Third Party Candidates on Puerto Rico

We’ve shared the Democratic and Republican party platform statements on Puerto Rico.  We don’t want to leave out the other parties who have candidates in the 2016 presidential race. Third party candidates may be more important in this year’s race — they are expecting to be on ballots in more states than usual.

First, the Green Party:

The Territory of Puerto Rico

We support the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted to the Union as a fully sovereign state. We further recognize the historic significance of the 2012 local referendum in which a 54 percent majority voted to end Puerto Rico’s current status as a U.S. territory, and 61 percent chose statehood over options for sovereign nationhood. We support the federally sponsored political status referendum authorized and funded by an Act of Congress in 2014 to ascertain the aspirations of the people of Puerto Rico. Once the 2012 local vote for statehood is ratified, Congress should approve an enabling act with terms for Puerto Rico’s future admission as the 51st state of the Union.

Jill Stein, the presidential candidate for the Green Party, spoke out against PROMESA and in favor of a federal  bailout for Puerto Rico.

The Libertarian Party platform doesn’t mention Puerto Rico. Nor has their presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, made any public statements about Puerto Rico.

Political website ISideWith.com claims that Johnson is opposed to a bailout of Puerto Rico, but their source for the claim is this statement:

I think it’s crazy that we have foreign aid to countries when we’re borrowing 43 cents out of every dollar to do that.

Puerto Rico, of course, is not a foreign country.

One individual speculated in a forum that Johnson might favor statehood, in these words: “The general Libertarian position is ‘let people do their thing’ so I’d expect him to say something along the lines of ‘whatever Puerto Ricans want is OK with me’ in terms of legal structure. Once he looked into it and found that the Puerto Rican people voted in favor of statehood in 2012, I assume he’d support statehood.” This is speculation by an anonymous member of the public. If Johnson makes a statement, we will update this post.