Category Archives: Libertarian

The current pandemic is revealing critical flaws in the American electoral system

Howie Hawkins. Jacob Hornberger. Don Blankenship.

Yes, these are real names. But do you know who they are? They are the current leading nominees for the respective Green, Libertarian and Constitution parties.

If youre a political junkie, you are probably familiar with Blankenship. The former West Virginia coal mining executive has experienced occasional cameos in national headlines: first, for a trial concerning a mine explosion that killed 29 people in 2010 and later, for a bizarre 2018 Senate run where he declared himself Trumpier than Trump and ran ads referring to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as Cocaine Mitch. To a lesser degree, you may also be familiar with Hawkins, the environmental activist who co-founded the Green Party just over two decades ago.

But for most Americans, these names are simply more faces in the crowd.

The national appeal of a viable third-party candidate has increased in recent weeks by the possible entry of two figures with significant name recognition: Justin Amash and Jesse Ventura. Amash, a current U.S. representative from Michigan and frequent critic of President Donald Trump, announced the formation of an exploratory committee aimed at seeking the Libertarian Party nomination. Likewise, former professional wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, who has his own complex relationship with Trump, recently voiced his interest in a potential 2020 Green Party run. It is a given that neither candidate will command major support on a national stage, but the general consensus is that they could potentially siphon enough voters to prevent Biden victories in a number of swing states.

Currently, third-party advocates are engaged in a number of legal battles aimed at gaining ballot access come November of 2020. In Illinois, the Greens and Libertarians are engaged in a court case aimed at removing all petitioning requirements for ballot access while a similar lawsuit by the coalition in Georgia aims to reduce the minimum number of signatures necessary.

Meanwhile, the countrys two biggest parties share a vested interest in limiting third-party ballot access. As a result of political polarization, both parties are severely limited by the number of active electors up for grabs, meaning that any significant conversion of swing voters could have devastating effects on their path to the White House.

For Democrats, this issue is especially pronounced. Historical precedence shows that they have the potential to be severely damaged by a strong third-party run. In particular, Jill Steins 2016 Green Party campaign won more votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin than Trumps margin of victory in those states. Although its hard to say whether Steins absence would have allowed for a Clinton victory, it certainly played a role in the outcome.

Third-party candidates in 2020 are far less of a risk for Republicans, but there is still a chance that their presence on the ballot could sway a number of states. After leaving the Republican Party and becoming a registered Independent, Amash voted for Trumps impeachment, earning notoriety as a strict non-partisan ideologue. Now a Libertarian, Amashs recondite political ideology may simply be too niche for widespread national appeal.

Rather, Amash could steal more Libertarian-minded voters in Michigan from Trump, a vital state to the presidents re-election path. Lawsuits by the Libertarians and Greens in states like Georgia and Arizona could also put the little known, socially conservative Constitution Party on the ballot, potentially bringing the furthest politically right of Trump supporters with them. The threat seems negligible at first, but when you consider just how close the margin of victory is likely to be in these states, it is a threat worth considering.

Irrespective of the morality of voting for a third party in 2020, the entire scenario at hand reveals a number of fundamental albeit obvious flaws in the American electoral system. Most blatantly, it reveals the fragility of the two-party system. Its a system so fragile and riddled by establishment influence that it promotes candidates uninspiring enough to allow for a few thousand disaffected voters to sway the entire election. Furthermore, the dilemma posed by the lack of ballot access for third parties is part of a broader issue concerning politics in the era of COVID-19. From issues over voter disenfranchisement to a highly politicized debate over the entire logistics of ballot-casting, the predicament has revealed just how unprepared the American electoral system is for a crisis of this magnitude.

In this regard, the battle for third-party ballot access is merely a further indictment of a wildly myopic voting system. Instead of merely arguing over the merits of granting increased access to third-party candidates this fall, we should approach this problem with a degree of introspection, questioning just how we managed to get to this debate in the first place.

Written by: Brandon Jetter brjetter@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie

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Will COVID-19 block third-party ballot access? - The Aggie

Rep. Justin Amash announced April 28 that he was launching an exploratory committee to seek the Libertarian Partys presidential nomination.

There had long been buzz about a potential presidential run around Amash, who last year left the Republican party and became an Independent member of Congress (a spokesperson for Amash says he is now officially a Libertarian member of Congress). Though hes been critical of Trump and the Republican party, Amash says his main argument is broader: He believes the country is locked in what hes repeatedly called a partisan death spiral in which representative government is broken.

Amash, who says he will not seek reelection to his current House seat, spoke with TIME via Skype from his home in Michigan on May 3, where he discussed the state of the current Republican party, how he believes campaigning virtually levels the playing field, and why he thinks he has a pathway to the nomination.

Below is a lightly edited, condensed transcript of the interview.

As a presidential candidate, what would the core idea of your campaign be?

The core idea is liberty and representative government. And what we have right now in Washington is a very broken system. What happens right now too often is a few leaders in Congress negotiate with the White House, and they decide everything for everyone. And this leads to a lot of frustration and a lot of partisanship because when Congress cant deliberate actual policies, when you have most members of Congress left out of the process, then they start to debate personalities.

Why are you dipping your toes into this with an exploratory committee instead of just outright running?

Im new to the Libertarian Party, and Im seeking the nomination of the Libertarian Party. I want to be respectful of all the delegates, I want to be respectful of the people who have been a part of that party for a long time. And Im starting it as an exploratory committee so that I can try to earn the nomination, and if Im able to get further along and obtain the nomination, then we can talk about changing it to a full committee.

Do you have a deadline then when it comes to deciding whether you will actually run versus exploratory?

I dont have a specific deadline in mind. I think as this goes on, well have a better idea of where we stand with the delegates. And there may come a point where I feel more comfortable moving forward concretely and saying, yes, Im in 100%, Im going all the way. But right now I want to make sure Im being respectful of the delegates and working to earn their trust. And Im going to continue to work to do that over the next few weeks.

Why now, when its so late in the election cycle, and in the middle of a pandemic?

Well for one thing, I think its important to think about the fact that the election cycles have been getting longer. Theyre starting early in the year before the election, and we dont need that much campaigning going on for a presidency, otherwise these things are just nonstop, around-the-clock, and people get really tired of it. But actually, at the beginning of this year, in February, I started to look at it very carefully, and wanted to consider whether I would be a candidate, and I would have made a decision earlier, but then we had the coronavirus pandemic come up, and I had to make the decision, the right decision, I believe, to delay the final judgement of whether Im going to jump in or not, because I want to be able to represent my constituents during this time, I wanted to make sure Im in top of what was going on in Congress, and I wanted to reassess how a pandemic situation where were all stuck at home would affect the campaign.

Is it still possible to advance the things you want to talk about as a third-party candidate?

It is possible to do that, and the way Im going to do that is by getting my message out there. And if I do that, I feel confident that people will see that among the three candidates, the one running as a Libertarian Party nominee right now, or seeking the Libertarian Party nomination, is the one who will be the most compelling and qualified candidate of the three.

Do you think your presence in the race will help or hurt either candidate?

I think it hurts both candidates. The goal is to win, so you obviously want to take votes from both candidates. Theres a huge pool of voters who arent represented by either of the parties, and a lot of times, they just stay home or they settle for one of the two parties, but they would be happy to vote for someone else if they felt there was another candidate that was compelling.

Have you thought about whether youd vote for Biden or Trump?

I would not vote for Biden or Trump. Getting rid of Donald Trump does not fix the problems because Donald Trump is just a symptom of the problems. The problems will still exist with Joe Biden in the White House.

Is there anything that your friends in the Republican Party could do to redeem themselves now in your eyes?

I dont think that theres any way to pull them back from where they are. The culture of Donald Trump that has become dominant in the Republican Party is not going away anytime soon. Its probably here for at least a decade. Its a very different tone; its a very different style. Theres not much focus on principles anymore, its a focus on personality.

What makes you think that theres a viable path for you?

When you think about whether Republicans are firmly behind Trump, yes, theyre firmly behind Trump because they dont see an alternative. And they view the alternative right now as Joe Biden, and thats not a viable alternative for most Republicans. So there is a path for a third candidate to receive votes from Republicans.

Michigan has been in the news recently for the protests against the governors coronavirus policies. Can I ask what you made of them?

I support people protesting. I support their right to protest. I think people are very upset in Michigan about much of the overreach. I do condemn and denounce things like using Nazi flags or Nazi symbols at protests. Or coming into the state capitol holding weapons in a way that might be intimidating to many people.

What about the protests where folks havent been adhering to socialdistancing practices?

It shouldnt happen where people dont keep away from each other by at least 6 ft. I mean, were hearing from doctors and epidemiologists and others. We should adhere to those guidelines.

What was the decision not to run for reelection like?

It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. I think its important to focus on one race at a time, and this is the race Im focused on. Ultimately I decided that even though I can win reelection as an independent, I wasnt sure it would make the same kind of difference to our system as running a presidential campaign and winning that campaign. If you win as an independent, some people might just write it off to some oddity of the third district of Michigan, saying, well in that district, an independent can win, but it wont work anywhere else. If you win the presidency as a Libertarian, you have a chance to really upset the system in a way that can restore our constitutional process and our representative government, and to me that is the more important thing.

Whats it like being home and deciding whether you want to run for President under these circumstances?

Its a different kind of campaign, but its one that actually may work to my benefit. If we were running a normal campaign, I obviously dont have the name ID yet to go out and hold massive rallies or any of those kinds of things, like the President might, or maybe Joe Biden might. So were at a point where we can compete with the other candidates through video and through technology, and I have an advantage in that, maybe, as a younger candidate, going out there and getting my message out on social media and elsewhere.

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Write to Lissandra Villa at lissandra.villa@time.com.

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Michigan Rep. Justin Amash on Why Hed Run for President as a Libertarian and the Culture of the GOP - TIME

The government has not been an efficient or competent dispenser of the masks so vital to protecting health care workers and patients from COVID-19.

As of mid-April, The Wall Street Journal reports, the federal government had for whatever reason dedicated millions in contracts, involving at least 80 percent of the 20 million N95 masks it was trying to procure, from "suppliers that either had never done business with the federal government or had only taken on small prior contracts that didn't include medical supplies." Predictably, some of those vendors"missed delivery deadlines or have backed out because of supply problems. The parent company of one supplier is in bankruptcy and its owners have been accused of fraud in lawsuits by multiple business partners."

One contractor, who usually works in hospital renovation for the government, told the Journal he just figured he'd be able to find the masks somehow through suppliers he typically worked with. After he agreed to a $5.5 million contract, the paper says, he was "stymied by sellers that don't really have high-quality masks or who jack up the price."

At least one would-be contractor has now been nabbed for fraud on such a mask deal.

ProPublicatagged along with what theJournalcalled the "largest N95 mask contract given out by the VA [Veterans Administration], for an initial $35.4 million." The company, Federal Government Experts, "agreed to provide the VA six million masks for $5.90 apiece by April 25, with potential for another five million masks at the same price at a later date, for a total of $64.9 million, according to federal contracting data."

It didn't work out. As Robert Stewartthe boss at Federal Government Expertswondered to the ProPublica reporter himself, "Awarding a $34.5 million contract to a small company without any supply chain experience.Why would you do that?"

Stewart let that reporter tag along on fruitless (and expensive) private jet rides (including picking up what Stewart hoped would be his proud parents) on his way to cities where he didn't know he'd find any masks, and in general to witness him get jerked around by other unreliable potential sources for the masks he promised to deliver.

The fiasco ended with no masks deliveredbut at least, according to the VA, no money paid either. (This contract paid only on delivery.) Despite months of scrambling, the Veterans Administration was not prepared to keep its hospitals equipped with masks. As of now over 2,000 V.A. employees have tested positive.

Stewart's absurd deal is only the tip of the iceberg in questionable procurement practices. ProPublica notes that the administration "has handed out at least $5.1 billion in no-bid contracts to address the pandemic."

The feds aren't the only ones making bad mask decisions. California is currently trying to get a refund on a $456.9 million wire transfer it sent as a down payment on a $600 million contract for 110 million N95 masks. It paid the money to a firm called Blue Flame Medical, which, The Wall Street Journalinforms us, was "founded days earlier by former Republican fundraiser Mike Gula.Blue Flame struck a flurry of deals with states looking for medical supplies in late March and the first weeks of April, most of which have unraveled." Maryland and Alabama are also cancelling orders with the company, having decided that they are unlikely to be fulfilled.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Timesreports that Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is refusing "to reveal the contents of a $990-million contract for purchasing protective masks from a Chinese electric car manufacturer." All the state would cough up was that they committed to buying 200 million masks a month for two months, of which 150 million were N95, but "all other details, including the price paid per mask, have been kept confidential." Even the state's legislators are being blocked from learning details of the deal. Such secrecy is not comforting when such enormous amounts of public funds are being spent.

When it does have the masks, the government hasn't been a great or intelligent caretaker or distributor of them. The Transportation Security Agency decided to hoard more than 1.3 million N95 respirator masks (which it received from Customs and Border Protection) rather than distribute them to hospitals or agencies or people who might lack themeven, as ProPublica reported, "as the number of people coming through U.S. airports dropped by 95% and the TSA instructed many employees to stay home to avoid being infected."

Other wasteful, clumsy, or even macabre stories have arisen from government attempts to help with or procure medical equipment. In Seattle, the county Public Health Department sent a Native American community health board body bags instead of requested medical supplies.

Before COVID-19 hit, certain pundits were promoting "state capacity libertarianism"the idea that it is silly to focus on how much government spends or taxes, or the ways it dictates how people live, buy, sell, or behave, or the breadth and width of tasks it takes upon itself: What's important, this argument holds, is how effective and smart government is at doing what it tries to do.

The idea was, at best, an attempt to turn libertarian energies toward making government better at what it does. But these not-at-all-shocking snafus show no obvious way the concept could help, other than hand-waving calls to have better people making better decisions.

Mask procurement is not going awry because government lacks the capacity to do anything. They have plenty of money, essentially as much as they want to have, and they have plenty of staff. It's not because they don't have professional experts and bureaucrats trying to manage things, and it's not because Republicans hate government and want it to fail.

Even in a relatively free market, fraud and incompetence exist. The government in its mask decisions have shown a keen ability to find market actors who are very bad (deliberately or not) at what they do and offer them ungodly amounts of money. But government's unique combination of endless money and impunity for messing things up mean that the state is going to get things more wrong, more often. And that's true even, or perhaps especially, when it's urgent that the state get things right. The evidence is in the news every day, even if ideological blinders prevent non-libertarians from acknowledging it.

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Governments Have Screwed Up Mask Purchase and Distribution. Maybe Everyone Should Be a Libertarian in a Pandemic. - Reason

At the supermarket last week, amidst too many empty shelves, the manager looked at me through a plexiglass sneeze barrier and groused, "they need to open things up. I'd rather get the sniffles than face an angry mob."

COVID-19 is more than the "sniffles"so far, over a quarter-million people have died globally during the pandemic, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. But it's also not the only risk human beings face, even if many policymakers seem consumed with it to the exclusion of all else. There are also the economic repercussions of harsh enforcement of lockdown measures to consider. And we should also include in there the danger to life and liberty inherent in mandated shutdown orders that are enforced by police and jails.

To focus on the virus alone to the exclusion of other threats is to court disaster. Well, not just to court itdisaster is here.

For the week ending May 2, another 3.2 million Americans filed unemployment claims, bringing the total number to over 33 million for the seven weeks since pandemic-related lockdowns began. On a similar note, the European Union predicts its economy will contract by 7.5 percent in 2020 because of the pandemic and related lockdown measures. And "the global economy likely shrank an annualized 12.6 percent in first quarter 2020 relative to fourth quarter 2019 and will weaken a further 8.6 percent in the second quarter," according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

If numbers bore you, we can just go with the International Monetary Fund's pithy description: "worst economic downturn since the Great Depression" because of the pandemic and related lockdowns. Or there's the United Nations' equally catchy forecast of "multiple famines of biblical proportions"not entirely due to the pandemic, but certainly made much worse by the disruptions it has created.

Enforcing lockdowns inflicts a cost on our freedom, too.

"As countries around the world institute extraordinary measures to fight the pandemic, both dictatorships and democracies are curtailing civil liberties on a massive scale," Florian Bieber of Austria's University of Graz observed in Foreign Policy.

That has meant opportunistic muzzling of dissent and arrests of critics, as documented by monitors including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. But it has also meant moronic enforcement of stay-at-home orders, such as protecting people from infection by beating them (the predictable go-to for many law-enforcers around the world). Less brutal but just as stupid are arrests for playing with family members in public parks, and jailings for hanging out with friends and opening businesses without government permissionheavy-handed moves that increase the danger of transmitting disease through contact with cops and incarceration in crowded cells.

Which is to say, focusing narrowly on the danger of the virus has made billions of human beings poorer than they were before, and less free than they have every right to be. And, as the phrase "multiple famines of biblical proportions" implies, there are add-on costs in terms of human life and welfare to being impoverished and under the boot.

"In some cases, people are dying because of the inappropriate application of measures that have been supposedly put in place to save them," United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet concedes.

That's probably a little more analysis than the local supermarket manager had in mind when he talked about balancing fear of "sniffles" against that of an "angry mob," but he did a fair job of recognizing that there are tradeoffs in dealing with the pandemic. He knows that his customers are hurting because of the measures taken to battle the virus, that their paychecks are drying up, and that it's difficult to fully stock shelves because some items are in short supply.

That's not to say he and I would necessarily agree on the proper balance between the competing dangers. Like I said, I think there's more to COVID-19 than "sniffles." But if one of us enforces his judgment on the other with a nightstick, that disagreement becomes a lot more costly than if we're free to make our own assessments about the proper balance of risksespecially since we don't know each other's risk tolerances and abilities to weather one danger relative to another.

Noah Feldman, professor of law at Harvard, frames the ability to conceive of tradeoffs in handling the pandemic in terms of the different ways epidemiologists and economists think.

"Unlike epidemiologists, who identify a biological enemy and try to defeat it without thinking much about the costs, economists live on trade-offs," he wrote for Bloomberg. "It's an article of faith for economists that there is no such thing as an absolute valuenot even the value of human life. Instead, most economists embrace the hardheaded reality that helping one person often leaves another less well-off."

If you add a civil libertarian (or perhaps just a jaded defense attorney, who knows that "law enforcement" is synonymous with busted heads) to that mix, you might get an even better-balanced discussion of the tradeoffs in various approaches to dealing with the pandemic. That would make for a much more serious discussion about the danger of a new, deadly, and highly contagious virus, balanced with the risk of poverty and despair from shutting down societies in order to battle that virus, and considering the peril inherent in turning the world into a vast prison in order to enforce a shutdown.

Maybe that's a discussion we could have soon. Because the tradeoffs among considerations of health, prosperity, and liberty are catching up with us even if we don't want to acknowledge them.

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We Need Economists, Civil Libertarians, and Epidemiologists in the COVID-19 Discussion - Reason

In ablog post entitled It Is Time For aLibertarian Case Against China, Tanner Greer responds to apiece in Reason magazine by Dan Drezner, in which Dan argued that There is No China Crisis. Greer says that libertarians need to take the [China] problem with the seriousness it deserves.

Not that it matters much, but if he wants to make a libertarian case against China, is Greer even alibertarian? Kind of, sort of, maybe, but not really. He says:

I like libertarians and libertarianism. Icant bring myself to identify as one, but someone recently described me as libertarian adjacent, and Iwill not dispute the label.

But regardless of whether Greer identifies as alibertarian, the issue of how to deal with arising power that is authoritarian and looking to expand its influence in world affairs is certainly one of the biggest foreign policy challenges the U.S. government faces. We do need to take it seriously. (And if you read Dans piece, Ithink its clear that he does take it seriously, in the sense of offering thoughtful and nuanced analysis). How people in the United States (including, but not limited to, libertarians) think about this issue is extremely important. Having gotten so many of our foreign policy challenges wrong in recent decades, it would be nice to get this one right.

But in order to think about it clearly and rationally, we need to understand exactly what Chinas goals are, in particular in the global arena. This post wont answer that question fully, because it would take much longer than ablog post to do so. But we do want to push back on some of Greers characterizations, which reflect the overheated rhetoric of many China hawks. Greer says this about President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party:

What [Liza]Tobin describes as a new path to peace, prosperity, and modernity Xi has variously described as Chinese wisdom and aChinese answer to solving the problems of the mankind, a new [achievement] in the history of the development of human society, a new and greater contribution to mankind, and new advance in political civilization.[8] Notice the scope of what the Party hopes to reshape. They hope not to remake China, nor even Asia, but human society, civilization, and mankind. As Politburo member Yang Jiechi exhorted in 2018, the time has come for the Party to energetically control the new direction of the common progress of China and the world. [9]

Clearly, then, based on this language, China is out to dominate the world, right? Not so fast. First of all, relying too much on official government statements (of any government!) may be amistake, in part because governments have many audiences in mindwhen they speak (importantly, their own citizens).But if you are going to use them, you need the full context. In the first sentence that Greer quotes, Xi does, in fact, use the quoted words. But when you read them in context, you dont get the impression that the Communist Party hopes to remake, as Greer puts it,human society, civilization, and mankind. For example, the speech by Xi says this: The Communist Party of China strives for both the wellbeing of the Chinese people and human progress. To make new and greater contributions for mankind is our Partys abiding mission. That sounds like the usual generalities of agovernments public relations campaign rather than an objective of remaking the world.

And with regard to the phraseenergetically control the new direction of the common progress of China and the world, translations are difficult, and word choices between languages are not always clear, but we offer this translation of the broader passage at issue:

We (China) should have aprofound insight into the new developments in China and the world, fully understand the new connotations of Chinas relations with the world, accurately grasp the new law of interaction between China and the world, and proactively drive the new direction that China and the world are heading together.

Again, this seems like somewhat normal and expected governmentspeak.

So what are the actual goals of the Chinese government in world affairs? Thats an area where we need more analysis from unbiased experts. For security hawks, its very convenient to have found anew existential threat that can justify aconfrontational foreign policy and more military spending. But in order to craft the appropriate policy here, we need to get past the selfserving assumptions of certain members of the foreign policy establishment, and sort out exactly what we are dealing with in terms of the Chinese governments global ambitions.The case against China needs examining, but an overexcited rush in one direction could be very damaging (and has been before).

This article by Simon Lester and Huan Zhu first appeared in CATO on May 7, 2020.

Image: Reuters.

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Is the Chinese Communist Party Really Trying To Take Over the World? - The National Interest

On Friday, election offices around Montana began sending out ballots for the June primary election, as they do every two years. However, there was a big difference this year: Mail ballots werent going just to those who asked for them, but to all active registered voters.

In March, Gov. Steve Bullock directed that counties could decide to hold the primary election by mail, to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19. All 56 counties took that option. That means traditional local polling places will not be open, though people will be able to vote in person at county election offices.

Election officials estimate about 600,000 ballots were mailed out across the state on Friday. About 94,000 more registered voters are considered inactive, and will need to contact officials in order to receive a ballot.

In Lewis and Clark County, about 40,500 active voters are having ballots mailed to them. Audrey McCue, the countys elections supervisor, said they have usually had 50% to 60% of their voters request absentee ballots, so it was not as big of a change as it might have been.

That number has gone up, but its not a drastic increase for us, she said.

For the vast majority of voters, the mail packet they receive will include three individual party ballots Democratic, Republican and Green. Some voters, including in Missoula Countys Montana Senate District 45, will also get a Libertarian ballot.

Voters can choose one, and only one, ballot to vote. Once theyre done, they put that ballot back in the secrecy and return envelopes, sign the envelope and mail it back. The other two ballots can be discarded.

If a voter sends in two ballots that have been voted, neither one will be counted.

McCue said, in previous elections, mail ballot packets also included a separate envelope that people could use to send back their unvoted ballots.

You didnt have to send them back, but it gave you somewhere to put them and to send them back, she said. That law was changed last year, so now were not sending out that envelope, and voters arent required or instructed to return them.

Bullocks directive also said that any county that switched to mail ballots needed to ensure voters would not have to add postage to send their ballot in. Each county has chosen its own way to provide postage. In Lewis and Clark County, officials simply put stamps on each return envelope.

In other counties, you might see business reply mail on the envelopes, or you might see metered postage in the top right corner, but statewide postage is covered on those return envelopes, and voters dont need stamps, McCue said.

The governors order also extended the regular voter registration deadline, from 30 days before the election to 10 days before the election. That means there is still time to register by mail. You can contact your county elections office to get more information on how to register.

Business for us is as usual; were still here, said McCue. If you dont get a ballot, call us or come in person; well be here.

In a release, the Montana Association of Clerks and Recorders said voters should contact their local election administrator if they dont receive their mail ballots by May 13.

Residents can use the Montana Secretary of StatesMy Voter pageto check whether they are registered to vote, determine whether they are considered inactive, and track whether their ballot has been received. They can find contact information for elections officialson the Secretary of States website.

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600K primary election ballots are in the mail to Montana voters - Missoula Current

Green Party presidential front-runner Howie Hawkins. Photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

If the 2020 presidential election becomes another tense, tight contest like the last one, with candidates battling for Electoral College votes across a complex battleground, minor-party voting could again be an important factor in the outcome. Of the many factors that led to Donald Trumps threading-the-needle win, an unusually high level of votes for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein is impossible to dismiss entirely, as the Guardian noted immediately after the election:

[Trumps 12,000-vote margin was] significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in Michigan. Its a similar story elsewhere: third-party candidates won more total votes than the Trumps margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Without those states, Trump would not have won the presidency.

In part because Johnson and Stein were each running for a second consecutive time, they did very well by the standards of their parties:

Johnson (and running mate William Weld), who was on the ballot in all 50 states, won nearly 4.5 million votes; only once (four years earlier, with Johnson as the nominee) had the Libertarians topped 1 million votes. Stein and Ajamu Baraka, on the ballot in 45 states, didnt match Naders enormous 2000 vote, but with around one percent of the total, they beat the previous three Green presidential tickets combined.

Both the Libertarians and the Greens will have new nominees this year who will have to work for name identification and credibility. But the bigger problem they face is the threshold challenge of ballot access, with the coronavirus pandemic complicating the task immeasurably, as Bill Scher explains for Politico:

In 2016, the Libertarian Party was on the general election ballot in all 50 states; this year, it has secured ballot access in just 35. Similarly, the Green Partywhich in 2016 had its best election ever by making the ballot in 44 states, with a further three states granting the partys candidate official write-in statushas qualified for the November ballot in only 22 states

At present, neither the Libertarian Party nor the Green Party has qualified for the ballot in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Iowa or Minnesota. Additionally, the Green Party has not secured a place on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia or Nevada, and the Libertarian Party is missing from Maine.

Collecting the petitions necessary for minor-party ballot access is always a chore. Getting it done during a pandemic is extremely difficult. Unsurprisingly, third-party representatives are asking states to waive petition requirements entirely (as Vermont just did, via legislation), or at least delay existing deadlines. But they also plan to go to court with a combination of traditional and pandemic-related arguments that barriers to the ballot infringe upon voting rights. Prospects for success are at best mixed, as Scher reports:

Those kind of cases are not slam dunks because courts are generally wary of changing election rules, said Rick Hasen of University of California Irvine School of Law, citing litigation over this months primary election in Wisconsin, which culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court deciding that the state could not extend the deadline for mail-in ballots because existing state law implied they needed to be postmarked by Election Day. The Court majority was not very moved by arguments about Covid-19 being a compelling enough reason to change from the ordinary requirements of an election, Hasen said.

I would be shocked if the minor parties do as well in terms of ballot access this year as they did [in 2016], said Michael S. Kang of Northwestern Universitys Pritzker School of Law. He argues because of a lack of binding precedents, judges have a lot of discretion. In turn, he expects a mixed response with some states providing relief and others refusing to change the rules.

Ballot access aside, the minor parties will simply be struggling for attention during the pandemic, much like other political actors who are not in a position to command media coverage of official actions germane to public health and economic recovery. And its unlikely they will attract as much support as Johnson and Stein did. Green front-runner Howie Hawkins is known to some for his claim that he was the originator of the Green New Deal but is not a national figure. And the Libertarians seem to be going through a purist phase, departing from their recent practice of handing their presidential nomination to dissident Republicans like Johnson. The current front-runner, Jacob Hornberger, is committed to the very poorly timed idea of abolishing the Fed and moving to a deflationary hard-money currency.

Yes, independent (and ex-Republican) congressman Justin Amash is flirting with a Libertarian candidacy; a lot may depend on whether the party delays its May convention in Texas. Amash could raise Libertarian prospects significantly, in part because hes from the key battleground state of Michigan and gained significant national attention by voting for Trumps impeachment.

Ballot-access appeals by the Greens and the Libertarians could open the door for other minor parties, notably the far-right Constitution Party, which is already on the ballot in 15 states, including battlegrounds Florida, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The best-known candidate for that partys nomination (which will be determined by phone balloting May 12) is former West Virginia coal baron Don Blankenship. Most famous for a strange, more-Trumpian-than-Trump Senate Republican primary run in 2018, featuring wild charges that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was involved in the drug trade, Blankenship has the wealth to self-finance something of a campaign.

The relevance of any minor-party presidential candidate, of course, will depend on the dynamics of the major-party competition. Arguably a key factor in the abundant 2016 protest vote was the widespread belief that Hillary Clinton had the presidency in the bag. Its extremely unlikely that opinion leaders or voters will be so confident in the outcome this time around. But crazy things can happen in crazy-close elections, so keeping an eye on the Greens, the Libertarians, and even the theocrats of the Constitution Party as the battle for ballot access unfolds would be a good idea.

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The Coronavirus Might Force Minor Parties Off the 2020 Ballot - New York Magazine

Many are familiar with the long intellectual tradition of progressivism within academia. While progressive ideas may hold true, it is important students are exposed to the full breadth of knowledge academia holds. Without ideological diversity, students lose the critical thinking skills to discern between important ideas. Who I think should be included in the libertarian canon is merely a sample, but sufficient enough for readers to get their feet wet in libertarianism. My methodology is multidisciplinary, ranging from literature, to economics and more. All of the figures in this article are a product of my own research and I have never been formally taught any of them in school, which is why it is doubly important this message is expressed. Besides, one of the main tenets of libertarianism is self-directed education.

Firstly, lets discuss literature. My favorite author, George Orwell was a libertarian socialist. Another author, Ayn Rand, was a libertarian capitalist. Ive read both 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell and enjoyed them, thoroughly. Both were a critique of the overreach of government and totalitarianism. Some readers believe Snowball and Napoleon from Animal Farm represent dictators, Stalin and Trotsky.

Orwell also coined such phrases as The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians, and If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In short this man stood up for and advocated what he believed in: libertarianism.

As for Ayn Rand: I listened to half of her audiobook, Anthem. The book is written in first-person, plural pronouns. Individuality in the book is deemphasized. In fact, individuality is an important theme in her books and her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. Though I disagree with major components of Objectivism it believes altruism is evil I appreciate that it stresses capitalism, individualism and limited government. Ive been learning a lot about Ayn Rands work through her think tanks and through Yaron Brook, businessman and president of the Ayn Rand institute.

Economics is where the vast majority of libertarian theories arises. It goes without saying that I believe students should study the works of F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. As Hayek says, The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better. Despite these economists long accolades and contributions to society, my favorite economist is someone else, an obscure economist from Virginia.

I first became a fan of economist Bryan Caplan when I was googling libertarian quizzes, several years ago. From there, I became curious about his work, watching lectures, interviews and debates he participated in. I eventually bought two of his books, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Caplans statistics were educational and pointed to an idea he called signalling, the idea that educations mere purpose is to convey intelligence, conformity and conscientiousness. In Open Borders, he explained a philosophical thought experiment my favorite about a man named Marvin. I had emailed Dr. Caplan last summer, out of sheer curiosity, about his positions of abolishing the FDA and anti-discrimination laws, ideas hes defended in the past. He answered my emails, thanking me for emailing him, along with a link for senior economics students, using statistics to convey why the general public is not bigoted. Overall, it was an interesting read, but Im not sure if Im ready to repeal anti-discrimination laws just yet, but he definitely deserves to be in the canon.

Overall, this is a sampling of who should be in the libertarian canon. You are free to research, enjoy and discern between opinions. I hope this article helps someone in exploring libertarianism, even if they decide libertarianism is not for them.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual writers in the opinion section do not reflect the views and opinions of The Daily Campus or other staff members. Only articles labeled Editorial are the official opinions of The Daily Campus.

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Who should be included in the libertarian canon - UConn Daily Campus

Dont these orders go beyond the Commerce Clause, infringe the Privileges or Immunities Clause, or violate one of the other constitutional provisions Im constantly banging on about? Surely Icant approve such extreme impositions on economic liberty, the right to travel, and just the basic freedom to go about your daily life as you choose so long as you dont get in the way of others freedom to do the same?

Well, thats the rub. As Iexplained during Catos online forum on Coronavirus and the Constitution, in apandemic when we dont know whos infected and infections are often asymptomatic, these sorts of restrictions end up maximizing freedom. The traditional libertarian principle that one has aright to swing ones fists, but that right ends at the tip of someone elses nose, means government can restrict our movements and activities, because were all fistswingers now.

This isnt like seatbelt mandates or soda restrictions, where the government regulates your behavior for our own good, becausesetting aside the issue of publicly borne health care coststhe only person you hurt by not wearing aseatbelt or drinking too much sugar is yourself. With communicable diseases, you violate others rights just by being around them.

The federal government is one of enumerated and thus limited powersat least in theory, if observed largely in the breach since the New Dealbut states have police powers to govern for the public health, safety, welfare, and morals (the last one having fallen away in recent decades). Accordingly, in light of the best epidemiological data we have, state and local executives ordered shut downs to prevent people from being around too many other people and thus spreading the disease.

Interestingly, despite the infamous pictures of springbreakers and St. Patricks Day revelers, these government actions were lagging indicators. Restaurant traffic and airline travel fell off acliff before any official action. Airports are still open, even though the president has total authority to shut them down, as George W. Bush did on 9/11.

People began socialdistancing and wearing masks without any edicts. Sports leagues canceled their seasons without so much as a dont play ball from state umpires.

Not being satisfied with this largescale recognition of the threat we face and compliance with commonsense rules for the new normal, however, governors and mayors have begun to overreach. Although Ihad been telling reporters that nobody was going to get arrested for reading in the park or enjoying wildlife with her family, police were indeed telling people to move along if they were in apublic space, even if they were nowhere near anybody else.

When we got questions at that Cato forum about restrictions on the sale of nonessential products or prohibitions on fishinga right going back to Magna Carta!I thought these were farfetched hypotheticals, but it turns out they were all too real.

Then came the bans on parking at achurch and staying in your car to hear asermon, ahead of Easter Sunday, no less, which led toone of the best district court opinionsIve read in along time, reversing such an order in Louisville. (Full disclosure: Judge Justin Walker is afriend, and Im advising the Mississippi Justice Institute on one of these cases in Greenville, Miss.)

Look, this isnt about religious liberty, or any other constitutional right in particular. Assuming that socialdistancing is required to flatten the curve and fight COVID-19, such rules are fine so long as theyre applied equally everywhere, whether to yoga studios or churches, hackathons or street protests.

But theyre not fine when theyre arbitrarily targeted at some businesses and not others, as if coronavirus spreads more in gun shops than liquor stores. Theyre also not fine when they have nothing to do with socialdistancing, as with the fatwas against drivein liturgy or closing only aisles three and five of abigbox store. Or when tennis courts are closed even if the players wear allwhite masks and promise not to both go to the net at the same time. Or that video of the cop chasing that poor guy going for arun on the beach by his lonesome.

These ridiculous examples of petty tyranny led to mymost viral tweet ever: Angered by citations for being in park with nuclear family, or in car at church, or running on the beach. Or nonessential goods roped off in stores. These things have nothing to do with fighting the virus and everything to do with powerhungry politicians and law enforcement.

Just because significant restrictions on our daytoday lives are warranted doesnt mean its afreeforall for government coercion. To borrow alegal standard from adifferent context, the rules have to be congruent and proportional to the harm being addressed. As amatter of law, judges will give executives awide berth to deal with acrisis, but their enforcement measures still have to pass the constitutional smell test.

More fundamentally, any regulations that dont make common sense, that arent seen as reasonable by most people, are simply not going to be taken as legitimate, and they wont be followed. The American people will decide what restrictions are reasonable, and for how long. Just like they decided when to shut down, they have total authority to decide when to reopen.

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The Government Has a Lot More Emergency Powers Than Libertarians Like, but It Still Can't Control Everything - Cato Institute

On April 15, protesters in Michigan railed against Gov. Gretchen Whitmers stay-at-home executive order. Spurred by right-wing media goliaths like Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh, demonstrators took to the streets of Lansing, holding signs and waving flags. Some of the signs compared Gov. Whitmer to Adolf Hitler. Some protesters waved Confederate flags. Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel tweeted that Democrat Gretchen Whitmer is turning Michigan into a police state.

Sound familiar?

The Tea Party burst onto the national scene in February 2009 after the Obama administration announced the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, which refinanced mortgages while the country was in the throes of the Great Recession. The first national Tea Party protest was on Feb. 27, 2009, but the seeds of the movement were sown before that day.

Modern right-wing populism was born in a time similar to this one, during a recession with a big-government response. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed what would become the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 on September 20 of that year, and while the bailouts were necessary to save the global economy, they were unpopular. Grassroots organizations on both the left and right mobilized against the Acts Troubled Asset Relief Program. Protesters on the left argued against what they perceived to be a policy package that would only help Wall Street, not ordinary Americans, in step with the lefts positions on Wall Street for decades. Opposition to TARP on the right came from a new movement.

When the Bush administration unveiled its bailout plan, fiscal libertarians who would become the Tea Party felt that TARP was the government picking winners and losers in the economy. Staunch advocates against federal intervention, they immediately opposed the plan, despite evidence that without it, Americans would soon be unable to get money from ATMs.

Libertarian conservatives were not unreasonable in their growing discontent with President George W. Bush. The compassionate conservatism he campaigned on manifested in big-government policy. It makes sense that some Republicans felt like their leader had abandoned them with Medicare Part D. Civil libertarians in the party werent happy with the Patriot Act either, as they felt it represented big government violating citizens privacy. The Bush administration also found resistance to its stance on immigration; a nascent paleoconservative wing of the party defeated Bushs immigration reform plan because of the path to citizenship it sought to provide to illegal immigrants.

Conservatives werent stupid to think the Tea Party was going to right the ship. Tea Party candidates won handily in the 2010 midterms, but their time in Washington was indicative of a greater issue in the movement.

Tea Party protesters held signs and waved flags. A lot of the signs compared Obama to Hitler. Occasionally, protestors had Confederate flags. Tea Party Republicans complained that Obama was turning this country into a police state, taking their guns and taxing the bejesus out of them.

Conservative intelligentsia largely saw the Tea Party as a vehicle for a return to Reagan-era conservatism. Tea Party candidates evoked the Gippers memory in their speeches and policies. In fact, Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who rode the Tea Party wave into office in 2010, was hailed as the next Reagan before his 2016 presidential campaign.

But it was all a lie.

If Tea Party voters actually cared about limited government and the separation of powers, they couldnt possibly be Trump supporters.

The thing is, it was never about principles.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a libertarian hardliner, said to the Washington Examiner of his voters:

All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they werent voting for libertarian ideasthey were voting for the craziest son of a b- in the race.

Massie is spot-on here. The vast majority of Tea Party voters and politicians still in office have pledged fealty to Donald Total Authority Trump, certainly not deigning to investigate his flagrant corruption, their one-time raison dtre. The anti-Whitmer protest, and similar demonstrations across the country, are nothing more than a redux of the Tea Partys beginnings this time without any pretense of support for the free market and limited government.

Lets not get caught up in the same narrative. It was all about tearing down the establishment. Real Americans versus the latte-sipping elites. Thats what it is now, too. Trump, in his unwillingness to listen to medical and epidemiological experts, is a man of the people. Hes draining the swamp when he reassigns career public servants Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother from the National Security Council to lower posts after Vindman testifies against him in his impeachment hearings.

Bulwark founder and editor-at-large, Charlie Sykes, wrote Thursday that on the populist right, there is no tension between outrage over the Nanny State and slavish devotion to the Orange God King. Although as a matter of political philosophy or logic you would think those two things would be incompatible, as a matter of psychology theyre not.

Hes absolutely right on that point. Its a psychology of war, one that the Tea Party instilled in the partys identity, and that persists today. John McCain was a squishy RINO in 2008 to the conservative wing of the party, so he picked Sarah Palin, who ended up being maybe the highest-profile Tea Party leader. Mitt Romney wasnt conservative enough, and he picked Paul Ryan, who, while as conservative as Tea Party politicians, was seen as too much of a Washington policy wonk.

The right wing of the Republican Party wanted someone to take up the cause. Not of conservatism, but of populism. Donald Trump is the strongman who can give power back to the people the president who will tweet all-caps calls to LIBERATE three states, which might have been incitement.

Its not as if there arent valid reasons for all kinds of Americans to be distrustful of government and our countrys institutions. If the 21st century can be described in one word, that word would be disillusionment. But Trumps goal, and greatest strength, is self-preservation. Hell do whatever he and his team think necessary for him to stay in power.

What happens next?

Trump will likely exploit growing populist indignation, pitting Americans against one another even more than he did in 2016. Hell double down on immigration, citing the coronavirus pandemic as a reason to tighten border security. Hell claim countless powers he doesnt have, all while calling Biden a big-government socialist. His supporters wont call him out on his hypocrisy, because to them, the president isnt the government. Hes a fighter, and the government is the deep state that he has to beat.

My hope is that real conservatives dont fall prey to this faux-libertarian movement the way the right did a decade ago. Considering the responses to Trumps claim that when somebodys the president of the United States, the authority is total and Trumps history of not typically following through on his loudest pronouncements, I doubt anything shockingly more apocalyptic than what were currently experiencing comes to pass. Im sure there will be protests, more hand-wringing from elected Republicans when Trump says something particularly egregious about liberating states and Democrats taking guns, but not much more.

Polling data overwhelmingly shows that Americans support social isolation measures and stay-at-home orders. The divide between those who do and dont is almost entirely partisan. Americans are growing increasingly frustrated with the federal response to the pandemic, and theyre not the ones out in the streets protesting. The new silent majority is the moderate suburban voter, and their vote is right there for Joe Biden to pick up.

If he does, and is elected president of the United States, this new Tea Party wont pick up much political momentum, but itll exist as long as we as a country feel the effects of coronavirus. And theres no telling how long the GOPs populist turn will last, but its clear that its never been about conservative principles.

Zach Kessel is a Medill freshman. He can be contacted at zachkessel2023@u.northwestern.edu. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to opinion@dailynorthwestern.com. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.

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Opinion | A new populist revolution is here. Don't buy in. - The Daily Northwestern