Paul Grant: Difference between revisions

Grant first became active in the LP in [[1976]] when he collected petition signatures in Rochester, New York, for Roger MacBride's presidential campaign.

Paul was Chairman of the 1981 Libertarian National Convention|Tenth Anniversary LP National Convention held in Denver in 1981, a convention which was not only well-attended and a success for the LP, but which was also a financial success - the convention was financed by local libertarians and it returned a profit to those who invested in it.

Also in the early 1980s, Paul and Brian Erickson formed a free market organization, Coloradans for Free Enterprise (CFE), to bring creative speakers to Colorado to meet with those interested in discussing and learning how to apply free market improvements to government-impeded economic activities. In addition to bringing interesting speakers to Denver-area audiences, CFE in 1984 organized a statewide citizen initiative campaign to free Colorado’s transportation industry from control by the Public Utility Commission. Although they were unsuccessful in placing their initiative on the ballot, they were successful in challenging Colorado’s law which made it a felony to pay petition circulators.  They took their challenge all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where they won a unanimous (9-0) decision [Meyer v. Grant, 486 U.S. 414 (1988)], in which the Supreme Court held that petition advocacy was core political speech protected by the First Amendment and that the law prohibiting paid petitioning penalized political speech and, therefore, violated the First Amendment.  This ruling has helped inspire and empower the citizen initiative movement in those states which allow the initiative process, and led to such paid petition citizen initiative successes as legalized marijuana in Washington and Colorado, legalized gambling in Colorado, and many others.