying all treaties, all treaties need to be ratified by the United States Senate by a two thirds majority, none of this executive agreement thing. But beyond that, treaties at the time of the founding fathers were dealing with two topics and only two topics. How one nation treats another nation and how things are governed on the high seas, piracy and things like that. That's it. It was never a treaty that would be permitted to govern the internal affairs of the United States or the internal affairs of any country for that matter. So Americans should make the law for America, Canadians should make the law for Canada, and so on. That's the principle it should be governed around the world. But after the World War II, again, President Frank Roosevelt, it was his initiative that pushed this internal politics kind of treaty and the executive agreement process. And that's what's going on. When we have the Convention of States, when we have the Convention of States, we can have an amendment that says if we're going to have a treaty that governs the internal processes of the United States, not only does it have to have two thirds of the Senate ratify it, it also has to have three fourths of the state legislatures ratify it. And then it would never happen. It would never happen. We get rid of these treaties that have anything to do with the internal processes of the United States. That's the kind of thinking that we need. Now, remember the $1.7 trillion bill that passed last December? So much bad spending, probably 100 different pieces of legislation. If we have a proposed amendment that's germane under our resolution to require a single subject rule in the United States Congress, that bill go away. It had to be broken up into 100 bills. They wouldn't have floor time for all that nonsense. And half of them wouldn't pass if they were straight up. We can stop a lot of bad stuff by a single subject rule. Those are two examples of things that I think would actually sail through the Convention. Now, would I like to do a lot more? Yeah, I would like to do a lot more. The biggest two problems in our Constitution, in fact, it really be fair to say that the Supreme Court does a pretty good job of interpreting the Constitution with two glaring exceptions. The general welfare clause and the commerce clause. The commerce clause was intended to regulate shipping. Some of you are my era. You look like it might be close to my age. And you remember Deon Warwick trains and boats and planes. That's the commerce clause, trains and boats and planes. That's it. And if the train and the boat are the plane is going to go across state lines, then it's interstate commerce. They can't regulate manufacturing. They can't regulate banking. They can't regulate anything in our commerce, except shipping. Commerce clause starts at the loading dock. It ends at the loading dock. That's all commerce is. And all the federal regulation, all of it, every bit of it on any economic topic, including minimum wage, all that nonsense, is unconstitutional by the original meaning of the Constitution. Now, the Supreme Court, of course, has gone the other direction on that. And we could fix that. Now, we may not get all of that done in the first quack, but we have the ability our resolution allows us to fix that. The general welfare clause is similar to know how badly they've abused the general welfare clause. I just have to tell you this. The general welfare clause was taken verbatim out of the Articles of Confederation. And if you think that the general welfare clause in the Articles of Confederation meant that Congress could spend money on any full thing they wanted, then you don't understand history at all. The Articles of Confederation Congress had very, very limited power. And the general welfare clause went out of grant of power. It was a limited power. It says, when you spend money, you're lawfully entitled to spend, you must do it in a way that doesn't do any special favors for anybody. It does. It's for the general welfare, not for some local deal or some deal for some guy or your friend or anything. It was a rule against favoritism. It was not a rule. Spend whatever you want on any top you want. Of course, the Supreme Court got that wrong in a case that's the Butler decision. And like a lot of murder and mysteries, Butler murdered the United States financial system by this crazy decision that said basically, Congress can spend money on things that are not in furtherance of their enumerated powers. We can fix that in the Constitution by a Conventionist states. There is no other way to address the problems of the magnitude that need to be addressed other than by this process. The Founders understood that. That's why they gave it. George Mason stood up with the last week of the Constitutional Convention because the proposal at that point in time was for Congress to propose all the amendments and the states to ratify all the amendments. And Mason said, look at guys. Now, I'm going to translate it into modern English. I don't have an actual transcript because I don't think he said look at guys. And I don't think the Congress said like Doug, but they're going to in just a second. They probably said we hold that truth to be self-evident. But he said, Congress will never propose an amendment that will reduce the power of the federal government. Just won't happen. And that's when they said like, duh. And there was a motion made to change Article 5 to the way it is today and it passed without debate. They just saw the common sense of it and passed it immediately. That's why we have Article 5 the way it is, for the very reason that when the federal government abuses its power, there's an expectation that the states will do what they need to do and stop the federal government from abusing it. Now, there are people that say, we can't do this today because there were a different breed of people in those days. I ask you to go read some biographies. They had great ideas, but these guys were still guys. They were still people. They were still and the Bible teaches us without needing to read any biographies. Every person that's ever lived is a sinner. And they wrote the document with that in mind that everybody is a sinner. And that's why we have federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances because they didn't want any group of sinners having the authority to decide how much power that they themselves should have. They wanted one group of dissenters looking at another group of sinners and using institutional jealousy to say, we're not going to let you get away with too much power. We want some of that for ourselves. We figured that freedom, they figured that freedom would be protected by limited government and institutional jealousy of one sinner looking over the group of another sinner would be the sav- salvation of the nation because they knew they weren't saints. They knew that they weren't some group of archangels or something. They were people with great political philosophy, but they were ordinary people. They were ordinary people and they had courage. That's what they have that's often missing in state legislatures. It's not missing among the Democrats. They have the courage of their convictions. They stand up for what they believe. It's not missing among the people that support the Convention of States. They have courage too. The people, the Republicans that oppose Convention of States are driven almost exclusively by fear. They are afraid of things happening that first of all, the Bible says, God has not given us a spirit of fear but of love and power and a sound mind. We shouldn't be operating from that perspective from the start. But nonetheless, the sound mind tells you, look at the process. Look at how the process works and look at the fact that 38 states have to ratify whatever comes out. There's a lot of checks and balances all the way up to it, but the final check is absolutely without possibility of failing. 38 states will not pass something that's stupid. They will not pass something that's extreme whether it's right wing extreme or left wing industry. It just can't happen. It's hard to do what we're trying to do. It's hard, but it is impossible to do something crazy. And the fear of crazy shouldn't be the basis for people turning and running away. We need to get people to stand for their convictions and have courage. Courage breeds hope. And we need to have hope and courage actually and hope continues to be encouraged among other people. We need the people of this country to stand up, have hope, have hope that we can return this country to a freedom loving country. There's only two people that can decide in an ultimate sense, two agencies that can decide where your kids go to school. If you decide where your kids go to school, you got freedom. If the government decides where you go to school, the government, you don't have freedom. They've got the control. If you decide where you go to the doctor, you have freedom. If they decide where you go to the doctor, you don't have freedom. If you decide how much of your money you get to spend, the more money they take from you, the less freedom you have. That's one kind of a gradation. We're going to have to pay some taxes, but the more they take from us, the less freedom we have. And the the the mortgaging of our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids and generations beyond with the debt is just utterly immoral. They have taken their freedom at a very profound level. Freedom is the ability to make your own decisions and the government doesn't interfere. Religious freedom as opposed to religious toleration. By the way, I hope that none of you ever, ever are tolerant because toleration is below what God calls us to. On a personal level, toleration means, I don't really like you, but I'm going to put up with you. The Bible tells us we're to love people. We're to love people that are not only different from us. We're to love people that hate us. Love is a lot higher standard than toleration. And religious toleration, the toleration acts of William and Mary of 1688, they were, you can differ with the Church of England, but only in five particular areas. And not of your choice, not you don't get any choice you want on those five areas, is choice A or B. It's like a toggle switch, which meant if you differ just a little bit from the Church of England, then we tolerate you. You still have to pay your taxes to the Church of England. You still have to get married only in the Church of England, but other than that, we'll tolerate you. That's not what our country was found on. We were found on liberty, which meant the government had no jurisdiction over the heart, soul, and mind demand. When it comes to the heart, soul, and mind demand, what we think, what we say, what we believe, the government has to stay out entirely because we stood for freedom, not mere toleration. Liberty and love are higher than toleration any day of the week. And we need to be people that are about love and liberty. That's our call. That's our goal. That's our heritage. Ladies and gentlemen, we are really close to getting this done. The House did a terrific job here. Praise God for what the House of Representatives did here in North Carolina. The leadership is to be commended. Our sponsors to be commended. Just great job. Introduce it. I think they said, I got whiplash watching it. They went so fast. It was amazing. We are really close in the Senate. And I would urge you to continue to contact, kindly talk to these people. Aggressiveness isn't our friend. Kind persuasion. Continual kind persuasion is our friend. If they're a supporter, thank them. Encourage them. Ask them if there's anything you can do for them. Include and pray for them. Encourage those that are standing for the right thing. And if they're decided, urge them to do the right thing. Urge them to do the right thing. Kindly explain why you support it and ask for their vote. We're very, very close. I'm very hopeful that North Carolina is going to be number 20. I have been in the legal political world full time since November of 1980. Actually a couple months before that, since 1980. A long time. I was six. I was married and had three kids. But I've been in this full time a very long time. And there are a lot of things that I've been allowed to do by God's blessing and encouragement and grace and mercy. The homeschool world that I was able to help lead for. I'm still the chairman of the board of homeschool legal defense association for over 40 years. So that's been a blessing. But I am wired like a structural engineer when it comes to the area of law. That's what constitutional law really is. Structural engineering for our political legal system. And I'm convinced that the right structure is the best chance that we have to get to the right outcome. We have a bad foundation. The outcome is not going to be very good. The Supreme Court obeys the Constitution most of the time, especially for the amendments that have come from the Bill of Rights. You know, people say, well, you amended, they're not going to obey it. Well, that's not true. There's a certain class of lawsuits against state, the 11th Amendment ban. We follow that every day. There's no suits that violate the 11th Amendment. The 12th Amendment changed the process of electing the president. We follow that, you know, every every time the 13th Amendment ban slavery. So every still ban the 14th Amendment guaranteed equal protection of the law. We guarantee equal protection of the law. 15th Amendment said black people can vote. Black people can vote. 16th Amendment said they can take your money out in income tax. Unfortunately, they still follow that one too. The 17th Amendment said state legislatures no longer decide who was in the Senate. The people decide that. That's how we still do it. The 18th Amendment, let me see. Well, that was prohibition. We repealed that one. And the 19th Amendment said women can vote. Women can still vote. 20th Amendment did something on presidential succession and I forget. But you get the idea. The amendments that we do, we obey them. The amendments that we do, they'll obey. And we can change the structure. We can reduce the power of the federal government. Because whenever the federal government takes away our power. I mean, just one last example, then I'm going to shut up. There are 50 books, 50 volumes. If you printed out the federal code and didn't put annotations or any notes, just 50 volumes of books to publish the entire code passed by Congress. There are over 200 books of the laws passed by the executive agencies. 200 books. The new rule on electric cars is coming from the EPA. It's in those 200 books. The rules on putting abortions into the Obamacare didn't come from Congress. It came from the executive agencies. It's in the 200 books. There's so much bad stuff that happens in those 200 books. We can stop that and go back to Article One, Section One, that says all legislative authority is vested in the Congress of the United States. They say they're delegating their power. They're not delegating their power. They're taking away our right to vote the rascals out who make laws we don't like. We need to stop them from doing this. We're going to undermine the principles that have undermined the framework of limited government. It's time that we bring back limited government because with limited government, we have greater freedom. With greater government, we have less freedom. I don't know about you, but I named a college after Patrick Henry. I stand with him when he said, you give me liberty or give me death. We need to be that kind of people. God bless you. Thank you for being here today. I hope you enjoyed that speech from Mike Ferris. I hope it really opened your imagination to what can be accomplished through an Article Five convention of states. We're all trying to put limitations on the federal government because we believe that American self-governance is more important than having an overbearing federal government. That's why Michael Ferris, Senator Rick Santoram, Mark Meckler, and others worked so diligently to bring about the very first Article Five convention of states. With that, we're going to go over to our Article Five trivia giveaway with the US Vice President Mike Ruthenberg. He has the answer. Thanks, Andrew. I hope you guys had as much fun seeing Michael Ferris as I always do hearing him talk and knowing just the incredible wisdom that lives within that man. I just love to hear him share that wisdom whenever he speaks. If you remember earlier in the show, I gave you our trivia question. I'm also giving away one of these cool, CLS embroidered sweaters, fleece sweaters, and of course, if you win, awesome. If for some reason you weren't the one that got this answer first, just go to shopconventionstates.com and you can pick one up. But here's our question. Recently, our co-founder Michael Ferris, of course, has been speaking in town halls and he's been touting two amendment ideas. Those two amendment ideas, the first one, a single subject amendment at the federal level limiting congressional legislation to a single subject, meaning it would wipe out omnibus bills or multi-subject type bills, which is really a freedom killer for us. The other amendment idea would be to limit the, in any treaties, limit treaties that govern the internal operations of the country from taking effect without three quarters of the states agreeing. And then the question is, which prong of the convention states article five application would these two amendment ideas likely qualify under? It was A, term limits, B, limits on federal power or C, fiscal restraints. And the answer is B, limits on federal power, because that's exactly what those two amendments would do. The single subject amendment would limit Congress's present ability to combine many bills together into a single package. Likewise, a treaty limitation amendment would eliminate the present practice of the executive's ability to make international agreements that infringe on the rights of American people. Now, what you probably like those amendment ideas, I certainly do. And you also know that coming up in August, we have a simulated convention and it'll be really interesting to see what comes up there to show how well this process works. But if you want to learn more about the amendment process, you want to learn more about article five, just go to conventionstates.com and you'll be able to study up on the body of work that not only Ferris has done, but people like Rob Nadelson and many other scholars have bodies of work on conventionstates.com. Anyway, that's what I've got for today. I hope you were the winner. Otherwise, I'm going to turn it back over to you, Andrew, to wrap up the show. Thanks, Mike. What we do this show every week to reach, teach and activate supporters, just like you, we want to empower you with the gift that was given to you by the founding father that's found right there in article five of the Constitution. Article five allows you to call for a convention of states when a federal government fails to act. It allows the states to come together to amend the US Constitution. So far, 19 states have passed. We need 34 to get there. So we need you in the fight for liberty. Go to conventionstates.com and hit the take action page. If you're ready to get involved as a self-governing activist, as a self-governing citizen activist who wants to see a better America, make sure that you also check out our podcast page. You can see wonderful content created by our own Rita Peters. You can see content created by Mark Meckler and several others. Go to conventionstates.com forward slash pod to get more information. We received several five star reviews and that helps us really grow the show. So go ahead and check out our content over there. Please also make sure that you are subscribing to all of our social media pages. You can find us on RumbleMeWeY YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Truthsocial and Instagram. Make sure that you're checking out the Battlecry with COS co-founder Mark Meckler. It's on every Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. We'll see you next Tuesday at 6 p.m. Eastern Time for another edition of COS Live. We've got a country to say so let's get to work. This has been the podcast version of COS Live. Check out more content at conventionstates.com slash pod. Thank you for listening.