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On Sunday, November 5, a man identified as 26-year-old Devin Kelley opened fire in a church outside of San Antonio, Texas, killing 26 people and wounding at least another 20. Reason’s Nick Gillespie speaks with Robert VerBruggen, the deputy managing editor of National Review and a gun-policy analyst, about what can be done to reduce mass shootings without eviscerating the Second Amendment.

In this new podcast they discuss the changing nature of mass shootings, whether an armed society is actually a safer one, how Kelley was able to obtain guns despite being flagged for domestic abuse and a bad-conduct discharge from the military, and what policies can be put in place to limit mass shootings.

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Federal auto safety regulations fill nearly 900 pages with standards that determine everything from rear-view mirror and steering wheel placement to the shape of vehicles and the exact placement of seats. Many of the rules don’t make sense in the coming era of self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles don’t need rear-view mirrors, or (eventually) steering wheels. Their ideal physical form is still a work in progress.

But an even bigger rethink is in order. As motor vehicles become essentially computers on wheels, software, not hardware, will soon be paramount for safety. This will make most government regulation unnecessary, and, to the extent that it slows innovation, could even cost lives on the highway.

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New London, New Hampshire, a community of 4,400 is not bursting at the seams with doctors. Nevertheless, there may soon be one fewer, thanks to state regulators.

The state’s Board of Medicine has taken away 85-year-old Anna Konopka’s medical license, and they’re resisting her efforts to get it back.

Konopka’s problems started with an accusation earlier in the year that she wasn’t properly treating a 7-year-old with asthma. She says the child’s mother wasn’t following her instructions, but the Board of Medicine reprimanded her.

Since then, four additional complaints have been filed against Konopka, but the details have not been disclosed. When the board began disciplinary procedures, she agreed to voluntarily surrender her license, but said she was essentially forced to do so or the board would have shut her down immediately. The “voluntary” surrender allowed her to practice to the end of October. She’s gone to a judge to ask to get her license back.

It may well be those complaints are serious, but a significant detail in the matter may have been overlooked: Konopka is mostly computer illiterate. She has no computers in her office, keeps patient records in filing cabinets, and says she doesn’t have the time to learn how computers work.

This has made it impossible for her to comply with reporting guidelines put in place in New Hampshire in 2014 to “fight” the opioid overdose crisis, according to the Associated Press. Doctors who prescribe opioids are supposed to participate in this reporting program and check a patient’s drug history in the register before prescribing them.

Also worth noting: Konopka often takes care of the medical needs of people without insurance who feel like they don’t have many choices or treatment alternatives. From the Associated Press:

She often attracts patients who have run out of options, many with complicated conditions, such as chronic pain. She also draws patients who have no insurance and little means to pay. She takes anyone willing to pay her $50 in cash.

“I’m interested in helping people. I didn’t go to medicine for money, and I didn’t make money,” she said, noting she works alone and can’t afford things like and administrative assistant or even a nurse.

So Konopka’s inability to participate in the opioid reporting program would be a terrible reason to revoke her license. In fact, in the hearing with the judge Friday, several of her patients came to speak on her behalf, and one claimed that she helped him get off oxycontin and use other remedies. He said that his previous doctor was responsible for overprescribing medications.

We’re well along in the mistaken belief that prescription-based pain treatment is the source of our opioid overdose crisis, and the Trump administration is buying into it. Jacob Sullum explained just last week that this narrative is misguided and that the risk of overdose among patients seeking a doctor’s assistance for fighting chronic pain is relatively low. In fact, it’s government crackdowns and interventions in pain management that are sending patients to the much more dangerous black market.

Poor New Hampshire residents may have one fewer treatment option because the state decided a doctor wasn’t keeping records the way the state wants her to. And those demands are, in part, guided by a mistaken grasp of the opioid crisis.

Devin Kelley, who police say murdered 26 people at a rural Texas church yesterday, seems to have been legally disqualified from owning a gun. It’s not clear why he repeatedly passed federal background checks while purchasing firearms, including the Ruger AR-556 rifle he used in the attack, which he bought last year from an Academy Sports & Outdoors store in San Antonio.

The Air Force says Kelley, an airman who served in logistics readiness at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, was convicted by a court-martial in 2012 of two counts under Article 128 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which applies to assault. The victims were his wife, from whom he was subsequently divorced, and their child. Kelley’s punishment was 12 months of confinement, a reduction in rank, and a bad-conduct discharge.

As Christian Britschgi noted this morning, the discharge itself would not have prevented Kelley from legally buying a gun, since it fell short of the “dishonorable conditions” specified by federal law. But the same law prohibits the purchase or possession of a gun by anyone who “has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” Kelley’s crimes seem to fit the definition of that phrase, which includes “the use or attempted use of physical force” by a spouse or parent of the victim.

The form that Kelley would have filled out while buying guns from Academy or any other federally licensed dealer asks, “Have you ever been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence?” Kelley presumably checked “no,” but the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which includes the National Criminal Information Check (NCIC) database, should have flagged the court-martial convictions.

According to a 2001 article in The Military Lawyer, “A court-martialed soldier convicted of a reportable offense entered into the NCIC/NICS will be denied the sale of a firearm.” A footnote says reportable offenses include cases involving “a dismissal or punitive discharge” or “conviction of an offense that carries a possible sentence of confinement of one year or more.”

In a CNN interview, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Kelley had applied for a carry permit but was rejected. “So how was it that he was able to get a gun?” Abbott asked. “By all the facts that we seem to know, he was not supposed to have access to a gun. So how did this happen?”

Although mass shooters typically do not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records, it looks like Kelley did. But as with Dylann Roof, the perpetrator of another horrifying assault on a church, the system that is supposed to catch people who are not legally allowed to buy guns failed to do so. President Obama cited Roof’s attack in making the case for “universal background checks,” meaning a legal requirement that all gun transfers, not just those involving federally licensed dealers, receive the FBI’s approval. But since Roof passed a background check, that argument did not make much sense. The problem was not the absence of a background check but the inadequacy of the background check that was performed. The same thing seems to be true in this case.

One burning question since Trump arrived on the political scene is can Trumpism—a noxious combination of overt nativism and covert racism—survive without him? The outcome of the gubernatorial race in Virginia might offer an answer tomorrow. Late in the game, the Republican candidate Ed Gillespie went whole-hog Trumpist even though his record thus far would have suggested that he is as far from a natural Trumpist as a politico can get. A former chair of the Republican National Committee, he is a fiscal conservative whose main flaw is that he makes milquetoast look enticing.

Yet he has embraced a campaign of fear mongering and fake rage against Hispanic criminal gangs and sanctuary cities while sticking up for Confederate monuments. This has earned him praise from Trumpist organ Breitbart (and revulsion from his former Republican friends). Given this platform:

Should he scrape a victory in this blue state that Hillary Clinton won—or even lose by a narrow margin—it’ll be a signal that Trump’s red meat strategy is a viable one. Usually, when Republicans have played the race card—say, George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad—they’ve done so somewhat hesitantly for fear of alienating suburban moms and social moderates who connect mostly with the GOP’s economic message. But if Gillespie makes headway with this message—which it seems he is doing given that he has narrowed the gap with Northam considerably in the latest polls—the Republican takeaway will be that their problem in the past wasn’t that they were too aggressive in stoking their red-meat base, but not aggressive enough. A new calculus will prevail where there is much more to be gained than lost by embracing Trumpism.

And what will the left’s response be? A near-hysterical campaign of fear of its own about the future minorities face under Republicans.

Go here to read the piece.

Investigators Monday were scrambling to find a motive for yesterday’s deadly mass shooting at a church in a small town outside of San Antonio, Texas.

On Sunday, a gunman identified by the Texas Department of Public Safety as 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley opened fire during a service at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, killing 26 people, and injuring another 20.

Kelley, from nearby New Braunfels, was an Air Force veteran who was court-martialed in 2012 on charges of assaulting his wife and child. He was sentenced to 12 months confinement and received a “bad conduct” discharge in 2014.

Suspect in Sutherland Springs shooting confirmed to be Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, of New Braunfels, TX. More info to be released later today.

— Texas DPS (@TxDPS) November 6, 2017

“This is a person who had violent tendencies, and who was a powder keg waiting to go off,” said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on CBS News. Abbott said that Kelley tried to get Texas gun permit prior to the shooting and was denied.

Domestic violence convictions, along any felony conviction and dishonorable discharges from the military would disqualify one from gun ownership. Kelley’s “bad conduct” discharge would not have disqualified him from firearm ownership, and it is not clear whether his assault conviction would have.

However, the fact that the crimes he was convicted of carried a combined sentence of over a year in jail may have made him ineligible to buy or possess a firearm.

According to law enforcement officials, Kelley purchased a Ruger AR-556 rifle from an Academy Sports & Outdoors store in San Antonio, Texas. Officials say that he passed a background check at the store.

The shooting occurred at around 11:20 a.m. when Kelley—dressed in black and armed with a Ruger AR-556 rifle—opened fire in front of the First Baptist Church entering the building and firing on the worshipers inside.

A local resident, who reportedly lived next to the church, engaged Kelley in a firefight as he left the building. According to law enforcement, Kelley then dropped his weapon and fled in his vehicle, being pursued by armed resident.

After an 11-mile chase, Kelley lost control of his vehicle and crashed on the side of the highway. Law enforcement arrived, and found him dead in his vehicle from gunshot wounds. It is not known whether the wounds were self-inflicted or not.

Despite so much unknown about the attack, political reactions are already starting to pour in.

President Donald Trump has said the shooting was a result of “a mental health problem at the highest level”, adding that “this isn’t a guns situation.”

Longtime gun control advocate Sen. Diane Feinstein disagreed, saying in a Sunday statement that “this latest mass shooting comes just one month after the country’s deadliest mass shooting, and we’re still trying to garner support for even the most basic steps to reduce gun violence.”

Reason will update this post as more information becomes available.

Most of the tax-reform legislative war-gaming articles until now haven’t featured the name of Oklahoma’s junior senator, Republican James Lankford. That’s now likely to change after Lankford’s appearance on Sunday’s Meet the Press, where he said “I am a no” if the final cut/reform package increases the debt too much. Here’s the whole exchange with Chuck Todd:

Todd: […] [D]o you have a red line? You’ve been a big deficit hawk in the past. If this increases the debt, is that something you’re comfortable with supporting even if the debt is increased given that you’ve been a pretty tough critic of increasing the debt in the past?

Lankford: I’m actually not comfortable with increasing the debt. This is something that’s been a behind-the-scenes conversation for a long time. It’s one thing to be able to cut taxes, it’s another thing to be able to say, ‘how are going to deal with our debt and deficit?’ So my main focus has been whatever economic growth model we put in place has to be reasonable to be able to do it. So if we cut taxes right now, we’re expecting a .4 percent growth in the economy to be able to offset that. That’s a pretty conservative estimate of economic growth. Our economy for the past ten years has not grown above two percent, or about three percent a single year. We are stuck in a rut. We’re going to have to bump the record player to get something going on the economy again and that we want to be reasonable on our assumptions to do it.

Todd: So if this tax bill increases the debt too much, you’re a no?

Lankford: I am a no. I want to make sure we have reasonable assumptions in the process for growth estimates.

You don’t need a microscope to see the wiggle room there—”reasonable assumptions,” “too much,” a desire to “bump the record player,” etc. But “I am a no” is a pretty stark opening bid on negotiations, particularly when combined with other reluctant fiscal hawks, such as the officially off-the-reservation Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). “[If] we’re adding one penny to the deficit, I am not going to be for it, OK?” Corker told Todd five weeks ago.

Then there’s Corker’s fellow Trump-refusenik and debt-worrier, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “If we are going to do ‘cuts, cuts, cuts,’ we have got to do wholesale reform,” Flake said after the reform package was introduced. “With the national debt exceeding $20 trillion, we have got to take this seriously.…We cannot simply rely on rosy economic assumptions, rosy growth rates, to fill in the gap. We’ve got to make tough decisions. We cannot have cuts today that assume that we’ll grow a backbone in the out years.”

And it’s important to recognize, as I point out in today’s L.A. Times, that the final bill, if one ever comes, is almost certain to generate even more debt than this week’s model, due to legislators’ unwillingness to take away the cookie tray:

[G]oing after any tax deductions and loopholes requires some political courage to face down outraged recipients and their organized lobbies. So ask yourself this: When’s the last time this Congress has exhibited anything approaching bravery?

This is a legislature that hasn’t passed a proper budget in 20 years, that can’t fulfill promises large (replacing Obamacare) or small (killing off the Export-Import Bank), that hasn’t even been able to muster changes to the century-old Jones Act in the wake of Hurricane Maria. A body that can’t bear to jeopardize all of 1,500 shipping jobs in the course of helping 3.4 million devastated Americans is not likely to hold the line on killing the State and Local Taxes (SALT) deduction. […]

SALT and the mortgage-interest deduction cut are the two biggest fillers of the $4-trillion hole, so caving on that could blow whatever slim chance there is for passage in the Senate.

Read the whole thing here. Then watch Nick Gillespie explain how “The Trump Tax Plan Is Government as Usual“:

• 26 people were killed during a church service in Texas.
• President Trump met with the emperor of Japan.
• The Robert Mueller probe is reportedly zeroing in on the former national security advisor Michael Flynn.
• Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was assaulted at his home in Bowling Green.
• A ground invasion is the only way to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons, according to the Pentagon.
• At least 17 princes and other high-ranking officials were arrested as part of a massive corruption probe in Saudi Arabia.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

William Weld, the blue-blooded former two-term governor of Massachusetts, was controversial among Libertarians a good decade before becoming the most high-profile and numerically successful vice presidential nominee in the party’s 45-year history. (The reticence is a long story; start here.)

Then came a highly contentious, razor-thin victory on the second ballot of the Libertarian Party National Convention; a deluge of national media attention, a hard stumble out of the gate on CNN where he referred to Hillary Clinton as an “old friend” and “nice kid” (which he later walked back), speculation (hotly denied) from Weld’s friend Carl Bernstein that he was thinking about dropping out to support Clinton, a report from Weld’s hometown newspaper (also denied) that the L.P. VP candidate “plans to focus exclusively on blasting Donald Trump over the next five weeks,” a special message to non-third-party voters that they should vote against the “unhinged” Trump, and then—most controversially of all, by far—an appearance on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show show, one week before Election Day, in which he said “I’m here vouching for Mrs. Clinton.”

By that time, Libertarians and libertarians alike were fed up enough that the party chapter in Weld’s neighboring state of Rhode Island chose to cancel a campaign event rather than deal with the fallout. To the end, and even beyond, Weld was not just a lightning rod, but a hotly disputed symbol: If you thought that the L.P. finally punched above its weight, he was proof that the party was now attracting impressive Normals. If you thought 2016 was a historic face-plant given the opportunity, he was the avatar for principles-free, ex-Republican centrism.

On Saturday night, Weld gave his first major political speech since the election, at a Students for Liberty (SFL) regional conference in New York. A week before, he had generated a headline or two by giving the Boston Globe a playful “Who knows?” when asked about whether he’d run again in 2020. “The most I’ve said is I’m still a ­Libertarian, and as the years roll by I’ll probably want to be involved in the discussion leading up to 2020, and supportive of the Libertarian Party,” he told the paper.

The L.P. right now is in a curious place vis-à-vis high-profile candidates: It is the third party in America, yet just about every major 2016-election figure not named Weld has stepped away from third-party politics. The 2012/2016 nominee has checked out (headline from David Weigel’s interview last week: “Gary Johnson is back, and he’s never running for office again“). Nomination runner-up Austin Petersen is running for U.S. Senate in Missouri as a #MAGA-curious Republican (and is a distant second so far in fundraising); third-place finisher John McAfee these days is mostly talking publicly about crypto-currencies.

Arguably the party’s biggest national figure—who has been working the state-L.P.-convention circuit in a way that Weld decidedly has not, hyping a bottom-up, seven-year plan for the party’s success—is 2016 V.P. runner-up Larry Sharpe, currently running for governor of New York. “He’s a real good candidate,” Weld tells me. “I told him I’m going to do whatever I can for him in New York.” In 2018, anyway!

I caught up with Bill Weld just before his SFL speech Saturday, to talk about whether he was still as bullish on both the L.P.’s future and his role within the party as he was a year ago, and how he feels about various 2016-related controversies. The following is an edited and shortened transcript of our conversation:

Reason: So, the last time I saw you—correct me if I’m wrong—was about 45 minutes after we knew Donald Trump was going to win on election night…the world was sort of in shock at the moment. We’d had some idea that you guys had won around three percent, I don’t know how much we knew the numbers, but we knew it wasn’t going to be five. And you were walking to the elevators and I stuck that phone in front of your face, and you were—surprisingly, to me—very buoyant. You were like, “Great night, I fully expect,” the quote was, “the Libertarian Party to be the biggest party in the country within 8 to 12 years.” Perfectly set up. And you were not disappointed at all, at least that’s how you expressed it at the time. So I guess the first question is—

Weld: I thought I didn’t know that Trump was going to win until I got upstairs with Leslie. Did we know that downstairs? […]

[Note: Weld’s memory was more right than mine; Trump had won Florida, and was looking solid, but the national race had not yet been called.]

Reason: Broader point was that you were upbeat in the moment, like you felt like that the results, the campaign, had gone well; the L.P. was well-suited, and you were, to take advantage of where American politics were going, and that you intended to be part of it in the next 8 to 12 years.

Weld: That’s how it’s panning out.

Reason: In what way is it panning out?

Weld: Well, I’ll talk about it tonight, but I see the Libertarian Party as being perfectly positioned to fill what’s a growing need in the country, which is either a third party or a different party. There are crevices in support for the duopoly;…more and more time has gone by where the two parties in Washington are simply trying to kill each other. And they have one thing in common: They want to perpetuate their duopoly, and that’s not efficient. Monopolies are not efficient, they have no incentive to be. And duopolies are not really efficient, either.

It’s the guild mentality of the Middle Ages: Let’s exclude everyone who isn’t already inside the clubhouse. It’s an ugly picture, and I plan to make a certain amount of noise to try and persuade people that that’s the case.

Reason: Now, you guys ran very much as a kind of, there’s a six-lane highway in the center of the road kinda thing.

Weld: Yeah.

Reason: And you had, I think, a very plausible kind of executive-competence claim as well, that I thought would in fact do better than it did, or be more persuasive than it was. But looking at that concept that yes, people are tired of the duopoly and the bickering and all that—there’s different clusters of different humans who are out there responding to that. Bill Kristol has a very similar response as you, but Bill Kristol is nobody’s libertarian. Is the place to be then the center of the road? Or is looking at it ideologically, is that in itself kind of the wrong response to what has been more of a kind of populist cultural moment?

Weld: Well, one place to be is on the ballot in all 50 states.

Reason: There’s that.

Weld: That’s where the Libertarian Party will be. And people who want to start these third parties from scratch—I take my hat off to them, but it’s simply a lot more trouble than going with one of the three parties. And there are three, not two, who are going to be on the ballot in all 50 states.

The Libertarian Party is more congenial to me, dogmatically, ideologically, than either of the other two parties, because the Democratic Party is not fiscally responsible and the Republican Party is not socially tolerant. So I’m one for two in each of the other two parties.

I hear a lot more conversation now than I did two years ago about, hey, maybe it would be a good idea if there was something a little different, a little bit different [kind of] party. And as you recall, I spent a lot of last year predicting that the Republican Party was going to split in half like the Whigs in the 1850s. And it didn’t quite happen then, but you could argue that it’s kind of happened with the Republican Party this year, in that you have the party of the president and those who follow him, and then you have many people who are Republicans who differ with the president, either on program or on style, for want of a better word.

Reason: One such person would be a Jeff Flake figure. Do you think the future of a Jeff Flake character, whether it’s that person himself or the person who is like him, is in the Libertarian Party going forward?

Weld: I would hope so, I would hope so. I intend to have conversations with people: Really now, why not? Why not? Is being against the legalization of marijuana so important for you that you don’t want to be in the Libertarian Party, given that A-B-C-D-E? Or tell me the one issue.

Reason: Not to go too far down that rabbit hole, but you used to be a prosecutor, you used to not be on the perfect Libertarian ground on the legalization of marijuana, and [then] you’re running with a pothead, and I say that with affection, as you know.

Weld: I’m running with a cannabis executive.

Reason: Thank you. How did running as a Libertarian change your views on that issue in particular, if at all, and on any other issues?

Weld: Well, that one was a special issue because it was so important to Gary. It was the signature issue of his candidacy, so I wasn’t about to pick a scab on that issue. I did support the ballot issue in Massachusetts last year to legalize marijuana, and my friends in the D.A.’s offices were not pleased with that, but I think it was the right thing to do. My argument is, get it out of the shadows. I just hope they don’t put the tax too high or they’re going to drive it right back in the shadows.

Reason: Sounds like you’re kind of all-in here. If [Ohio Gov.] John Kasich and [Colorado Gov. John] Hickenlooper start some Third Way party tomorrow, are they going to compete for Bill Weld’s affection with the Libertarian Party. or are you L.P. through and through?

Weld: Oh no, I’m going to stay L.P.

I’ve supported Governor Kasich for president either two or three times. I supported him back in 2000, the first time he ran, early on, and raised money for him. And did a lot with him in the mid-’90s when he was chair of the House Budget Committee. And I happened to be in his office on a work matter when Sheryl Stolberg from The New York Times was interviewing him about possibly running last time, and gave her a long interview about why he’d be great and how he could do it. So I was very interested in that Kasich-Hickenlooper hitch-up or matchup. I don’t know that they’re still doing it, but in 2008 I supported and was quite active in an organization called Unity 2008, whose premise was we needed a president of one party and a vice president of the other party. And I think that just systemically would make a difference.

Reason: Now, you’re familiar enough with libertarians to know that they hate—especially in the party—they hate John Kasich with the fire of a thousand sons.

Weld: Oh, I know. And there’s some Ohio politics in that, too.

Reason: Yeah, right. In fact, I was asking someone before, What’s the one question you want me to ask Bill Weld? And he said, “Did he call Kasich about ballot access in Ohio?” So: Did you?

Weld: I called someone in Ohio. I’m not sure I reached Kasich, but I made a call. […]

Reason: Kasich also is kind of a classic Mitch Daniels-style fiscal conservative from the early ’90s and early aughts, but his foreign policy is very promiscuously interventionist. He was talking about—

Weld: Yeah, I’ve really come off that. If I had to talk about an issue where the campaign changed my thinking, it probably would be interventionism. I do consider myself an internationalist, but that’s different from being an interventionist. I don’t like it when I see the body bags coming back. An air strike is maybe something a little different, to project U.S. military power, and Libertarians do believe in a very strong defense, so rattling the saber from time to time is not a bad thing. But U.S. land wars, it’ll be a cold day in July before I could think of a U.S. land war that was worth starting. […]

And Afghanistan leaves me totally cold. We can’t ever leave? Tell that to the British Empire and the Russian Soviet Union: It bled them both to death, and they both got out. […]

Reason: As you know, the last week in particular of the campaign, a lot of Libertarians were upset with your appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show and some other things. Do you have any regrets about—

Weld: No, no. I chose the word “vouch” on purpose. I thought it was a soft word, but apparently many people interpreted it as an endorsement. […]

So, the previous month or two, everyone in the United States had been dumping all over Hillary Clinton in criminal terms—she’s a felon, lock her up—and that’s not the person I know. And I don’t share her politics. […]

But I did not intend that as an endorsement. I intended it to—I think what I said is, I wish there was someone besides members of the Democratic National Committee who would vouch for Mrs. Clinton, even if only to say she’s not so bad. That’s what I was saying. […]

Reason: But the L.P. activists have a point when they say, “Look, it’s a week before the election, and this is your competitor, and you’re on Rachel Maddow of all places, that not only has a large audience but has a large audience of younger people who are probably going to lean more left than not, and you’re telling them”—

Weld: Well, I did get the question the last week of the campaign, “Are you saying that people should vote for Mrs. Clinton?”—not from Rachel Maddow, but from a number of other people. And I said, “Hell no, vote for Johnson. I want us to get over five percent.”

Reason: I’m sure you’ve run into this as well—I still don’t have a good answer for it—but when people look back at your campaign, the words that you’ll hear are, “it was a historical success” and “it was a historic failure.” You will oftentimes hear that in the same sentence.

[You] tripled the size of the previous record for votes; it’s pretty amazing to see that happen. You had candidates that were taken seriously by the media in a way that used to never happen. There’s a lot of metrics—[ballot access in] all 50 states, beat the Green Party in every state, super successful. But! The two most reviled major party candidates in history, by a lot; polls right before Election Day were saying 4.8 percent, you get 3.4 [actually 3.3], and it feels like this was a squandered opportunity. So how do you look at it in terms of results, expectations and all that?

Weld: Well, you know, we had $15 million dollars to spend, and they had billions. If we’d had $100 million dollars I think we could have shown enough strength early on so we would have been in the debates. And if we’d been in the debates—you know, Gary was at 13 percent just a week or two before the Commission on Presidential Debates was going to make their decision and they had nailed their own fists to the planks saying that whoever was at 15 was going to get into the debates. And around that time, I believe, one of the major parties dumped a lot of negative advertising on us, and we went down to 5.

Reason: Yeah, that was the September when Tom Steyer and all of that was happening.

Weld: Unanswered negative advertising takes a toll. So, I think that’s partly a money thing.

Reason: Do you have any kind of regrets? Do you look at any moments and think “Ah, we screwed that up,” or “I screwed that up” or “Gary screwed that up”?

Weld: Not really. Gary and I served together as governors and really got along very well, and I was a self-identified libertarian even before I met Gary Johnson. But I remember we weren’t particularly ideological at Republican governors meetings, we just had a good time, so there was never any friction. And we did all our [campaign] rallies together. We could have given each other’s speeches by the end, and sometimes did.

Reason: Have you been in touch? Or is he still off skiing the Continental Divide?

Weld: No, no, I talked to Gary last week. He’s in a very good frame of mind. […]

Reason: Briefly on the money thing: That was part of the attractiveness of Bill Weld, is not only that you have a resume, but you know how to talk to rich people. What did you learn rattling the tin cup for a third party as opposed to the Republican Party?

Weld: A lot of people just said “No way.” And some people, particularly in New York, said yes who were not members of the Libertarian Party, but they were exactly in the same place as I was politically, and they said “Okay, we’ll give you a shake, here’s a hundred grand or here’s two-fifty. Your voice deserves to be heard.” But that’s a far cry from what the other parties were getting, even in their campaign committees, let alone their 501(c)(4)s and their Super PACs.

Reason: There’s a lot of different kinds of heated debate in the party right now about how to go forward and take advantage of the moment and keep the momentum. Do you have a working theory of how the L.P. continues to grow going forward, or a thing it should do that it hasn’t been doing? What’s your sense?

Weld: Well, you want to get out more candidates like Larry Sharpe in New York. He’s a real good candidate. He came very close to winning the VP nomination at the convention. I think if the motion to adjourn had been successful—I told Larry that today—he would have been the V.P. nominee. And that wouldn’t have been so bad; he was strong then. And I told him I’m going to do whatever I can for him in New York. My friend Dan Fishman from Massachusetts is going to be a very strong candidate for auditor, and he’s off to the races. And I will try to help within the limits of my time, given my law practice and business interests, to help the party raise money. Headlining events and making calls.

Reason: Do you have any interest in being a candidate again for anything?

Weld: That’s too far off. I like the way things are right now.

Reason on Bill Weld here.

The Pittsburgh Arts Commission has unanimously recommended removing a 117-year-old statue of Stephen Foster, the “Father of American Music,” from a public park. The statue depicts him next to a black slave playing a banjo.