Rescinding Utah's Call for a Con-Con

by Larry Garske (Utah)

Remarks given at the Barbecue of the IAP National Conference, July 14, 2001, Kearns (Salt Lake City), Utah.  Larry Garske is a former officer and current Advisor of the national Independent American Party. 

[Ed note:  Because of a strong wind that arose at the barbecue, and particularly during Mr. Garske's speech, we were unable to transcribe some parts of his remarks.]

I will bring a little sunshine to this [strong windy weather]. Anyway, I'm speaking today actually to take the place of my wife. She was instrumental as the Chairman of the effort to rescind Utah's call for a Constitutional Convention. Let me just give you a little background on that. At the time, I was a coordinator for the John Birch Society, so I was not able to be involved in that originally. Although I was the one that coordinated the effort.

It was an interesting and special experience because we knew that 30 of the 32 required states -- I believe it was -- had called for this convention. And it was able to roll back by four. But it had been some time since anyone had rolled it back.

What happened, was in the middle of the night, I was awakened up, and a voice come and said, "Larry, go get the Constitution Convention." So next, I started digging around and looking through my files trying to find some information. And we found that it had been tried in Utah some six or seven years before. I got a list of the legislators who had voted in favor. And there were still four of them left in the Utah legislature.

Anyway, we contacted those four. And of course, they weren't too happy. What happened, we found out that the Republicans would not support this. It was the Democrats in the state legislature that were willing to sponsor this. We went to our legislator and gave them the information on this.

We told him that he was going to get phone calls on this. And we went around and in less than an hour, we got 30 people to call him on the telephone to get him to sponsor it. And so, Rick Span, a good Democrat, liberal way up there -- he had never sponsored a bill before in the legislature. So we had to go up and show him how to do it. So he went to a man in the senate -- and that senator was the one who was sponsoring a hate crime bill -- I mean, that's how liberal he was. Yet, he was in favor of this and was willing to spearhead it.

So we were able to get people in each legislative district to personally go to their legislators and inform them on this piece of legislation. It was a tremendous thing. In fact we got a three-day write-up in the Bulletin which said there was a 100 to 1 chance that this would ever pass in Utah. And yet, there was a two-page article, I believe, in the New American magazine.

The thing that happened, as things unfolded, there were a couple of things that came to light that we might benefit from. The greatest obstacle that we had to work through, in my estimation, was pride, pride -- get the Democratic legislators, or the Republican ones. And they said, there's no hope. The guy is an idiot. Or I'm too bashful.

But we had to humble ourselves. And go out and do the things we found out people are people. They respect our opinions. And the other thing, is to draw upon the powers of the Divine. We had that guided direction because our cause is true. And we were willing and able to abide by the cause that we had. And accept and overcome the trials that sometime cause us not to do the things we should. We were successful.

Now I'm just going to tell you that I'm really glad I've got a good wife who helped on that. And all the people -- we got people from all over the state of Utah who helped rescind that call for a Constitutional Convention. The thing is, we have the opportunity that Will [Christensen, a previous speaker] mentioned earlier to accomplish other things throughout our legislators and Congressmen -- maybe its not in the name of the Independent American Party, but its in the name of the Constitution and the founding fathers and the true principles of liberty.

And we need to learn to work together. We need to learn to work with other groups. We appreciate you.