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Meckler reports that he was "in Washington D.C. meeting with a bunch of folks last week" and is optimistic that "there is an appetite growing" among Republican legislators to support an Article V Convention of States to propose amendments to the Constitution.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-conservative-networks-backing-anti-quarantine-protests/2020/04/22/da75c81e-83fe-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html

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Politics

The anti-quarantine protests seem spontaneous. But behind the scenes, a powerful network is helping.

Protests with honking horns, anti-shutdown signs and angry Americans continued in Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin on April 18. (The Washington Post)]

By

Isaac Stanley-Becker

and

Tony Romm

April 22, 2020

The ads on Facebook sounded populist and passionate: “The people are rising up against these insane shutdowns,” they said. “We’re fighting back to demand that our elected officials reopen America.”

But the posts, funded by an initiative called Convention of States, were not the product of a grass-roots uprising alone. Instead, they represented one salvo in a wide-ranging and well-

financed conservative campaign to undermine restrictions that medical experts say are necessary to contain the coronavirus — but that protesters call overkill and whose economic fallout could damage President Trump’s political prospects.

A network of right-leaning individuals and groups, aided by nimble online outfits, has helped incubate the fervor erupting in state capitals across the country. The activism is often organic and the frustration deeply felt, but it is also being amplified, and in some cases coordinated, by longtime conservative activists, whose robust operations were initially set up with help from Republican megadonors.

Protesters assemble near the Texas State Capitol during a recent demonstration April 18 in Austin.

]

The Convention of States project launched in 2015 with a high-dollar donation from the family foundation of Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican patron. It boasts past support from two members of the Trump administration — Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development.

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It also trumpets a prior endorsement from Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Floridaand a close Trump ally who is pursuing an aggressive plan to reopen his state’s economy. A spokesman for Carson declined to comment. Cuccinelli and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.

The initiative, aimed at curtailing federal power, is now leveraging its sweeping national network and digital arsenal to help stitch together scattered demonstrations across the country, making opposition to stay-at-home orders appear more widespread than is suggested by polling.

“We’re providing a digital platform for people to plan and communicate about what they’re doing,” said Eric O’Keefe, board president of Citizens for Self-Governance, the parent organization of the Convention of States project.

A longtime associate of the conservative activist Koch family, O’Keefe helped manage David Koch’s 1980 bid for the White House when he served as the No. 2 on the Libertarian ticket.

“To shut down our rural counties because of what’s going on in New York City, or in some sense Milwaukee, is draconian,” saidO’Keefe, who lives in Wisconsin.

Polls suggest most Americans support local directives encouraging them to stay at home as covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, ravages the country, killing more than 44,000 people in the United States so far. Public health officials, including epidemiologists advising Trump’s White House, agree that sweeping restrictions represent the most effective mitigation strategy in the absence of a vaccine, which could be more than a year away.

White House aides, outside groups launch effort to reopen economy

Still, some activists insist that states should lift controls on commercial activity and public assembly, citing the effects of mass closures on businesses. They have been encouraged at times by Trump, whose attorney general, William P. Barr, said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that the Justice Department would consider supporting lawsuits against restrictions that go “too far.”

Further afield, the protests have been encouraged by some of the president’s allies outside the White House, including Stephen Moore,once considered for a top post at the Federal Reserve.

The swelling frustration on the right coincides with major policy changes in some states, especially those with Republican governors. Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee have begun relaxing their restrictions in recent days after bowing to pressure and imposing far-reaching guidelines.

The protests are reminiscent in some ways of the tea party movement and the demonstrations against the Affordable Care Act that erupted in 2010, which also involved a mix of homegrown activism and shrewd behind-the-scenes funding.

For the Convention of States, public health is an unusual focus.It was founded to push for a convention that would add a ­balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. That same anti-government impulse is now animating the group’s campaign against coronavirus precautions.

“Heavy-handed government orders that interfere with our most basic liberties will do more harm than good,” read its Facebook ads, which had been viewed as many as 36,000 times as of Tuesday evening.

Asking for a $5 donation “to support our fight,” the paid posts are part of an online blitz called “Open the States,” which also includes newly created websites, a data-collecting petition and an ominous video about the economic effects of the lockdown.

The group’s president, Mark Meckler, said his aim was to act as a “clearinghouse where these guys can all find each other” — a role he learned as co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group also active in the tea party movement, is seeking to play a similar function, creating an online calendar of protests.

“The major need back in 2009 was no different than it is today — some easy centralizing point to list events, to allow people to communicate with each other,” he said.

Meckler, who draws a salary of about $250,000 from the Convention of States parent group, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service, hailed the “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.”

So far, the protests against stay-at-home orders in states including Washington and Pennsylvania have captured headlines and drawn rebukes from some governors and epidemiologists. Experts say a sudden, widespread reopening of the country is likely to worsen the outbreak, overwhelming hospitals and killing tens of thousands.

The protesters so far have not aimed their ire at Trump, though it is his administration’s experts whose guidelines underlie many of the states’ actions.

Trump’s public comments — including his recent tweets calling for supporters to “liberate” states including Michigan, a coronavirus hot spot — have catalyzed some of the broader public reaction. Following those tweets, tens of thousands of people joined Facebook groups calling for protests in states including Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the efforts are coordinated by a trio of brothers who typically focus their efforts on fighting gun control.

Pro-gun activists using Facebook groups to push anti-quarantine protests

In recent days, conservatives have set their sights on Wisconsin, where a few dozen protesters turned out at the Capitol to air their frustrations with Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, after he extended his state’s stay-at-home order until late May. Ahead of the demonstration, Moore, the Trump ally, revealed on a live stream that he was “working with a group” in the state with the goal of trying “to shut down the capital.”

Moore, who served as a Trump campaign adviser in 2016, said he had located a big donor to aid in the effort, though he never elaborated. “I told him about this, and he said, ‘Steve, I promise to pay the bail and legal fees for anyone who gets arrested,’?” Moore said in the video. He likened his quest to the civil rights movement, adding, “We need to be the Rosa Parks here and protest against these government injustices.”

Moore, who has also worked at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In Michigan, among those organizing “Operation Gridlock” was Meshawn Maddock, who sits on the Trump campaign’s advisory board and is a prominent figure in the “Women for Trump” coalition. Funds to promote the demonstrations on Facebook came from the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is headed by Greg McNeilly, a longtime adviser to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

McNeilly said the money used to advance the anti-quarantine protests came from “grass-roots fundraising efforts” and had “nothing to do with any DeVos work.”

Many of the seemingly scattered, spontaneous outbursts of citizen activism reflect deeply interwoven networks of conservative and libertarian nonprofit organizations. One of the most vocal groups opposing the lockdown in Texas is an Austin-based conservative think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which also hails the demonstrations nationwide.

“Some Americans are angry,” its director wrote in an op-ed promoted on Facebook and placed in the local media, telling readers in Texas about the achievements of protesters in Michigan.

The board vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, oil executive Tim Dunn, is also a founding board member of the group promoting the Convention of States initiative. And the foundation’s former president, Brooke Rollins, now works as an assistant to Trump in the Office of American Innovation.

Neither Dunn nor Rollins responded to requests for comment.

The John Hancock Committee for the States — the name used in IRS filings by the group behind the Convention of States — gave more than $100,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2011.

The Convention of States project, meanwhile, has received backing from DonorsTrust, a tax-exempt financial conduit for right-wing causes that does not disclose its contributors. The same fund has helped bankroll theIdaho Freedom Foundation,which is encouraging protests of a stay-at-home order imposed by the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little.

“Disobey Idaho,” say its Facebook ads, which use an image of the “Join or Die” snake woodcut emblematic of the Revolutionary War and later adopted by the tea party movement.

In 2014, the year before it launched theConvention of States initiative, Citizens for Self-Governance received $500,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation,a donation Meckler said helped jump-start the campaign. Mercer declined to comment.

While groups and individual activists associated with the Koch brothers have boosted this far-flung network, Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity advocacy group, sought to distance the organization from the protest activity, which she said was “not the best way” to “get people back to work.”

“Instead, we are working directly with policymakers, to bring business leaders and public health officials together to help develop standards to safely reopen the economy without jeopardizing public health,” Seidel said.

But others see linkages to groups pushing anti-quarantine uprisings.

“The involvement of the Koch institutional apparatus in groups supporting these protests is clear to me,” said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University whose research has focused on climate lobbying. “The presence of allies on the board usually means that they are deeply engaged in the organization and most likely a funder.”

Brulle said the blowback against the coronavirus precautions carries echoes of efforts to deny climate change, both of which rely on hostility toward government action.

“These are extreme right-wing efforts to delegitimize government,” he said. “It’s an anti-government crusade.”

Reconsidering the Wisdom of an Article V Convention of the States | The Heritage Foundation

John Malcolm

@malcolm_john

Vice President, Institute for Constitutional Government

John is Vice President for the Institute for Constitutional Government and Director of the Meese Center and Simon Center.

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Convention of States Action - SourceWatch

7 24

convention of States Action is a 501 (c)(4)[1] project founded by Citizens for Self Governance (CSG). It is often referred to as simply "Convention of the States" (COS) or "the Convention of States Project." CSG, founded by Eric O'Keefe and Mark Meckler, is "heading up" the to push for a constitutional convention in order to severely restrict federal power. Meckler described his group's goals to "stop the federal spending and debt spree, the power grabs of the federal courts, and other misuses of federal power."[2] According to the organization's handbook, it aims to "go AROUND the Washington political establishment and rein in the out-of-control federal government PERMANENTLY" (emphasis from source).[3]

Common Cause called COS "a more far-reaching plan" than an Article V convention, advocating for "a complete change in how the federal government operates." According to The Dangerous Path report, COS "has deep ties" to the tea party movement, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch brothers."[4]

Potential outcomes range from redefining the Commerce Clause to prohibit Congress from enacting protections against child labor laws, to adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. CSG has promoted this strategy in workshops at the 2012 and 2013 annual conference of ALEC, which has published a "how-to" manual for an Article V constitutional amendment and offers a "model" resolution, the "Balanced Budget Amendment Resolution."[5]

"Various activist groups have sought to amend the constitution on specific points through an Article V convention before, but few have been as well-funded or as ideologically driven as the Convention of States Project, steeped in evangelical Christianity and backed by millions of dollars in dark money. Between 2011 and 2015, the group’s budget more than tripled to $5.7 million—buoyed by donations from the Mercer Family Foundation and various donor-advised funds linked to the Koch brothers," Brendan O'Connor reported in June 2017. Arn Pearson of the Center for Media and Democracy said “Convention of States is a much more radical approach to a constitutional convention... Their budget has increased dramatically. This is their effort to push the state agenda as far as they can while they hold peak power.”[6][7]

O'Keefe and Meckler also run the related non-profits Convention of States Foundation and CSG Action.

Contents

News and Controversies

Stance on Black Lives Matter and Transgender People

In a June 2020 edition of his video blog The BattleCry with Mark Meckler, Meckler said that "Black Lives Matter as an organization is evil. It is anti-American, it is anti-nuclear family; they say this on their website. It is pro-transgender- it's a mental illness by the way, you can't be pro-mental illness it's a terrible thing." [8] Meckler also told viewers that there is a danger in labeling ANTIFA or BLM a terrorist organization because "most business insurance policies have an exception, in other words they don't cover terrorist incidents. And so that would mean if a business gets burned down and they've been declared a terrorist organization, no insurance coverage, so we've got to watch out for what we ask for."[9]

In response to Black Lives Matter protests around the country, Meckler told his viewers in July of 2020 that "I'm sick of these thugs and these hooligans, whatever you want to call them, criminals, radical elements in society, Marxists, whatever you want to call them, running wild in our society, running rampant in our society."[10]

COVID-19 Reopen Protests

In April of 2020, Convention of States helped coordinate protests against COVID-19 lockdowns.[11] COS launched the website Open The States which allows users to organize on online forums and petition state and federal officials. According to Politico, in a COS Facebook livestream Meckler told viewers that "Facebook…[is] literally working with the governors to find out what the policy is and they're trying to shut [us] down... So what we're trying to do is we're trying to create other ways to communicate with people about what we're doing."[12]

Convention of States Holds First "Leadership Summit"

In August 2019, Convention of States held its first "Leadership Summit" in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.[13] That event featured many right-wing speakers including Fox & Friends' Pete Hegseth, Wallbuilders' David Barton, Charles Cooper, Eric O'Keefe, Rob Natelson, Tom Coburn, and Mark Levin.

Emerging Leaders Program

COS hires college students and high school seniors for an internship program called the "Emerging Leaders Program." In an interview by PragerU, all of the Students were from Hillsdale College. The interns work remotely, as COS does not have an office space.[14]

Claims Medicare-for-All is Why "we need to call an Article V Convention of States"

Following the first congressional hearings on Medicare-for-All, a proposal in its current iteration put forth by Rep. Pramila Jayapal[15] COS claimed that "Nationalized healthcare" is "why we need to call an Article V Convention of States." The COS argument is that "the Founders never imagined that the federal government would control industries as massive as our healthcare system -- or any industries at all" further stating that an article five convention should be called to so that the United States can return to the "Founders' original vision."[16]

Target States

In a Facebook live video mid-April 2019, COS founder Mark Meckler said "North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan" in regards to which states COS is "shooting for right now."[17]

COS Plan

COS no longer hosts their plan on their "about" page. An archived version of that page states that the plan "is twofold." The first step listed is to get 34 states to pass resolutions to call a convention of states on the same subject. "We are working with state legislators around the country to call a convention for a specific subject: Limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government." The second step is to recruit 100 citizens in 40 states "who are ready to contact their state legislators in at least 75% of the state legislative districts."[1]

Ties to Conservative Groups and Politicans

The leadership of the COS is staffed with alumni of various conservative organizations.[18] Meckler is a founder of the Tea Party Patriots and writer at The Daily Caller. O'Keefe is a founding Board Member of the Institute for Free Speech, the Wisconsin Club for Growth and numerous other conservative groups. Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint both serve as senior advisors to COS. DeMint resigned from the Senate to become the president of the Heritage Foundation but was ousted after failing to resolve issues to the satisfaction of the board.[19] Coburn is a Republican politician who has been called "one of the real far-right guys" for his stances as "a top anti-abortion crusader," proclaiming "I am a global warming denier" and fearmongering over what he calls the "gay agenda" alongside austerity budgeting.[20][21][22] Coburn joined the Manhattan Institute in 2016 as a Senior Fellow.[23]

COS boasts endorsements of its ideas from Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Gov. Greg Abbott, Rand Paul, Gov. Sarah Palin, Ben Shaprio, Sen. Marco Rubio, Charlie Kirk, James O'Keefe, Dr. Ben Carson, Sen. Ron Johnson, David Horowitz and other conservatives.[24]

Ties to the Council for National Policy

As of September 2020, Convention of State Action's Mark Meckler was a "Gold Circle" member of the Council for National Policy.

Council for National Policy

The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a secretive, Christian Right organization of funders and activists founded in 1981 by activist Morton Blackwell, commentator Paul Weyrich, direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye. Anne Nelson's book about CNP, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes how the organization connects "the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives.”

CNP membership as of September 2020 is available here.

Mock Constitutional Convention

As of 2023, the Convention of States has held three “simulation” constitutional conventions.

2016

Convention of States hosted a three-day simulated constitutional convention in September 2016 in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Thepromotional video, invoking a sense of nostalgia, describes the city as the place "where liberty was born". A nearly seven-hour video of the "historic simulation" is available on the organization's YouTube channelhere. The mock convention passed amendments related to right-wing agenda items, easing the process to repeal federal regulations, requiring approval to increase the national debt, imposing congressional term limits, repealing the 16th amendment, limiting the Commerce Clause and requiring a supermajority to impose federal taxes.

2023

In August 2023, the Convention of States held its third mock convention, once again in Colonial Williamsburg. At the end of the three-day mock convention, delegates adopted six “Official Proposals,” all of which are designed to weaken the federal government and lock in conservative political controls.[25] The majority of the proposals adopted at the mock convention sought “to curtail the federal government’s discretionary spending authority, land ownership rights, ability to regulate interstate commerce — and, most radically, power to enforce any federal law or regulation with which the majority of state legislators disagree.”[25] The convention also adopted proposals that would limit the number of justices to the current nine as well as impose term limits for Congress members.

Convention of States Article V Application Gaining Momentum

In March 2014 the Convention of States application was passed by the state of Georgia, making it the nation's first. During the 2017 legislative session, COS introduced wide-ranging resolutions calling for a broad convention to limit the powers of the federal government in 24 states and won passage in four, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota, and Texas, bringing the total number of states to pass COS resolutions to 12, as of June 2017. Most of the states that have passed Convention of State resolutions are in the deep south, prompting some critics to call it the “New Confederacy.”[7]

Funding

Convention of the States Action is not required to disclose its funders, but some of COSA's funding sources can be identified through other organizations' IRS tax filings. A December 2019 Financial Report states that, "Two donors accounted for $2,471,000 (approximately 36%) of the Organization's total support during 2019."[26] Through an examination of IRS filings, additional funders of related non-profits Convention of States Foundation and CSG Action have also been uncovered and are available on their respective Sourcewatch pages.

Core Financials

2022[27]

Grants Distributed

2021[28]

Grants Distributed

2020[29]

Grants Distributed

2019[30]

2018[31]

2017[32]

2016[33]

2015[34]

2014[35]

Personnel

As of June 2022:[36]

Board of Directors

As of December 2022:[27]

Contact Information

Employer Identification Number (EIN): 47-2245708

Convention of States Action

5850 San Felipe

Suite 580A

Houston, TX 77057

Phone: 540-441-7227

Email: info@conventionofstates.com

Website: https://conventionofstates.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/conventionofstates

Twitter: https://twitter.com/COSProject

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC0eXtGEMvjxpdYQl2LUiVw

Articles and Resources

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