Eight Republican Members of the U.S. House Vote to Replace Speaker Kevin McCarthy

On October 3, the House voted to replace Speaker Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy lost his position because eight Republicans voted against him. The eight include seven who are from states that allow independents to vote in primaries.

Proponents of top-two, top-four, and top-five, are constantly repeating the mantra that primaries need “reform”, because closed primaries nominate “extremists”. But seven of the eight Republicans who voted against McCarthy are from states that allow independents to vote in primaries.

The seven who voted against McCarthy and who are from states in which independents can vote in primaries are: Andy Biggs (Arizona); Ken Buck (Colorado); Tim Burchett (Tennessee); Eli Crane (Arizona); Bob Good (Virginia); Nancy Mace (South Carolina); and Matt Ronsendale (Montana).

The one who voted against McCarthy, and who is from a state with closed primaries, is Matt Gaetz (Florida).

President Joe Biden Says No Labels Has a Right to Run a Candidate

On October 2, President Joe Biden, speaking to a reporter for ProPublica, commented on the possibility that No Labels will run a presidential candidate in 2024. He said, referring to No Labels leader Joe Lieberman, “Well, he has a democratic right to do it. There’s no reason not to do that. Now it’s going to help the other guy. And he knows that…That’s a political decision he’s making that I obviously think is a mistake. But he has a right to do that.”

New York Media Utterly Fails to Report that New York Is Now Likely to be the Only State in the Nation in the 2024 Presidential Race With a Democratic-Republican Monopoly

As a result of the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday not to hear the New York ballot access case, it is likely that in November 2024, New York will be the only state in the nation with only the Democratic and Republican nominees on the ballot. Yet the entire media in New York state, with the exception of Spectrum TV, has failed to note this.

The Libertarian Party is already on the ballot for president in 2024 in all the difficult states except New York. Although the party is still not on the ballot in 16 other states, those 16 other states are all states which require 25,000 or fewer signatures (if it weren’t for Illinois, they would all be at 10,000 or fewer). So it can be expected that the Libertarian nominee will be on in all of those other 16 states.

The New York Times knows this, or should know it. One long-time writer for the New York Times has subscribed to BAN for decades. Instead, the problem is that the New York Times doesn’t want to print news about the ballot access destruction that former Governor Andrew Cuomo imposed on the state in 2020. The New York Times never mentioned what happened to New York ballot access in 2020, never mentioned the lower court decisions upholding those new laws, and now has not mentioned the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to get involved.

The 2020 ballot access law changes changed the definition of a qualified party, so that the Libertarian, Green, and Independence Parties were removed from the ballot. The same bill also tripled the petition requirement from 15,000 signatures to 45,000, without expanding the six-week petitioning period. The bill also vastly increased the difficulty of meeting the distribution requirement.