Following the Convention, a post went up on the Libertarian Party Cathedral Caucus page, a page following and combatting the Mises Caucus takeover efforts, announcing that only three of the ten State Board seats in the LPD has fallen to the Mises Caucus. Reliably incapable of keeping his mouth shut, the newly elected Chair and State Board Representative for New Castle County announced that the new State Chair was also, unbeknownst to many of the people who voted for him, a member of the Mises Caucus. They had, in fact, taken four out of the ten seats and one of them was the Chair.
The Libertarian Party of Delaware's bylaws establish a weak Chair. All the duties related to the operations of the state party are the responsibility of the Board as a whole. The Chair is only responsible for chairing meetings and conventions in a parliamentary sense. They are not the "chief executive" of the Party. With six of the ten State Board seats not in Mises hands, it should have been possible to resist any attempts to disrupt the party's operations outside of New Castle County, where they held a clear majority of membership and every officer position on the County Board.
It did put us into a holding pattern though. Even in the parliamentary sense, the Chair is responsible for calling the votes on motions that occur in the LPD's online Discord meetings. Holding four out of ten seats is enough to thwart efforts to amend the original Articles of Association section governing many aspects of the state party's operations. With a Mises majority in New Castle County and a strong presence in Kent as well, two of the three counties were at best stuck and at worst being actively subverted by Mises takeover efforts.
The State Board itself found its members needing to maintain a constant state of vigilance. Even though this authority is not extended to the LPD's chair, the elected Chair delegated to himself the authority to call "emergency" meetings with less than 24 hours notice and give orders to the contracted staff of the party contrary to their existing obligations to the Board as a whole. In light of the recent experiences in New Hampshire, where a State Chair took it upon herself to shut out access to social media and other physical assets of the State Party without authorization from the rest of her Executive Committee while claiming to form a new organization transferring the national affiliation status with her, other members of the Board were understandably concerned about the elected Chair's intentions. The factional roles between New Hampshire and Delaware may have been reversed, but the unauthorized attempts to hijack party resources in order to take them outside of accountability to the Board were the same.
In response to these infringements, five of the members of the Board took it upon themselves to organize a strong front of unified resistance to the Mises Chair's actions and those of his enablers. This five to four breakdown excluded the Secretary, who as previously mentioned was just too nice to everyone to take sides in this dispute. With five members, we had the ability to prevent a majority vote from passing on any issue when needed, and in the event one of our number might be missing from a meeting at any time, we could all leave and block the existence of a quorum. It's not enough to make progress, but it's enough to prevent damage.
This power was exercised at the Q3 meeting of the State Board. By preparing for the meeting well ahead of time, we adopted our own agenda over the one proposed by the Chair, and introduced our own versions of several amendments to the Articles of Association and Bylaws that had been planned by the Chair in an effort to achieve through bylaws amendments what he had been unable to achieve so far with unilateral motions and orders. We successfully controlled the situation and prevented any harm from being done to the party.
One particular amendment that was proposed would have pushed the LPD's IT Administrator out a back door by limiting the length of contracts and appointments with the Party, with no mechanism for picking up the work that would be dropped on the floor in the process. An amended version removing the time limitation was proposed and defeated on a tie vote, then the original version was proposed and defeated with a perfectly flipped tie vote. The stalemate continued, but we had shown our teeth and ability to dig in and protect the party from their maneuvers.
This lead to one of the resisting Board members to ask if it was possible to remove any of these people. At face value, our governing documents did not allow this, requiring a 4/5 majority of the State Board to support a motion to remove another member. However, the section those provisions appeared in was amendable with a simple majority. Thus, "The Plot" was born.
