Most weeks, my job doesn't take me any farther than the Capitol in Helena, or a kitchen table in House District 37 talking crop insurance and county roads with a neighbor. This month it took me to a resort ballroom outside Denver, sitting alongside a former U.S. senator and a room full of state lawmakers from across the country, all wrestling with the same question: what happens when Washington won't fix itself, and it falls to the states to do it instead.

I represent a roughly 12,000-person district covering Petroleum County and most of Fergus County, and I was in Aurora, Colorado, for the Convention of States Article V Summit — a gathering built around a part of the U.S. Constitution most Montanans have never had reason to think much about. Article V is the section that lays out how the Constitution gets amended, and it offers two paths to get there. One runs through Congress. The other runs through the states themselves, two-thirds of which submit an application to convene a convention to propose amendments, which then still need 38 states to ratify before anything changes. It's never been used. I believe it's time central Montana — and the rest of the country — took a hard look at why.

We came down for the summit to learn more about the Article V process and how states put together the requirements to come together and propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

It's not the first time I've carried that fight home. In my very first session in Helena, I introduced House Joint Resolution 5, an effort to add Montana to the growing list of states formally applying for a convention. The resolution made it further than any similar measure had in Montana before — clearing the House Business and Labor Committee and reaching the floor for a full debate — though it ultimately fell short of passage.

It didn't pass the House, but Montana got a resolution like this onto the floor for the first time ever, and we got members on record with their votes. That's real progress, and now we're working to bring more of them around.

I don't think it takes much imagination to see the federal government now does a lot more than its eighteen enumerated powers.

A Constitution Studied in a Living Room, Then a Small Church

in Grass Range

I didn't come to this issue through party politics. I came to it through COVID — and through a small country church.

I got involved with this as a freshman legislator because of COVID, honestly. We had rules imposed without going through the legislative process — bars were deemed essential but churches weren't, big box stores stayed open while mom-and-pop shops were shut down. That got me looking hard at what was going on, and it got me looking into our Constitution.

That search led me to Patriot Academy, an organization that teaches the founding documents. I brought the material home to my living room, then felt compelled to bring it to my congregation at the small church I attend in Grass Range. We ran through the Biblical Citizenship course twice, and on the third pass, worked through Constitution Alive as well.

When you teach something, you learn it a lot better. Founding Father John Jay charged citizens to study, and teach, the Constitution to the rising generation so they know how to be free and how to defend their rights. I believe that's true of any subject, and that's what I did.

It was in that study that I first ran across Article V — the way the Constitution provides for its own repair, as I like to put it. That curiosity led me to ConventionOfStates.com, and from there, to a role as a district captain gathering petition signatures alongside one of the organization's Montana co-directors.

The two of us got to talking, and a few weeks later, that conversation reached a state senator in Billings. Sen. Tom McGillvray had heard there was no candidate lined up for House District 37 and asked if anyone locally might be interested. My co-director didn't hesitate — he told the senator he'd call me.

I'm a 32-year veteran of military, wildland firefighting and law enforcement service, and I'd describe myself as having been largely disengaged from local civic life before that call. It caught me off guard. I'd been thinking, if anything, about a seat on a rural electric or telephone cooperative board, not the Montana Legislature.

I told him it wasn't something I'd expected. I'd been pretty unengaged locally on any civic body — not on any boards or commissions, nothing with real decision-making power in my community. I figured I needed to do something.

A day or two after that first call from Sen. McGillvray, I'd agreed to run. I'm now in my first term, seeking a second, and I raised my hand to carry the Article V resolution myself when no one else stepped forward.

Sharp Company in Aurora

The Colorado summit put me in a room with some of the movement's best-known figures — former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum; Rob Natelson, a former University of Montana law professor now retired from the Article V Information Center in Colorado; and Convention of States co-founders Mark Meckler and Michael Ferris. Ferris is an attorney who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Constitutional issues and prevailed.

These folks are incredibly accessible. I have personal cell phone numbers for people who've told me to call or text anytime I have a question. Part of the summit's purpose, as I see it, is simply taking the fear out of a process most people have never seen in action — and reminding skeptics that conventions aren't some untested experiment.

The Constitution doesn't spell out exactly how a convention would be run, how delegates get there, or how it's controlled — but the same is true of juries, and nobody's scared of those, because we have history and experience with how they work. There were roughly twenty conventions held in this country before the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and eleven afterwards — Conventions aren't new to America. We just haven't seen one in a while, and people mistake that for not knowing how it's done.

A Rancher's-Eye View of Federal Overreach

For a district built on cattle, grain and wide-open country, my argument leans hard on ground central Montanans already know well: who's really in charge, and who's paying for it.

I point to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which lists eighteen specific powers granted to the federal government — and nothing more.

It doesn't take much imagination to see the federal government now does a lot more than those eighteen powers. The way they do it is through money. About half of Montana's budget is federal money, and when they send it, they attach strings — do this, or you don't get it.

I think about Montana's old fight over the state speed limit, once effectively dictated by Washington through highway funding, as a familiar example of federal leverage — and I'd point to education as a modern one.

Education is not one of those eighteen powers. I'm not against education, or even consistency in education, but it's a state responsibility, not a federal one. Education is not for the federal government to dictate how it's done.

The urgency, to me, comes down to arithmetic most ranchers understand better than most economists: you can't keep spending money you don't have.

Forty trillion dollars is unimaginable. Roughly 25% of GDP now goes just to servicing the interest on that debt. That can't go on forever — eventually the money runs out. Neither party, Republican or Democrat, has shown any real appetite for reducing spending or fiscal discipline.

Convention of States organizes its goals around three pillars: limiting the scope and jurisdiction of the federal government, fiscal restraint, and term limits for Congress and federal bureaucrats — an idea that polls at 80 to 85% public support, though I'd caution it needs to be designed carefully so power doesn't simply shift to unelected agencies instead.

My own 32-year run through federal service — nine years in the Army National Guard, nine more flying lead planes as a wildland firefighter for the Forest Service, and 11 years in law enforcement with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — gave me a front-row seat to how that growth actually happens on the ground.

The federal government grows — that's just what it does. It doesn't know fiscal discipline. In the Forest Service, it happens through grade creep: the same job gets upgraded again and again until it's a much higher pay grade for identical work. In Customs & Border Protection, we built what I'd call fiefdoms — five air branches along the northern border with no real operational need for that many, just expansion for its own sake.

"It's a Tremendous Duty"

I frame this fight less as ideology than obligation — a duty I believe the founders handed to state legislators on purpose.

It's our duty as legislators to check the federal government. That authority to call a convention of states to propose amendments wasn't given to us thoughtlessly — the founders knew that at some point, the states would need to check federal overreach, what people often call tyranny, and rein in its growth and lack of discipline.

I'm candid about the odds and the stakes alike.

If we keep doing what we're doing now, which is essentially nothing, and expect a different result — that is insanity. If we do our duty and use the Article V process, the worst outcome is nothing changes. But at minimum, we raise national awareness about how this country is supposed to work. At best, we get real amendments proposed and ratified by 38 states, and that changes how this country actually operates. So yes — it's a tremendous duty, and a real opportunity, both to educate the country on how the process works and to make immediate, meaningful change.

I plan to bring the resolution back to Helena and keep building support among my colleagues, one conversation at a time — the same way I built support for it back home, starting with a living room, a small church in Grass Range, and a district that, cows included, isn't quite as outnumbered on this issue as it might look.