LP POTUS candidates go negative on Amash

Libertarian Presidential Candidates Prefer Each Other Over Justin Amash – Reason.com - Matt Welch:

July 15, 2019 "Saturday night just outside of Boston, at one of the first L.P. presidential debates this cycle, ... I was moderating, and had just asked the assembled candidates — [Kim] Ruff, Arvin Vohra, Adam Kokesh, New Hampshire State Rep. Max Abramson, and Dan 'Taxation Is Theft' Behrman — whether they would support Amash.... Vohra, then Kokesh, then Behrman, each said that they would support everyone on stage before the newly independent libertarian congressman. And even the two other comparative moderates were critical of his potential candidacy.

"'We aren't Republican light; we're not Democrat light,' said Ruff, an Arizona-based manufacturer.... 'We're advocates of full, unencumbered liberty. And that means taking positions that make the public squeamish.... I don't see somebody who is personally conservative being comfortable saying, "Yeah, I think we should legalize all narcotics. I think sex work is work. I think that you should have body autonomy. And if that means you want to end your life or ask a friend to do it for you, you should have that right." So no, I don't think he would be a great candidate for us. He's got a lot to learn.'

"Vohra ... dismissed the idea that Amash's defection from the GOP represents any kind of bravery. 'It does not take courage to speak out against a president that is unpopular with more than half the population,' said Vohra.... 'We don't need somebody who's ... just pandering to a large group of people who believe that the orange man is bad.... I would support any of the people sitting here in a second — in a second — over Justin Amash, because they have shown real boldness, not just pandering. They have been willing to say things that are true, honest, and unpopular, and that to me is the true measure of leadership.'

"Kokesh ... portrayed it as a referendum on institutional self-confidence. 'We cannot elect or nominate a former Republican…for the fourth cycle in a row. I just think that would set the party back so far,' Kokesh said.... 'Gary Johnson was better than [2008 nominee] Bob Barr, and Justin Amash might be that much better than Gary Johnson even. It's the worst temptation we've ever seen from this vector. But it's the most important time to resist it'....

"Even Abramson, the only elected official of the bunch (and he was elected as a Republican ... before ... switching back to the party he ran for governor in 2016 with), lamented the 'Republican savior' complex..... 'We have our own message. We're a different party. We're not Republican light, we're not cheap Democrats, we're something completely different. We want a free society'....

"'We need to be doing this now,' said Behrman.... 'And if Justin Amash is busy doing something else that he can't commit to this.... Let him stay where he is, do what he's doing; let him choose his own path. But we need to put our support behind myself and these other great candidates so we can start getting this message out and start getting people to see our faces'....

"The decision by potential contenders to go negative on Amash ... makes all the sense in the world from an incentives point of view. They're running to win, and there is pent-up grassroots Libertarian frustration at the tendency for their presidential nominations to be handed to temporary Libertarians like Bob Barr rather than longtime activists such as Mary Ruwart. (Indeed, Ruwart was singled out for praise by three of the five candidates on stage.)

"As for Amash, he has little incentive to make any premature declaration about running for president. The first major-party primaries are seven months away, and God only knows what American politics will look like then."

Read more: https://reason.com/2019/07/15/libertarian-presidential-candidates-prefer-each-other-over-justin-amash/
'via Blog this'

LP POTUS field makes me want to vote NOTA

by George J. Dance

2020 will be a leap year, and like all leap years will witness a new installment of the biggest, longest, most-watched media event of them all. No, not the Summer Olympics; those run for only a few weeks. I'm talking about the U.S. presidential election, which runs from January right through to the inauguration finale a year later.

The Republican and Democratic races for the 2020 nomination are already getting plenty of attention; as usual, the Libertarian race is not. This year, though, that is probably a very good thing, considering the choice of candidates offered so far.

Apparent frontrunner Adam Kokesh is a founder of Iraqi Veterans against the War, who has run for the Senate (and lost) as a Ron Paul Republican. The only Libertarian Party activism I know him for is his disrupton of the LP's 2008 campaign kickoff. He has also conducted a libertarian podcast, on one show of which he advocated killing police (hence my nickname for him, "Kop-Killer Kokesh"). His platform is to abolish the U.S. government by Executive Order, and then resign.

Then comes Arvin Vohra, former LP vice-chairman. Originally a pragmatic millennial politician-in-training, he became radicalized after the 2016 Johnson campaign, and began taking extreme positions - some of which, like writing that age of consent laws should be abolished, and calling school board shootings a "good idea," led to attempts to censure him and remove him from office. In the end, LP voters did remove him at the last convention - following which he promptly declared as a POTUS candidate.

Then there is John McAfee, an eccentric (if he's still rich) who plans to campaign "from exile". Plus a bunch of people I know nothing about; this is getting too long, so I'll just give a link. And as always there is Vermin Supreme, the ex-Democrat who campaigns with a boot on his head, and whose signature campaign plank is to give every American a pony.

In short, the real LP candidate hasn't surfaced yet; all we have are possibilities.  Four well-qualified possibilities are:

Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina. Sanford has never lost a general election, but was defeated as congressman by a Trump-endorsed candidate in the 2018 GOP primary, so he has no seat to lose. He has always focused on the national debt crisis, which I think will be big news again by 2020 (now that the Democratic-leaning media can blame it on Trump).

William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts. While he ran for the LP as Johnson's running mate, Weld is a divisive figure in the party. Besides, he has rejoined the Republicans to primary Trump. Weld is staking everything on New Hampshire: if he does well there, his campaign could catch fire (at least with the Dem-leaning media), and make him a star; in which case he would be the most prominent candidate we could get. But many members count his reregistering Republican, after declaring that he was in the LP for life, as a betrayal and sell-out, making him more hated than ever by a large faction.

Lincoln Chafee, former governor of Rhode Island. Chafee is a wild card - he registered Libertarian just this month - who isn't telling anyone his plans as yet.

Justin Amash, congressman from Michigan. Amash is the most libertarian guy in the House, today's Ron Paul, and I would prefer that he stay there. However, since he accused Trump of "impeachable" conduct, he too has a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, who is leading him by double digits. If Amash loses the primary, there is no way he could win his seat as an independent (or Libertarian), as Michigan has straight-ticket voting. Meanwhile, there is a sizable movement within the LP to draft him for the Libertarian nomination, including a facebook page I recently joined:

Three of those four (Weld excepted) could have the nomination for the asking. Alas, none of the four is presently a live option: none is even running for the job. Given today's live options - the current field of declared candidates - the only one worth voting for is None of the Above: which, fortunately, will be on the ballot at the LP's 2020 presidential convention.

Vohra announces 2020 Libertarian POTUS bid

Controversialist Arvin Vohra Announces 2020 Libertarian Presidential Run - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Matt Welch:

July 6, 2018 - "Arvin Vohra, a 39-year-old educational entrepreneur notorious for questioning age-of-consent laws for 14-year-olds, for arguing that joining the military to pay for college is 'morally unacceptable,' and for joking about shooting up school boards, announced at the tail end of the Libertarian Party's biennial national convention that he is running for president. Vohra joins longtime libertarian activist and serial arrestee Adam Kokesh, a 36-year-old Iraq War veteran who is running on a platform to dissolve the federal government, as the two biggest L.P. presidential candidates to officially announce.

"'On the first day of my presidency,' Vohra tweeted Thursday, 'I will pardon those in prison who have neither harmed anyone nor stolen anything. I will start with @Snowden and @RossUlbricht.' Next comes 'all nonviolent drug users, all nonviolent drug traffickers, all nonviolent drug kingpins...anyone that's in jail for crypto-currency crime [and] gun possession where they didn't actually hurt anybody.'

"'My number one goal,' the candidate tells me, 'is to end the welfare state and abolish the income tax. I'm going to be using my campaign to spread that message on the policy level, but also to help people realize there are so many ways to reduce government without changing policy, including opting out of government schools, including using cryptocurrency, including using the power of jury nullification.'

"Vohra, who served two terms as national vice chair, has been the Libertarian Party's single most controversial figure the past year and a half. In February, he survived attempted suspension and censure motions from the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) over his age-of-consent and military remarks; in April, a second effort to suspend after the school-shooting joke came one vote short. Vohra's self-conscious controversialism—what movement graybeards call the 'libertarian macho flash'—was a recurrent, negative theme throughout the three-day national convention....

"[I]n all three rounds of voting ... Vohra's limped along at 9–8–10. Party delegates had ample opportunity to weigh in on the incumbent's provocative rhetorical strategy, and the conclusion was unmistakable: two thumbs way down.

"Vohra sounds cheerful about seeking his party's presidential nomination after such a snub. 'I'm going to be trying to bring a lot of new people into the party,' he explains. Also, 'a presidential campaign to me is just different from being a vice chair. A vice chair is about kind of half externally focused, half internally focused, and realistically most people objected to my internally focused messaging.... A presidential campaign ... is 99 percent externally focused, and so the type of messaging that goes into it is just different.' In other words, he says he'll tone it down at least a little."

Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/06/controversialist-arvin-vohra-announces-2
'via Blog this'

Sarwark re-elected Libertarian chair in landslide

Libertarian Party Rebuffs Mises Uprising - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Matt Welch:

July 4, 2018 - "The Libertarian Party on Monday afternoon re-elected in a surprising first-ballot landslide incumbent Chair Nicholas Sarwark to an unprecedented third consecutive two-year term. In doing so, the nation's third-largest political party swatted down what was supposed to be the most contentious challenge at its biannual national convention — to a leadership that was considered by various critics to be too operationally incremental, too ideologically tepid, and too (in the words of Ludwig von Mises Institute Senior Fellow and popular podcaster Tom Woods at a nearby New Orleans rally Saturday) 'SJW-friendly.'

"Sarwark's main opponent, the Mises Caucus-endorsed Joshua Smith, stumbled badly in a defensive debate performance at the New Orleans Hyatt Regency Sunday night, and ended up Monday on the business end of a 65 percent-22 percent rout. In the vice chair race, two-term incumbent Arvin Vohra, who has become a lightning rod over the past year-plus for intentionally provocative public comments such as 'Bad Idea: School Shootings. Good Idea: School Board Shootings,' was resoundingly drummed out of office, never receiving more than 11 percent of the vote in three rounds of balloting that ended Tuesday with a positivity-exuding 33-year-old finance/tech/consulting guy named Alex Merced squeaking past the 50 percent finish line.

"'What I think the race shows is that if you want to change the direction of the Libertarian Party, if you have new ideas about how we can grow and reach new members, the election of Merced to vice chair shows that the delegates want that kind of change,' Sarwark told me Tuesday afternoon. 'If your campaign is seen, or has themes of trying to kick people out, of trying to attack people like Gov. Weld, or... basically anyone — if your campaign was seen as trying to drive people out of the party, the delegates soundly rejected that. And I think that that is the biggest takeaway from the convention.'

"Weld, the controversial-within-the-party 2016 vice presidential nominee and former moderate Republican Massachusetts governor who is laying the groundwork for a possible 2020 presidential run (and was everywhere to be seen at the convention, amiably taking on all skeptical comers), played a pivotal role in the decisive debate. Candidates had the opportunity to ask their opponents one question, and when it was Smith's turn, a delegate in the audience shouted out, 'What do you think about Bill Weld?!' (Weld-heckling was a sporadic feature throughout the three-day event.) Smith decided to make that his question.

"'What I think about Bill Weld," Sarwark started slowly, building into a feisty crescendo, 'is that he is still in the Libertarian Party, while many of his opponents are not. [He's been] raising money for and endorsing Libertarian candidates. He is fundraising for us. And the exposure of Bill Weld to the Libertarian Party has not made the Libertarian Party more like an establishment Republican, but has made Bill Weld a lot more like a Libertarian....He knows something about winning public office, and [we need to] learn how to do that from anybody who will help us, anybody who will join us. And we should not PUSH PEOPLE OUT who are willing to help!'

"As New York gubernatorial candidate and popular party organizer Larry Sharpe, who had backed Smith, commented later, after that exchange it was 'game over'."

Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/04/libertarian-party-rebuffs-mises-uprising
'via Blog this'

Vohra bashed for 'School Board shootings' line

Libertarian Party Vice Chair Jokes About Shooting Up a School Board; Party's National Committee Declines to Suspend Him - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Brian Doherty:

April 13, 2018 - "Arvin Vohra, vice chair of the Libertarian Party's National Committee (LNC), prides himself on being rhetorically uncompromising in staking out the most radical and potentially outrageous outer frontiers of libertarian thought. His past comments on the age of consent (he says it isn't the government's business) and the proper moral attitude toward members of the U.S. military (he says they're hired killers) caused the party's New York gubernatorial candidate Larry Sharpe (singled out by Politico as a 'rarity...a serious Libertarian candidate') to quit his position on the National Committee after it failed to suspend Vohra back in February.

"Since then, the rhetorical outrages have continued. In a post last month on the social network site MeWe, Vohra wrote: 'Bad Idea: School Shootings. Good Idea: School Board Shootings.'

"Vohra insists that was not a serious threat but a joke in 'poor taste.' But he also has tried to use it as a teaching moment over the question of when violent resistance might be justified.... [A]s he wrote on Facebook, 'I've routinely argued against any violence against the state, since I consider it unlikely to work. But for all the hardcore gun supporters who wear taxation is theft t-shirts: what is the level of tyranny that would be great enough to morally justify using violence in self defense?'

"He has 'no plans to ever advocate violence against the state,' but only for pragmatic reasons. 'I consider it unnecessary,' not wrong. 'I believe that Dr. King and Gandhi have showed that violence is not needed to fight the state. I consider it unlikely to work.' He absolutely believes in the right to use violence to defend yourself against state actions.

"Many LNC members found the seeming threat of school board shootings to violate a pledge [the non-aggression pledge - gd] party members take to 'certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.' Vohra seems to doubt that striking at agents of the state with violence is initiating such violence, but even he wrote off the school board shooting line as a joke.

"At the end of March, some LNC members publicly asked Vohra to resign, which he opted not to do. Another motion to suspend Vohra was introduced on April 3, and last night it failed. The vote was 11–6 in favor of suspending him, but the party's rules require a two-thirds vote of the total body for suspension, so it fell a vote short....

 "LNC Chair Nicholas Sarwark voted against booting Vohra.... Sarwark stood on the principle that, since Vohra was elected by the body of the members, the decision to get him out of his job should be left up to that body when it votes for the next vice chair at the party's convention in New Orleans this summer."

Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2018/04/13/libertarian-partys-vice-chair-jokes-abou
'via Blog this'

Libertarian response to State of the Union (video)

Watch the Libertarian Party’s Response to Obama: ‘We Need to Massively Downsize and Defund the Federal Government’ | TheBlaze.com - Pete Kasperowich:

January 21, 2015 - "Arvin Vohra, vice chair of the National Libertarian Committee, said Obama’s solutions on education, minimum wage, taxes, Internet privacy and healthcare were all aimed at increasing the size of the federal government. Vohra said those ideas, and even those being advanced by many Republicans, are all about letting the government take more control over people’s lives.

"'We need to massively downsize and defund the federal government,' he said. 'But Republican and Democratic politicians only want to make it bigger.'

"Vohra said Obama’s speech, and the GOP reaction to it, show that only Libertarians have any interest in reducing the size of the federal government.

"'When you vote for a Democrat or Republican, it tells them, "Keep doing what you’re doing",' Vohra said. “But when you vote for a Libertarian, it tells them, in no uncertain terms, "You have neither my approval nor my permission to grow or sustain Big Government. Shrink it now."'

"For example, Obama on Tuesday night formally proposed a federal program to make community college 'free,' a plan that would cost an estimated $60 billion over ten years. But Vohra said college would be more affordable if government got out of the business of subsidizing it.

"'Without subsidies and costly mandates, competition will force colleges to decrease their tuition or go out of business,' he said. 'Massive student debt would be a thing of the past.'

"He also said the Department of Education needs to be abolished, along with the Common Core program....

"Vohra said he agrees with Obama’s claim to want an Internet that protects people’s privacy, but said Obama’s words don’t match his actions.

"'You have funded and enabled the surveillance state,' Vohra said. 'To protect privacy, Libertarian candidates have pledged to defund the NSA’s mass surveillance program, repeal the Patriot Act, and massively downsize and consolidate redundant spy agencies.'

"And on healthcare, Vohra said neither Republicans nor Democrats have found the will to repeal Obamacare, and said the Libertarian Party has pledged to repeal that law and make other changes to promote lower costs and higher quality."

Read more: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/21/watch-the-libertarian-partys-response-to-obama-we-need-to-massively-downsize-and-defund-the-federal-government/
'via Blog this'