First, THANK YOU to everyone who supported my efforts to serve on the Libertarian Party's 2020 platform committee.
I tried to do a good job for you. I think I made it to every electronic meeting, but I was late to at least one (road work on my route home delayed me -- my fault).
Here's our final report.
I think it's some damn good work, which is not the same thing as saying that I agree with every comma in it. I'm proud to have been involved in its creation, and I hope it lives up to any expectations you had of me performance-wise. Now ...
Its contents were not heard/considered/voted on by the national convention delegates.
Why? Because at least one third plus one of those delegates resolutely refused to do their fucking jobs, that's why.
In most years, at least some work remains undone when the national convention adjourns. We have hard deadlines for getting out of the meeting facilities, some delegates have planes to catch, etc.
This year, for the first time ever, such problems were irrelevant. We have electronic participation, so we could have added additional working sessions to the agenda on weekends to come and finished every bit of the party's business -- not just platform, but bylaws as well (some of that did get done).
But when the time came to suspend the rules to so amend the agenda, at least 1/3+1 delegates effectively announced that they had lied when they told their state parties that they were willing to buckle down and actually do the work.
Those delegates squatted over, and took a giant shit on, a whole bunch of work done well and in good faith by tens of their fellow party members on the platform and bylaws committees.
Not only would they not do the job they promised to do, they wouldn't let anyone else do it either.
If they had any integrity, they'd never ask to be selected as national convention delegates again.
But, then, if they had any integrity, they wouldn't have pulled this shit, would they?
Or the shit that some of them pulled on Thursday, when 1/5th of the delegates bullied the convention chair into silencing and ignoring the other 80% of the delegates for nine fucking hours of fake convention business before pretending they were doing to body a favor by magnanimously "allowing" that other 80% of the body to exercise its clear and unambiguous rights per the call to convention.
Did some good stuff happen? Sure. The officer and at-large LNC elections didn't turn out too badly. I haven't seen Judicial Committee results yet, but I'm hopeful they'll be nice as well.
I'm grateful to the Libertarian Party of Florida for selecting me as an alternate to the convention, and for seating me as a delegate on Sunday. This was my eighth national convention as (at some point) a delegate.
Really, the event wasn't more than 85%, maybe 90%, raging dumpster fire.
But it might have only been 50% raging dumpster fire if the online delegates had constituted themselves as, and started doing business as, the real convention the instant they got muted on Thursday. The in-person mutineers should have quickly been informed that they were headed down a road that ended in litigation over the party's assets, and invited to hit the brakes ASAP.
One of my priorities for the future is making damn sure that that can easily and seamlessly happen in any future such situation.
See you in Reno in 2022!
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