The Standard at Grand Rapids — 2026 Libertarian National Convention Recap

“Tyranny always begins with the oppression of unpopular minorities... It is important that even the guilty have their day in court.”— Ron Paul, Liberty Defined¹

There are more than seven hundred thousand registered Libertarian voters in the United States. The number comes from Evan McMahon, the party’s newly elected national chair, in an interview published the week after the convention closed.² It is a useful number to hold in mind, because the decisions made at Grand Rapids over five days in late May — who would chair the party, what its bylaws would say, who would sit on its Judicial Committee, and, in the committee meeting that followed the convention, which state affiliate would be expelled from the party entirely — were made by roughly six hundred people.

Six hundred of seven hundred thousand. Less than one tenth of one percent of the Americans who have told their state election officials that they identify with this party were in the room when the party decided what it would be for the next two years. That ratio is the single most important fact about the 2026 Libertarian National Convention, and it frames everything that follows. The body that gathered in Grand Rapids did real and consequential work, some of it admirable and some of it troubling, and it did all of it with a mandate drawn from a sliver of the people in whose name it acted.

This is the third piece in a feature on the convention. The first established what the word “libertarian” means when it stands alone, and traced the party’s institutional history. The second carried the forensic treatment of the party’s factions, its adjacent movements, and the candidates contending for its leadership; the companion episode, recorded the night Representative Thomas Massie lost his Republican primary in Kentucky, set that material aside to analyze the defeat as it landed. This piece is the convention itself, as it unfolded from the Thursday committee meeting through the Monday adjournment and into the national committee session that followed it. I was on the floor for all of it, recording, and operating the Consequential Actions table in the vendors hall during the non-voting periods.

The standard this feature has carried from the first piece applies here as it has throughout. The Liberty Test asks of any proposed action three questions in sequence. Could an individual morally do this thing to another individual? If not, could a group of individuals delegate a power to government that none of them possessed alone? The answer to the second question is no, because one cannot delegate a power one does not have. The act remains aggression regardless of who performs it or how many of them agree. Fancy hats and larger mobs do not change ethics.³ The question this piece asks is narrower and harder, because it turns the standard inward. When a party that exists to hold the state to that test must govern itself, does it hold to the same standard it demands of everyone else?

The honest answer from Grand Rapids is mixed. The convention produced moments of genuine institutional discipline and moments of genuine institutional failure, and on two occasions — once on the convention floor and once in the committee room afterward — it set aside the most basic procedural protection the libertarian tradition insists upon, due process, in favor of the emotionally satisfying immediate action. That is the story. It begins, as these things should, with the strongest case the convention can make for itself.

The Case for Grand Rapids

A convention should be judged first by what it accomplished, and the body that met in Grand Rapids accomplished more than its sharpest critics will credit. The case for the convention, stated as charitably as the record permits, is substantial.

It addressed an ethics gap that the previous two years had made impossible to ignore. The McArdle period, documented in the second piece of this feature, had exposed the absence of enforceable conflict-of-interest rules at the national committee level. Approximately forty-nine thousand six hundred dollars had moved from the national committee to a company controlled by the former chair’s partner without board authorization, and the party had no codified mechanism to prevent it.⁴ The ethics proposal that came to the floor at Grand Rapids closed that gap. It required that conflicts of interest be disclosed and approved by two-thirds of the disinterested members of the national committee, with the conflicted member recusing; it required receipts and majority committee approval for reimbursement; and it prohibited the use of party resources to favor or disfavor candidates before the nomination. The proposal failed on its first attempt Friday night, falling six votes short of the two-thirds threshold. It was redrafted overnight, brought back Saturday morning, and passed. Whether this represents real reform or the codification of a rule whose violation was already obvious is a fair question, and reasonable members will land in different places on it. What can be said plainly is that the discussion was necessary and the party held it.⁵

It modernized its own procedures. The convention adopted electronic voting, a reform that the party’s geographic dispersion and the expense of in-person attendance had long made sensible. It adopted a standing rule allowing twenty delegates to compel a recorded vote, a transparency measure that gives a determined minority the power to put the body on the record. The treasurer released the 2025 audited financial statements, which carried a clean unqualified opinion, to the membership by unanimous consent. These are not glamorous accomplishments. They are the ordinary maintenance of a functioning institution, and the convention performed them.⁶

It assembled a slate of speakers that few party conventions of any size could match. Justin Amash, the only Libertarian ever to serve in Congress, delivered a substantive address on the party’s strategic future that I will treat at length below. Scott Horton delivered a closing keynote on foreign-policy infiltration of the international libertarian movement that was among the most serious pieces of political analysis offered from any convention stage this cycle. Ammon Bundy, whose standoffs with federal authorities in Nevada and Oregon made him a national figure, gave both a lunch breakout and a keynote on federal overreach and his own efforts to resist it. Lynn Ulbricht, the mother of Ross Ulbricht, spoke about the pardon that freed her son from a double life sentence and about the new organization she has founded to extend the same mercy to others serving sentences she regards as unjust. Dr. Sheena Meade, the chief executive of the Clean Slate Initiative, spoke about criminal-record expungement and the tens of millions of Americans whose past convictions foreclose their futures. This was a convention that took its own ideas seriously enough to invite people who had spent their lives advancing them.⁷

And it elected a chair who has articulated, clearly and without hedging, the strategic case against the approach that had governed the party for the previous four years. McMahon told Reason the week after the convention that there are no deals to be made for a cabinet position when the price is the party’s principles, and that a Libertarian candidate’s proper approach is to be a libertarian and run, not to seek an armistice with someone who will grow the state.⁸ Whatever one concludes about the decisions made under his gavel in the days that followed, the chair the convention produced holds a coherent and defensible theory of what the party is for.

The case for Grand Rapids is real. It should be held in view through everything that follows, because the failures this piece will examine were the failures of a body that was also capable of all of the above. A convention that could not have passed the ethics reform would be a simpler thing to write about. This one could, and did, and then did other things that are harder to defend.

The Body That Showed Up

Return to the arithmetic. The convention credentialed five hundred thirty-nine primary delegates on Friday morning, a number that rose to six hundred four by late morning Saturday as more delegates checked in.⁹ Set that against McMahon’s seven hundred thousand registered Libertarians, and the structure of the problem becomes visible. A registered voter is not a delegate. Becoming a delegate requires party membership, attendance at a state convention, selection by that convention, and the time and money to travel to Grand Rapids and stay for five days. Each of those filters is reasonable on its own terms. Their cumulative effect is that the people who decide the party’s direction are a small, self-selected, and intensely engaged subset of the people who identify with it.

A small electorate is a volatile electorate. When six hundred people decide a question, a shift of a few dozen votes reverses the outcome, and the composition of the room on any given afternoon — who stayed, who left for a breakout session, who was at the microphone and who was at lunch — can determine what the party stands for. The convention demonstrated this repeatedly. The ethics reform failed by six votes on Friday and passed on Saturday with substantially the same language. A bylaws proposal to require life membership for officers carried a majority but failed the two-thirds threshold by a margin that turned on the corrected denominator of votes cast. These were not deep ideological divisions resolving themselves. They were the ordinary variance of a small body, and in a small body variance is destiny.

The convention’s first running joke captured the dynamic, though it also raised a question of principle that deserves to be taken seriously rather than laughed off. On Thursday, before the convention formally opened, the national committee debated a proposed “Professional Appearance and Decorum Guidelines” subsection for the policy manual — a dress code, in plain terms. It was the third iteration of a proposal that had been introduced and softened over successive meetings, the earlier versions described by their own sponsor as atrocious. The version that came to the committee was explicitly aspirational, protected expressive and religious attire, and used the word “should” rather than “shall.” Public comment was uniformly hostile. One commenter predicted a hundred delegates would violate it on purpose. Another noted that neither major party has a dress code. The proposal failed.¹⁰ The next morning, the convention’s Wi-Fi password was revealed to be, with a capital S, Sandals.

I count myself among those who opposed it, and not as a matter of taste. A party founded on the principle that individuals own themselves has no business telling its members how to dress, even aspirationally, even with the softening language of “should.” The proposal was anathema to the thing the party claims to be. It is faintly absurd that a libertarian body would entertain a rule dictating personal appearance at all, and the right response to such a proposal is not amusement but refusal. The body refused, and it was right to. But the episode is also a tell about the convention’s relationship to its own rules. This is a party constitutionally suspicious of rules, including its own — a suspicion that is the correct instinct when the rule is a dress code, and a liability when the rule is the one that protects a member from being expelled without a hearing. The same body that would not dictate a dress code would, within seventy-two hours, dictate a member’s removal on hearsay. The suspicion of rules is selective, and the selection is the problem.

The point of the arithmetic is not that six hundred delegates lack the authority to act for the party. Under the bylaws they plainly have it. The point is that authority and legitimacy are different things, and the gap between them is measured in the seven hundred thousand registered Libertarians who were not in the room. A party that wants its decisions to carry weight beyond the ballroom has to either close that gap or accept that its mandate is thinner than its rhetoric. I will return to this at the end, because it is the through-line that connects everything Grand Rapids did, and it is the charge the convention hands to the next one.

The Chair Race

Six candidates contended for the chair. The debate that preceded the vote was moderated by Dr. James Lark, a former national chair and a member of the party’s Hall of Liberty, and it produced a clearer picture of the party’s divisions than any platform fight.

James Ostrowski, a Buffalo trial lawyer who had been Ron Paul’s election counsel in New York and a colleague of Murray Rothbard, ran on affordability as the party’s lead issue and on the argument that the party had to market itself far more aggressively than it had — that a movement with the better ideas was losing for want of selling them. Evan McMahon, the party’s secretary and the chair of the Indiana affiliate, ran on membership — the argument that the party’s central problem was its shrinking dues-paying base, and that everything else followed from fixing it. Wes Benedict, a former national executive director who has also worked as a professional lobbyist, ran on operations and on a track record of candidate recruitment numbers from his prior tenure. Rob Yates, with a quarter-century in marketing, ran on the surveillance state as the issue with the highest ceiling. Stephen Phillips, who campaigned under the name Grumpy Gnome, ran a deliberately abrasive campaign against the party’s existing platform positions.

And Jeremy Kaufman ran against the convention itself. His speech was a sustained attack on the people in the room. He told the delegates that many of them were the problem, that the party had been increasingly controlled by what he called leftist freaks, degenerates, losers, and antisocial people, and he closed by promising that if elected he would do nothing and deliver on it. The body responded by squeaking rubber chickens throughout his speaking time. I watched this happen, and I want to be precise about what it was. It was not a rebuttal. It was a heckle dressed up as one, a room full of people who claim to prize reason answering a provocation with noise. Kaufman fed on the contention and turned the debate into spectacle, and the body obliged him. It was one of the low points of the convention, and the discredit is shared. A movement that believes argument is how free people resolve their differences had a candidate insult it to its face, and its answer was a sound effect.

The vote itself was the most institutionally interesting moment of the convention, because it showed the party doing something it rarely does well: building a coalition. Approval voting was not used for the chair; the election ran through successive rounds of elimination. In the first round, McMahon led with one hundred ninety-five votes, just under thirty-three percent, with Ostrowski close behind and Benedict third at one hundred eighty-seven. Kaufman, for all the noise, drew forty-two votes — seven percent. In the second round, with the field narrowed, McMahon held first at two hundred forty-one and Ostrowski climbed to two hundred thirty-six, five votes back, while Benedict was eliminated at one hundred ten. In the third round, Benedict’s voters moved, and they moved decisively to McMahon, who won with three hundred twenty votes — fifty-three and a half percent — to Ostrowski’s two hundred sixty-five.¹¹

The mechanism deserves a name, because Libertarians have seen it before. In 2024, Mike ter Maat threw his support to Chase Oliver and helped carry him to the presidential nomination. At Grand Rapids, Benedict’s elimination sent his operations-minded delegates to McMahon, and the membership argument absorbed the operations argument to build a majority. No candidate won the debate; Kaufman’s spectacle saw to that. The coalition won the election. That is the mechanism by which conventions resolve multi-candidate fields — not by who performs best on stage, but by who can assemble the second-choice votes of the eliminated. It is worth understanding clearly, whatever one thinks of the result it produced here, because it is the mechanism that will decide El Paso as well.

The Elections the Body Could Not Finish

The back half of the convention produced its central institutional failure, and it is worth tracing carefully, because the failure was structural rather than personal. No villain caused it. The body’s own rules, the reforms it had declined to adopt earlier in the week, and the time it squandered on routine business caused it.

Begin with the Judicial Committee. On Saturday afternoon the convention voted to suspend its rules and move to elections, postponing the remaining bylaws proposals. This is a familiar convention dynamic: the agenda runs long, the delegates grow restless, and the body trades deliberation for the business it most wants to transact. The Judicial Committee election came up under that suspension.

The Judicial Committee has seven seats. It is the party’s internal court, the body that hears appeals and resolves disputes, including disputes about the very kinds of disciplinary action the convention and the national committee would take in the days that followed. The election ran by approval voting, in which each delegate may approve as many nominees as the delegate chooses, and a candidate is elected by clearing a majority threshold. Seventeen people were nominated. When the ballots were counted, four thousand and seven approvals had been cast across all of them, and exactly two candidates cleared a majority. Avens O’Brien led with three hundred eighty-seven approvals, just over sixty-three percent. Ken Moellman followed with three hundred seventy-three, just over sixty-one percent. The third-place finisher, Jake Porter, fell three votes short of the majority threshold. No one else came close.¹²

Two seats filled. Five vacant. Seven-member committee, two members elected. Under the bylaws, the remaining members of the Judicial Committee, rather than the delegates, fill the committee’s vacancies — so the convention’s failure to elect a full slate handed the composition of the party’s internal court to the two members it had managed to elect.¹³ Whether two members can lawfully exercise that power before the committee reaches a quorum is precisely the kind of question the Judicial Committee exists to resolve, and it is a question about the Judicial Committee’s own ability to constitute itself. The party left Grand Rapids with its internal court staffed at two of seven and a circular problem at the center of it.

The same pattern then repeated, more consequentially, with the at-large and officer elections. The eighteen-member national committee includes seven at-large seats, and those seats, together with the officers, are the body that governs the party between conventions — that sets its direction, manages its money, and takes the disciplinary actions this piece will turn to next. They are, in factional terms, the seats that matter most, because they are the ones that act when the delegates have gone home. And the convention nearly failed to fill them.

By Sunday evening the body had run well behind schedule. The officer and at-large elections were still unfinished, the room was thinning as delegates were hungry and needing to prepare for travel, and the clock was the enemy. My concern that night was specific and procedural. Monday was Memorial Day. A large portion of an already diluted body would be absent for travel and for events in their home districts, and if the elections were not completed before the room emptied, the party risked losing quorum entirely — which would have left every remaining selection, at-large and officer alike, to the newly elected chair and vice chair rather than to the delegates. To prevent that, I moved to suspend the rules and work through the evening until the at-large and treasurer elections were complete. The motion required a two-thirds vote. It received a simple majority and no more. It failed. The body broke for dinner with its work unfinished.

Fortunately, quorum held. When the convention reconvened Monday morning, a counted quorum confirmed the body could still act, though it was smaller than it had been. At-large voting proceeded. But even with the additional day, the body could not seat the full committee, and the remaining at-large vacancies were left to be filled by the committee itself rather than by the delegates who were supposed to choose them.¹⁵ The seats that govern the party between conventions — the seats that determine which faction sets the agenda for the next two years — were filled in part by the very committee they constitute, because the convention could not find the hours to elect them.

This is where the arithmetic, the rules, and the clock converge into a genuine governance failure. The reforms that would have produced a full slate from a single ballot had come before the body earlier in the week and been defeated. A proposal to adopt ranked-choice voting for officers failed, twice. A proposal for cumulative voting failed. These are precisely the mechanisms that fill a multi-seat body cleanly rather than leaving it half-empty when the field is large and the room divided.¹⁶ The convention had the tools to prevent the collapse in its hands on Friday, declined them, and walked into the collapse over the weekend.

And the deeper cause was the one the next convention can actually fix: the body wasted its hours. Conventions that run out of time to elect their own governing committee do not run out of time because the elections are long. They run out because the early days are consumed by administrative business — credentialing fights, procedural skirmishes, the relitigation of settled questions — that devours the clock before the body reaches the decisions that matter. A small electorate, voting on methods that require broad consensus, on an agenda that squanders its first two days, will reliably under-fill the bodies it most needs to fill. That is not a hypothesis. It is what happened, twice, to the two committees whose composition determines how the party governs itself and adjudicates its disputes.

The Two Anchors

Between the chair race and the collapse, the convention heard its two most substantial addresses, and they pointed in directions the party will be arguing about for years.

Justin Amash spoke Saturday afternoon. His speech was the strongest articulation of a recruitment strategy the convention produced, and it deserves to be engaged on its own terms. Amash framed the United States as the most libertarian country in the history of the world, grounding the claim in Adams on the Revolution and Madison on the Constitution, and then named the threat as what he called the corporate socialist coalition — MAGA, Incorporated. He laid out a specific indictment of the second Trump administration: the spending increases, the record federal debt, the military expansion in the Middle East, the reauthorization of Section 702 and the Patriot Act, the expansion of civil asset forfeiture, the tariffs declared under emergency authority, and the campaign against Massie, whom the president had called a third-rate grandstander. He cited Laura Loomer’s post-Massie warning that Rand Paul would be next.¹⁷

Then he offered a four-point program. Double down on national politics, on the counterintuitive ground that voters are more willing to elect Libertarians at higher levels than lower ones. Focus on organizing libertarians to win, and under no circumstances operate as a Republican junior-varsity team. Keep the messaging simple. And give people room to join the party without being required to pass an ideological examination first. He closed by warning that if the Libertarian Party did not seize the moment with courage, clarity, and discipline, someone else would.

It is a serious program, and the membership argument that won McMahon the chair is its institutional expression. The party’s case for itself, on this reading, is that the wreckage of the populist coalition has created a constituency of disaffected constitutional conservatives with nowhere to go, and that the Libertarian Party is the natural home for them if it can make itself a credible institution. I find the analysis largely persuasive. I will only note, and the rest of this piece will bear it out, that the program assumes a party capable of the courage, clarity, and discipline Amash named — and the same convention that applauded the speech had just failed to fill its own Judicial Committee and would, within forty-eight hours, expel a member and an affiliate without a hearing. The strategy is sound. The instrument is not yet equal to it.

Scott Horton delivered the closing keynote, and it turned the party’s attention outward, to the international libertarian movement and the foreign-policy interests that have sought to shape it. Horton argued that the party should withdraw from the International Association of Libertarian Parties. He reported that the IALP’s own founder had resigned, telling Horton that morning, with permission to quote, that the organization had strayed far from his vision. Horton laid out a detailed case — naming organizations, funding sources, and individuals — that the apparatus of color-coded revolution, the network of government-funded democracy-promotion bodies, had found purchase inside the international libertarian movement, and he invoked the rule he attributed to Daniel McAdams: never criticize a country the intelligence agencies are criticizing. He closed on Justin Raimondo’s formulation that it is libertarianism in one country or nowhere at all. A resolution to disassociate the party from the IALP was announced, and it drew cross-factional support.¹⁸

Due Process, Twice

On two occasions, once on the convention floor on Sunday and once in the national committee meeting that followed the convention on Monday, the party was asked to discipline a member or an affiliate, and on both occasions it set aside due process in favor of immediate action. The cases were different in their particulars, and the second had far more documented justification than the first. But they failed in the same way, and the pattern is the thing worth seeing.

The first incident I report as a witness, because it is not in any transcript and I have found no published account of it. On Sunday, outside the convention hall, an altercation occurred. As I and others later pieced it together from the people who saw it, a member upset with the New Hampshire delegation had been taking that delegation’s printed materials and discarding them, and a person associated with the New Hampshire delegation responded by physically striking her. The person who struck her was, by the accounts I heard, arrested. I do not doubt that something happened; the witnesses I spoke with afterward were consistent, and I have no reason to question them.

But that is not the point, and the distinction is the entire point. When the convention reconvened, the chair, Steven Nekhaila, moved from the chair to expel the New Hampshire member alleged to have committed the assault, and he put it to a vote of the delegates. We were asked to vote — and I was one of the people asked — to remove a fellow member from the delegation on the basis of an emotional account delivered in the heat of the moment. We had no testimony. We had no police report or charging document to read. We had no statement from the accused. We had nothing but a description of an incident most of us in that vote had not seen directly, presented under the pressure of a genuinely upset chair, and we were asked to act on it immediately.

I believe the chair acted rashly. The situation called for dispassionate leadership, and it received the opposite. There may well have been an assault. The person may well deserve removal, or worse, through whatever process the law and the party’s own rules provide. But a party that exists to insist the state may not deprive a person of liberty without due process cannot ask its own members to expel one of their number on hearsay, in a moment of high emotion, with no record before them and no opportunity for the accused to respond. The principle the party demands of the government is the principle it abandoned in that vote. Tyranny always begins with the oppression of unpopular minorities, and the unpopular are never more unpopular than in the minutes after an alleged offense, which is precisely when the protection matters and precisely when it is hardest to extend.

The second incident is documented, and it is the harder case, which is what makes it the more important one. In the national committee meeting that followed the convention on Monday, a motion came to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. The cause was real and stated plainly: the New Hampshire affiliate had publicly endorsed Donald Trump during the 2024 election, an endorsement of another party’s candidate in direct violation of the bylaws, and had repeatedly advanced positions the national party regarded as hostile to its own.¹⁹ McMahon, in his interview the following week, called the disaffiliation necessary and a long time coming, and described the affiliate as a toxic group damaging the party’s brand and its candidates.²⁰ The underlying complaint, in other words, was not hearsay. It was a documented bylaws violation, and a serious one.

That is exactly why what happened next matters. A member moved to amend the disaffiliation motion — not to defeat it, but to form an investigative committee that would establish the facts and circumstances, produce a documented report of particulars, and give the affiliate notice and an opportunity to respond before the party took an action as large as expelling a state party. The argument for the amendment was made explicitly in the language of due process: that a disciplinary action of this magnitude, taken without notice or an opportunity to respond, would be easily shown to be a snap decision if it were ever challenged, that it exposed the national committee to liability, and that picking and choosing which affiliates to enforce against, based on which ones the body found distasteful, was the road to fracturing the party.²¹ One member warned that the action would be considered a disciplinary measure for which no notice had been given, made in the heat of a great deal of angry rhetoric, and urged the body to protect itself by building the record first.

The amendment failed. The body declined to form the investigative committee, and the argument that carried the day was that everyone already knew what had been going on, that the disaffiliation was badly overdue, and that the time was right to bring New Hampshire to order immediately. The disaffiliation then passed on a roll-call vote.²²

Let us note, the cases are not identical and the difference cuts in an instructive direction. The Sunday vote rested on no record at all. The Monday disaffiliation rested on a real and documented cause — the Trump endorsement was a genuine bylaws violation, a matter of public record, and the affiliate’s broader conduct had been an open problem for years. That is what makes the refusal to build the record so much worse, not better. When the cause is weak, skipping the process is a tactical error. When the cause is strong, skipping the process is a choice — a choice to act on conviction rather than on demonstrated fact, when demonstrated fact was available for the asking. The party had every opportunity to do this properly. The violation was documented; the committee was moved; the only thing required was the patience to establish the particulars and extend the affiliate the notice and hearing that the party’s own commitment to due process demands. The body chose speed over process, and it did so in the case where process would have cost it almost nothing and protected it from almost everything.

Due process is not a courtesy extended to the sympathetic. It is the discipline a free people hold to precisely when emotion makes skipping it feel justified, and precisely when the accused is least deserving of sympathy. The New Hampshire affiliate may be everything its critics say. That is not an argument against giving it a hearing. It is the argument for giving it one, because a party that will deny process to the affiliate it finds most odious has established that process is available only to the affiliates it likes, which is to say it is not a principle at all but a preference. The same body that would, days earlier, have been the natural venue for reviewing both of these actions — the Judicial Committee — sat empty at two of seven seats, unable to reach quorum, because the convention had failed to fill it. The party disarmed its own internal court in the same week it took two disciplinary actions that court existed to review.

The Standard Applied

The Liberty Test asks whether an action leaves people more free or more governed. Applied to the convention as a whole, the verdict is genuinely mixed, and the mix is the finding.

On the side of freedom: the party codified the ethics rules whose absence had cost it dearly, and it did so by learning from failure and binding itself against its repetition. It adopted transparency reforms. It released a clean audit. It elected a chair with a coherent theory of the party’s purpose and a clear refusal of the kingmaker strategy that had governed the previous four years. It gave its stage to people doing serious work on criminal justice, on foreign policy, and on the recovery of lives the state had ruined. These are real accomplishments, and a fair accounting credits them fully.

On the side of governance: the convention failed to fill its own internal court, leaving a seven-member committee staffed at two and no credible path to the rest, after declining the structural reforms that would have prevented it. And twice, once on the floor and once in committee, it disciplined a member or an affiliate without process — once on pure hearsay, once in a case where the documented cause made the refusal to build a record not a necessity but a choice. The party governed itself badly on the procedural questions, and on the most important structural question it could not govern itself at all.

The standard does not assign blame. It measures. What it measures at Grand Rapids is a body capable of real discipline on some questions and incapable of it on others, and the pattern in the failures is consistent: when patience and process competed with the satisfaction of immediate action, immediate action won. That is a human tendency, not a uniquely libertarian one. But this is the party that exists to hold everyone else to the harder standard, and it is fair to hold it to its own.

What Grand Rapids Hands to El Paso

The next convention will be in El Paso in 2028, and the verdict on Grand Rapids is best understood not as a condemnation but as a charge to the body that gathers there.

Return one final time to the arithmetic. Six hundred delegates decided everything at Grand Rapids, drawn from seven hundred thousand registered Libertarians. Nearly every failure in this piece traces back to the smallness and the volatility of that body. The ethics reform that turned on six votes, the Judicial Committee that filled two of seven seats, the structural reforms defeated by narrow margins, the disciplinary actions pushed through by the room that happened to be present in a moment of high feeling — all of these are the pathologies of a small electorate, where a few dozen votes are destiny and the composition of the room on a given afternoon decides what the party stands for.

The cure is the same as the strategy. McMahon set a goal of sixty-six thousand sustaining members — those who contribute at least twenty-five dollars a year — by 2028.²³ Amash named recruitment as the first task. The membership argument won the chair. And the membership argument is also, though the convention did not frame it this way, the answer to the governance failures this piece has catalogued. A larger, more engaged, more representative body is a more stable one. It is harder to stampede. It is more likely to fill a seven-member committee, more likely to insist on a record before it expels, more likely to choose process over the satisfaction of the moment, because a larger body has more people in it who were not in the room when the anger crested. Growing the party does not merely expand its reach. It improves its judgment. It changes who decides, and therefore what is decided, from the composition of the national committee to the focus of the party’s energy.

The broader incorporation of members is one half of the work. The other half is tactical, and it is entirely in the party’s own hands. A convention cannot keep running out of the hours it needs to elect its own governing committee because it has spent those hours on administrative business. The credentialing disputes, the procedural skirmishes, the relitigation of questions the body has already settled — these consumed the early days at Grand Rapids and left the convention scrambling against the clock when it reached the decisions that actually determine how the party is governed. El Paso has to be organized so that the work that matters is not the work that gets squeezed. That is not a question of philosophy or faction. It is a question of running a meeting, and a party that aspires to run a country ought to be able to run a meeting.

That is the work between now and El Paso, and it is work that the people reading this can do. I am encouraged in this by the candidates I met on the floor at Grand Rapids, because the recruitment thesis is not an abstraction to them. It is what they are already doing. Thomas Laehn, the Greene County Attorney in Iowa and the first Libertarian ever elected to partisan office in that state, is running for the United States Senate on a platform of curbing executive power and ending eminent domain abuse, against the two-party system itself. Jamie Frost Remmey is running for Congress in Pennsylvania’s First District, gathering the petition signatures that ballot access in that state demands. And Jeremy Todd is running for Congress in Kentucky’s Fourth District — the seat Thomas Massie is leaving — carrying the Libertarian standard into the very district whose primary occasioned the second piece of this feature. These are serious people running real races, and they are the answer to the question of what the party is for, far more than any vote on a convention floor. They deserve the support of every one of the seven hundred thousand, and they have mine.²⁴

The party does not become a credible home for the politically homeless by winning arguments on a convention stage. As Harry Browne put it, winning an argument is of no value; what you want is to win a convert.²⁵ The rubber chickens that answered Jeremy Kaufman won an argument, after a fashion. They won no converts. The convert is won by the affiliate that shows up at the zoning board and the town council, by the member who does the unglamorous work of building the local chapter, by candidates like Laehn and Remmey and Todd who put their names on a ballot against long odds, by the party that proves it can govern itself well enough to be trusted to govern anything. Grand Rapids showed a party that can do some of that and not yet all of it. El Paso is the chance to close the gap — between what the party accomplished and what it failed to, between authority and legitimacy, between the seven hundred thousand who carry the name and the six hundred who decide what it means.

The standard was on the table the whole time. The convention met it on the questions that were easy to meet and abandoned it on the two where meeting it would have required patience the room did not have. The next convention will be larger if the work between now and then is done. A larger convention will be a more patient one. And a more patient party is one that can hold to its own standard even when emotion makes abandoning it feel like justice. That is the charge. It is also, for once, entirely within the party’s power to answer.

Self-Reflection Prompts

1. The piece argues that due process matters most when the accused is least sympathetic. Where in your own political thinking do you extend process to those you agree with and deny it to those you do not? How would you know if you were doing it?

2. Six hundred delegates decided the direction of a party that seven hundred thousand Americans identify with. Is that a failure of the party, a failure of the seven hundred thousand who did not participate, or simply the nature of voluntary association? What would change your answer?

3. The convention passed an ethics reform it had failed to pass the night before, with substantially the same language. What does it mean that the same body reached opposite conclusions on consecutive days? Is that deliberation working, or variance masquerading as deliberation?

4. The disaffiliation of the New Hampshire affiliate was potentially correct on the merits. Does that make the refusal to build a record before acting better or worse? Defend your answer against the strongest version of the opposite view.

5. Amash argued the party should give people room to join without requiring them to be experts first. The Radical Caucus tradition holds that a party that stands for everything stands for nothing. Where is the line between an open door and an empty doorway?

6. If you were one of the six hundred in the room for the Sunday vote, with the upset still fresh and the account still ringing, would you have voted to expel? Would you have been right to?

Endnotes

¹ Ron Paul, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (Grand Central Publishing, 2011), pp. 32–33. The passage appears in Paul’s discussion of crime and individual rights. Wording to be confirmed verbatim against the print edition prior to publication.

² Eric Boehm, “The Libertarian Party’s New Leader Has No Interest in Playing Kingmaker,” Reason, May 29, 2026. McMahon’s figure of more than seven hundred thousand registered Libertarian voters is given directly in the interview.

³ The Adjective and the Noun, Piece 1 of this feature, Consequential Actions, May 2026. The Liberty Test is restated here in compressed form; the full derivation appears in Piece 1.

⁴ Special Investigatory Committee final report, adopted by the Libertarian National Committee June 9, 2025; coverage in Independent Political Report, June 11, 2025, and in Reason. The figure of approximately forty-nine thousand six hundred dollars is documented in the committee report and discussed in Piece 2 of this feature.

⁵ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Saturday session transcript, May 23, 2026. The ethics proposal (Bylaws Proposal 9) failed Friday night on a counted vote falling six votes short of the two-thirds threshold, was redrafted overnight, and passed Saturday morning. The three sections of the redraft — conflict-of-interest disclosure and recusal, receipts and committee approval for reimbursement, and the prohibition on using party resources to favor or disfavor candidates before nomination — are recorded in the Saturday transcript.

⁶ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Friday and Saturday session transcripts, May 22–23, 2026. Electronic voting (Bylaws Proposal 3) and the twenty-delegate standing rule (Bylaws Proposal 5) passed; the twenty-delegate rule was made effective immediately. The 2025 audited financial statements, carrying a clean unqualified opinion, were released by the treasurer to the membership by unanimous consent at the Thursday national committee meeting.

⁷ 2026 Libertarian National Convention program and Saturday session transcript. The speaker roster included Justin Amash, Scott Horton, Lynn Ulbricht, Dr. Sheena Meade of the Clean Slate Initiative, and Aaron Day of the Free State Project.

⁸ Eric Boehm, “The Libertarian Party’s New Leader Has No Interest in Playing Kingmaker,” Reason, May 29, 2026. McMahon’s statement that “there’s no deals that can be made for a cabinet position when you’re sacrificing our set of principles in our platform” is quoted in the interview.

⁹ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, credentials reports, Friday and Saturday sessions. The credentials committee, chaired by Ken Moellman, reported five hundred thirty-nine primary delegates Friday morning, rising to six hundred four by late Saturday morning.

¹⁰ 2026 pre-convention Libertarian National Committee meeting, Thursday, May 21, 2026, transcript. The “Professional Appearance and Decorum Guidelines” subsection, moved by an at-large member, failed on a hand count. Public comment is recorded in the meeting transcript.

¹¹ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, chair election results, Saturday, May 23, 2026, Rounds 1 through 3, from the official tabulation displayed to the convention. Round 1: McMahon 195 (32.94%), Ostrowski second, Benedict 187 (31.59%), Yates 125 (21.11%), Kaufman 42 (7.09%), Phillips 5, write-ins 2, none-of-the-above 5, of 592 cast. Round 2: McMahon 241 (39.97%), Ostrowski 236 (39.14%), Benedict eliminated at 110 (18.24%), of 603 cast. Round 3: McMahon 320 (53.51%), Ostrowski 265 (44.31%), of 598 cast. The 2024 parallel is the ter Maat-to-Oliver consolidation at that year’s presidential nominating convention.

¹² 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Judicial Committee election, Round 1 official tabulation displayed to the convention. Of four thousand seven total approvals cast, Avens O’Brien received 387 (63.44%) and Ken Moellman received 373 (61.15%), both clearing the majority threshold and elected. Jake Porter finished third at 301 (49.34%), short of the threshold. No additional candidate cleared a majority. Seven seats; two filled.

¹³ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Monday session transcript, May 25, 2026, and Bylaws of the Libertarian Party, Article 1, Section 1. The bylaws provide that the remaining members of the Judicial Committee, rather than the delegates, fill vacancies on the committee. With only two of seven seats elected at the convention, the composition of the remaining five seats fell to the two elected members, raising the question of whether a two-member body may act before reaching quorum.

¹⁴ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Sunday session transcript, May 24, 2026. Reece Smith, a Pennsylvania delegate, raised a parliamentary inquiry on how the at-large elections would proceed; Alfa Shaw, also of Pennsylvania, asked the chair what the effect would be if the elections were not completed and the body failed to reach quorum the following morning. The author’s motion to suspend the rules and continue the at-large and treasurer elections through the evening required a two-thirds vote, received a simple majority, and failed.

¹⁵ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Monday session transcript, May 25, 2026. A counted quorum confirmed the body could act Monday morning, though it was smaller than on previous days. At-large voting proceeded but did not seat the full committee; the remaining at-large vacancies were left to be filled by the committee itself rather than by the delegates.

¹⁶ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Friday session transcript. The ranked-choice voting proposal for officers (Bylaws Proposal 1) failed, as did an instant-runoff amendment; cumulative voting (Bylaws Proposal 4) failed. These were the structural mechanisms most directly applicable to filling a multi-seat body from a single ballot.

¹⁷ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Justin Amash keynote, Saturday afternoon, May 23, 2026, transcript. Amash’s four-point program and his characterization of “the corporate socialist coalition that I refer to as MAGA, Inc.” are recorded in the Saturday transcript.

¹⁸ 2026 Libertarian National Convention, Scott Horton closing keynote, Saturday, May 23, 2026, transcript. Horton’s case regarding the International Association of Libertarian Parties, his report of the IALP founder’s resignation, and the announced disassociation resolution are recorded in the transcript. The resolution was subsequently taken up in the post-convention period.

¹⁹ Post-convention Libertarian National Committee meeting, Monday, May 25, 2026, transcript. The motion to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire cited the affiliate’s public endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2024 election, in violation of the bylaws provision that an affiliate party shall not endorse the candidate of another party, together with a pattern of positions hostile to the national party.

²⁰ Eric Boehm, “The Libertarian Party’s New Leader Has No Interest in Playing Kingmaker,” Reason, May 29, 2026. McMahon described the disaffiliation as “necessary” and “a long time coming,” and characterized the affiliate as “a toxic group that is doing damage to our brand and to our candidates and our affiliates.” The article also documents the affiliate’s 2024 Trump endorsement over the party’s own nominee.

²¹ Post-convention Libertarian National Committee meeting, Monday, May 25, 2026, transcript. The amendment to form an investigative committee, the due-process arguments advanced in its support — notice, opportunity to respond, documented particulars, protection against the appearance of selective enforcement, and protection against liability — and the warning that the action would be shown to be a snap decision if challenged are recorded in the meeting transcript.

²² Post-convention Libertarian National Committee meeting, Monday, May 25, 2026, transcript. The investigative-committee amendment failed; the disaffiliation passed on a roll-call vote.

²³ Eric Boehm, “The Libertarian Party’s New Leader Has No Interest in Playing Kingmaker,” Reason, May 29, 2026. McMahon’s stated goal of sixty-six thousand sustaining members — defined as those donating at least twenty-five dollars annually — by 2028 is given in the interview.

²⁴ The author met these candidates at the 2026 Libertarian National Convention. Thomas Laehn, Greene County Attorney and the first Libertarian elected to partisan office in Iowa history, is the Libertarian candidate for United States Senate in Iowa in 2026; campaign and biographical detail from Iowa Public Radio, October 11, 2025, and Reason, October 20, 2025. Jamie Frost Remmey is the Libertarian candidate for Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District; detail from the Bucks County Beacon, May 2026, and jamiefrostremmey.com. Jeremy Todd is the Libertarian candidate for Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District, the seat vacated by Thomas Massie; his candidacy was referenced from the convention floor and is recorded in the Saturday session transcript, May 23, 2026.

²⁵ Harry Browne, Liberty A to Z: 872 Libertarian Soundbites You Can Use Right Now! The formulation that winning an argument is of no value and that what one wants is to win a convert is attributed to Browne in this collection. Wording to be confirmed verbatim against the published source prior to publication.