Federal Spending: The Winning Issue

By Vickie Deppe

Last month’s Republican trifecta presents a window of opportunity for Article V advocates to secure bipartisan support for a convention for proposing amendments. Though Democrats are typically more inclined than Republicans to invest power and trust in Washington, the mandate-level victory secured by Donald Trump and his Merry Band of Disruptors is likely to inspire at least some Democratic state legislators to search for what their Republican counterparts have wanted all along: opportunities to insulate their state from federal encroachment.

One area in which Republicans and Democrats should be able to find consensus is federal spending. Our national debt has grown every year since 1957 and has increased by at least a trillion dollars under every president since Ronald Reagan. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has characterized this profligate federal spending as “unsustainable” and “worrisome;” and the Congressional Budget Office reports that income inequality rises with increasing national debt. There are 18 states that do not have some kind of fiscal reform or general application in place to address this problem. Half of these are “donor states:” those in which residents and businesses pay more in federal taxes than their state gets back in federal spending. In all nine, Democrats control at least one chamber of the state legislature.

In its 2024 Prime Cuts report, Citizens Against Government Waste identifies over $5 trillion in “pork” (an appropriation that circumvents established budgetary procedures) over the next five years. Whether they elect to return these savings to taxpayers or use that money to fund local projects, a federal fiscal responsibility amendment would provide donor states with a pathway to keep that money at home instead of having Washington take its cut, then return what’s left with strings attached. A SmartAsset analysis of state remittances allows us to apportion the annual savings to these nine donor states:

California.. $145 billion

Colorado… $16 billion

Delaware… $8 billion

Illinois……….$45 billion

Massachusetts… $35 billion

Minnesota………. $26 billion

New Jersey… $38 billion

New York…… $81 billion

Nevada……… $7 billion

Article V advocates are well-advised to use this window of opportunity—which could close in as little as two years—to prioritize getting applications passed in these “blue wall” states. This will not only get us closer to a convention, but forever dismantle the idea that state-led constitutional reform is something few outside of conservative circles care about. Federal spending is the issue that can bring enough Republicans and Democrats together to get an amendment all the way across the finish line.

Article V News 

Townhall published “The DOGE Initiative is Clearly Needed But It Is Not Enough” by Federal Fiscal Sustainability Chair and former Comptroller General David Walker.

Corporate finance and restructuring expert Michael Eisenband comments on bipartisan aversion to addressing the fiscal elephant in the room in “There Is Something We Should All Agree on After This Election Season.”

MSN picked up “Pete Hegseth’s Radical Push for a Convention of States Raises Concerns,” by JD Wolf. Billed a 2-minute read, the cherry-picked and extraneous information make it feel a lot longer and will leave you wishing you had those 2 minutes of your life back. Democratic interest in an Article V convention pre-dates Mark Meckler’s Convention of States Project, and the Republican trifecta should inspire additional blue state support.

The Phoenix Correspondence Commission will host Dr. Michael Farris discussing congressional rules and facilitating the Article V process on Friday, December 13. Dr. Farris has made many contributions to constitutional governance in the United States. He is the co-founder and Senior Advisor of the Convention of States Project and founding President of both Patrick Henry College and the Home School Legal Defense Fund. He has served as the President and CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom. He has secured eight favorable rulings of the nine cases he has argued before the United States Supreme Court, and argued before eight federal circuit courts and appellate courts in 13 states. He has provided testimony in both the United States House and Senate. To RSVP or find out if your state is represented in the PCC, please contact Executive Director W. Bruce Lee.

Article V Legislative Activity

In Texas, a Convention of States Project application has been pre-filed in the House. HJR 22, a bill repealing a 2017 measure attaching an automatic sunset clause to any and all Article V applications passed by the Texas legislature, has also been pre-filed.

Constitution Boot Camp  

Are you working through the Constitution with your colleagues across the nation? This month we’ll be looking at Checks and Balances, beginning on page 22.

Who Said It? 

We owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States.

Vice-President Kamala Harris