I tendered my resignation to the Libertarian Party of Florida's Executive Committee this evening.

The immediate cause of this was that several posts I had made from The Ticker to the party's open and public Facebook discussion page were apparently removed, and the Chair, Adrian Wyllie, refused to address what was a fairly-clear case of selective censorship despite his stated policy that the page was a "free for discussion" zone sponsored by the party where censorship should not occur.  The final insult was when my post related to monopoly behavior in the Health Care system that I penned dealing with "CON" laws in the several States was removed; this post took a position that I believe should find vehement agreement within the rank, file, and Executive Committees of the various Libertarian Party organizations nation-wide. 

I have also been told that others have been censored in the past, although I will not speak for others in this regard.

Indeed, that's one of the problems with censorship; it is too often conducted in the dark of night and no records are kept, intentionally, to prevent the guilty parties from being fingered and examination of the facts related to what happened are thus kept from public exposure and debate.

My response to these acts was to file notice of a motion for the meeting this evening to force the disclosure of who had been conducting censorship, who was censored (other than myself, if others were also impacted) and the grounds on which the action was taken, along with putting in place formal requirements to log and track future acts of censorship, whether automatically in whatever software was used or manually if it was not otherwise available.  The Chair refused to docket my motion.  When I challenged the Chair's refusal by filing a notice of objection to the September 9th meeting agenda I was removed from the public Facebook group and blackballed within 12 hours in an act that appeared to be in retribution for having the temerity of sticking to Roberts' Rules in my challenge to his authority.

The Chair later took, in an email, personal responsibility for all of the acts of censorship and blackballing noted above.

That drew a motion from me, heard this evening, to censure the chair for violation of our Standing Rules, which require even and non-discriminatory enforcement of policy.  This was docketed and heard, but failed on a voice vote; the Libertarian Party of Florida's Executive Committee has thus spoken and stated that all of the admitted acts are deemed, by vote, acceptable conduct.

Recently I had also challenged the Chair's failure to notice Candidate Committees in a timely fashion on a motion from July that had I offered urging Libertarian Candidates to call for formal investigations and redress related to LIBOR and similar financial scams.  This motion passed after some modification and debate but no notice was given to the candidate committees. The Chair first tried to lay off his responsibility for the failure to provide that notice on me even though he is by definition (and formal declaration in the governing documents) the spokesman for the party.  I refused that assignment given the conditions he attached, including a demand that I not include the original text before modification (which included a penalty clause) along with the votes associated with that modification -- even though the minutes of our meetings are of course public.  The chair ultimately belatedly sent it himself without explanation for its tardiness.

That motion, by the way, was an attempt to apply pressure to candidates, including Gary Johnson, to do the right thing and take a strong position on financial fraud.

That's what State and local political parties and groups such as The Tea Party have as their essential purpose -- take principled stands on issues and then demand that candidates bring those positions with them when they win elective office and thus turn positions into formal government policy in exchange for the votes of the members. 

There is of course no point to filing motions and passing them if nobody is ever told of the outcome.

As a member of a deliberative body I agree to accept the rulings that come from deliberative process, debate and vote, even when I disagree with the majority.

However, I do not have to lend my association or future effort to that body if I find the outcome of those votes and what they represent repugnant.

That's my personal line in the sand and tonight it was crossed.

Many will undoubtedly argue that this all adds up to a "trivial" insult and thus I should overlook it; that the greater good of remaining within the organization and attempting to change it from the inside is a superior course of action to washing my hands and walking away.

But while the actual incident itself was trivial the principle involved is not.  Indeed, The Rule of Law and its even application is all we have to separate ourselves from animals, where might makes right and the ape with the largest club or the element of surprise takes the other from behind and beats him senseless or worse. 

I have spent the last five years writing The Ticker on exactly this point through all areas of our political system.  Whether it be banks, the health delivery complex, something "so simple" as "disappearance" of segregated funds, an act that just yesterday I heard a broker call, in a public venue in California, just cause for capital punishment (a sentiment with which I agree) or something "so trivial" as the uneven, arbitrary and "in the dark" censorship of material without even identifying the party responsible for doing so the bottom line is the same.

There are those who disagree with some of my policies on The Market Ticker and Tickerforum when it comes to how I run this place.  But the Ticker and its associated forum is not a state political party and I do not have an executive committee with a set of governing documents, standing rules and bylaws.  I instead have a TOS and a pretty-clear set of standards that leave little wiggle room, and do my level best to enforce those rules evenly.

But on that point, everything I do here -- and everything everyone else does here -- is logged and, if challenged, the record can be reviewed including who did what and when.

The Chair made clear this evening that my original motion (which he blacklisted) to require accountability and logging of enforcement actions, including the responsible parties, or any attempt to raise such a motion in the future would be ruled frivolous and not heard.

I find this stance flatly unacceptable; a public and accountable body must be exactly that.  One cannot hold a body to account if records are intentionally not kept and thus the persons responsible for a given action, the action itself and the reasons it was taken are not subject to review and challenge. 

There is a long and storied history of petty fiefdoms turning into not-so-petty ones.  Our nation has devolved into an ugly caricature of what our Founding Fathers intended and gave us, where policy, rule and law are invoked selectively in favor of some people and against others, often at pure whim.

I believed that the Libertarian Party of Florida stood as a light above this darkness, a beacon through the fog, where Liberty, founded through The Rule of Law and even application of the rules without fear or favor was the order of the day.  It was in this light and with this hope that I engaged the State Party, ran for elective office within the party and asked for and was given Committee Chairmanship over a reconciliation and re-write of the party's governing documents -- an admitted mess that had grown like a many-headed hydra through annual revisions yet was never cleaned up.

One can disagree with the policies and procedures within a body but so long as they are consistently applied the fact that you don't always win your fights is part of the game and how deliberative assemblies work.  I have offered and supported motions that have succeeded, and I have offered and supported motions that have failed.  That's politics and life in any assembly; you don't always get what you want or think is right.

But when a body adopts policy to intentionally not keep records and thus decisions become beyond review, challenge and reversal then The Rule of Law and indeed all claim to legitimacy and parliamentary procedure have been immediately and irretrievably lost.

Once the first step is taken down that road you find out what the character of an organization is truly like.  Either the members step up and put an immediate stop to this conduct, censuring the parties involved, or you have received fair warning that while today you may be favored and thus like the outcome, tomorrow you may not and the visage of an alleged assembly operating under Roberts' Rules, Standing Rules, Bylaws and a Constitution is nothing more than a convenient mask.

The dripping irony of courting Ron Paul voters who got screwed via the same sort of back-door crap within the GOP while our own State Party leadership was pulling this sort of stunt should be lost on absolutely nobody. 

If you're a Ron Paul supporter who recently heard the siren song of the LPF and are disappointed later don't say you weren't warned.

Life is too short to devote time to a deliberative body that in our own individual opinion fails to be internally self-consistent.  While I have thoroughly enjoyed my work with the LPF, even when various members of the party and its Executive Committee and I have disagreed on various points and taken diametrically-opposing points of view, I draw the line where policy is selectively ignored and intentions are stated to bury the identity and actions of those acting under color of authority of the body and by vote of the assembly these acts are given the imprint of legitimacy.  I should not, and neither should anyone else, have to wonder whether they stand in the "favored" or "disfavored" line on any given day; rather, we should all labor under the same rules and policies that are evenly enforced irrespective of the personalities involved and whether their opinion happens to match that of one or more of the other participants.

That is my baseline requirement to serve within such a body and unfortunately my attempt to remedy violations of that principle this evening met with failure.

It is thus with a heavy heart that I have tendered my resignation as an Executive Committee member of the Libertarian Party of Florida, effective this evening.