Bylaws Committee

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The Bylaws Committee met in Las Vegas on February 15th and adopted 34 recommendations for our party bylaws and convention rules. Many of these are clean-ups and technical corrections to fix errors introduced by hasty consideration at past conventions. Others are designed to protect us against hostile takeover by those who disagree with our principles, help us in the transition from debating society to political party, or help ensure that delegates to future conventions have more time to read, consider, and debate proposals likely to come before them. If all of our recommendations were to be adopted, our bylaws would then look like this.

Several recommendations regarding our platform or the Platform Committee are jointly recommended by both the Bylaws and Platform committees. These proposals will be submitted by both committees jointly to the delegates.

One of the joint proposals includes a modification to our Statement of Principles. Contrary to apparent intent, the original drafters of our bylaws left a backdoor circumventing the requirement of a 7/8 vote to amend our Statement of Principles by means of a series of three consecutive 2/3 votes. In speaking with various Party leaders, we found that many are unwilling to close the backdoor until the most controversial clauses have been deleted, while other Party leaders are unwilling to consider any changes unless the backdoor is closed and padlocked. Therefore the Bylaws and Platform committees jointly propose to Suspend the Rules to wrap it all up in a single vote without any possibility of the proposal being highjacked to make other changes to our Statement of Principles. The first vote, to Suspend the Rules, requires a 2/3 vote. If it passes, there would be 15 minutes of debate without amendments, followed by a vote to make the proposed changes including amending our Bylaws to close and padlock the backdoor.

Of particular interest is a proposal that would change the meaning of Libertarian Party membership. Now, anyone who signs the pledge/ certification is a member, whether or not we have any current contact information. Statistically, thousands of our members are deceased, but we don't know about it. A small subset of our members are donors to the Party. Delegates to our national conventions are often neither members nor donors. Our proposal would define members as those who donate to the Party and restrict voting membership i.e. eligibility to be a delegate or hold party office to those who have both signed the pledge/certification and donated to the party. Looking at it another way, we now require signing the pledge/certification to carry a membership card but not to serve as a national convention delegate or as a member of the Platform Committee. We propose to reverse that, so that one would need to sign the pledge/certification to be a national convention delegate or serve on the Platform Committee, but not to carry a membership card. We expect this change to help protect our principles and to result in a modest increase in donations.

Bylaws Committee members are: M Carling (NY), Seth Cohn (NH), Dan Karlan (NJ), Rob Latham (UT), Frank Manske (CA), Rob Oates (ID), Heather Scott (TN), Aaron Starr (CA), Blay Tarnoff, (NY), and Alfredo Torrejon (OR).

The Bylaws Committee will meet again in Denver on Thursday, May 22nd, at 9:00pm in advance of the national convention. If you find any errors or unintended consequences, please let us know as soon before we meet as possible by leaving a comment to the appropriate proposal at http://lpbylaws.blogspot.com with your name and state. We appreciate any help toward improving our bylaws and convention rules.