I don’t recall his ever asking for our opinion in the past on any issue. I could be wrong.

If not, is there a way you can get an email vote to do so from your executive committee or appropriate body in time for Austin?

Most of the convention planning needed to be settled a year ahead of time and that includes budgeting properly. That said a comment about the dues is in order.

The party needs to look at the manner it charges dues and what the members get for them. I was reluctant to write a check for $25 last year. I’ll put my money to use at the local or state level instead of at national. Ask me for $10 and you probably will get it. Ask me for $120 at once and I doubt that I would write a check. All though I could. I am not pleased with what I have seen in the past few years coming from the office but it has been improving under Wes’. management.

I also specifically use $10 as an example because the membership has been going down and that suggest to me that people do not see a value in contributing any more. The product is not worth buying!

Maybe the LP needs to be asking people for smaller monthly contributions instead of the $30 it was asking last time I looked.

Most importantly some have suggested that getting too specific on the issues drives people away. I recently spoke to a long time activist who left because the platform has been watered down and the party is too wishy washy on the issues. I’ll bet there are a bunch more out there.

We do charge for the “auxiliary”, or “nonessential” activities. We generally make enough on these to pay for the business session room rental.

The *only* people who must pay to attend the Business Session are NONMEMBERS. The Libertarian Party of Virginia is not under any obligation to allow nonmembers access to our business meeting, so we do charge them an admission fee if they wish to attend & observe the business session. Nonmembers must also obtain the permission of the members to sit in on our convention. If a nonmember wishes to sit in and has paid the nonmember fee, the members are asked if they wish to admit that person.

Alternatively, nonmembers can simply join and obtain all the privileges of membership.

But in any case, a member of the Libertarian Party of Virginia is entitled to attend the business session at no charge. We verify membership status at the registration table, give each his voting credential and name tag, and off he goes.

Here are my feelings about floor fees:

1) We don’t need any more divisive decisions.
2) The floor fee is divisive, and its proponents knew very well that it would be.
3) Given the washout in attendance compared to the 1996-2004 period, perhaps the convention organizers should think about doing things to encourage attendance, rather than discourage it.
4) The qualifications for getting onto the business floor are listed in the bylaws, and they do not include a floor fee.
5) The delegates should be asked to impose a floor fee on themselves; it should not be imposed by fiat.
6) It won’t hurt the LP one bit to delay the implementation of a floor fee for a few months until the delegates can make the decision for themselves.
7) I would support a floor fee if it was agreed to by the delegates in convention.
The alleged need for a floor fee to pay for convention materials and the room required could have been avoided with saner budgeting.
9) I’d rather see substantially higher dues + in-kind credit for work towards dues, than a floor fee. Being allowed to muck about in the Libertarian Party’s business should require a rather large investment of either money or time.
10) Most important of all, the D’s and R’s do not charge a floor fee, because they know how to raise money from outside sources. I have asked the LNC may times in the past to investigate the possibility of obtaining corporate sponsorships of our convention committee (entirely legal!), but the majority is so wrapped around the axle in their march to charge floor fees and eliminate the povertarians that they have apparently chosen to remain willfully ignorant about this legal source of money. Frankly I do not understand the insistence on keeping the LP mired in amateur hour.

Some additional explanation of how corporations and other groups could help fund our convention is here.

If we must use the argument from anecdote, there are plenty of other people who cannot afford an extra hundred bucks above and beyond cost of getting to St. Louis and having a place to stay, in this economy. But that’s simply not a good argument because, as you can see, those who are subject to falling for logical fallacy arguments are trying to invalidate the entire argument against the floor fee by proving that Starchild is not destitute, as if that changes the fundamental objection.

The fundamental objection still stands. The by-laws don’t allow national to impose an additional requirement on the delegates apart from registration. Registration cannot be taken to mean anything beyond entering one’s name on a registry, as Knapp has pointed out.

I don’t always agree with Starchild, but y’know what? I will give him this. He’s always looking out for people less fortunate than himself. Consistently. Even though he’s probably got more money than a lot of the LNC lootertarian types, you don’t see him playing these kinds of money games to try to keep people from voting.

That no one knows how wealthy he actually is or isn’t speaks VOLUMES to the fact that he doesn’t wave his chequebook in people’s faces or try to buy off conventions to get his way like some members of the LNC have been known to do. That, in spite of his ability to pay a floor fee without breaking a sweat, he’s choosing, like so many of us who have money, to speak against it both at national and in CA also speaks volumes.

That sure does tell us a lot about priorities.

Starchild should be fine.

You write:

“Tom, the registration fee is indeed ‘a particular one identifiable to the listener’ and is ‘uniquely specified’: it’s the registration fee defined by the people putting on the 2010 LPUS convention.”

And “the people putting on the 2010 LPUS convention” have no authority to “define” any such fee.

“By the logic you guys are using, the registration process cannot even require delegates to ‘sign the list of registrations’.”

Only if you exclude language from logic.

The bylaws require the delegates to register: “to enter one’s name or cause it to be entered in a register.”

“Paying the registration fee” is no more an extra “qualification for being a delegate” than is “signing the list of registrations”. Rather, those are just enumerated as steps that must be performed during registration by someone who meets the qualifications for being a delegate, and thus is entitled to go through the registration process.

It’s very odd to say that if an organization’s Bylaws list any criteria for being a delegate, they must then also include as criteria all the steps Robert’s says are included in registration, because as soon as one criterion is listed, then Robert’s definition of the registration process goes out the window.

And it’s even more odd in the case of an organization like the LP whose bylaws explicitly acknowledge the registration process but leave it undefined: “At all Regular Conventions delegates shall be those so accredited who have registered at the Convention.”

Tom, the registration fee is indeed “a particular one identifiable to the listener” and is “uniquely specified”: it’s the registration fee defined by the people putting on the 2010 LPUS convention.

By the logic you guys are using, the registration process cannot even require delegates to “sign the list of registrations”.

Libertarians, of all people, should know that not everything stupid is — or should be — illegal. If a $99 registration fee is really so stupid, its stupidity should be all you need to make your case. When you trump up charges of Bylaws violations, you create opponents out of potential allies. And if among your potential allies there are a lot of sticklers for holding people to the rules they voluntarily agreed to, then such trumped-up charges are even more unwise.

The key word there is “the.”

If the word used was “a,” perhaps with an appended formula for calculating such a fee, the section might reasonably be construed as authorization for the levying of such a fee (in the absence of bylaws language which supersedes RRONR).

Use of definite article, however, “indicates that its noun is a particular one (or ones) identifiable to the listener. It may be the same thing that the speaker has already mentioned, or it may be something uniquely specified.”

This section of RRONR does not create the authority to levy a registration fee. Rather it includes mention of “the” registration fee on the assumption that that authority has been conferred, and that that fee has been set pursuant to that authority, elsewhere.

In the case of the LP, that assumption is incorrect. The bylaws plainly spell out the entitlement of the affiliates to send delegates, and the qualifications of those delegates. That is where the authority to levy such a fee would reside, if there was any such authority. There isn’t.

There is one registration-fee critic who I trust to be intellectually honest in his opinion about whether the text of our rules supports a claim that any registration fee violates our rules. His name is Chuck Moulton. Chuck, do you still claim that a registration fee “implicitly conflicts with the bylaws”?

Yes, I believe it implicitly conflicts with the bylaws.

Just because registration “normally includes” paying a fee doesn’t mean a fee is thereby authorized.

Normal procedure is often a function of what the majority of organizations have in their bylaws and do by custom. There are many things that are normally done which are contradicted by bylaws in general and the LP bylaws specifically. The bylaws take precedence.

I don’t believe our bylaws explicitly allow a fee or explicitly forbid it; however, the bylaws do implicitly forbid a fee by listing qualifications and not listing payment of fee as one of those qualifications.

This is clearly a gray area because it is not made explicit. In interpreting, the implicit arguments have to be weighed against one another. In this case I would look at principles of interpretation and custom.

Custom is straightforward. We have never charged a mandatory registration fee or a floor fee for business sessions in the LP’s 35+ year history. This leads me to the conclusion that for the purposes of our organization, registration does not “normally include” a fee.

A principle of interpretation is on point. “If the bylaws authorize certain things specifically, other things of the same class are thereby prohibited.” RONR (10th ed.), p. 571, l. 24-25. In this case the bylaws list qualifications for being a delegate. Imposing other qualifications that are not listed in the bylaws is therefore prohibited.

The right thing to do is let the delegates decide. It won’t be the end of the world if we punt 2 years and conduct this convention like all the other LP national conventions ever held and do not have a mandatory minimum registration fee. Let the delegates make this matter explicit by passing a bylaws change and make a decision for the 2012 convention based on clear unambiguous wording instead of tortured parliamentary procedure arguments that waste lots of time.

RRONR p. 593 says registration “normally includes” “paying the registration fee”.

Nobody here has quoted anything from the LP Bylaws here that contradicts or overrides how Robert’s describes the registration process that our Bylaws leave undefined.

There is one registration-fee critic who I trust to be intellectually honest in his opinion about whether the text of our rules supports a claim that any registration fee violates our rules. His name is Chuck Moulton. Chuck, do you still claim that a registration fee “implicitly conflicts with the bylaws”?

As a reminder:
1. Bylaw 11(3) mentions delegate registration as an extra step beyond accreditation by an affiliate: “At all Regular Conventions delegates shall be those so accredited who have registered at the Convention.”
2. Nothing in the Bylaws defines registration.
3. “The rules contained in the current edition of Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised shall govern the Party in all cases to which they are applicable and in which they are not inconsistent with these bylaws”.
4. RRONR p. 593 says registration “normally includes” “paying the registration fee”.

Let’s change the rules if we don’t like them, but let’s not pretend they say something that they don’t actually say.

Please stick to the facts, Sir Nolan KWT

Those of you who are complaining about Wayne Root’s speaking slot position are telling your fellow Libertarian Party National Convention Delegates that you think they are so stupid that they will somehow change their vote for Chair at the last minute,

No, I am not telling anyone they are stupid. Many people may not have their minds made up, or may not be firmly committed to one candidate or another even if they do have a tentative preference. Others are, yes, persuadable. Persuadable =/= stupid.

Would you have considered it acceptable, if, say, Mary Ruwart or George Phillies had a solo speaking slot before the presidential nomination? There’s a reason why things like that are generally not done, it’s not fair to the other candidates.

assuming Wayne Root really does run for LNC Chair.

There’s no assuming involved.

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2010/02/wayne-root-confirms-he-is-running-for-lnc-chair/

And all of this assumes that you know when the election for Chair will take place. I did not know that so many of you have psychic powers.

OK, that’s fair. What I had heard was that the speech was before the election. If that’s incorrect, please let us know as soon as possible, and if that ends up being the case I apologize for jumping the gun.

I am very disappointed that so many of you Libertarian Party leaders consider your fellow Delegates to be mindless sheep that can be influenced by somehow seeing “The All Mighty Wayne Root” speak a few words to them.

I think our Delegates are smart enough to resist any propaganda that Mr. Root might throw at them. Besides, if Wayne Root is as bad for the Libertarian Party as you say he is, his possible last-minute speech will probably lose him more delegates than it gains, if Root does run for LNC Chair.

And all of this assumes that you know when the election for Chair will take place. I did not know that so many of you have psychic powers.

Another thought, slightly off-topic but relevant. It strikes me as grossly inequitable to give Wayne Root the Sunday Lunch speaking slot immediately prior to the election of officers. This is completely unfair to the other candidates for LNC Chair – currently Mark Hinkle, Ernest Hancock and George Phillies.

Wayne is a dynamic speaker, and deserves a speaking slot, but it should be AFTER the election of the new LNC. My suggestion: Make Wayne the Banquet Speaker, and cancel Boortz. Nobody I’ve spoken to (except Bruce Cohen) is at all excited about hearing Boortz blather on about the “fair tax” yet again.

The lineup of speakers (which includes me) is tilted too far to the right; dump Boortz and substitute someone like Scott Horton from antiwar.com

In case my last sentence above was not clear, my suggestion is to move Wayne Root to Sunday evening, and fill the Sunday Lunch slot with someone like Scott Horton. Wayne gets a prime speaking slot, and we are spared The Boor.

Completely agreed.

With all the floor fee controversy, has this ever been addressed?

At one point I saw some responses that Wayne hadn’t announced for chair. We made clear that he did, but has any followup taken place?

Here’s a thought: Instead of a mandatory “floor fee” ask each delegate who registers for a voluntary donation of $20 or so to pay for the cost of his/her convention materials.

My understand is that even with the fee, the convention binders will not be included with registration this time; members are asked to print their own. I also understand that, outside of official channels, one or more people will be printing and selling them for anyone who did not print them in advance or bring a printer with them.