Willis is imprecise as to whether or not Browne’s money influenced his decision to break the Libertarian Party’s rules. He claims on page 11 of his memo “Most of what I did for the Browne campaign I did for free. When I first decided to disobey the policy I figured ‘If I’m going to disobey the policy I might as well get something out of it.’ ” Willis was already on the Party payroll and was paid well for the job that he was supposed to be doing. There is evidence that he also had LNC employees under his direction do work for the Browne campaign. There is documentary evidence that before the 1996 nominating convention the LNC, with Willis’s knowledge, gave Browne’s campaign substantial financial support, even though other Libertarians were competing for the nomination.
Willis continues: “I received exactly one payment before the current policy [GP: forbidding him to aid secretly pre-nomination campaigns] was put into effect, and (if I recall correctly) one payment afterwards. The Browne campaign was having trouble catching up on past debts, so I stopped charging, but I kept doing the work…”
There is data suggesting that Willis does not recall correctly. Extensive documentary evidence shows tens of thousands of dollars being channeled to Willis’s immediate vicinity by the campaign. Browne’s FEC statements show additional payments.
The Libertarian Party unintentionally gave Willis a large financial incentive to break Party rules and help Browne. Willis emphasizes that his employment agreement with the Party included performance bonuses based on Party membership and income. Browne’s campaign claimed that it was working to increase Party membership and income. Willis knew that if Browne’s campaign succeeded, Willis would personally benefit financially from a substantial increase in his salary and eventually in his severance pay. In contrast, if Willis had worked for a candidate whose objectives involved building stronger local organizations and electing Libertarians to office, national Party membership and income might have grown less rapidly, in which case Willis might have suffered financially.
Based on the available evidence, Willis wrote the four letters enumerated above and was paid for them. Willis says (above) that he ‘kept doing the work’ and that ‘Most of what I did for the Browne campaign I did for free.’. What work did he do for free? The work was not the letters; he was paid for those. Recent documentation publicly released by John Famularo provides a partial answer. Careful examination of the Party’s FEC reports sheds additional light.
Willis admits that he hid the payments from the Party, and prevaricated about having taken them. He writes on page 13 of his Memo:
“Some people have hurt feelings because I concealed my actions from them or I lied to them. I understand. I sympathize. I feel badly about that. But this only goes so far.
“If I had informed people of what I was doing, they would have had to stop me and thereby stop the benefits to the party. Or they would have had to hide what they knew…”
I have omitted most of Willis’s self-serving justifications for what he did. In short, Willis claims he believed it was good for the Party to nominate Browne. Willis claims he believed that Browne was running a superior sort of campaign, a campaign that would be better for the Party than the campaigns of Browne’s opponents. Willis then claims that since he personally knew what was best for the Libertarian Party, he was entitled to ignore the Party’s rules, turn his back on the Party that employed him, and do instead what he personally thought best.
In essence, according to his confession, Willis viewed himself as a superior sort of person, entitled to ignore the petty rules that bound the inferior sorts of people who supported Browne’s inferior competitors for the Presidential nomination: Ohmen, Tompkins, and Schiff. Because Willis viewed himself as a superior sort of person, he was entitled to deceive the thousands of Libertarians who paid their dues, elected National Convention delegates, and erroneously believed that they were the owners of a democratically run Party based on honest elections under agreed-upon rules for Party officers and national candidates. Willis finally urged that since he broke Party rules in the past, we should change Party rules to permit future National Directors to do what he did.
If you were looking for statements of contrition or appeals for forgiveness, you will need to look elsewhere.
Browne’s Illicit Payment Procured Him the Nomination
@ Editor proposed separate editorial article regarding Mr Phillips comment – I am not proposing it as a comment on this discussion
——-
Voting for minor parties can help change policies even when they come in a distant third
By Pat Jones, with thanks to Hank Phillips
In a recent discussion on another topic, Mr. Phillips opined
“Fabian Marxists got 9% in 1892 and tacked a Manifesto income tax onto the tariff within 2 years.”
That’s true: the Populist Party ticket of James Weaver and James Field gathered 22 of 444 electoral votes (just under 5%) but, rounded up, they got 8.6% of the aggregate popular vote, which rounds up to 9%. The Populist Party demanded a graduated income tax in its 1892 platform. The Democratic Party, led by William Jennings Bryan, advocated the income tax law passed in 1894. In 1894, an amendment was attached to the Wilson–Gorman Tariff Act that attempted to impose a federal tax of two percent on incomes over $4,000 (equal to $145,000 in 2024). That tax was ruled unconstitutional the following year in the US supreme court Pollock decision, and was brought back in 1913 by the passage of the 16th amendment.
“Wallace votes turned the Solid South Republican”
That’s false, but not entirely. In 1948 Strom Thurmond began to break the South of the habit of automatically supporting Democratic nominees when he ran for President against Truman in the general election. In the 1950s some Southern states began to elect Republicans to the US Senate, with Thurmond again among the first, while some voted for unpledged electors to the electoral college. In 1964, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater won all his electoral votes other than those of his home state of Arizona in the deep South.
In 1968 Wallace again broke with the Democrats to run a separate presidential ticket, but most Southern politicians continued to be Democrats, including Wallace himself, who was elected as Governor again and served in 1971-9 and 1983-7, always as a Democrat. In 1972 he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination and was widely considered a plausible candidate to win both that nomination and the general election until a failed assassination attempt put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and cut that campaign short. In response, President Nixon had a Southern strategy to help turn the South Republican, which it turned out he didn’t need – he would have won reelection handily anyway even without it.
In 1976 Carter won throughout the South except in Virginia, but in 1980 Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and ever since then the South has been predominantly Republican at the presidential level , and gradually ever more Republican further down the ballot. It’s not entirely accurate that Wallace 1968 singlehandedly caused that transformation, but it was a piece of it. I think Strom Thurmond should get a larger part of the credit or blame for that , as far as minor party candidates go.
“One 1973 LP electoral vote got the Supreme Court to knock down Comstock laws.”
That one seems to me to be a real stretch. In 1972, faithless Republican elector Roger McBride of Virginia cast his vote for Libertarian John Hospers, who had only been on the ballot in two states and not come close to winning either one (neither of those states was Virginia or anywhere near it). In 1973, the US Supreme Court’s Miller v California decision further weakened the enforcement of obscenity laws, but Miller was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted under California statutes, not the federal Comstock acts. The Comstock Act remains federal law, and is currently enforced only against child pornography, although there are serious plans to enforce it more broadly again.
That law had already been weakened repeatedly by Supreme Court decisions Roth v United States (1957), Jacobellis v Ohio (1964), Memoirs v Massachusetts (1966), and various state decisions. Explicit pornography was already widely openly distributed in the US for several years by 1973, including in numerous “adult theaters”. I find it difficult to believe that McBride voting for Hospers had much to do with any of this, but Mr. Phillips or anyone who agrees with him is certainly free to make a case.
There are in fact better known and more direct examples which Mr. Phillips did not mention of the phenomenon he describes.
In 1916, the Prohibition Party was blamed by many for the second time for costing the Republicans the presidential election. The 18th amendment to the US Constitution passed before the following presidential election.
In 1992, Ross Perot failed to win any electors, but gathered about 19% of the aggregate popular vote for President. He has ever since been widely blamed for supposedly swinging the election to Bill Clinton, although I don’t believe he actually did: during the period when he suspended his campaign Clinton kept beating Bush head to head in opinion polls throughout that time, and exit polls showed that just as many Perot voters had Clinton as their second choice as Bush. Nevertheless, perception is what matters here as far as changing policy goes. It may well be a direct result of Perot’s campaign and its primary focus on budget deficits that the US briefly had a budget surplus during President Clinton’s time in office.
Another big issue for Mr. Perot was the exportation of American jobs due to international trade deals, which he called the giant sucking sound. In 2000, Donald Trump ran for the Presidential nomination of the Reform Party, which had been founded to support Perot for President. In 2025, President Trump is scrapping international trade deals and imposing tariffs with the goal of reversing the direction of that sucking sound. Mr. Perot might well be playing a role in that policy shift even from beyond the grave right now.
Another major policy shift under Trump is backing away from international military alliances. Ross Perot campaigned on that as well, actively opposing the Persian Gulf war and stating that his “highest foreign policy priority is to get our house in order and make America work again”. This position was also taken by Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul when they ran for President; both in Republican primaries (1992, 1996, 2008 and 2012) and in the general election as minor party candidates – Buchanan as the Reform Party nominee in 2000, Ron Paul as the Libertarian nominee in 1988. Other Libertarians throughout the years have largely campaigned on bringing the troops home from around the world, and in addition to his aforementioned run for the Reform Party nomination in 2000, Mr. Trump spoke at the site of and during the Libertarian national convention in 2024 – something that would have been unthinkable for a major party presumptive presidential nominee before then.
At that speech, Trump said his four criminal indictments – Lawfare, as Trump supporters call them – had convinced him to become a libertarian: “If I wasn’t a libertarian before, I sure as hell am a libertarian now.” Most libertarians at the event, and in comments on sites like this one, loudly disagreed with that self assessment, but the fact that he would want to or feel the need to openly seek libertarian votes by going there and saying so indicates that libertarians have more influence than their objectively viewed numbers would indicate.
The common element in all those examples is that major parties try to head minor parties off at the pass by trying to win back the voters minor parties appeal to through implementation of their core demands.
What are some other examples of this phenomenon?
In 2007 I posted the vote charts for small parties focusing on the Prohibion and Income Tax amendments with audio here. https://jhenryphillips.com/caseforlp07.html
But Dr Phillies is right; the topic is how corruption has its own mission creep.
As specifically noted at the start of my missive, I intended it to be a separate article, not a comment.
I originally responded to your comment and then commented separately to self correct a minor issue with my comment which I felt opened it to misinterpretation. The first, longer comment was neither approved nor rejected, but left in moderation, and the orphaned self correction was approved.
Simultaneously, Dr. Phillies made his own comment that the discussion was going off topic.
I recognized that he is correct, so I asked for the orphaned comment to be removed if the comment it was to correct would not be approved. It was then removed, and the longer comment was rejected, which is why you see a blank comment from me below.
I still wanted to discuss those issues without being off topic, so I submitted was intended to be an article and separate discussion. I subsequently thought of additional examples, and commented @ Editor only that I’d prefer to know whether my article would be posted before I’d take time to expound on the matter further.
At that point, my proposed article was approved, but as a comment instead of an article, and the comment @ Editor was rejected without reply, so that still leaves this discussion off topic, although your response was approved.
So, I’ll make this my last off topic comment on the discussion – hopefully, this comment will be approved, so how we got here will be clear.
I’d like to discuss the matter further, but not to make off topic posts, so I’m done with it unless and until the article is posted as an article rather than as a comment. I will however take a look at your link if it’s a chart, but if it’s audio mine has other concurrent uses which take precedence.
Posts are wandering off topic.
I recall the Harry Browne campaign. I liked the guy, voted LP, but felt demoralized by the looter contention that voting for what you want is “wasted.” It would take another 6 years to understand how small-party spoiler votes routinely cause the looter kleptocracy to repeal some laws and pass others in competition for those “maverick” votes. Observe that nobody tells you to lie on opinion polls to avoid “wasting” your replies. Yet actual elections are the mother of all opinion polls, and their shifted outcomes matter a lot. Fabian Marxists got 9% in 1892 and tacked a Manifesto income tax onto the tariff within 2 years. Wallace votes turned the Solid South Republican. One 1973 LP electoral vote got the Supreme Court to knock down Comstock laws. Voting for what you value gets results. Results are what change bad laws. Ex-post facto nitpicking a quarter-century later? Meh.
How did the ’72 electoral vote get the Supreme Court to knock down Comstock laws?