On January 28, Matt Mahan, Mayor of San Jose, entered the race for Governor of California. He is the ninth prominent Democrat to declare. See this story.
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Mississippi Representative Bob Evans (D-Monticello) has introduced HB 760. It says that if an elected official changes parties, or changes to or from independent status, that official is deemed to have resigned.
Probably that bill, if it became law, could not constitutionally be applied to members of Congress. States that have provision for recall of members of Congress have not been allowed to enforce such laws. The same principle would probably apply to party-switchers. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t permit states to end the tenure of a member of Congress in the middle of the term.
Hawaii Representative Mahina Poepoe (D-Molokai) has introduced HB 1716. It would provide that parties that have been on the ballot continuously for twenty years would remain ballot-qualified, as long as they continue to run a candidate in every election. Parties would still be free to dissolve themselves if they wished. If the bill passed, it would affect the Green and Libertarian Parties.
The Kansas House Elections Committee has introduced HB 2447, to restore presidential primaries for parties that have primaries. In Kansas, only the Republican and Democratic Parties have primaries. Other qualified parties nominate by convention, so the bill will have no effect on them if it passes.
The New York Times of january 28 has a story “Shootings pose conservatism debate”. At the very end of the article, it mentions libertarians and the Libertarian Party, in a most deceiving fashion. First it says that libertarians are critical of how ICE treats protesters in Minneapolis, quoting Walter Olson of CATO. But then it says, “But even among libertarians, there is disagreement. Angela McArdle, a former chair of the Libertarian Party, argued this weekend that the nation was in crisis mode and that now was not a time for libertarians to stick so strictly to their ideology. It quotes her as saying, “The threat of mass migration is civilizational. If we don’t deport illegal aliens and stop Democrat fraud we will be Canada in less than ten years.”
The reporter completely ignored the position of the Libertarian Party, issued by current national chair Stephen Nekhaila on January 24. It says that ICE should be abolished.