📆January 15, 2026

✒️A message from the Chair

By Loren Dean

2026 started with a breathtaking bang. It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the Venezuela action at this stage. There are lots of ways this Maduro “extradition” could become absurdly authoritarian. But one thing is clear: Venezuela is in a position RIGHT NOW where real people in Venezuela can effect real change. The window is open for liberty-minded folks in Venezuela to make their voices heard and their presence known, right there in the place where they live. The people of Venezuela have a precious opportunity here to change their homeland for the better. 

That window won’t stay open for long. Authoritarians abhor a vacuum, and they’ll want to sweep in and take control of everything. They’ll call it “continuity” or something. And if the liberty-minded folk of Venezuela don’t move fast, they’ll get left behind and left out of what comes next. 

There is a lesson here for each of us wishing for a freer California. You need to be out in your community right now. Opportunities like this kind of power vacuum are rare, but not as rare as you think. Politicians sometimes disappear unexpectedly even here in America. 

Look at what’s happening in Minnesota. Colossally disastrous billion-dollar scandal is forcing out the state governor, who “should” have had the political clout to weather a storm like that. Turns out he doesn’t, and just like that he’s walking away.

This happens in your city and county, too, all over California. Politicians try to scoot out of the spotlight of scandal all the time. Sometimes they have to leave office before they had planned. And when they do, there’s opportunity. But those opportunities are only open to people who have been watching, preparing and making themselves known within their respective communities. 

If you want to make a difference in the place where you live, get out there and get to know your neighbors. Be active in your community. Work and watch, and you’ll be ready when opportunities come. Make 2026 the year you get out there. Your neighbors are going to need you, and probably sooner than you think

📰News Review

submitted by LPCA Secretary Rebecca Lau

🎖Ex-Com Recon

by Wesley Martin

We all know that there are some extremely talented people who volunteer with the LPCA. This month I want to take a look at the talents of 2 committee members in particular, Mimi Robson and Caitlin Peters. Mimi is our Treasurer and Caitlin is a Communications and Media committee member. Both of these hard-working individuals have had their writing published in professional sources. Please take a moment for a quick read.

Why Congress must rein in the modern presidency

by Mimi Robson - originally published ocregister.com

If there is one theme that has shaped recent American politics, it is the steady concentration of power in the presidency. Congress — under both parties — has repeatedly delegated authority that was never meant to rest in a single office. The consequences are now impossible to ignore. The actions of President Donald Trump reveal how fragile our liberties become when one person holds too much power.

read more at: Why Congress must rein in the modern presidency – Orange County Register

Libertarians and the Long Road to Cannabis Freedom

by Caitlin Peters - originally published HighTimes.com

For decades, both Democrats and Republicans have skirted around marijuana reform, but only one party has stood firmly for full legalization since day one: the Libertarian Party. 

Founded in 1971, the Libertarian Party emerged in direct contrast to President Nixon’s newly declared War on Drugs. Its first platform, adopted a year later, called for the legalization of all drugs—a radical stance for its time.

read more at: Libertarians and the Long Road to Cannabis Legalization

📖Better Judgement - A Libertarian Review

by Aaron Bonn

What is the purpose of the Federal Court? Is it to simply identify the limits of the law, as written - to “call balls and strikes” as Chief Justice John Roberts famously put it during his confirmation hearing - and then meekly stay out of the way of the other two branches? Or is it to push those limits from the bottom in the direction of liberty, freedom, and justice?

Likewise, within the Federal Court system, what is the proper role of the District Court? Is it, in turn, to remain subservient to the courts superior to them in the system, simply identifying the limits of law as established by said courts and calling balls and strikes accordingly, or is it to likewise push those limits from the bottom in the direction of liberty, freedom, and justice?

And how should we, as libertarians, answer these two questions?

The call for judicial restraint, popular on the right and often closely aligned with the Originalist school of legal thought, has as-of-late found many adherents among the libertarian movement. And one can reasonably understand why. It’s imperative to affirm the former answer to both of the questions posed above makes it seem resonant with libertarians’ long-held concerns regarding the power of politically motivated courts to creatively read expansive Federal powers into the Constitution that clearly aren’t there in the text. Yet things aren’t always what they seem, and a new book which directly challenges the validity of judicial restraint by highlighting and celebrating three Federal District Court judges who have found creative and innovative ways to actively “push up” for change in spite of the restrictions the current vogue for judicial restraint has placed upon the lower courts, has, in my read, much positive food for thought to offer the libertarian movement. 

In his new book, Better Judgment, lawyer and journalist Reynolds Holding argues, persuasively, that the limits that proponents of judicial restraint have as of late placed on the courts are, in effect, limits on justice itself. Courts, he argues, are a fundamental piece of the architecture of freedom that our framers have established for us - and judicial restraint makes it impossible for them to serve the function that they are best suited to serve in that scheme.

“At their best,” Holding writes in the introduction, “(the courts) can act as a kind of whistleblower in our democracy, sending an early signal that a serious problem needs repair. They can also bring us together with persuasive rulings that broaden support for shifts in what society views as good or appropriate or desirable” - which is to say, if I may add, that they can broaden the popular desire for lifestyle-choice freedom. “They can offer a direct and effective way for us to voice our concerns and have them addressed. And the courts are one of the few places where facts - tested, proven facts - can emerge to shed light on disasters so that lawmakers can sensibly gauge what happened and enact reforms. Yet over the past six decades federal courts and, even more important, people’s access to them have been constrained or blocked - by Congress, by the Executive, and especially by the Supreme Court itself - to the point where they can no longer do what we count on them to do.” 

The examples that Holding highlights throughout the text to illustrate his point are almost all issues that libertarians, by right, should find concerning. They include, among other things, the ability of the courts to hold law enforcement accountable; the ability of judges to sentence appropriately, as opposed to uniformly; the ability of judges to overrule bureaucratic executive choices that don’t meet the interest of justice; and the ability of judges to ensure that a criminal is not pressured into an unconstitutionally punitive plea bargain. In each of these cases, and others, he tells stories of lower courts hamstrung by practice and precedent to address clear injustice. And to prove his point about the importance of the lower court’s freedom to judge, each case he describes is also a story about how one of the three remarkable judges he chose to highlight was able to find ways to push back against practice and precedent and deliver justice anyway - from below. 

How, specifically, do they do this?

Two of the three judges in question, Jed Rakoff of New York and Martha Vasquez of New Mexico, have made names for themselves by simply defying precedent and custom, rendering just rulings in their own courts for all to see, and then letting the higher courts reverse them - or not - on appeal. In Rakoff’s case, this was done most prominently in a death penalty case, and - famously - during the financial crisis of 2008, when he chose to defy the Chevron precedent and reject an SEC settlement agreement that could arguably have been described as a sweetheart deal for executives and a raw deal for shareholders. Vasquez, meanwhile - who probably has the most personal motive of the group, as her brother did close to thirty years in prison for a single-instance drug charge - has made something of a practice of ignoring the Federal sentencing guidelines, choosing instead to sentence people fairly, with context in mind, without regard to mandatory minimums. In both cases, they chose to use their courtrooms to show the world what actual, unrestricted justice looked like. And in both cases, after ruffling numerous feathers in the Appellate Courts, they were ultimately vindicated, as the restrictive laws and precedents they were pushing back against were ultimately overruled. 

The third judge - Carlton Reeves, of Mississippi, who is clearly closest to the author’s own heart - hasn’t been as directly defiant as the other two, but he has made a name for himself for the powerful prose with which he explains his rulings, even when he’s making them under duress. The introduction to the book speaks of a case in which an innocent black motorist, whose car was damaged during a random and unwarranted roadside drug search that he consented to under duress, sought to sue the officer who damaged the car. Qualified immunity offering him no choice but to dismiss the case, Reeves dismissed it - but not before using the rest of his ruling to make clear that his hand was being forced, and to explain in stark, haunting language how unfair and unjust the precedent forcing his hand really was, especially to black people, who have good, historically established reasons to fear police when they encounter them. 

The profiles Holdings presents of these three remarkable judges paints a powerful picture of what justice in an unrestricted courtroom could look like - one that, in my read, resonates quite strongly with libertarian interests and sympathies. It also presents a hopeful roadmap for how courageous judges who don’t want to play the game of judicial restraint can push back and “do justice” on their own. But most importantly, as I previously said, it presents an argument against judicial restraint itself - an argument that says restraint of the judiciary is nothing less than restraint of justice. Indeed, the Judiciary is the only branch of our government with no positive agenda of its own, whose whole reason for being is, frankly, government restraint itself. As counterintuitive as it may be, the judicial restraint agenda in practice really has very little of value to offer libertarians or libertarianism. Whether he meant to or not, Holding’s book highlights this fundamental disconnect between the judicial restraint agenda that so many libertarians have gravitated toward, and actual libertarian concerns in practice, in a particularly vivid way. And if for no other reason than that, it is, in my estimation, a book of distinctly libertarian value. 

👟Stepping on Toes

By Shawn Osbourne

There are a wide range of people with varying attitudes and views on life who consider themselves libertarians. We have followers of the Austrian school, anarcho-capitalists, minarchists, civil libertarians, people who follow the Chicago school or the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, and many others.

To properly represent all of these diverse views is a difficult task indeed. Yet fitting all of these different ideas under one broad umbrella is the *only* way for the Libertarian Party to succeed as a viable political force.

Recently, there has been controversy in the Libertarian Party of California over the removal of the state platform. Some people were deeply upset at the decision to eliminate the California-specific platform and adopt the national platform in its place. The California program, however, remains in place and focuses on issues that more readily affect Californians, giving it real distinction from the national platform.

As a member of the program committee, I can say we have worked hard to ensure that the program truly represents California libertarians.

I fully understand that people were disappointed when the platform was removed; many had added planks over decades that meant a great deal to them personally. Unfortunately, this led to a bloated and often redundant platform that left people confused, misrepresented, or misled.

I firmly believe the Libertarian Party must practice what we preach: keep the party's statements minimal and sharply focused on core individual liberties, rather than trying to list specific issues to appeal to particular groups. Only then can each of us as individuals confidently point to it and declare, “These things I believe in are fully covered in the libertarian philosophy here.”

The more we add individual libertarians' personal interests at the expense of clarity, the more we will continue down the same path—toward internal hostility instead of cooperation. We cannot afford that division if we hope to grow and win.

For example, I am legally blind, yet I would never want an entire plank devoted to handicapped or blind issues. I want to be seen as a person who lives with a vision impairment, not defined as a visually impaired person. There is a crucial difference. My blindness is not my identity, and cluttering a platform with issues revolving around me would be redundant and selfish when the Libertarian Party already clearly states that it protects individual liberties.

I also smoke marijuana. I see no need for separate planks just about marijuana. Simply stating that people own their bodies and can put whatever substance they want in them—and protecting the right of people to do business in any way that does not harm others—is more than enough. As an activist, I will proudly point to these core principles in the national platform and say, “This is what libertarians stand for on these rights.” Clarity and conciseness are our strength.

On the program committee, we are committed to selecting topics that genuinely concern Californians and providing clear links showing where these align with the national platform. This approach lets newcomers quickly find what they need, allows candidates to confidently declare, “This is what we libertarians stand for,” and gives every individual libertarian room to interpret and explain those principles in their own authentic way to voters.

We are also discussing expanding the program to more than five planks so that more topics can be addressed when truly necessary. At the same time, we can create an archive of older planks as they become less relevant or as more pressing issues arise—ensuring people can still reference them and say, “This is what we libertarians believe.”

“We need to stop stepping on each other’s toes.” A libertarian friend said this to me one day while we were discussing party issues, and I could not agree more. We are individuals first and foremost. The more complex and bloated the system we try to work under becomes, the less functional it will be—and the more we will dislike one another and turn fellow libertarians into the enemy instead of the state.

Let us choose unity over division. Let us stop stepping on each other’s toes and leave room for all of us to fight together for liberty.

Memes of the Month

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