Voter registration instead became part of the Kahn for Mayor campaign in Tucson, which by report received $50,000 in state Clean Elections funds, and apparently used the larger part of those funds to register Libertarian voters. The National Party apparently provided manpower for the effort. The Tucson group then launched the first of a series of lawsuits to establish its claim to be the legitimate State Party.
The National Committee staff was highly responsive to the Tucson group. When in 1998 the leadership of the Tucson group claimed to the National Committee that they had secured control of a merged state party, the name of their claimed state chair immediately appeared on the National Party web site as the true state chair. When the Phoenix group told the National Committee Staff that the National Committee had been misinformed, at that someone else was state chair, the National Committee Staff refused to make the correction or withdraw the name of the listed chair. It continued to list the Tucson group’s state chair on its web pages. Given the dispute, an impartial National Party could have noted on its web pages that there was an internal Party dispute in the state, and then listed either both State Chairs or neither State Chair. The pages instead listed only one State Chair, even after the National Party’s attention was called to the issue. Thus, prior to the LNC action on the affiliation issue the National Party had already intervened in the Libertarian dispute in Arizona, supporting one side over the other.
The National Committee Chooses an Affiliated Arizona Party and Experiences the Consequences of Its Actions
At its August 1999 meeting the Libertarian National Committee entered the fray by invoking its own By-Laws, specifically:
“ARTICLE 8: AFFILIATE PARTIES
- The National Committee shall have the power to revoke the status of any affiliate party, for cause, by a vote of 3/4 of the entire National Committee. The affiliate party may challenge the revocation of its status by written appeal to the Judicial Committee within 30 days of receipt of notice of such revocation. Failure to appeal within 30 days shall confirm the revocation and bar any later challenge or appeal. The National Committee shall not revoke the status of any affiliate party within six months prior to a Regular Convention.”
After an extremely long meeting and a long series of motions that were defeated or ruled out of order by National Chair David Bergland, the National Committee passed a motion targeting its Arizona affiliate. According to the Minutes of that meeting, “The motion on disaffiliation passed with 14 affirmative votes: Bergland, Bisson, Butler, Dehn, Dixon, Franke, Fylstra, Givot, Hall, Lark, Neale, Ruwart, Schwarz, and Smith. Buttrick and Tuniewicz voted against the motion. Savyon abstained.”
Having discarded its historic state affiliate, the LNC then voted to poll its Arizona members to determine which state party group should be given affiliation. This innocent-sounding step led to considerable difficulties, because there were three groups involved, namely the Phoenix group, the Tucson group, and the National Party. Membership lists for these three groups were substantially non-overlapping. In particular, the rolls of the National Party included many dues-paying, oath-signing National Party members who were registered to vote as Democrats or Republicans, and who were thus from the point of view of the Phoenix group not Libertarians at all. Furthermore, there were 15,000 registered Libertarians in the state, all members of the Phoenix group, most of whom were not National Party members; these Libertarians were not polled. The National Party’s poll allegedly indicated a preference for the Tucson group, so the National Committee cited the poll as a justification when it made the Tucson group its state affiliate in Arizona.
Only gradually does the recognition appear to have percolated through the National Committee that the National Party’s actions had had no effect on the Arizona state government, which continued to recognize the Phoenix group as the lawful Libertarian State Party of Arizona.
Discrepancies between the National Committee’s actions and the requirements of the Party By-Laws are apparent. The Party By-Laws specify that disaffiliation must be “for cause”. “For cause” is a term of art with a very well understood meaning, namely that the party against which action is being taken must have done something wrong. Furthermore, that wrong has to be specified, so that the accused can have due process by offering a defense.
What wrong had the ALP committed? The assertion was made in some quarters that the cause was that the LNC could not tell which group was its affiliate. It is not clear how the inability of the LNC to understand what was happening in Arizona could constitute ‘cause’ against the Phoenix group. Indeed, on the date of the disaffiliation there was ongoing litigation between the two groups as to which group was the real Libertarian Party in Arizona. The Phoenix group recommended that the National Party should postpone action until the judge ruled; their recommendation was not accepted by the National Committee.
It is extremely hard to avoid the conclusion that the LNC’s disaffiliation of the Phoenix group violated Party By-Laws, which require that the disaffiliation be ‘for cause’. No rational cause was specified in the motion, nor does such a cause appear to be noted in the LNC Minutes. As was shown at the start of the book when ‘support’ and ‘conflict of interest’ were discussed, the Libertarian National Committee does not appear to have been heavily attached to careful textual analysis of its own By-laws. It is therefore unsurprising that the National Committee’s interpretation of ‘for cause’ was situationally driven.
It is important to emphasize that the ‘for cause’ issue that was placed before the Libertarian National Committee, and the issues then being litigated in Arizona, are entirely separate. The Arizona State Courts eventually resolved the questions at hand on the basis of the State Party By-Laws and Roberts’ Rules of Order. The National Committee did not hear or review these arguments. To say ‘the National Party did not obey its own bylaws in the decision its made’ does not speak to the question of which group was the legitimate state party in Arizona.
A variety of other reasons for disaffiliating the Phoenix group have been suggested: (To Be Continued)
