Hijacking Media for Badnarik

Last Friday, the Libertarian Party of Arizona filed a lawsuit against Arizona State University and the Commission on Presidential Debates, alleging that the University’s sponsorship of the October 13th debate amounts to an illegal campaign contribution to Bush and Kerry.

David Euchner, the self-described “gonzo lawyer” who filed the suit, has written an article at Liberty for All answering some criticisms of the suit.

The complaint is available online at www.badnarik.org and elsewhere. (A copy of the signed complaint is available on the Internet here.) There is solid legal basis for it; we allege violation of two provisions of the Arizona Constitution that prohibit state gifts or loans to private individuals or corporations, and in so doing the state subdivision has violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The AZLP brought the suit in the name of its 17,429 registered voters and named its Treasurer Warren Severin individually. In addition to ASU, we also name the Commission on Presidential Debates as a Defendant; after all, they accepted the illegal donation.

As far as I know, the complaint was on today’s docket. Regardless of the result, we’ve already won. As Euchner points out:

So this time we had to buy front-page media coverage. It cost $205, the price of a filing fee in Maricopa County Superior Court. For that price, we got our “government number”, and now the media is allowed to cover us. Some are asking me whether I think we’ll win. WE ALREADY WON. WE WON THE MOMENT WE FILED.

In other news, a media tip I sent to the Badnarik campaign about a sympathetic reporter in New York appears to have born fruit. On the front page of today’s New York Sun was an article entitled “Election Spoiler May Turn Out to Be a Libertarian. It’s one of the best and most in depth articles I’ve seen yet, describing why Badnarik has so much momentum:

“So many people who lean Libertarian have been arguing for years that the only effective thing to do is to work in the Republican Party,” the editor of Ballot Access News, Richard Winger, said. “All those people … have been rebuffed by what Bush does in terms of deficit spending and starting the war.”

Mr. Winger said the anti-war message has been adding momentum to Mr. Badnarik’s campaign. “He’s certainly more opposed to U.S. involvement in Iraq than Kerry,” Mr. Winger said.

If we never give up, we never lose.

Yours truly,

Mr. X

…back to studying…