Skip to main content

TJ Rohr and possibly the best shot at a State Assembly seat in North Carolina


Rarely can a Libertarian run for public office as any sort of incumbent, but that's not the case with TJ Rohr of the Lenoir City Council.

He's challenging long-time incumbent Ed Starnes in House District 87, and generating real coverage in the Caldwell County News-Topic:

The race for one of Caldwell County's seats in the North Carolina General Assembly has become a three-way affair.

Lenoir City Councilman Timothy (T.J.) Rohr said he is running as a Libertarian candidate for the 87th District House of Representatives, having secured the party's nomination for the Nov. 4 general election at a recent executive committee meeting. Rohr joins seven-term incumbent Republican Edgar Starnes, along with Democrat and former Bank of Granite Chairman John Forlines Jr., on the ballot....

Known for his vigorous dissents during city council meetings that often result in 6-1 votes, Rohr said has entered the campaign with the intention of achieving victory. No Libertarian has won a seat in the N.C. General Assembly, though the party has claimed victories in other state assemblies such as Alaska and New Hampshire.

"I'm not in the race to be a spoiler or difference maker," Rohr, 39, said. "I'm in the race to win it. I definitely think I could be a better representative for the citizens and taxpayers of the county. I've got a one-in-three chance. There's only two other guys that can say that."...

"Libertarians are seen as extreme, but we are actually the middle ground," Rohr said. "We are socially liberal and economically conservative. (Democrats and Republicans) are both big government. I am small government."

Elected to the Lenoir Council in 2003 after being involuntarily annexed into the city, Rohr has championed an anti-tax position, along with taking a critical view on receiving federal and state grants for municipal projects. Rohr was re-elected last year....


Regular readers here may remember Rohr as the attorney who joined us in taking the North Carolina Bar Association to task for excluding Michael Munger from their gubernatorial debate.

If he believes he's got a chance, I'm inclined to agree.
Labels:

Comments

David said…
That is where it starts.
July 11, 2008 at 9:29 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

Soda tax debate reveals fundamental progressive assertions about your lack of individual rights and the "responsiblities" of the State

I thought it would be at least amusing to use the Delawareliberal comments as sub-headings regarding each category of what is wrong with the proposed tax on sodas and juice drinks. But there are so many different little strands of each comment that it would be impossible to pull them all out. So, instead, I'm going to let you read them in more or less the order they appeared, and note the assumptions. pandora: I’m perfectly okay with taxing sodas and juice drinks. Mainly because they’re total crap, and one of the main reasons our country’s children are overweight. They are also dirt cheap. Assumptions here: (1) Because "I" am perfectly okay with a new tax it should be imposed on everybody; (2) it is the government's responsibility to keep children from being obese; (3) the cheapness of the product to be taxed justifies charging people more for it. John Manifold: Soda fattens your kids [and you and your husband], shortens their lives, costs more than water [a...
31 comments
Read more