According to my source(s), the Judicial Committee has rejected the delegate petition of appeal on this matter, on the grounds that its request for relief is moot (Mr. Wrights having been “reinstated” [sic]).

According to the same source(s), the committee has accepted as within its jurisdiction one question from Mr. Wrights’s personal appeal:

“Does a lapse in dues require a ‘for cause’ removal described in Article 8, section 5?”

So, I guess we’ll find out how they read the bylaws

You write:

“Yes, Tom, I agree that your reading of 8.4 ‘is absurd with respect to regional reps.’

It’s not “my reading.” It’s any plain reading when viewed in light of 8.7, which allows only the regions to evaluate the eligibility of their representatives. That’s a clear conflict, i.e. an absurdity, which needs to be resolved through amendment.

“What I don’t hear you claiming is ‘8.4 is absurd if we read it as being automatic in the way that the Judicial Committee unanimously reads 8.5.3 as being automatic’. Do you dare say that?”

Yes, I dare say that, although I consider it inconsequential, since nobody who can parse English would read it that way.

The Judicial Committee interprets 8.5.3 as being “automatic” because 8.5.3 includes language making itself automatic (“shall be deemed”) in contrast to 8.4 (which includes no such language) and as an exception to the previous language 8.5 applies to all other causes, presumptively including the causes in 8.4.

In other words, there are rules, there is a method for dealing with violations of those rules, and there is an exception method for dealing with one particular type of violation of those rules. Attempting to apply the exception to anything other than that which it claims to specifically apply to isn’t something that can be done on a plain reading.

“the Judicial Committee unanimously says that 8.5.3 is ‘automatic’ — even though it is in the same 8.5 subsection as the for-cause removal power defined in 8.5.1. If 8.5.3 can be ‘automatic’, so can 8.4.”

Except that 8.5.3 designates itself as “automatic,” while 8.4 does not so designate itself and is followed by a process for implementation.

“There is nothing ‘tangential’ about the absurdity you admit that you read in 8.4.”

The absurdity is not in 8.4. The absurdity is in 8.4 in light of 8.7. Since 8.7 applies only to regional reps, it most certainly is tangential to the issue of an at-large rep.

“Fully eight of our thirteen LNC reps are regional reps, and you don’t dare deny that 8.4 applies to all thirteen.”

According to the bylaws, 8.4 certainly does apply to all 13, except that 8.7 says that it doesn’t. The absurdity is in the bylaws, not in a particular reading of the bylaws.

“Instead, you claim it’s ‘tangential’ that you read 8.4 as effectively just a polite suggestion for 62% of the LNC reps it purports to be a rule about.”

Incorrect. I claim it is tangential because the case at issue does not concern a regional rep, and therefore the absurdity has no real bearing on the case.

“‘Imputing an implicit plenary power of removal to the Secretary’ is just a recycling of Seebeck’s straw man, changing the word ‘arbitrary’ to ‘plenary.’”

Arbitrary and plenary are two very different words with two very different meanings.

As you point out, Mr. Sullentrup did NOT attempt to claim or exercise an arbitrary (“Depending on will or discretion; not governed by any fixed rules”) power to remove an LNC member. Rather, he claimed and attempted to exercise a plenary (“Full; entire; complete; absolute”) power to remove an LNC member in enforcement of a fixed rule.

The problem with that is that he possesses no such power. Nor does he possess in full the power you impute to him — “the power of the recording officer to record that a very specific kind of disqualification has taken place.”

The secretary’s records are in fact subject to the examination and approval of the body, as anyone who’s attended an LNC meeting and stayed long enough to get past the front matter of the agenda, “approval of the minutes” knows. They are not official records of the party until such time as they receive that approval — until that point, they’re effectively just personal notes which he intends to submit for approval as party records.

If the secretary had recorded Mr. Wrights’s putative disqualification, and if the body had, at its subsequent meeting, made that record official by approving his record of doing so, then the next step would have been for someone to move to suspend Mr. Wrights on grounds of ineligibility.

That, however, is not what happened. Mr. Sullentrup made a personal note to himself that Mr. Wrights was no longer eligible to serve on the LNC. Then he acted to have Mr. Wrights’s name removed from the party’s web site, and to have Mr. Wrights’s name removed from the LNC’s working email list. In other words, he attempted to remove Mr. Wrights from the LNC.

As of the time he did so, his assertion of Mr. Wrights’s ineligibility had neither been approved as a minuted fact by the LNC, nor tried by the LNC pursuant to a motion to suspend. The chair then acted to quash the LNC’s authority to evaluate and accept or reject the secretary’s records, or to hear, evaluate and possibly act upon the claim made in those records.

“It remains hilarious for you to talk about the Secretary’s records as ‘allegations’ when Wrights himself admitted that his sustaining membership had lapsed.”

To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Wrights made no such admission to the LNC while the matter was on its floor. Nor has the matter been open on its floor for any such admission to be entered into the record either by him or at second hand. Therefore, with respect to the proceedings of the LNC, no such admission exists and the secretary’s assertions or allegations thus far remain merely assertions or allegations, since the body has had no opportunity to examine them or approve them.

“I recall that there is a long-standing personal beef between you and our current Secretary”

Actually, no — the beef is entirely on his side. I did something wrong once. It made him angry. He was right to be angry. I even spoke in favor of his motion to the MOLP state committee to censure me over the matter. He hasn’t moved on. I’ve tried to.

I can only read your attempt to bring Mr. Sullentrup’s sad personal obsession with me into the matter, and to further theorize a reciprocal obsession on my part, as a tacit admission that you’re near the bottom of your barrel of red herrings.

I’m sorry, but there is just nothing “clear” in 8.4 about the process for enforcing the rule it sets forth. 8.4 no more describes the process for its enforcement than 8.5.3 does, and yet the Judicial Committee unanimously says that 8.5.3 is “automatic” — even though it is in the same 8.5 subsection as the for-cause removal power defined in 8.5.1. If 8.5.3 can be “automatic”, so can 8.4.

There is nothing “tangential” about the absurdity you admit that you read in 8.4. Fully eight of our thirteen LNC reps are regional reps, and you don’t dare deny that 8.4 applies to all thirteen. Instead, you claim it’s “tangential” that you read 8.4 as effectively just a polite suggestion for 62% of the LNC reps it purports to be a rule about.

“Imputing an implicit plenary power of removal to the Secretary” is just a recycling of Seebeck’s straw man, changing the word “arbitrary” to “plenary”. I already dismantled that straw man, thus:

The Secretary did not claim the power to remove somebody because of a bad hairstyle, for example. You’re confusing an “arbitrary” power of removal with the power of the recording officer to record that a very specific kind of disqualification has taken place.

I don’t impute, I quote. Again: the Bylaws say that “a National Committee member shall be a sustaining member of the Party”, and that “the Secretary shall be the recording officer of the Party” and shall “keep such minutes and records as necessary”. Necessary for what? Well, necessary for him to report who is a sustaining member, for example.

It remains hilarious for you to talk about the Secretary’s records as “allegations” when Wrights himself admitted that his sustaining membership had lapsed. I recall that there is a long-standing personal beef between you and our current Secretary, and I guess you would dearly love to create the urban legend that he has claimed “plenary power” to remove any LNC rep who looks at him wrong. I suspect that’s why you’re lashing yourself to the mainmast of your sinking argument, and riding it down to the depths of absurdity.

Lee Wrights gives enthusiastically – he works tirelessly for both the LP and for Liberty.

“It’s certainly something expected of any Board member of any Membership/Donor suported organization. This would include the LP, the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, CATO, Reason, etc…”

Wrights doesn’t belong to the Board of Directors of a non-profit company. He’s a representative to the national committee of a political party. That’s what we elected him for for. He does it. We didn’t elect him to give money. Anyone who knows him knows he doesn’t have money, because he works his butt off for almost no money – but to actually achieve more freedom.

“Now is the time for Mister Wrights to step up and do the real work he was elected to do, not to argue the fine points of Robert’s Rules, or tell the other 17 Members how they are wrong and he is “right”.”

Apparently you didn’t vote for him. Those of us who did voted for him to represent us. He does it well.

“Being an LP Board Member is primarily about growing the organization, not about getting in people’s faces or telling them how to think.

I am pessimistic about Mister Wrights giving or getting, much less recruiting.”

How much have you GIVEN or GOT? This is not a requirement for the job, nor a duty. Governing the party is. Aaron Starr’s ideas about what the job entails do not a truth make. Read your bylaws. LP.org/bylaws, I think.

Imputing an implicit plenary power of removal to the Secretary, absent any evidence whatsoever in the bylaws to support that imputation, in no way affects the absurdity you allude to.

“When a provision of the bylaws is susceptible to two meanings” is not Parliamentese for “when there’s a clear meaning meaning of one bylaws provision on one hand, and a tangentially related absurdity inherent in another bylaws provision on the other hand, and Brian Holtz is in the middle trying to use the absurdity to replace the clear meaning with some shit that he made up.”

Or maybe your edition says “When a provision of the bylaws is susceptible to two meanings, one of which conflicts with or renders absurd another bylaw provision that Mike Seebeck is willing to talk about, and the other meaning does not, the latter must be taken as the true meaning.”

After all, I’ve heard there were some mistakes in the most recent print run…

I’ll happily “admit defeat” when you explain either 1) how you’re not rendering 8.4 absurd with respect to regional reps, or 2) why the general principle of interpretation I quoted from p.570 does not apply here.

You can’t do either, and you know it. And so you shout insults at me.

Libervention costs lives. Libervention is Brian Holz-in-his-thinking code for “let’s slaughter civilians in other countries as often as possible, because committing atrocities makes people pay attention, and not enough people are visiting my web pages.”

He’s kind of like Catholic Trotskyist in that the only people who take him seriously is him.

As for me, I need to get back to my current LP project of the Chris Agrella for Congress campaign….insert segue here.

Forgive the shameless plug for our candidate, but he can really use donations for his campaign as well as volunteers. He kicked some major ass at the league of Women’s Voters’ Forum on Wednesday, getting the most raucous ovations (and there were only 4 LP members out of a crowd of 120, so it wasn’t us!), and he’s making a lot of noise against his 8 Democrat and 3 Republican opponents. Check out http://agrella4congress.org for more and to help out!

There’s a reason why you’re not on the JudComm or Bylaws, Brian. Your tortured lack of logic and argument twisting is reason by itself.

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

The part about Tom Campbell was of course a joke. The part about JudCom follows straightforwardly from http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/04/statement-from-the-lp-judicial-committee-regarding-wrights/

If 8.4 is not automatic in the same way as 8.5.3 is, then 8.4 is effectively just an optional guideline in the case of regional reps, and the whim of a region to ignore 8.4 is apparently unreviewable by anybody. Such whims are certainly not reviewable by the JudCom, per its jurisdiction defined at 9.2. And the LNC clearly has no 8.5.1 for-cause power to remove regional reps for an 8.4 violation. So if what I wrote is “misinformation”, please quote the Bylaws provision that can make a region adhere to 8.4 if it doesn’t want to. You can’t, because no such provision exists. Of course, the spectre of a region ignoring 8.4 is just as unlikely as the bogeyman of a rogue Secretary de-credentialing at-large reps under false pretenses. At least the latter case can be trivially corrected by the JudCom, but all the people who are shouting about the latter bogeyman lose their tongues when asked about the former spectre, which doesn’t even have a route to remediation.

Sorry, but you guys have construed the Bylaws in such a way as to make 8.4 absurd in the context of regional reps. The JudCom apparently overlooked the second fundamental principle of interpretation (RRONR p.570): “When a provision of the bylaws is susceptible to two meanings, one of which conflicts with or renders absurd another bylaw provision, and the other meaning does not, the latter must be taken as the true meaning.”