Lesson in Legslation

Discussion with the Honorable William Fowler around state legislative process' and how to get your representatives to do their damn job!

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Transcript

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Hi Bill. So we're on with William Fowler, who had previously seated legislator in New Hampshire. Uh Bill, what's what's your background with all that uh government whatnot? I served as a state legislator, long-term, get behind curtain, and how the game is laid. Um, but I got out of politics as a result because I can't play the game. Can't play it anymore. So, what advice would you give to the American people that think that they're legislators are out of time or interest? Look at voting records. Look at who donates to what can uh what candidate, um, who donates and who pays the bill, and then I come to you and you accept that money. And I come come to you as as a third-party person stating, hey, I need um uh this legislative piece of you know government law to be in my favor with my money. I need you to and or um it's influential based on how much money these candidates have received from the different you know donating uh agencies. I think they can it it's it's a way for people to bribe legally our government. So what's it look like from the inside? Inside is about uh it's a boys club, uh regardless to the to the uh sexual engineering boys club. It's if you are in favor with the party, then you get some recognition. If you in say favor a piece of legislature that would benefit the people, but it does not benefit the party as a whole, it only has one vote. So it carries that power, but there's never a piece of legislature that comes down to a single vote. They can ouch you just based on the fact that if you don't support the party political agenda, uh you're not gonna go anywhere in the party. And if you don't go anywhere in the party, then your your campaigns in the future are dead in the water. So back in the old days, you know, when it was you, me and Kimberly on TikTok talking about these things, uh, you know, I'm gonna have her on to discuss how to petition and lobby, but uh what what would as a legislature your traditional day-to-day engagement with a non-special interest, non-paid lobbyist look like? Normally a legislator and their responsibility is to adhere to the the public, the people that they they support uh they represent. And people don't understand that if I'm elected from a district, say, hypothetically say district 20, I don't only represent district 20, although those are the people that elect me into office to represent their interests. I represent the people of the state that I'm elected into. In other words, all 1.4 million people I represent. When you deal with the general public, uh they're mandated, they're required under certain stipulations to respond to you, to adhere to your calls, your emails, in-person interviews. That's your job, is to interact between the general public who elect you into power and the government who you establish laws and policies with. So that's your job. Unfortunately, that's not the way it runs in our government today. Most constituents are ignored. I would gather, and I would even go out on the limit saying 80 to 92 percent, and I say that pretty wholeheartedly, um, are ignored by their elected officials until it's an election day. Once during an election process, the midterms and of the general election, that's when you're gonna see your elected official pay attention to you, listen to you, talk to you, go out on the campaign trail. Um, I was one of very few legislators who interacted with my community on a regular basis. I knew these people, they were my friends, my family, people I interacted with regularly. So when I went to Concord uh to represent their best interests, I was met with a barrage and a wall of, well, the party that you represent don't agree with those those philosophies, so you're where are you gonna land on this? And we encourage you to vote in in favor of the party, not in favor of the people you represent. And that happened pretty regularly. Is it difficult? That's that is your job. Bill, is it difficult to run for office? And I've encouraged quite a few people, myself included, to do so. Difficult to run? Not at all. Not at all. Anybody can run. It doesn't matter your educational level, it doesn't matter your criminal background, it doesn't matter how many wives you've had, none of that matters. The only requirement is that you are born in the United States and on the state that you represent. Well, you don't have to be born in the state that you represent, but uh you have to be an American citizen. Um you have to occupy the district from which you're going to represent uh within a period of time. Each state is different, each district sets their own policies to how long you must be a resident to qualify to represent, um, and then uh pay the fee to put your name on the ballot. That's pretty much all you need. No background, no history, no education, nothing. And the legislature, to include Congress, was designed and written to be operated as a part-time job by farmers, by laborers, by you, me, and the guy next door. It was never designed to be occupied by professional, 24-hour a day, seven-day a week politicians. That's when the corruption is taking place. Interesting. On a higher level, we've talked about uh Mason's manual, Roberts Rules of Order, and using the ethics committee against non-compliant uh legislators. How does any of that work? Well, we have a set of rules depending on the state. Uh, it's Roberts, uh, we use Roberts in New Hampshire. Uh, and then you have Mason's. Uh, these are just a set of rules that we conduct in the legislature to how we deal with interact with each other, how we interact with the speaker of the house. Uh, basically our rules on how we operate our house. Um, if we violate those rules, then we can be censured, uh, which is kind of penalized. Um, so many times of being censured, you can be withdrawn and removed from position. Um, and then you have a process through the state where you can report these violations. Um, an ethics committee is supposed to take everything at face value and they're supposed to be uh unbiased. Um my experience not so much. It's biased depending on if it's a majority of one party. Your ethics committee is kind of kind of lean towards that majority. Um that's just has been my experience and my observation. They're obviously going to want to stick with who is in power in the leadership because that's who grants them their authority and control. So in government, most things are biased. There's very few times where there's a uh an unbiased partnership between the parties. The other thing, too, on on your link tree, which people will notice if they uh if they do get the Codex Politica, there is a link to your link tree, to that PDF that you provide on Black's Law's Dictionary. Can you go into a little bit of you know how that matters, how that's used for interpretations and rulings and legislation and the evolution of key terms? Well, that's a little bit of a history lesson. If we go back 2,000 years, the verbiage of today would sound like Chinese to an American person. The language used 2,000 years ago is not the language that was used 500 years later or 1,000 years later or 2,000 years later. Language is important, words are important, the definitions at the time that that word has been put to paper matters. Last law dictionary, which was introduced into our government from the very beginning, is where our government derived its terminology, understanding, and constitution, our rights. Anything that was written to establish our country was written from dictionary with a baseline set of understandings of what these words mean. We all agree that just from this particular introduced and find out what the definition of was of the was interpretive. It's also going to be based on years and years and years of development, changing, manipulation. Black's law, which is legal ease and legal terms, of the time in which it was used. In other words, you have these different volumes: Black's Law Dictionary 1, Black's Law Dictionary 2, Black's Law Dictionary 3, and so forth and so on. You need to know the document that you're reading, which dictionary was used to determine what these words meant at the time of pen to paper. We can't interpret it a hundred years later what that word, what you believe it to mean. You have to go back to when it was written, what that word was was accepted by everybody to know, and it's the interpretation. It's changed over the years, which is why you have different additions, you have different uh you know subtractions and different understandings of those words. So our constitution is written in the Black's Law Dictionary. It's on my link tree. That version is what wrote our constitution, our declaration of independence, our bill of rights. So when you want to understand what these verbs, these words in these amendments mean, go to black's law. It'll give you the definition of what that word means. Not its interpreted rendition of later editions, but of the time, of the dictionary, of that particular time and what that word means about the stipulator. So it's important to understand how important when you're reading any legal document, the dictionary in which it's derived its terms from is used. It's super important. Anyone that writes anybody anything to do with contractual law understands that when you write a contract, you also have to state, you know, where you get this information, what dictionaries derive from these terms. That's why you have 47 million pages in the legal contract because it has to list all these things, or it's non-disclosure. They haven't disclosed all their information. They've left you to open to interpretation, which is what 99% of our country has been left to do with our constitution, our declaration of independence, and our Bill of Rights. Interesting. Verbiage matters, especially when it's a written document, especially when it's been voted on as law. Understand the verbiage of the law of the time in which it was written and passed. That is super important for everybody to understand because if you apply today's dictionary terms to a 200-year-old document, you're going to get an entirely different, derived version of what they meant at the time of its adoption. Makes sense. The other thing I wanted to bring up with you is sometime back you said that the state legislature is parallel to the federal legislature and that at the state level it has more power than the judicial and the executive. Can you explain what you meant by that? Well, your state legislature has more power over its state than Congress. It has more power. Well, more power is really a derogatory term. Um, it has more authority. In other words, each state is separate and independent from its from its its its partner, its next door neighbor. In other words, uh my Montana is entirely different than Texas. Their laws are different. What they accept, speed limits. Whether, you know, let's use marijuana, for example, is legal in one state and not another, because a state dictates how it operates. Congress and the laws derived from that are a broad spread. In other words, it's how Montana and Texas interact with each other, not necessarily how the state itself operates. Now, the only time that that takes precedent is if a state does not have a law on the books which derive or explain a particular set of rules based on a certain violation andor you know policy, then the Fed blanket that. Uh immigration. States cannot set immigration law on their policy. It's not within their power to do so, even though states have done it and are trying. That's a broad spectrum. That's how each state interacts with each other and how this uh United States interacts with other countries. That's above and beyond their spectrum, and it's very broad. So a state can't set a sanctuary state, it's in violation of the federal law, which this state doesn't have laws to stipulate how immigration policies are to be enforced. The federal government does, that's what we default to. The state has more power over its state independently than Congress has over that state directly. In a state legislature, you actually have more control over your state than if you ran for Congress because you have, yes, broader powers across the entire United States, but you're limited, you can't go in and tell a state you can no longer enforce this law. The law is this, but every state you have to appear to that law. You can make it tougher, but you can't make it more rumored, which is why the federal government hasn't ruled on anything when it comes to uh marijuana. They have just scheduled it and left it up to each state to set its own rules and policies. So I gotta ask, because it's it's the obvious question here. As a legislator for your state, did you often tell the federal government to fuck off? Many times we are a Second Amendment free state. We encourage all of our people, all of our citizens to open the carry. And the federal government says, well, you have to have some restriction, and then we tell them to go pound sand because there's no way for them to enforce that in our state. We have sovereignty. And we told them many times, nope, not going to adhere to it. Where we we get caught in a bind is they have laws of scheduling a certain type of drug. They set a schedule. And if they schedule at a schedule one drug, by federal law, you can't pull a firearms permit, or you can't openly own a firearm and be actively using a Schedule One drug. So they set a blanket or an umbrella law that we kind of can't break. So we just say, well, we're not gonna, we're gonna decriminalize it, we're not gonna make it legal. If you choose to lose marijuana, then you have willingly given up that right under federal law to go to fire round, but we're not gonna stop you from owning one. That's up to you. If the feds will come in and arrest you for it, that's gonna be of effect. Now the states will adopt if they catch you with that, they'll just issue a felony, which is a federal docket anyway. So, I mean, they interact very well with gray area, red tape, and they have to. They've been doing this for long enough to know how to circumvent the system and honestly violate people's human rights. So, what type of authorities does, let's say, the state legislature have over the state's judiciary? 100%. State legislature. There's judiciary answers to the legislature because the legislature sets the laws for in which those judiciaries have to operate. In other words, if I write a law and I hand it to a judge, it's up to the judge to adhere to the way that law was written, to the letter, is that he is not allowed to interpret, even though they do. It's general practice that a job will interpret, a judge will interpret the law, uh, which is why when I deal with judges, which I have on a few occasions professionally, um, I make sure they they understand the reason this law was enacted, the the purpose for it and its interpretation, so they don't have to guess at it. And if judges would take a more active role in understanding why this particular law was written, um there would be less gray area uh guessing by judges and then in misinterpreting how a law is written. It's too much gray area for the judiciary. It should be black and white, it should be pretty simple. So can a legislator contest an entire case based off of that interpretation? Um legislature generally won't, but they will turn it over to uh the legal. Legal will look at a case if it particularly violates um a law and its interpretation. Um a lot of times judges' interpretation can be challenged. That's what the appellate is designed to do. Um, if the judge makes a ruling based on his interpretation of the law, you appeal your case to the appellate. The appellate will now apply what the legislature has set forth as um a test. And isn't this what that law was originally designed to do? Is it interpreted inaccurately? If it was misinterpreted, then the appellate's gonna overturn that judge's ruling. There's a process, it's not just the judge makes his interpretive rule and that's the end of it. The appellate answers to the legislature on top of answers to the the uh the senior uh judiciary of the state. Well, sure, but at the federal level, I mean you you must have noticed that precedent is significantly overreaching uh legislation at this point. The legislators seem to just keep running with it. Legislators want to stay in office. They stay in office, they have to do what's in the party's best interest. I mean, that's the bottom line. If you don't support your party belief, you're you're not gonna get re-elected. I mean, I was not super popular in my party, although I was pro for my party, um, only because I was for the people. My first platform was about people before politics, and I've never strayed from that position, which didn't give me a lot of re-election points, but I didn't care. I didn't care. I saw what I needed to see. I made uh nine bills into law, um, and it's affected a lot of people, and still to this day, I sit down with people who have uh uh children and family law cases as well as criminal law cases, but children of family predominantly, which is my my committee or my area of expertise, um, and help them through the process. Explain to them that it's not cut and dry, that it's not just what they read in front of them, that there's a lot more to understanding the family court system. Um, and in my opinion, they should get rid of the family court anyway. It's it's it's unneeded, it can be kept under a civil uh civil process. It doesn't need to be a family law and this whole big blowing up proportion. And it's all about money. It's all about money. The thing I try to help people these days is that judges make money and courts make money when children are removed from families, whether it's legit or whether it's not legit or invalid, then removing that child makes the state money. Didn't you say something about having to actively tell the government no, otherwise they assume it's an affirmative if they send you a missive? Yep. How does that work? Well, I'll use a hypothetical, for example, if say child support sends me a letter stating that if I don't make a child support payment, they're gonna suspend my driver's license. If I say nothing, they're gonna assume I'm in compliance. That's with anything in government. If you say nothing, they assume you agree. Saying no comes with a lot of work and a lot of extraneous process later on. But if you say if you don't say anything, they assume you agree and they process. That is every government agency will do that does that, not just the legislature, but everything. If you don't say no, they assume you say yes. You can ask any any politician, they'll tell you the same thing, they don't lie. If you don't say no to process, they assume you agree with it and they will process, and then they will proceed from there. If you say no, you don't have the authority. Are you ready to explain why they why you're saying no? In the case of, say, child support, um, then notifying the department of motor vehicle. No, that's a third-party notification, it's a fourth or right, that's what the amendment right violation of privacy. Um, but have the case files. There are federal case files that that grant that that restriction. If you don't say anything, they then they assume that you're saying yes and they go ahead and process it, you can't argue. All right. The laws is what they tell you, trust me. They're never gonna tell you the truth. They're just gonna leave it to your your energy to find out whether or not they can do it, they're gonna do it. You don't question it, they gotta do it. Are you suggesting politicians lie, Bill? That isn't even a topic, then we can. Gosh, you know for a fact I don't know that I have anybody that has a question of whether or not politicians lie. It's to the extent I was asked one time, you had asked me many times, what percentage of government while I was in office was corrupt? And my answer has always been, and will always be, a hundred percent of government, a hundred percent of politicians are corrupt. Now, then does that mean they're all criminals? Not necessarily. Even myself was corrupt to a point. Because if I'm not corrupt to a point, to be invited to the table of corruption, which is what our government operates under, then I have no power and no ability to do anything. Right. Correct. I have to be corruptible enough to get invited to the table, but not enough to where I sacrifice the people. Right. That's where you really have to stay in your guns, and I've always stuck to I will be enticed, I will be attracted to the corruption, but you'll never get me to take a dime, and you'll never get me to not tell the truth. Right. Let me see how that doesn't flow very well with any party, regardless of the party that I support. If you're not willing to lie, you're not willing to cheat, you're not willing to steal, but you're willing to discuss it, that doesn't leave you very much, you know, corrupt when it comes to re-election. Alright, so we got time for one more question here. I wanted to ask you about the subtle powers at the state level, like the unelected magistrates or the authority that sheriffs and coroners have uh regionally. A lot of people don't know about those. Do you mind going into a little bit? Uh can you be more clear? That's kind of a broader. Yeah, for example, the the sheriffs and the marshals' ability to check corrupted law enforcement, or the the coroner's ability to override it when it gets out of control, or you know, the magistrates doing pretty much whatever they damn well please as the uh appointed managers of the judicial system in the state. Well, that's the that's the thing, is being appointed is different than being elected. Being appointed just means a bunch of people agree that you're that you're you're good for the position. To be elected, you have you have to have proof. You have to have some type of concrete foundation to sell to people to get them to support you and vote you. Um we elect uh as elected officials, we're granted the power of the people. People give us their authority. So, in other words, I may only have a single vote in the legislature, but I have 4,000 votes behind that single vote. That's where the power of the legislature comes from. It's the power in numbers. Those hundreds and hundreds of votes that are underneath of that single vote that I make in the legislature. That's what grants me my power and authority. Now it comes to an appointed position. You're not elected by anybody. You have no actual power andor authority. You're granted it by an elected official. An elected official who you operate under grants you your authority. So if I appoint you as director of, I don't know, sour milk, you don't have the authority to dictate how you test it, how you process it, what the numbers are. Your job is to administer what I tell you, which is what is based on law, which is what we pass. Well, sure, but there's plenty of judges that are pretty much just, you know, phoning it in and half-assing it and letting the magisterium handle damn near everything, including what's above their pay grade, and people don't pay attention to it because they just think that they're glorified, you know, coffee bringers and pencil pushers, but magistrates don't have the same reporting requisites that judges do. No, they don't. And a magistrate is not a judge. A magistrate is what's called an interim judge or a judge in per se. Um, they act uh uh they act under the appointed judge. The judge grants them the authority to act on their stead. And the judge has to review it, sign off on it, and then it gets processed. But the judge still answers to the elector uh to the electorate, the answer to the legislature. If a judge violates law, if a judge is shown to be corrupt, if a judge is overstepping his authority, you can be brought in front of the legislature, sanctioned andor removed and put in prison. And it's the only body in the entire country that can remove a sitting judge, appointed or otherwise, is the legislature. The legislature dictates how the judiciary operates, the laws in which that they are allowed to enforce and they're not to enforce. The legislature sets everything, sets all the rules, sets all the policies. The judge has must adhere to those policies and those laws. Must. What we're finding is a lot of times judges aren't. They're interpreting, they're practicing law from the bench, which is illegal. Nobody brings it to the legislature. You don't go to your legislative meetings, you don't go to your legislative committee hearings, you don't bring it to the attention of the legislature so it goes unnoticed. And that's about 98%. That's a very high number that people don't know. They can take their case and say, no, this is wrong. Take it to the appellate. The appellate says, Well, we don't see any issues. You now have a third place. You can go to the legislature, to a committee hearing, and say, you guys are studying these laws. This is what the law stipulates. This is the judges twisting the law to interpret it this way. Um, the appellate doesn't see an issue with it, but you guys wrote it. Interpret it for us. Explain how the judiciary is allowed to twist and change law from the bench, which is practicing law from the bench, and it's just going under the rug. Now the legislator's responsibility is to look into it, is to review it, check it, apply this the strength against it to see whether or not what the judge ruled in favor of or against actually carries the weight of the law in which it was written and its interpretation. And if it if those two areas meet. There's so many different processes you can do to fight back against something you don't feel is is just because let's face it, judges aren't 100% honest, nor are they 100% right. I have many times gone into a court hearing as an active legislator and sat in the back row and sat there and watched. And I've had people on many occasions come up to me and say, you know, he was different today, or she was different today because you were there. So that tells you something. I've gone in front of a judge one time during a family mediation for my children, and the judge treated me differently because they knew I was a state legislator than if I was a regular person. And to me that I'm sorry, but that's not the way it should be. It should be the exact opposite. The exact opposite. Because I work for the people. And if you're treating them worse than you're treating me, then there's an issue. Right. There's corruption out there. It's up to the people. All right. Judges are, I think there's like 14,000 judges across the country. And that was a gastimated number. Don't take it for ban. But there's 31, about 300 million people in this country. Where do you think the power lies? In the few judges and the few legislators, or is it in the hands of the people? Well, it doesn't do anything if they don't sit in on committee hearings or petition like Kim does. I know she loses her mind over, you know, no one else showing up in Texas ever. I've sat in committee hearings where I've talked to the same four people every committee hearing. Always the same four that show up, nobody more than that, nobody less than that. Um, unless it's a hot topic. Uh we tried to legalize marijuana in the state, and we had the uh police chiefs of uh association there arguing against it because they make money off every marijuana bus. Well, that's policing for profit, and that's illegal. And I spoke to I said that to the to the uh the head of the chief uh police association um and the look I got and the quiet that went after that comment was was so deafening because they couldn't argue it. They knew they were walking, they walked right into it. So it's up to the people to educate themselves. It's up to the people. Your responsibility doesn't end at the ballot box, your responsibility ends when you die. Well, yeah, because if you don't tell legislators what to do, they just kind of passively launder money across the board. That you can't see. Because you didn't tell them no, so they assumed yes. Exactly. It's our job to educate ourselves to what the legislature does. The power the powers, authority that we are granting them. We give them that power, they don't just automatically get it because we elect them. It's not given to them by the state, it's given to them by us. The state cannot grant you power, the state cannot give you the power of a legislator. You're electing your election from the people grant you that authority and power. And if people would stay educated, if people would keep themselves educated, I mean, the more people learn, the more dangerous you are to govern them. Because it's harder to be a criminal with all eyes around you. I appreciate you taking the time, Bill. I know uh you're a very busy man. I guess in closing, are there any good uh sites or resources you would direct the average American to to start their education? Uh your state legislature, find out uh get a copy of um the rules in which your our state operates, depending on you know if it's you know one or the other. There's only two, I believe, that we use in the in the state. Find out which one your state uses, read through it, get a general idea of the powers and duties and authority on how legislators operate their job, and then find out how a bill is written. Find out what process it goes through. Learn these things so when somebody says, Well, we have a bill coming up, you know it's not as easy as saying, I'm gonna write a bill and pass it into law. I wrote a bill in 2019, it didn't pass until this following year, and I've been out of office now for a number of years. But a law or a bill I wrote in 2019 just recently became law. That's how long it takes. And it's to our benefit because if we could just change laws quickly and easily, we'd have so much crap in our law system that it would have failed a hundred years ago. But because it's hard, because it's difficult, and because it takes so much time, that's why our laws are decent enough to so that we can survive in the world. But understand your rights, understand what your legislatures can and can't do, what their duties are, how the state operates, in other words, and under what rules and regulations they operate, that gives you a good foundation to understand your legislature. That's where what you want to learn is how your legislature does what it does. Uh, because it sits, in essence, above the executive and above the judicial. The executive is a single person that just kind of administrates over it and runs all the agencies. We give them the laws and rules and policies on how to operate. So understanding your legislature is where I would start. Um, and then take your constitution, take your bill of rights, take your your uh original documents that grant you your rights and apply it to a black law dictionary written of the time in which it was written. And you'll see an entirely different interpretation of what your rights are. Understanding how your state operates, understanding the rights that you have as an individual based on its original interpretation, not what they've perverted it into over the past 200 years, but what it's originally designed to do because it has never been changed. That gives you a good kind of foundation of where you stand legally, on how the processes work, and how you can get involved to kind of help manipulate the system to stay on the straight and narrow, because that's our responsibility. Our responsibility isn't to vote and then walk away. Our responsibility is to vote and then stay on that person until the day they get out of that office. Call their office, send emails. If they don't respond, and like I said previously, about 80 to 92 percent never respond to you, go to the office, sign the book. Now they're required to notify you within 30 days. If they don't, they're in violation. You can now file a lawsuit against them for up to $10,000 for violating their process. They can't ignore you, it's illegal. And if they do, they're gonna accountable. They get sued four or five times, they're gonna start listening. You reckon that's a pro bono deal? Uh yeah, you'll find a lot of like hungry attorneys going after that because it's cut and dry, it'll just settle. There's never even a court hearing. Did you neglect to respond to this person? Yeah, it's right there. There's no argument. How do you say, no, I responded to them? What's the proof? Well, I don't have any. Then you didn't. If you didn't have proof, you spoke to somebody, then you didn't talk to them. If you can't choose you did a thing, then you did not do that thing, period. Brilliant. There you go, guys. Hold your legislators accountable. They'd be proven. Yeah, exactly. Hold them accountable. You'll watch the government change. You watch who runs a public office change. Thank you, Bill. As always, we appreciate the time and uh yeah, have have a great night.