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CASTLETON House Rep. Jarrod Sammis appears to have left the Republican Party and joined the Libertarian Party.

His biographical page on the Legislature's website, bit.ly/0428Sammis, now lists his party affiliation as Libertarian.

In an email on Thursday, Sammis referred questions about the matter to his "press secretary," Patrick Ford.

As of press time, Ford, whos listed on the Libertarian National Committee as the regional representative for Region 8, had not responded to an email from the Herald.

Region 8 appears to include New England and New York.

Sammis ran as a Republican when he was elected in November, beating Mary Droege, who ran as a Democrat, 835-793.

House Minority Leader Pattie McCoy, R-Poultney, said in a voicemail Thursday that Sammis had not let the Republican Party know that hed be doing this ahead of time.

Its not clear when exactly Sammis changed party affiliations.

The reasons he offered were, he felt he wasnt being effective or being heard by his committee, said McCoy. I wish him well in whatever future endeavors he has as the sole member of a House Libertarian caucus. Theres not much more I can say about Jarrod.

According to his legislative page, Sammis graduated from Fair Haven Union High School and later Castleton State College with a degree in communications, public relations, and political science.

Read more:
Castleton House rep changes parties | Local News | rutlandherald.com - Rutland Herald

Today's guest is Vivek Ramaswamy, an Ohio-based biotech entrepreneur and best-selling author who is running for the Republican presidential nomination. His America First 2.0 platform combines some libertarian elements (prioritizing economic growth, opposing central bank digital currencies, shutting down whole federal agencies) with others that are anything but ("using our military to annihilate Mexican drug cartels").

He tells Zach Weissmueller and me why Donald Trump has accomplished as much as he ever will as president and why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantiswho, like Ramaswamy, opposes woke corporate activitiesis simply "responding to what the base wants, jumping like a circus monkey without actually having independent thoughts about what our actual principles ought to be." He discusses why he thinks Julian Assange should be pardoned and why the FBI, IRS, and other federal agencies should be shuttered. And he explains why he no longer calls himself a libertarian.

We also discuss his new book, Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For, a critical analysis of ESG rules and what he calls "lurking state actions" that he says are driving corporations to develop policies to ward off government interference.

This is a podcast version of Reason's weekly livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

Continued here:
Podcast: Vivek Ramaswamy On Why He's Running for President - Reason

WASHINGTON The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up a case that could make it easier to curtail the power of administrative agencies, a long-running goal of the conservative legal movement that could have far-reaching implications for how American society imposes rules on businesses.

In a terse order, the court said it would hear a case that seeks to limit or overturn a unanimous 1984 precedent, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. According to the decision, if part of the law Congress wrote empowering a regulatory agency is ambiguous but the agencys interpretation is reasonable, judges should defer to it.

At issue in the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, is a rule that requires fishing vessels to pay for monitors who ensure that they comply with regulations meant to prevent overfishing. The National Marine Fisheries Service established the rule, and a group of companies has challenged whether the agency had the authority to do so.

When the Supreme Court decides on the case, most likely in its next term, the outcome could have implications that go beyond fisheries.

If the court overturns or sharply limits the Chevron precedent, it would become easier for business owners to challenge regulations across the economy. Those include rules aimed at ensuring that the air and water are clean; that food, drugs, cars and consumer products are safe; and that financial firms do not take on too much risk.

In the fishing dispute, a divided three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had upheld the rule. Citing the Chevron precedent, Judge Judith W. Rogers wrote, When Congress has not directly spoken to the precise question at issue, the agency may fill this gap with a reasonable interpretation of the statutory text.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the Supreme Courts decision to hear the case, apparently because she had participated in the arguments while still on the appeals court.

Libertarian-minded conservatives have long sought to overturn the Chevron precedent as part of a broader campaign to curtail the administrative state. Regulatory agencies have been a target since the New Deal, when Congress created many specialized regulatory agencies and charged them with studying complex problems and issuing technical rules to address them.

In an opinion in November related to a separate case, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the judiciary had overread Chevrons deference and abdicated its responsibility to independently determine the best interpretation of laws.

Rather than provide individuals with the best understanding of their rights and duties under law a neutral magistrate can muster, we outsource our interpretive responsibilities, he wrote. Rather than say what the law is, we tell those who come before us to go ask a bureaucrat.

Advisers to President Donald J. Trump prioritized skepticism toward the administrative state in picking judges and justices, and the courts Republican-appointed majority has in recent years chipped away at the ability of the administrative state to impose regulations on business interests.

In a 2020 ruling, the five Republican appointees on the court at the time struck down a provision of the law Congress enacted to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that had protected its chief from being fired by a president without good cause, like misconduct.

Two years later, the six-justice conservative majority struck down a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to curtail carbon emissions from power plants. The ruling strengthened a doctrine that courts should overturn regulations that raise major questions if Congress was not explicit enough in authorizing such actions.

Read more:
Supreme Court Takes Up Case That Could Curtail Agency Power to ... - The New York Times

MISSOULA, Montana (AP) In the college town of Missoula, pride flags are as common a sight as the peaks of Montana's Rattlesnake Mountains. Even a downtown crosswalk is rainbow-colored.

Often described as a blue island in a vast red state, Missoula sent the first openly transgender legislator in Montana history to the state capital. Its voters, fully aware that they are vastly outnumbered by conservatives statewide, were still shocked at what happened next.

Their new representative, Zooey Zephyr, was barred last week from speaking on the floor of the Legislature by the Republican majority, which accused her of violating decorum by saying they had "blood on your hands" for approving a bill barring gender-affirming care for minors. On Wednesday, Republicans voted to bar Zephyr from the House floor for the remainder of the legislative session, scheduled to end next month.

Zephyr was elected with 80 percent of the vote in November in her heavily liberal district, which runs through the oddly-aligned section of central Missoula known as the Slant Streets and stretches to the doorstep of the University of Montana, the 7,000-student school that has long fueled the town's liberal sensibility.

READ MORE: Transgender lawmaker banned from Montana House floor for rest of 2023 session

Nestled in a narrow valley at the northwestern edge of the state, Missoula is proud of its funky, countercultural style. This week, the hot ticket was the International Wildlife Film Festival, featuring a parade in which people dressed in animal costumes marched through downtown.

Zephyr's constituents were both shocked and reminded of the growing distance between them and the rest of their state.

"When she first ran I thought, 'They're going to do something to limit her power,'" said Erin Flint, 28, a native who plans to enroll in the university for a graduate degree in art education. But she didn't expect a step as dramatic as gagging the new lawmaker, or barring her from the floor.

Montana has long leaned to the right, but with more of a libertarian bent than a zest for culture wars. That allowed Democrats to win the governorship regularly over the decades, and occasionally to win control of one or more houses of the Legislature.

Andy Nelson grew up in a town of 750 in eastern Montana, and only felt comfortable coming out as gay as a senior at the University of Montana, when he volunteered at The Center, a LGBTQ+ community group in Missoula where he is now executive director. He remembered long discussions about whether such a group was still necessary after same-sex marriage was legalized nationally in 2015. But that all changed in 2016, with the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

Trump handily won the state that year and in 2020. Republicans now hold both congressional seats and all statewide offices, although one of the state's two U.S. Senate seats is held by Democrat Jon Tester, a top GOP target in 2024. Last year, as Zephyr was elected in her Missoula district of about 11,000 residents, Republicans rode a surge in popular support to win a supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature.

READ MORE: Majority of Americans reject anti-trans bills, but support for this restriction is rising

Zeke Cork, 62, one of The Center's board members, recalled the 1970s as a great time to come out in Missoula, though he acknowledged he still had to follow certain rules to be safe. A railroad dispatcher, Cork has lived all over the United States but came back to Montana in 2015. He felt safe enough to transition fully two years ago.

But today, Cork said, the state's "live and let live" sensibility seems to be ebbing. Conservative protesters, often armed, disrupt pride events. "Now, you don't know who's going to be the one who unloads on you and your community," he said.

Cork has been traveling up to the Capitol in Helena to speak against the legislation affecting transgender people since it was first introduced. After Zephyr was silenced, he joined dozens of others from Missoula at the Capitol this week, where they began crying, "Let her speak!" after she was gagged yet again. Seven demonstrators were arrested.

"We would much rather be living quiet lives, out of the spotlight, living under the radar, living our best lives," Cork said. "I don't want to be having this battle."

But, "she speaks for me, and I sent her to that house," said Cork, who lives in Zephyr's district. "We're fighting for democracy right now."

Legislative Republicans contend they're the ones preserving democracy by following their chamber's rules and gagging Zephyr for maligning her colleagues. "We will uphold the people's will that sent 68 Republicans to Helena," several said in a statement Monday evening, after activists including dozens from Missoula jeered them from the House gallery.

In the minds of many other Montanans, it's Missoula that has changed, not them.

"Missoula used to be a wonderful place," said Ken Sayler, 64, who grew up in the town when its primary industry was saw mills. Those all closed, and the town began to look a lot more like the university, driving him in disgust to a remote house in the mountains, where he manufactures boat parts.

"If you're transgender, I don't care," Sayler said, adding he had little sympathy for Zephyr. "She stepped out of bounds."

Sayler was drinking a beer in a bar about 20 miles south of Missoula, where plenty of patrons jeered the idea of a transgender lawmaker. The bar sits in a small town in the district of state Sen. Theresa Manzella, the chair of a group of conservative state lawmakers called the Montana Freedom Caucus who pushed for the measure silencing Zephyr with a statement thatintentionally misgendered her.

Jim McConnell, a 69-year-old machinist, was dubious of the idea of someone like Zephyr serving in the statehouse. But he didn't like the idea of muzzling her.

WATCH: Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on the politics of abortion, guns and democracy

"They have a right to speak," said Jim McConnell. "But in Montana, they're barking up the wrong tree."

Experts say intense cultural battles are out of character for Montana politics.

"This is a conservative, libertarian state, as opposed to a conservative, authoritarian one," said Paul Pope, a political scientist at Montana State University in Billings, noting that a far less liberal town's zoo received an influx of support after conservative activists attacked its drag story hour recently. "Even if they have some short-term success here," he added of the GOP, "long term, this is going to hurt them."

But for now, many in Missoula are simply stunned.

"They've stripped 11,000 Montanans of their voice," said Ignatius Fitzgerald, a University of Montana freshman who grew up in the district. "Republicans have left us without a voice and without recourse."

Even some who disagreed politically with Zephyr said they didn't think the Legislature should silence her.

"Even if I don't agree with her policies, I feel she has the right to speak," Addie Glidewell, a 19-year-old journalism student who supports banning gender-affirming care for minors, said of Zephyr. "I don't believe she should be shut down."

Danny Wainwright, a 56-year-old middle school teacher in Zephyr's district, said he doesn't always back aggressive protests or bombastic political rhetoric. But he felt Zephyr's actions were appropriate.

"When you're the minority and Republicans have a supermajority, you've got to be heard somehow, that's your job," Wainwright said.

Link:
Rep. Zooey Zephyrs town feels divide from rest of Montana after barring - PBS NewsHour

David Cole is taking his election challenge back to the Alabama Supreme Court, but his May 17 deposition still looms.

Cole is asking Alabamas highest court to intervene and overturn a Madison County Circuit Court judges order that determined deposition questions submitted in the challenge did not have to be limited to 40 or fewer. The judge also ruled that the questions more than 400 possible questions were not unduly burdensome.

Coles election as a state representative for House District 10 is being challenged by Libertarian candidate Elijah Boyd over Coles residency. A home that Cole and his family reside in is located outside of the 10th district, in District 4. In an apparent attempt to get around that issue, Cole supplied the home address of a family friend when submitting his qualifying documents to run for office.

Cole told APR, which first reported the discrepancy in October, that he and his family of five moved into that friends home, because the family wanted to downsize. The family friend and his wife, who still own the four-bedroom home, remained in the home at the same time, Coles campaign told APR.

In the nearly 18 months since that alleged move, the Coles have never placed the District 4 home on the market, and as recently as last week, still appear to reside in the home. Coles campaign provided APR with a lease for an apartment in District 10 that it said Cole and his family moved into last September. (Even if true, that move would have still left Cole ineligible to hold his current seat because state law requires a candidate to reside in the district where they run for one calendar year prior to the general election date.)

Cole has now twice turned to the Alabama Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn decisions by Madison County Judge Ruth Ann Hall. He first challenged Halls ruling that the Madison County Circuit Court the circuit court in the county where the election challenge was filed had standing to govern the case before ultimately presenting it to the Alabama Legislature for a proper hearing on the gathered facts. The ALSC agreed with Halls ruling.

The court also seems unlikely to overturn Hall on the latest issue. As Hall notes in her ruling on the matter of the number of questions, the unique nature of an election challenge deposition which requires written questions that must be asked by an impartial commissioner forces attorneys into a guessing game in which they have to submit follow-up questions for all reasonable potential answers.

The Court has reviewed the direct examination questions, cross examination questions, and the rebuttal questions and obviously recognizes that they are voluminous, Hall wrote. At the same time, this Court acknowledges the difficulty of trying to draft sufficiently thorough and unambiguous questions and potential follow-up questions. Having reviewed the questions, the Court finds that the areas of inquiry are material and relevant to the residency issue that is the subject of this election contest and that the questions submitted are not unduly burdensome as many of these questions may not be necessary dependent upon the initial response.

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David Cole again takes election challenge to the Alabama Supreme ... - Alabama Political Reporter