Libertarian Candidate Says He’s No Tinfoil Hat Wearer

By NADIA PFLAUM

Yesterday, I sat down with a candidate running for the 6th district Congressional seat whose name isn’t Kay or Sam.

Dave Browning is the Libertarian candidate for Congress. We meet in the back of Clint’s Comics at 39th and Main, where he’s part owner. He follows my eyes to a rack full of Playboy magazines from the ‘70s and ‘80s and laughs, “I wonder how many of those came from my collection.” He calls Clint’s “my only toehold in the city.” He lives in a rural town beyond Grain Valley and works as a divorce lawyer in Independence.

He’s an entertaining guy, full of stories about the radical founders of our country (did you know Andrew Jackson beat a would-be assassin with his cane on the White House steps?). He believes in a non-intervention policy on war, solid currency backed by gold or silver, free trade and strictly limited government. He and his fellow Libertarians would like to see the country run as it was in the good ol’ days – “good” according to them, at least — when the Constitution was the only rule in town.

For this, he says, his Democrat and Republican friends think he’s one signature short of a complete Bill of Rights.