Congratulations to members of the Republican Liberty Caucus in Delaware and Massachusetts. Members in both states have come together over the last several months to meet, organize, approve Bylaws, elect officers, and formalize their state affiliates.

Delaware RLC members have elected Diane Hernandez of New Castle as Chair with Jason O’Neill and Joseph O’Leary serving in other officer positions. The Delaware RLC officers attended the RLC National Convention in Arlington, Virginia last February.

Massachusetts RLC members, who have their own website up at http://www.massrlc.com/index.php, have elected Kevin Martin Chairman and Kamal Jain as Treasurer. Shelly Ortelt and Keith Messina will serve as Vice-Chair and Secretary.

Massachusetts RLC members gathered in February for their first meeting.

Congratulations to the officers and members of these two new state affiliates. Members of the RLC in Colorado and South Carolina should get in touch with their state contacts soon because both states have members working to charter their affiliates.

Republican Liberty Caucus members in Massachusetts held a successful charter-petitioning event this past Monday. Members of the MassRLC Organizing Committee, along with RLC member Karla Romero, hosted an event at Vlora in Boston to collect signatures of RLC members from across the state. Members of the organization gathered to petition the RLC Board of Directors to officially charter the Massachusetts chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus.

MassRLC Organizing Committee members Kevin Martin and Shelly Ortelt were on-hand to lay out a direction for the organization, explain to the members the structure of the organization and describe the types of projects the MassRLC will be focusing on. In addition, proposals for action on a few local legislative issues were given as near-term goals. The event culminated with the members in attendance signing the official petition to charter the MassRLC and voting in an interim board for the organization:

• Chair: Kevin Martin
• Vice-Chair: Shelly Ortelt
• Secretary: Keith Messina
• Treasurer: Kamal Jain

The Massachuestts RLC Organizing Committee would like to thank the members who attended for making it out to Vlora for this special event and Karla Romero for helping to organize the event. The National RLC would like to thank Ed and Marie Lopez-Reyes for serving as liaisons between the National chapter and the prospective Massachusetts affiliate as well as the Massachusetts RLC Organizing Committee — and in particular Shelly and Kevin.

The next steps will be to submit the charter application to the RLC Board of Directors and call to order the first executive board meeting.  We encourage you to join the Mass RLC Facebook group and the Mass RLC Yahoogroup to keep up to date on future activities.  Please join the RLC today!

There has been tremendous interest in forming state chapters of the RLC over the past several months. A group of activists from Massachusetts are well on their way to forming a state chapter in that state.

Dues-paid members of the RLC in Massachusetts should come out to Vlora Restaurant in Boston on Monday the 28th to help the Massachusetts RLC become an officially-chartered state chapter of the RLC.

The Facebook event invite is located here.

The goal of the meeting is to meet like-minded liberty activists in Massachusetts, elect officers, review the organizational Bylaws, and submit the Massachusetts RLC charter to the RLC National Committee for consideration.

Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats have come together to introduce bipartisan legislation to curb the never-ending war in Afghanistan.

U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Congressmen Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Walter Jones (R-NC) have introduced legislation requiring the President to develop a flexible timetable to draw down U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The legislation would require the President to provide a plan for drawing down our forces in Afghanistan. The legislation also increases oversight by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) over work done by private contractors with records of waste, fraud and abuse in order to safeguard U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Senator Feingold has also offered a flexible timetable to draw down U.S. troops from Afghanistan as an amendment to the supplemental spending bill currently being considered by the Senate.

Although the legislation does not set a specific date for withdrawal, it’s a step in the right direction.  It was recently announced that over 1,000 young men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces have died in that war.

It’s long past time to end it.

Students for Liberty has taken on the amazing task of organizing seven regional conferences this fall. The conferences bring different types of liberty-loving students together to hear from prominent speakers — many of whom are affiliated with the Republican Liberty Caucus.

This year’s regional conferences have occurred, thus far, in New York, Chicago, Phoenix/Tempe, and Austin. The RLC conducted outreach at three of the four seminars and had official speakers at two out of the four seminars.

I previously reported on the outreach at the first conference, which occurred on October 10. Two RLC supporters helped us table at that event, and two RLC representatives spoke. The most notable of the speakers was former National Board member Dr. Murray Sabrin, who was a contender for U.S. Senate in 2008. Additionally, RLC Northeast Regional Director Dan Halloran addressed the crowd. Dan is running an impressive campaign for New York City Council in a district that trends more conservative than most in the city.

Above: Students at the Chicago Conference weigh the issues.

On October 17 in Chicago, students heard from two RLC representatives: former Michigan State Representative Leon Drolet and former Wisconsin State Representative Terri McCormick (photos below).

Leon participated in a debate with Isaac Moorehouse about how liberty-oriented people can achieve our goals.  Leon argued for the RLC strategy.  Terri McCormick gave a presentation about the political elite versus the grassroots, arguing that now is the time we take our country back for liberty.

On October 24, RLC members conducted outreach at two Students for Liberty Conferences: the Texas SFL conference in Austin and the Southern SFL conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Rising young star and RLC supporter Jared Fuller organized the Winston-Salem conference, and North Carolina RLC members Gloria Lloyd and Dana Mazer tabled for the Republican Liberty Caucus at the conference.  Former Congressional candidate and North Carolina RLC Board member B.J. Lawson was among the featured speakers.  Dr. Lawson gave a speech called “The Economy, Monty Python, and You”:

Meanwhile, RLC National Chair Dave Nalle and Bexar County (Texas) RLC Membership Chair Nadia Gaona reached out at the Texas SFL conference.

Dave observed a general trend that we continue to see to in our small-but-growing movement, noting that “the long-time libertarian activists [in the] audience were eager to stand up and talk proudly about their token political campaigns where they spent no money but got their name mentioned in the local newspaper when they won 3% of the vote.”

Says Dave, “It’s heartening to see the growth of interest in liberty and bringing our government under control, but it’s enormously frustrating to see so much of this enthusiasm misdirected into the political dead end and do-nothingism which still characterizes the Libertarian Party. The truth is that the pissed-off non-intellectuals of the Tea Party movement who come to libertarianism out of expediency rather than intellect have already accomplished more real political change in a year than the Libertarian Party has accomplished in more than 30 years.”

All complaints aside, these events have proven tremendously beneficial to the movement and the RLC has been able to capitalize on the opportunity to reach new young people with our strategy for victory.

The next RLC outreach booths at Students for Liberty Conferences will occur on November 7, when members will conduct outreach at the Philadelphia and Boston Students for Liberty Conferences.  Prospective RLC endorsee, 2010 U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut Peter Schiff will be speaking at the Boston conference.  Schiff has previously explained the RLC strategy in a poignant way.

We look forward to reaching additional students at these conferences and thank the Students for Liberty for continuing to host these tremendous regional events. Thanks, too, to all of the RLC representatives and volunteers who have helped us at the conferences.

Above: Former Michigan State Representative Leon Drolet makes his points in a debate on strategies to attain liberty in our lifetime.

Spring elections have boded well for Republican Liberty Caucus members. In addition to recent victories by Texas RLC Treasurer Lisa Mallory to a large school board in Austin and RLC member Michael Tams’ recent election to a Town Board post in northern Illinois, Virginia RLC members recently helped Attorney General candidate Ken Cuccinelli capture the GOP nomination against two opponents.

And earlier this month two other RLC members won their local elections: Kara Egbert in Arizona and Bradford Wyatt in Massachusetts.

In the town of Sahuarita in southern Arizona, Kara Egbert spent $2,554 to gain a second place finish in a race for three seats on the Sahuarita Town Council. Sahuarita is a town of 16,000 in Pima County. It’s growing very rapidly, as the population in 2000 was just 3,000 people.

Egbert and the two other victors trounced the incumbents. Egbert, who lives in Rancho Sahuarita, said she looks forward to representing “all of Sahuarita during the next four years and will work to keep the small-town values in our growing community.” Egbert is involved in the Pima County affiliate of the Republican Liberty Caucus in Arizona, according to RLC organizer Ken Rineer.

In Massachusetts, RLC member Brad Wyatt, who is working to reorganize the Massachusetts RLC affiliate, easily defeated an incumbent in a race for Boylston School Committee. Boylston is a town of about 4,000 near Worcester. Using the slogan “Put Boylston First,” Wyatt, a first time candidate, ousted a two-term incumbent.  Brad, a business owner in the neighboring city of Worcester, intends to bring business common sense to local government.

His campaign was based on voter identification and door-knocking.  His advice to future candidates is — on Election Day — to “call favorable voters, and then call them again, and again, until they say they voted.”

Wyatt campaigned on honesty and transparency in government. He hopes to put his technology experience to work in the district, especially in the area of communication, including the district’s websites and the School Committee’s scheduling.

According to Cape Cod Online, Massachusetts lawmakers will receive “a 5.5 percent hike in their base pay this year — to more than $61,000 — even as they prepare to make deep cuts to state services. The increase lifts the base salary for the 200 members of the House and Senate from $58,237 to $61,440 — a raise of $3,203 a year.”

The timing of the pay raise awkward, as the state grapples with the tumbling economy and tax revenues, increasing unemployment and prospects for more deep spending cuts.

Some lawmakers called the pay hike inappropriate in the current economy.

“I am not going to take a pay increase at the same time I’m having to cut jobs,” said Rep. Jeffrey D. Perry, who said he’ll donate his raise “to worthy causes in my district.”

Perry, who is the eastern-most Republican elected in the state, is a former Wareham police sergeant and the RLC’s best ally in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

Perry recently celebrated his 45th birthday party with a campaign fundraiser in his hometown of Sandwich, Massachusetts.

An opposing view was offered by Rep. Demetrius Atsalis (D-Hyannis), who said state lawmakers are paid less than Boston city councilors, and the raise is “constitutionally required.” According to Atsalis, “The way I look at it is I earn every penny.”

Jeff Perry, once again, sticks to principle.