Delegates at the Libertarian National Convention today rejected 7 out of 9 Platform Committee recommendations to rewrite various platform planks.
The only rewrite that was approved as recommended was for 2.8. Education:
Education, like any other service,is best provided by the free market, achieving greater quality, accountability and efficiency with more diversity of choice.Schools should be managed locally to achieve greater accountability and parental involvement.Recognizing that the education of children isinextricably linked to moral valuesa parental responsibility, we would return authority to parents to determine the education of their children, without interference from government.In particular,Parents should have control of and responsibility for all funds expended for their children’s education.
Delegates also adopted a modified version of the recommendation for 3.5. Rights and Discrimination:
Libertarians embrace the concept that all people are born with certain inherent rights. We reject the idea that a natural right can ever impose an obligation upon others to fulfill that “right.” We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant. Government shouldnotneither deny nor abridge any individual’s human rights based on sex, wealth,race, colorethnicity, creed, age, national origin, personal habits, political preference or sexual orientation. Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs.
Delegates approved a recommendation to append a sentence to 3.6. Representative Government: “We advocate initiative, referendum, recall and repeal when used as popular checks on government.” The only other changes were two one-word tweaks, changing “electoral” to “election” and “restitution of” to “restitution to”.
Delegates debated and rejected these PlatCom recommendations:
- Modify 3.5 to indicate that parental rights over children are not absolute.
- Rewrite 1.0 to connect rights to the ability to make choices, and to replace force-initiation language with a statement that government’s proper role is to protect rights.
- Rewrite 2.7 to oppose government employee unions and defined-benefit public employee pensions.
- Rewrite 2.5 to oppose bailouts while dropping language about banking, currency, and legal tender.
- Rewrite 1.2 to reference self-ownership and replace “drug” and “victimless crime” references with broad language about consuming “media and substances” and accepting risks to one’s own “health, finances, safety, or life”.
With time running out for the platform debate, the rules were suspended to vote up or down on 3 of the last 4 recommendations:
- Rephrase 3.4 with language about “the American dream” and “the general welfare”.
- Rewrite 2.4 to call for the “eventual elimination” of income taxes.
- Replace 1.6 language opposing all gun-control laws with the statement that private property owners can set gun possession rules.
Delegates rejected all 3 recommendations. With only 3 minutes left to consider the final recommendations on the abortion plank, the convention adjourned for the day.
The resulting 2012 Platform can be seen here (with 2012 changes highlighted).
The Platform debate had opened with a report on the plank retention voting. No plank received enough tokens to be eligible for a plank retention vote. The planks receiving the most tokens were:
- 74 – 1.4. Abortion
- 19 – 3.4. Free Trade and Migration
- 18 – 2.2. Environment
- 15 – 2.5. Money and Financial Markets
- 11 – 2.6. Monopolies and Corporations
No other plank got more than 5 tokens.
As far as I can tell it is not Bruce.
Did someone let Cohen out of his straightjacket and rubber room @23?
@23
Wikipedia is a private organization. What information they choose to publish or not publish has nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with private property.
Carol Moore regularly posts anti-Semitic propaganda to Wikipedia, and all criticism of her is removed by the Wikipedia administrators. Is extreme censorship a quality that libertarians want to promote?
WHAT HAPPENED WITH BYLAWS PROPOSALS. Having heard nothing I assume non passed or at least whatever passed was innocuous.
I do believe there were some bylaws changes. I don’t remember exactly what. IIRC most of the proposed changes failed.
20 cm: So never say never.
me: While I’d never say never say never in an absolute sense, I agree. On the rank ordering of things I’d like to see happen, the ability to self-determinate in a righteous manner is pretty far down the list. Exit Afghanistan, SK, and Germany would be way up there; repealing the Patriot Act and ObamaCare; very big cuts to discretionary spending; etc. Near as I can tell, the people in CO, VA and NY are all Americans, with no appreciable differences culturally, economically, ethnically, or spiritually.
Eight months before the Declaration of Independence, few wanted independence. Then Thomas Paine published tens of thousands of copies of COMMON SENSE – and the whole mindset changed. That could happen again. Both left and right and lots of people in between see the US constitution as a failed experiment; and Jefferson emphasized that they were only experimenting with government. So never say never. (Was it Gray yesterday who quoted Jefferson on saying we need a revolution every 20 years and we are overdue??)
18 tk, yes, or one could contort one’s thoughts so as to force the exception into a universal truth.
Puerto Rico isn’t one of the 50 states. Nor is Guam. These are exceptions that are beside the point.
Now, Rick Perry made some noise about TX seceding, and he walked back after poking that hornet’s nest.
RC@14,
It’s one thing not to get out much, but entirely another to even ignore what’s going on in front of your face because you prefer to think that whatever makes you uncomfortable makes everyone else uncomfortable too.
Secession was explicitly addressed in the Republican nomination debate, live on national television, the day before the Florida primary, and nobody blinked an eye when each and every one of the candidates affirmed that whether Puerto Rico remains a US territory, applies for statehood, or SECEDES is a obviously a question for Puerto Rico’s people to decide.
WHAT HAPPENED WITH BYLAWS PROPOSALS. Having heard nothing I assume non passed or at least whatever passed was innocuous.
Only liberals anxious to yell about racism tend to bring up that “confederacy” issue. But it DOES help to say “libertarian secession” since there definitely are a small number of various racist and ethnic separatists who do have bigoted or even supremacist views on secession running about and even talking a good game til you scratch the service.
Brian “I don’t know who DOES have the right to have the delegates email list” Holt @9: adding right to secession depends on who 2/3 of delegates are, doesn’t it? and Free Earth Manifesto is at least thinking about the issue, even if details may be debateable.
13 tk, ya know, perhaps because I am unconsciously a member (the only one!) of the Cult of the Omnipotent State, I have been brainwashed to believe that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible.”
Self determination movements that result in secession in OTHER places does not have the same association as it does in the US. While this may seem hypocritical, the fact is that the last time “secession” was attempted in the US, it was an insurrection by Confederate Elites, who wanted to keep the institution of slavery, among other things.
In those few moments when I am able to wake up from the Cult’s brainwashing, I recognize that what “official US policy” is is of little to no concern for me, and I’m frankly surprised that you — the Ambassador of Bad-ass Statelessness — would invoke such a datapoint! 😉 If anything, my gut instinct is to maintain the US should not have a “policy” in the matter, one way or another.
In my judgment, then, the politics of the times say to me that using the term “secede” in a US context is a non-starter. There may be small pockets where it plays (Coeur d’Alene, ID?), but for now, it’s a third rail, as I see it.
RC@11,
“As soon as the letters s-e-c-e-d-e cross the screen, the association with chattel slavery and the Confederate Elite Insurrection is a non-starter, big time.”
Really? I don’t recall hearing such associations asserted over official US policy supporting Kosovo’s secession from Serbia, Georgia’s secession from the Russian Federation, South Sudan’s secession from Sudan, and so forth.
Does Ms. Moore really strike anyone as a supporter of the Confederacy? I think not.
It’s only reasonable that we would support the freedom of states to peacefully leave the union if they wish.
I think this view is more popular, more mainstream, than Mr. Holtz or Mr. Capozzi might think.
Back in 2007, I was a member of a student organisation called Maryland Student Legislature (MSL). Students from all across Maryland get together two or three times a semester to write, propose, debate, and vote on bills. Should a bill pass, it is then passed on to the MSL governor, who either signs or vetoes the bill. If the bill is signed, then it is sent off to specified politicians as an official recommendation of MSL.
My first bill was one to have Maryland secede from the Union. After a respectful debate on the subject, the bill was passed.
Now, before you assume that it only passed because there were a lot of libertarians in this organisation, I can assure you there were not. I never got any of my other bills passed after that, and I can assure you that there was general hostility toward libertarianism amongst the members. (These people didn’t even understand why the Westborow Baptist Church’s free speech must be defended. I was sickened.) Yet, the liberals and conservatives who made up the majority of the body found the arguments in favour of Maryland seceding from the union convincing, and voted for such, clearly demonstrating that secessionism is much more mainstream than even I would have thought.
(Unfortunately, the MSL governor, who was not present for the debate, decided to veto the bill. It was never sent to the Maryland General Assembly or the Maryland Governor. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a majority of MSL members supported the measure.)
Best,
Alex Peak
9 bh, while in theory I might concur with your plank, I would not support such a plank to be in the LP’s platform. As soon as the letters s-e-c-e-d-e cross the screen, the association with chattel slavery and the Confederate Elite Insurrection is a non-starter, big time. Talk of secession by a political party in this time and place is more dysfunctional than raving about “cults” and “omnipotent” states, if that’s possible.
Brian–
Thank you for this thoughtful and informative piece.
I have forwarded to my many local listserves in New York.
Fortunately, this year the delegates only improved the Platform, rather than the horrendous evisceration in Portland 2006.
@7 You’ll never get the 2/3 needed to put personal secession back into the Platform.
However, I think we could get 2/3 for a secession plank like that of the Free Earth Manifesto:
A community may secede from a surrounding community if 1) secession is supported by a majority within the seceding community, 2) the majority does not violate any rights of any minority, 3) the rules of the seceding community are at least as compatible with human freedom as that from which it seceded, and 4) the seceding community agrees to compensate its parent for any continuing impact on the parent’s resources or use of the parent’s services.
Does it really say “should not neither “?
No. I had to manually re-apply strikethroughs/underlines when I pasted from my wiki page, and missed that one. It’s now fixed above.
@6 You can see the vote counts at http://libertarianmajority.net/2012-lp-platform-report. The four rewrites for which the delegates agreed with my lone dissent were:
Happily the platform committee or natcom or somebody can correct obvious grammatical errors like Not Neither. Glad to see that the crappy stuff struck down and only innocuous changes made. Now to make it a bit more detailed and hard core. Next time. At least add the old secession plank to LP RIGHT TO ALTER OR ABOLISH GOVT plank 🙂
@1 What 4 were those?
I didn’t even turn my plank tokens in , enuf already…
@3: Jeri Ryan is a platform I can plank…
Thank you! Thank you! Try the veal!
Back to the issue at hand, it’s nice to see platform churn kept to a relative minimum for once. The national platform isn’t a collage of psychedelic weirdness glued onto 15 sheets of single-spaced paper anymore – at this point, it’s pretty close to a “mature” document. There’s undoubtedly some room for improvement here and there, but wholesale changes should be pretty much out of the question by this point.
7 of 9…I thought that was Jeri Ryan!!!
Does it really say “should not neither “?
I agree with the delegates: the platform is pretty good right now, so let’s not mess it up.
For four of PlatCom’s recommendations to rewrite entire planks, I was the only vote against the recommendation, and all four of those recommendations were rejected by the delegates. In the December PlatCom meeting I cast all five of the solitary nays, and was among the nays or abstentions whenever there were any. My goal was to minimize platform churn while making surgical changes to shield our candidates. Unfortunately, some of those changes were incorporated into larger plank rewrites that the delegates weren’t willing to accept.
I hope the 2014 PlatCom focuses less on stylistic rewrites and more on narrow fixes for specific problems.