If you think Congress will pass a BBA, boy are you a fool. Yes, they will vote on it, but both Democrats and Republicans know that it will never pass in their chambers. Both parties have too much vested interests in bloated spending. That spending gives them JOB SECURITY as they BUY VOTES and raise campaign money from BIG COMPANY A and BIG INFLUENCE B. If the Republicans had been serious about this amendment, they should have demanded the wording say "a balanced budget amendment SHALL be sent to the states". Instead they only got an agreement to VOTE on one. After that vote is done and the bill is voted down, the matter will be over until the Republicans begin the next debt limit crisis and ramp us up again for "maximum effort", "pour it on with your phone calls", etc. We don't have time for this crap. We work. And we want a government that works smoothly in the background without tying up all our time with campaign hype, rallying the troops, and constant worry over the vote dramas we have to endure. We don't want to buy a new TV set every few months after we've thrown some heavy object into the previous one!

The real problem is that we CAN'T amend the Constitution! It has several MAJOR HOLES that need to be closed, but there is no way for 'we the people' to get any control of our government back from Congress. Why? Because Congress is the bottleneck when it comes to amending and upgrading the Constitution. Congress will NEVER send a term limits amendment to the states for example. Thus we have a PROFESSIONAL POLITICIAN CLASS. Congressman John Conyors has been in office for 39 years! Senator Byrd had the record for the longest serving Senator. In his last couple of years, he probably didn't know what planet he was on! Congress will also NEVER give us (or ALLOW us children) a balanced budget amendment. Printing TRILLIONS upon TRILLIONS of increasingly worthless dollars suits their interests (democrats especially) just fine. You and I lose as we get poorer and poorer. And soon we will be no longer talking budgets in terms of TRILLIONS but in GAZILLIONS!

So what is the answer? Are we doomed to sink in the ashheap of history? Every pundit has written his or her book on "The 10-point plan to save America"/ NONE of them will work. All plans to lance the boils and bleed with leeches won't save the patient. The virus that is eating the patient must be killed first. And the virus that is killing us is the bottleneck of Congress. After getting our spiritual house in order as per my series of articles "Our Deuteronomy 28 Moment", I think there is really, politically, only ONE way to save the country. It is a way no one else has thought of. We need just ONE AMENDMENT, and we need to get it past the bottleneck of Congress somehow. We need an amendment that will allow amendments to the Constitution to be proposed by each State's legislature. Any State could send an amendment to all other States and, if 3/4ths of all States adopt it, then it will become part of the Constitution. This is the ONLY way we will EVER get term limits, balanced budgets, protection from world communist treaties, changes in the very structure of elections, a true definition of the role of courts, and any other problems that may be seen. If we can all get hyped up for just this one last massive campaign, we may not need to continue the seasonal hype-up drag again. Getting this one amendment passed (and I don't know exactly how to do it) should be the ONLY FOCUS of the tea party movement from now on. Whatever else the tea parties do will be just more waste of time and energy.

--RPC, Houston, TX Tues, August 2, 2011