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Where: Schimelpfenig Public Library, 5024 Custer Rd Plano
When: Aug 24, 6:30pm

We'll have updates on our progress in Texas and Nationally on the Convention of States Project.

Our guest speaker will be Tim Harden, President of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility. He will be giving a legislative breakdown of the policies passed in the 88th legislative session and 2 special sessions. He will be focusing heavily on the state budget and property tax relief packages. 

We will have the awesome Convention of States float in the North Texas Fair & Rodeo Parade in Denton, Texas. All welcome to ride or walk with the float. Contact for more information.

Darren York, our State Director for Ministry and Mentoring, was our guest speaker. He talked about the erosion of self-governance in the US, and how our constitution and form of government requires us to practice self-governance. He went into how we cannot rely on Washington DC to solve the issues of federal overreach, deficit spending and career politicians. We need to use the power in Article V of the constitution to reclaim self-governance. You can see the presentation here.

Darren also discussed our active prayer ministry. The prayer ministry reaches out to all our state legislators monthly to pray for them and their staff. If you are interested in helping the prayer ministry, contact Darren at darren.york@cosaction.com.

We had the awesome Convention of States float in the Weston and Plano parade, with close to 40 volunteers participating in the two parades. Check out the fun here.

We had a lively discussion on the TX Legislature Regular Session (pg 5), highlighting how grassroots pressure made a difference in this session. It can be frustrating not knowing if your calls, emails, and visits make a difference. But we likely would not have gotten SB12, HB900, or SB17 passed without a lot of grassroots pressure. Or these bills would have been severely weakened by amendments. For example, HB900 (Getting porn out of public school libraries) and SB17 (Eliminating DEI departments from Universities) faced significant attempts to weaken them with amendments. And, several of these bills on the “win” list would not have been possible to pass in the 2021 session. The increased conservative activism this session caused these bills to pass. Rising conservative activism is making a difference. We must stay engaged to make further progress.  

We went through the Texas State Legislative process, discussing the path a bill follows to become law. And the many ways that good bills die, often without a recorded vote. Here is a link to what we reviewed. 

Our priority in the next session is getting the expiration removed from our Texas call for a Convention of States. Contact me to get in the fight!

Stacy, Tara, and Russ received Patriot Pin awards in recognition of their dedication and patriotism. They have actively helped grow the grassroots and share how a Convention of States can help rein in the Federal Govt. Thanks for all you do!

We had a great discussion about what's happening locally and in the Texas legislative session. We finished discussing how we can all work on our self-governance - through education, volunteering, and our everyday decisions. Check out the material we discussed here.

We covered updates on the legislative session, our legislative day at the Capitol, the big Border Rally, the Plano City Council election, and (drumroll…) the School Board elections. You can see the presentation material with links here. The presentation also contains all of the School Board Candidate Survey Results for Plano, Frisco, McKinney and Prosper.

School Board Candidate Discussion
We had a very fiery meeting with lots of healthy Q&A and discussion on how to improve our schools. First, I'd like to thank the candidates that presented and took questions. Everyone I talked to benefited from the discussion. Candidates included Lydia Ortega (PISD Place 4), James Hollis (AISD), Michael Cook (PISD Place 5), Stephanie Elad (Current FISD board member, talking for Reed Bond and Susan Kershaw), and Dennis London (HD33 candidate). Next, I'd like to thank all that came and asked questions. This is the “secret sauce” to our democratic republic: challenging each other's view, in a spirited but civil manner.

Our most spirited discussion was over school choice, and we had candidates for school choice and against school choice. (I'm going to put here some of my own impressions of the arguments, as they seemed to be the major differentiating points for the candidates.)

Against school choice: (Hollis, Cook)

• Public schools have to serve all children, whatever their needs. So we should not pull any funding from them.
• Parents can decide to send their kids to another school, but they should not get money from the government to pay for it.
• Public schools need all the funding to provide excellent education.
• Vouchers (the number of $6k was put out, there are different bills being considered) may not cover the cost of a private school.
• Public schools have accreditation that private schools may not.

For school choice: (Ortega, London, Kershaw, Bond)

• Competition would compel Public schools to improve, they would have to assess why students are leaving, and make adjustments to improve their performance.
• Without competition, the Public schools have a monopoly, with no real incentive to improve. Test scores & college readiness have been in decline for years, not just since COVID.
• All the government funding comes from citizens, not the government. It's all from our property taxes. School choice is allowing parents to direct how their own money is used to educate their own children. 
• (I don't think it was mentioned, but my own experience serving on a private school board is that we did attain and maintain accreditation.)

Please VOTE. Early voting is open now, Election Day is May 6. These municipal elections have very low voter turnout, so your vote means more than in the national elections. 

The #HowManyMore Rally at the Capitol in Austin to demanded that our elected leaders take action to end the humanitarian crisis at our southern border. 

Please call and email your State Rep, State Senator, Governor, Lt. Governor and ask them to pass HB 20. 

How Many More…
Immigrants must be raped, drowned, and murdered?

How Many More…
Americans must die from Fentanyl poisoning?

How Many More…
Children must be sold into slavery?

How Many More…
American dollars must flow to Mexican cartels intent on destroying our society?

How Many More…
American cities and towns in the heartland of our nation must be infected, damaged, and destroyed by the Mexican cartels in partnership with their Chinese government suppliers?

March 27 COS Legislative Day at the State Capitol/Austin
COSers volunteers from across the state congregated in the Capitol. We had a great rally  in the morning, followed from visits with our legislators. We delivered COS packets to all Senators and House members. For the Collin team, we also met with Angela Paxton, Jeff Leach, Candy Noble and Frank Frazier. It was a great day!

We had a good discussion with Senator Paxton about COS

Lots of stories from Representative Frazier!

Rep Candy Noble made time for us between meetings to talk about progress in the session

Caught up with Rep Jeff Leach between votes

Great morning rally with Rep Vasut, Sen Birdwell, Mark Meckler, and many more inspiring speakers!

March 16 Collin Community Action Meeting

Our guest speaker was Erika Hatfield, our Convention of States Texas State Director. Erika gave national COS updates and then dove into our Texas legislative efforts to eliminate the expiration clause from our COS Texas petition. 

• Remove the Texas COS Petition expiration clause. Our COS petition in Texas will expire in 2025 if we don't remove the sunset clause. HJR 35 has been introduced in the House, and an identical SJR 36 in the Senate. We need to pass these bills so Texas is still part of the growing movement to call for a Convention of States!
• Come to Austin March 27 for Legislative Day. Sign up here.
• Call your legislator to express your support for COS and HJR35 and SJR36. Contact information here on page 12 of presentation.

Feb 25-26 Southfork Gun Show

We had a great time at the Gun Show, telling people how a Convention of States can help protect our liberty. We gained a lot of new petition signers, and had lots of good conversations with people that were glad to hear about the project.

February 16 Collin Community Action meeting

Our guest speaker was the Publisher of Texas Scorecard, Michael Quinn Sullivan. Michael started with a discussion on how important context is to understanding the news. How news can be both factually accurate, but be selective in what facts to include or emphasize. The end result is often news that is intentionally misleading. He also went into our context as citizens. That we need to wary of seeking a “strong leader” to “fix things” as we usually end up with tyranny. Instead, in our constitution, we have a framework where legislators are working for “we the people”. And it is the citizens responsibility to hold our legislators accountable, or replace them. (With a Convention of States, we seek to rein the federal govt in with term limits, fiscal restraints, and restraints on the govt's growth and scope. To get there we need to build our grassroots army of supporters!)

Michael also led a wide ranging discussion on the legislature, schools, elections, the border, and more.

Access the presentation here.

January 26 - Mark Meckler Live in Dallas

Read about & watch this live event with Chris Salcedo (NewsMax) and Mark Meckler, founder of Convention of States.

January 18 - Jan COS Community Action with Shelby Williams

Shelby Williams lead a discussion on effectively working with legislators. He reminded us to be “happy warriors”, and always remember that legislators are human and respond to being treated with kindness and respect. Shelby currently serves as a Plano City Council member, was on the Legislative Priorities Committee at the Republican State Convention, and formerly was the Texas State Director.

Access the presentation here.

January 16 - COS in MLK Day Parade

For the first time ever, COS participated in the MLK Day parade, celebrating the life and message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The flame of lady liberty was big hit with the crowd estimated at 100,000. Check out the Blog entry here.

January 12 - Visit State Capitol for start of legislative session

We visited the state Capitol to observe the passing of the House rules. We met with several legislators and participated in conservative legislators' news conference from the Capitol.

November 19 - Blockwalking!

We had our second successful Blockwalking event. In a couple hours on Saturday morning we knocked on over 130 doors to share how Article V can solve some of the biggest problems we face. We'll start blockwalking again when the weather warms up!

November Collin Community Action meeting - Nov 17, 2022

Aileen Blachowski, Director of Education for CCDFUSA Collin County talked to us about the “Toxic Triple Threat of Indoctrination” to Texas students:

• Sex & Gender Theory
• Critical Race Theory
• Social Emotional Learning

We also discussed the midterms, our CTA on removing the sunset clause, and our first trip to Austin, Jan 12, for the 88th Legislative Session.

Access the presentation here.

October Collin Community Action - Oct 27

We were inspired to hear Lt. Col. Allen West talk about our “Call to Duty” to uphold the constitution. We heard some of the personal experiences of our blockwalkers, where they talked to our neighbors about how the constitution can be used to save our country, which also was inspiring!

Call to Action on the COS Sunset clause. We need call our legislators to have them follow through in the next session to eliminate the Sunset clause. If they do not remove it, the Texas resolution will expire in 2025. That would then require us working with the legislature to pass a new resolution to call a Convention of States. All the detail on who to call and the message to share is in the presentation (pages 12-15). Access the presentation here.

We reviewed proactive steps to take this election to ensure that your vote counts. Our election resource is at https://conventionofstates.com/tx-vote. First and foremost, exercise your right to vote! If you don't, it is like you voted for the other candidate.

October 22 - Blockwalking!

In a couple of hours on a Saturday morning, we knocked on over 200 doors to talk to people about a Convention of States to impose term limits, limit the federal government's power, and impose fiscal restraints. It is fun to talk to people directly and know that there are a lot of like-minded people that support these goals. And they like showing that support by signing the petition!

September Collin Community Action meeting - Sep 15

Convention of States updates on successful SBOE grassroots effort and recent Telepatriot campaigns. Contact me to sign up for Telepatriot. **Training and more information here**.
Focus on Election Integrity - Rebekah Warwick, Heritage Action for America, showed practical ways we can improve the integrity of our elections.
We had a couple brave volunteers show us all how easy and fun it is to Blockwalk! Our first Blockwalk is October 22.

• Presentation from our meeting here.
• Site for Election Integrity and making your vote count

August Collin Community Action meeting - Aug 25

Convention of States updates, mission, values. Focus on effective communication with your legislator, Activism corner focused on radical proposed Social Studies curriculum pending State Board of Education approval.

• Take action on the pending Social Studies curriculum
• Check out the meeting content…lots in here!
• Convention of States Core Values for printing

Southfork Ranch Gun Show - Help grow our grassroots army!

We had a good time at the Gun Show on August 20-21! We gained experience presenting the Convention of States Project and gained 30 new supporters, several willing to volunteer!

 

Activism Corner

Are we sheep? NO!!

Here is an immediate, quick, step. Sign this open letter to the States: it is outlining our issues with our Federal government run amuck, and will be used to encourage all states to pass the Convention of States resolution.

At each local action meeting we will to touch on actions we can take to further our self-governance.

• Growing the grassroots, spreading the word about Convention of States
• Telepatriots make a difference, in Texas & nationwide!
• Communicating with our legislators; local, state, national
• Key legislation
• Election Integrity. Poll watchers - watching adds integrity to elections
• Coalitions
  • Election Integrity
  • Precinct Chairs
  • Education, School Boards
  • Veterans coalition

Contacts

Please contact us if you would like more information on Convention of States or how to get involved.

Stacy Faust - DC House District 61 / 70 - stacy.faust@cosaction.com

Russ Buettner - DC Team Collin - russ.buettner@cosaction.com

John Stufflebeam - RC Team - john.stufflebeam@cosaction.com

Denise Stufflebeam - RC Team - denise.stufflebeam@cosaction.com

* Schimelpfenig Library, Haggard Library, or the City of Plano are not associated with these meetings

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