Republicans elected new Governors in New Jersey and Virginia. Neither of the candidates, Chris Christie or Bob McDonnell, was endorsed by the Republican Liberty Caucus, but we believe they will provide a better vision for their states than their respective opponents.

In Virginia, voters elected State Senator Ken Cuccinelli to the post of Attorney General. Cuccinelli is a social and fiscal conservative, and some RLC members have been offended by his social conservatism. Still, he seems to be one of the few politicians in the state that understands the concept of limited government, and has a voting record consistent with the RLC’s goals. His new position elevates Cuccinelli to one of the most high-level advocates of limited government in the country.

RLC members in Virginia worked hard to help Cuccinelli win the nomination for Attorney General, and many contributed to his campaign directly. Cuccinelli has said that he will not enforce laws he deems unconstitutional. In 2007, Cuccinelli took the time to drive several hours to address a small group of RLC members. View his speech to RLC members at YouTube.

In the RLC’s biggest victory of the night, RLC National Committeeman Dan Halloran was elected to the New York City Council in a Queens district that leans heavily Democrat. Halloran is also the state Chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus in New York. He worked tirelessly to become elected and will join just four other Republicans on the 51-member City Council.

The RLC also had some other significant victories in New Jersey and New Hampshire. Incumbent Michael Patrick Carroll, who the RLC discovered earlier in the year, was re-elected to his New Jersey House seat. Perhaps the most successful liberty-oriented politician in the state, Michael Doherty, was elected to an open seat in the New Jersey State Senate. The RLC profiled Doherty in an earlier edition of our newsletter.

In the Granite State, Jim Forsythe led a team of liberty-loving Republicans that successfully helped three candidates obtain victory. Political newcomer Lynne Blankenbeker was elected in a special election to the New Hampshire House, and RLC members Phil Greazzo and Cameron DeJong were elected to Alderman and Selectman positions in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Several non-endorsed candidates with strong libertarian leanings were also successful on Election night, including Kim Rafferty, who was elected to the Birmingham City Council in Alabama, and Shaun Kenney, who was elected to a County Supervisor in Fluvanna County, Virginia. Additionally, Lisa Marie Coppoletta has advanced to a run-off in a race for San Marcos City Council in Texas.

Unfortunately, TABOR ballot initiatives — which would tie revenue increases to population and inflation growth to keep spending in check — were defeated by voters in Washington state and Maine. The gay marriage ballot initiative in Maine passed, overturning gay marriage in the state, while voters in Washington state chose to extend rights for gays and lesbians.

The nine victories for RLC-endorsed candidates this fall combined with the five spring victories (in Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas) have resulted in a very successful off-year election for liberty-focused Republicans.

Congratulations are extended to all of the above candidates, our other endorsed candidates, our supporters, and the folks that helped our endorsed candidates succeed.

Complete RLC election results are available here.

Halloran ran a tremendous race and was incredibly focused on winning. Dan will represent District 19, the communities of Queens.

Congratulations, Dan!

In New York City, the Students for Liberty held its first of seven regional conferences taking place this fall. Several Republican Liberty Caucus representatives brought literature and the RLC banner to the conference to educate students about the Republican Liberty Caucus message and strategy.

Former RLC Board member, Ramapo College Professor of Finance, and former New Jersey Senate candidate Murray Sabrin addressed the audience, as did New York RLC Chair and City Council candidate Dan Halloran (pictured below).

Paul Sanchez of the soon-to-form Wisconsin RLC affiliate attended the Future Wisconsin Conference on October 10, too, to reach out to interested parties there. Future Wisconsin is an annual gathering of conservatives in Wisconsin.

Said Sanchez, “I was able to meet a number of allies to liberty throughout the day and we received a positive reception.”

“After [we charter our chapter], [we should] hit the ground running [to] network as [much as] possible,” he said. “This should then help us gain experience in other tasks such as supporting candidates on a local and state level. I think the next year should be pretty exciting and look forward to moving on to the next step.”

The RLC hopes to have a presence at upcoming Students for Liberty conferences in Boston, Chicago, Austin, Winston-Salem, and Philadelphia.

According to CBSNews.com, any health care reform plan that Obama signs is almost certain to call for nutrition counseling, obesity screenings and wellness programs at workplaces and community centers. He wants more time in the school day for physical fitness, more nutritious school lunches and more bike paths, walking paths and grocery stores in underserved areas.”

“The president is filling top posts at Health and Human Services with officials who, in their previous jobs, outlawed trans fats, banned public smoking or required restaurants to provide a calorie count with that slice of banana cream pie.”

The whole situation has libertarians craving a basket of onion rings and a beer.

“If you care about the sorts of things I do, then you are going to be losing big-time for the next four to eight years,” said David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist and author of the book “Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children.”

Don’t get them wrong, critics such as Harsanyi say — they like broccoli and they lift barbells and they have no particular beef with a healthy president who was once described by his physician as having “no excess body fat.”

Says the paper, “They just don’t like it when government becomes the messenger and the enforcer.”

You can say that again.

Prominent right-wing blogger (and apparent closet Bircher) Eric Odom has decided to spend a lot of his time covering the controversial special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District, in which liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava has received the backing of the GOP establishment, and her Conservative Party opponent Doug Hoffman has attracted the support of a lot of the more outspoken pundits on the right and a number of religiously extreme anti-liberty groups like Eagle Forum.

In his latest article Odom makes the peculiar observation:

The race represents a clear message being sent to the RNC. And the message is simple… the liberty movement is not going to tolerate liberal Republicans anymore.

Now, I’m not sure who appointed Odom the spokesman for the liberty movement, but he seems to have forgotten that an essential component of that movement is, oddly enough, support for liberty. In all its forms. Not just the economic liberty of lower taxes, but also the other liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and granted to all people under natural law; liberties like freedom of association, of religion, of speech and of privacy.

I don’t know all that much about Doug Hoffman’s politics. He manages to avoid mentioning most of the tough issues on his website. But I can guess what some of them are by his list of endorsements, which includes a number of groups which can only be considered strongly anti-liberty and even among the greatest enemies of liberty on the political right.

Eagle Forum is certainly the worst of the lot. This group of bigoted biddies is headed up by Phyllis Schlafly. They are in favor of war, torture, abstinence and creationism. They are strongly anti-gay, not only opposing gay marriage, but also actively homophobic and supportive of gay reeducation programs. They’re also against gambling, divorce, pornography, immigration, birth-control, marijuana and vaccines. In my opinion no candidate endorsed by Eagle Forum could ever be considered a “liberty” candidate. Eagle Forum would basically like to turn the country into a totalitarian theocracy. Any candidate who loves liberty should publicly reject their endorsement.

Some of the other groups endorsing Hoffman are nearly as bad: GING-PAC is an extreme religious right group which promotes “family values” and “biblical government” which seems pretty ominous. The National Organization for Marriage is an anti-gay group claiming to be “the preeminent organization dedicated to preventing the legalization of same-sex marriage,” which makes them strongly anti-liberty. Many of the other groups endorsing him are pro-life groups; in itself not a problem, but many of them also promote a religious agenda which includes opposition to gay rights and birth control, and even support for school prayer.

Now, I’m by no means a fan of Dede Scozzafava, but she does at least have a reasonable record on many issues of individual liberty. She’s too supportive of unions and too tied into the New York leftist establishment, but she is relatively fiscally conservative, in favor of gun rights and for cutting taxes. I would never pick Scozzafava as a candidate or encourage a group I was part of to endorse her. But that said, she’s still less anti-liberty than Hoffman is. If his endorsements represent his views, Hoffman is actively opposed to a great many of our basic liberties, while Scozzafava is just another opportunistic moderate-to-liberal Republican who will vote with other Republicans more often than most Democrats will, and certainly more than any Democrat far enough to the left to get elected in her district.

There are some Republicans who claim to be part of or even speak for the “liberty movement” within the party who are not really part of it. They’re just religious fanatics and single-issue social conservatives who pay lip service to the idea of smaller government and want to cash in on the momentum they see growing. Their dirty secret is that they oppose Scozzafava not because of her level of commitment to liberty, but because she’s pro-choice and pro-gay. Nothing else matters to them. They are one of the groups which got us in the mess the GOP is in today, as bad as the neocons and big-business Republicans. They’re statists on too many issues and that makes them enemies of liberty.   They must not be allowed to hijack the liberty movement and drive the party in the wrong direction.

The truth is that liberal Republicans still have more in common with the liberty movement than Democrats or even most socially conservative Republicans, and while that doesn’t mean you should support an uninspiring candidate like Scozzafava, don’t let anyone get away with a big lie like claiming that a candidate like Doug Hoffman, who is endorsed and funded by Eagle Forum and other groups of bigots, extremists and theocrats, is in any way a candidate who supports liberty.

Hoffman may be a conservative, but he’s not a liberty conservative. He’s just another statist who wants to use the power of government to dictate how people live.  He’s not that different from Scozzafava, he’s just bad in different ways.  Don’t waste your time and effort on this pointless contest between two bad choices.  Spend your money and enthusiasm to support the many Republican candidates in other campaigns who are authentic advocates for individual liberty, free enterprise and limited government.

I just mailed the following press release on behalf of the New York Republican Liberty Caucus:

The Republican Liberty Caucus of New York, a group of approximately 200 liberty-oriented Republicans around the state, has endorsed Chris Edes, who is running on the Libertarian ticket in Rochester. Mr. Edes was endorsed on October 12 at a special meeting of the New York executive committee. Also endorsed by the Libertarian Party, Mr. Edes will appear on the ballot on the Libertarian Party line.

Speaking about the endorsement, Edes said: “I’m pleased to receive the RLC endorsement. The Republican Liberty Caucus is the vanguard of Republican thinking for the 21st Century.”

Mr. Edes aims to bring new ideas to the school debate. He is not part of the political establishment, and so is not part of the Democratic Party’s failed educational policies that respond to political pressure from teachers’ unions and an educational establishment that is encumbered by lockstep political correctness; neglect of basic three r’s education; and a willingness to tax this State out of existence.

As Diane Ravitch points out in her book Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform, progressive education and the cumbersome bureaucracy associated with big government have left generations of students unable to perform and a nation that has flagged in the global marketplace.

To find out more information about Mr. Edes’ campaign, visit his website at http://www.vote-for-chris.net.

The Republican Liberty Caucus favors a reduced scope of government in order to permit New York to become more competitive. Future generations will be deprived of freedom and the fruits of economic innovation because of encroaching socialism.

Delegates in New York state have elected Edward F. Cox, the son-in-law of President Richard M. Nixon, chair of the New York State Republican Party. You will recall that President Nixon, besides having been involved in break-ins and an improved relationship with China (recall the US/China ping-pong match), was Mr. Inflation. He abolished the gold standard and pressured then-Fed chairman Arthur Burns to reduce interest rates to create a stock market bubble to assist his own re-election. Hence, he was as tightly linked to the corrupt New York City economy as is the Democrat Party and its publicity wing, the New York Times. Morally and politically Nixon represents the worst in the Republican Party.

But should the sins of the father-in-law be visited on the son-in-law? Cox has worked as an attorney with Patterson Belknap, a white shoe law firm in Manhattan. The firm is intimately linked to the Wall Street-and-bubble economy, and so the Democrats are very much in his corner. The Democratic publicity wing describes Cox as “centrist”, which is a very, very bad sign. When the fringe left describes a Republican as “centrist” the smell of co-optation is in the air.

Mr. Cox assumed his post on September 29 and cannot be held responsible for the Republicans’ shooting themselves in the foot in New York’s 23rd Congressional district. The Wall Street Journal reports that the former state chair,  Joe Mondello,  led the charge to nominate a left-wing extremist to run there.  Raquel Okyay has blogged on this depressing race. As an active Republican I cannot support her endorsement for the Conservative Party candidate, though.

Newsrunner publishes a Daily Kos poll that finds that in the Republican 23rd district, the Democrat is ahead.  The Journal seems to claim that Joe Mondello and the Republican County chairs are stupid.  The Republican Liberty Caucus in New York has been discussing the Wall Street Journal editorial which claims about the supposedly conservative Republican 23rd district:

“…party bosses have managed to nominate a rare Republican who could lose: Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, whose liberal record has caused voters to flee to Doug Hoffman, a business executive who is running on the Conservative line. Mr. Hoffman has more than 20% support in the latest poll, which is only a few points behind Ms. Scozzafava, who is only a little behind Democratic lawyer Bill Owens.”

The Journal is inaccurate in describing the 23rd district as all that conservative. First of all, there are a number of higher education institutions in northern New York and they will slant the vote to the left. Second, the former Congressmen, John McHugh, was a loot-and-spend, big government Republican about whom I blogged in May 2007. McHugh was not only corrupt, but he was so “conservative” that Obama appointed him Secretary of the Army. That’s really a sign of conservatism. Their former Congressman was a regular John Locke. After all, he was appointed by Obama.

The question, though, if you care about freedom, is how to get candidates who can help optimize our quest for freedom. Edward F. Cox seems unlikely to be able to do a good job, even if he, as did other Progressive Republican types like George W. Bush, speaks the language of lower taxes and reduced spending.

Ivy League types make bad politicians because they have been indoctrinated in the failed ideas of Progressivism. Cox is a graduate of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Government. I very much doubt he knows the first thing about free markets, Locke or the principles on the nation was based. I very much doubt that he will make a difference with respect to Scozzafava or and will make similar kinds of calls.

There is no question that candidates must market themselves to voters and liberal districts need to be regaled with liberal-sounding candidates. But I would like to see people who are genuine conservatives who win by pandering to liberal voters on the surface, rather than what the Republicans have now, Republicans who are Progressives at heart who pander to the conservatives in the party and expand government when they are elected, not the least of which were George W. Bush and New York’s George E. Pataki.

GOP Caucus Supports New Congressional Leadership Calls for Renewed GOP Commitment to Liberty

Thousand Oaks, CA — The Republican Liberty Caucus has urged Congress to elect new party leaders who
are committed to a “Liberty Agenda” of individual rights, limited government, and private
enterprise. “This election was a repudiation of those Republican legislators who abandoned principle
in the pursuit of bigger and more intrusive government,” said Republican Liberty Caucus Chairman
William Westmiller.

The organization of libertarian activists within the GOP urged House members to elect RLC Advisor
Rep. John Shadegg (R-Arizona) as Minority Whip and consider Rep. Mike Pence for Minority Leader. The
Caucus applauds the election of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) as the new leader of the Republican
Conference and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nevada) as Chair of the Senatorial Campaign Committee. The
Senators were endorsed for re-election by the RLC and Kyl serves on its Advisory Board.

“It’s unfortunate that it took a defeat like this for the us to realize that we badly needed a
course correction, but that’s where we find ourselves,” said RLC Advisor Rep. Jeff Flake (R-
Arizona). Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) agreed, saying, “This election does not show that voters
have abandoned their belief in limited government; it shows that the Republican Party has abandoned
them. In fact, these results represent the total failure of big government Republicanism.”

The Republican Liberty Caucus candidates enjoyed broad success, in spite of widespread party losses.
Over 70% of RLC candidates won election or re-election in federal, state, and local contests. “The
defeated GOP candidates were simply not committed to the principles of limited government,” says RLC
Chairman Westmiller, “and were properly repudiated by voters. The average Republican is sick of
porkbarrel legislation, new interventions on their liberty, and expanded government entitlements.
It’s time to abolish earmarks, cut spending, and reform the perverse Social Security and Medicare
programs.”

The RLC Liberty Index has provided ratings on every member of Congress for over 15 years and
supports its favored candidates through member activism and RLCUSA-PAC donations. “We’re growing
because the universal demand for individual liberty is growing,” said Westmiller, “The GOP has to
abandon corporate favors, hollow rhetoric, and hypocritical moralizing if it wants to win the
affection of libertarian and conservative voters across the country.”

The Republican Liberty Caucus has members in all 50 states and 14 Chartered state organizations
dedicated to promoting the ideals of individual rights, limited government and free enterprise
within the Republican Party.

Republican Liberty Caucus
44 Summerfield Street
Thousand Oaks, CA 91350
(866) RLC-Liberty [752-5423]
(http://www.RLC.org)

Contacts:
William Westmiller, RLC Chairman (805) 493-4332 — Chairman@RLC.org
Thomas Sewell, Communications Chair (435) 531-6964 — Secretary@RLC.org