A Comprehensive Policy Guide
By Phill Van Horn
Edited by Jon Malinsky
Given the unprecedented nature of the 2016 presidential election, many people have begun to consider third party options for their vote. There is a widespread sentiment that both Trump and Clinton are so terrible in their own ways that many do not want to vote for either candidate. Still, there seems to be very little known about the third party candidates personally, professionally, or politically. For this reason, I have undertaken the task of compiling some available information about these candidates in hopes that this seldom-conveyed information will help the reader make a well-informed decision in this election.
This is not intended to communicate a personal stance about the efficacy or validity of Libertarian policies. Rather, it is to be an informative piece about Johnson’s policies and the relevant context I have been able to uncover, This will be the first article in a series detailing the Libertarian and Green party campaigns in 2016. In the next article, I plan to analyze Johnson’s Libertarian policies from my own political perspective.
Before I begin, I want to clarify: I am going to be directly quoting a lot from either the Johnson Weld 2016 website or from the transcript of their CNN town hall. Any quote not directly cited otherwise should be assumed to be from the town hall. The video of the town hall can be found here.
What’s a Libertarian, and who are Johnson & Weld?
There is, just like any other school of thought, a spectrum of beliefs within Libertarianism, so it is almost unavoidable to be reductive in order to broadly describe it. Johnson himself described Libertarianism at the recent CNN town hall as “fiscally conservative, socially accepting, tolerant. Look, people should be able to make choices in their own lives, [we] always come down on the side of choice.” It is a mix of fiscal conservatism with social liberalism, highly valuing ‘free market solutions’ to engender competition and espousing the belief that the government should be as minimally involved in people’s lives as possible.
Gary Johnson was the two-term Republican governor in New Mexico who became legendary for his prodigious use of the veto to slash New Mexico’s budget. Before that, in 1976 he started a handyman business called Big J Enterprises, which by 1999 had grown large enough to sell for millions. He is known to be a fitness enthusiast and athlete. He claims to have climbed the highest mountain on each continent and participated in a mind-blowing (300+) number of marathons and similar events. After his governorship, he became the CEO of the Nevada-based Marijuana conglomerate, Cannabis Sativa Inc., before undertaking his first presidential campaign in 2012.
Johnson’s running mate, William Weld, is a lawyer and career politician with his own storied history. He began as legal council for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate impeachment inquiry where he worked alongside, of all people, Hillary Rodham. Soon, Rudy Giuliani recommended President Reagan appoint him the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts where he developed a reputation prosecuting big banks for white-collar crimes. Reagan later appointed him as head of the Criminal Justice division of the Justice Department during the height of the War on Drugs where he supervised all federal prosecutions. He went on to run for governor of Massachusetts in 1990, winning two terms, and developing a very strong pro-business reputation. He later made an unsuccessful run at John Kerry’s senate seat, and was nearly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Mexico by Bill Clinton, but his nomination was blocked in the Senate. He ran an unsuccessful primary campaign for governor of New York in 2005, and went on to co-chair Romney’s Presidential campaign in New York in 2008.
Economic Policy
Libertarians famously claim to be fiscal conservatives, and the Johnson/Weld ticket stays on brand. One of their most dramatic campaign pledges is to cut government spending by 20% overall. Weld said in the CNN town hall, “I personally have never seen a layer of government that I didn’t think had 10 or 20 percent waste in it, and the federal government is no exception.” They pledge to cut spending and run a balanced budget while remaining revenue neutral. They also want to “simplify the tax code;” eliminate the personal and corporate income tax, payroll tax, abolish the IRS, and enact a “consumption tax,” all while pledging to remain revenue neutral and that “Such a tax would be structured to insure that no one’s tax burden for the purchase of basic family necessities would be increased.” A consumption tax is functionally a large sales tax, and while Johnson was evasive about what exactly that number would be in the town hall, proposals he has supported in the past have been on the order of 23%.
De-regulation is another cornerstone of the Libertarian economic policy. In their words, “regulation should not be used to manipulate the economy,” but rather to “protect citizens from bad actors and the harm they might do to health, safety, and property”. They surmise, as one might expect, that “tens of millions of jobs will get created [as a result of tax reform and deregulation].”
A core principal of Libertarianism is that free-market competition is the best solution to most problems. As such, Johnson has advocated throughout his career, and continues in his campaign, for things like “school choice,” which is the privatization of education, and also for the use of private sector prisons. It is fair to say that Libertarians want to privatize as many public services as possible and to reduce the size of public services that cannot be eliminated. The Johnson campaign advocates for the elimination of the federal Department of Education, and for entitlement reforms including significantly raising the Social Security age, possibly to 75, but he was again evasive about the specifics in the town hall.
Domestic Policy
One of the prominent pledges of their campaign is to end the War on Drugs, citing it as “an expensive failure.” They plan to do this by legalizing marijuana across the country, and changing drug policy to align with their belief that “drug rehabilitation and harm-reduction programs result in a more productive society than incarceration and arrests for drug use.” Another common way of phrasing this is to change the way we view drugs from a criminal justice issue to a health care issue.
They are socially liberal: marriage equality, pro-choice, against mass-surveillance, and for internet freedom. They believe that people should be able to make their own choices without government interference, so long as they are not harming others. On immigration, their solution is to “focus on creating a more efficient system of providing work visas, conducting background checks, and incentivizing non-citizens to pay their taxes, obtain proof of employment, and otherwise assimilate with our diverse society”.
With regard to addressing government corruption, their proposal is to enact term-limits for elected offices. On the environment, they take a characteristically “free-market” approach, which means their administration would attempt to “prevent future harm by focusing on regulations that protect us from real harm,” which is exactly as vague as it sounds.
Foreign Policy
The foreign policy of Johnson’s campaign centers around denouncing interventionism while insisting not to subscribe to isolationism. They take the stance that the United States’ interventions in the Middle East over the last few decades have created more problems than they have solved. They seem to be attempting to walk the line between radically altering foreign policy doctrine and being accused of a weak national defense strategy. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear what policies they would propose to replace the current ones, and when pressed about the topic, the only answer Johnson was able to give was that we should “involve Congress also in this process,” citing that we “find ourselves in these conflicts without an open debate and discussion on how we should move forward” seeming to imply that involving congress in foreign policy decisions would remedy the situation. Johnson is quick to say that “If we are attacked, we’re going to attack back,” but makes no substantial effort to explain the substance of how that is different from what we currently do.
When the issue of ISIS was raised at the town hall, Johnson made what could be viewed as a significant blunder in trying to explain his position. The moderator, Chris Cuomo, asked Johnson a great follow-up question: “If you believe that the United States should use military force to respond when attacked, and you say constructively we have been attacked by ISIS, then how can you not be involved in Syria, which is obviously a big swath of the Levant, where ISIS has its stronghold? How do you stay out of there?” to which Johnson replied “Well, because of our intervention, ISIS has grown as a result. I mean, you had Assad against ISIS, and now you take out — you know, we decided to go against Assad, and that’s ISIS. So, you know, that’s now our new ally?”
Granted, the conflict in Syria is very complex, but it is not unreasonable to expect a presidential candidate to know the difference between the various factions of Syrian rebels and ISIS. Johnson seems to think that we are currently (or were at some point) allied with ISIS in an effort to depose Assad, or that the crux of the Syrian civil war is a conflict between Assad’s government and ISIS, neither of which is true.
Johnson’s actual policy on ISIS is to set up a “thousand-person FBI task-force treating ISIS as a gigantic organized crime family, which is exactly what it is. And you have them add the probable cause bit by bit, just like the Justice Department does.” To be fair, this is almost certainly Weld’s policy, as it was Weld that issued this answer in the town hall, and it is Weld who spent a significant portion of his career as a prosecutor in the Justice Department. This is certainly a novel approach, but an apparent and problematic substantive difference between ISIS and an organized crime family is that, since ISIS are not protected under the US Constitution, we have no legal need to determine probable cause on them, which seems to be the entire substance of this bizarre plan.
Additional notes
Beyond the policies themselves, I uncovered some relevant facts about Johnson and Weld. As I previously mentioned, in 2014 he was the CEO of the marijuana conglomerate Cannabis Sativa. What is most interesting about this is the equity stake he received in lieu of a salary: 509,558 shares of stock. Johnson, who is running a campaign to nationally legalize marijuana, is the holder of significant stock in a publicly traded marijuana company. It is not wrong to own stocks or have a position on marijuana, but the combination amounts to textbook conflict of interest, which raises doubts about Johnson’s integrity on the issue.
On the subject of corruption, Weld used a very odd phrase in the town hall: “hyper gerrymandering.” Nobody says hyper gerrymandering; the term ‘gerrymandering’ by itself is wholly derogatory. This oddity spurred me to look into Weld’s history with the notorious practice, and it turns out that in 1992, he signed into law a redistricting plan in Massachusetts that cannot be characterized as anything less than gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is one of the gravest issues facing our democracy, and it is disturbing that Weld himself participated in it.
Perhaps the largest area of concern became apparent during the CNN town hall. The event was by far the highest profile event of their campaign, and throughout the night their answers on many critical issues run the gambit between evasiveness and stonewalling. When pressed about gun control, for instance, Johnson said “Believe me, these are really sensitive issues. And I’ll just point out that I kind of sort of want to pivot here. I mean, the death penalty…” Using the word pivot and changing the subject in the middle of a political discussion sends the message ‘I will absolutely not talk about this issue.’
On mass-surveillance, they seem to be attempting to avoid the subject as much as possible. Their policy page references “a national government that spies on private communications,” but by way of solution they offer the vague sentiment that they “want to get the government out of your life.” I find it interesting that their plan for ISIS is to set up a thousand-person FBI task force, but they expect us to believe that this task force would not make use of the mass-surveillance programs that are already in place. Given the immense political capital it would take to get rid of such a program, it seems unlikely at best that Johnson would be successful in doing so if the strongest campaign message he is willing to send is about getting government out of our lives.
I have already mentioned their vague or evasive positions about tax structures, cutting entitlements, and the use of military force. All of this combines to give one the sense that there are a lot of issues that the Johnson campaign is simply unwilling to address. The bottom line is, Johnson and Weld want us to trust them to dramatically reform our government, but they do not want to explain what exactly that reform would look like.
Finally, I want to draw attention to a particular part of Johnson’s history that should be of interest to us all. During his tenure as governor of New Mexico, he used his veto power more than his 49 contemporaries combined, a fact about which he seems to be incredibly proud. He pledges to do the same as President: “he pledges to veto any legislation that will result in deficit spending”. This is exactly the sort of exhausting obstructionism that this Republican congress has employed over the last six years, which has resulted in absolutely nothing of legislative substance being accomplished in that time. Johnson is a man of a single mind: to cut spending at all costs. As president, he very well might be able to balance the federal budget, but the question that comes to mind is: at what cost?
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