Jim DeMint – a Republican who represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate for eight years and in the House for six years before that – has created a small organization to support conservatives on the inside. He knows of what he speaks about the internal workings on Capitol Hill.
"Once you get to the House and the Senate, there is no support system for conservatives," DeMint told American Family Radio this week. "So I've started what we call the Conservative Partnership Institute to help staff and members be more effective."
While in the Senate, he founded the Senate Conservatives Fund – which played a major role in the election of Senate conservatives like Tom Cotton (Arkansas), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Rand Paul (Kentucky), and Ted Cruz (Texas).
DeMint, who served as president of The Heritage Foundation after leaving Congress, has now teamed with former Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) and a group called the Convention of States.
"[Our objective is] to get 34 states to call a convention to amend the Constitution, to restrain the federal government to balance its budget, and to put it back in the box that our founders intended," DeMint said.
The former GOP lawmaker believes it's no longer possible for Washington to stop spending and/or balance the budget.
"The founders gave us a way to stop it – and that is in Article 5 of the Constitution," he explained. "That gave people of this country two ways to amend the Constitution: one is for Congress to recommend amendments and send them to the states to ratify; the other is for states to come together in a convention and recommend amendments that the states ratify."
According to DeMint, America's founders added the language about states for a reason.
"They realized if the federal government ever got so big and powerful that it became tyrannical that it would never limit its own power," he stated.
"... States need to come together to restore the original intent of the Constitution," he continued. "We don't really need to change our Constitution, but it's been changed so many times by the court and by Congress that it no longer resembles the original."
Convention of States is a project of Citizens for Self-Governance.
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