Activists and Patriots!
The largest GOP convention on our planet formally starts Thursday morning, but the "Temporary Committees" handling the State Platform (shown below, SD7 Representative Alex McCoy), and the State Rules (SD7 Representative Clint Moore) began meeting yesterday (Monday, May 9, 2016).
The first day's work is usually a sleepy day--mostly organizational, logistics, getting to meet fellow committee volunteers, etc.
Not yesterday. A veritable war against your grassroots platform was waged on several fronts.
You may recall that Texas has a platform that "bubbles up" from the grassroots precinct level, through the County and Senate District Conventions, and on to the State convention. It is where MANY conservative ideas get their footing--from the grassroots in Texas--before arriving at the national scene.
The Texas platform is not a push-card. That is not its function. It is a reference document of grassroots ideas and messages to elected officials and to the SREC itself. It is often referred to as "The Voice of the Grassroots." Those who generally speaking, do not like accountability for elected officials often try to reduce, ridicule, or even gut the platform. These are not the same as those who, for whatever reason, have been convinced the platform is generically "too long". The events yesterday were clearly indicative of an organized push to take meaningful content out of the platform--not just make it more efficient a remove "in the weeds" or obsolete planks
.
First, in the temporary platform committee, there were three separate well-orchestrated attempts to gut the platform in a wholesale fashion. The first came when Davida Stike moved to limit the entire platform to 100 planks maximum. While the debate was not recorded in the minutes, this would be loosely like limiting the
Constitution to the original document without the
Bill of Rights or any other amendments! This idea was soundly defeated by the temporary committee.
Second, there was a move to start not with the prior platform as is ALWAYS THE CASE, but rather, to eliminate the 2014 platform and rather, start with ONE of the Senate Districts in Tarrant County's Platform, which only had 14 total planks! Thankfully, this too was defeated.
Third, there was an attempt to gum up the process by REQUIRING each sub-committee to go through a time consuming vote up or down on each 2014 plank, rather than giving the subcommittees their customary leeway in how they conduct their business. This was also defeated.
Fourth, after nearly two wasted hours, the committee voted as they should have from the beginning to use the 2014 platform as a starting point in their deliberations.
However, the assault on the platform was not over. In the Rules committee, there was a motion to require that in order to become part of the platform, a plank would have to garner two-thirds of the full delegate strength vote on Thursday evening! This flies in the face of a representative democracy and fundamentally puts the one-third minority in charge of the outcome!
Why is this such a horrible idea? Simple. ANY NEW IDEA, by definition, starts as a tiny minority and fights and claws its way into the majority. Such major movements typically take decades to come to fruition. In the 1800s, slavery was in this category. Had a supermajority been required in the British Parliament,
William WIlberforce would never have been successful at banning the British slave trade (he died just a few days after the simple majority vote banned it.)
In more recent decades, I can clearly remember the pitched battles in the Texas GOP over pro-life issues. 30-40 years ago these battles were won or lost on razor thin margins. Again, if a supermajority had been required, we might still have no meaningful pro-life planks in the Texas Platform, or they would have at the least been delayed by years or decades.
Third, think what a supermajority vote would do to Texas' leadership role in generating and promoting conservative principles. If a supermajority was required, the Texas GOP platform would instantly become a follower of other states, and only when an issue was essentially settled in other states' battlefields of thought would Texas delegates muster the supermajority to include it.
Yes, this supermajority idea is a terrible one, that fundamentally places the minority in control of the outcome.
Why are they doing this? Different folks have different reasons of course, but the orchestrated part of the effort is to reduce accountability of elected officials. Pure and simple. That gives the legislature more leeway and gives the big money lobbyists more leeway as well.
Think immigration. The "comprehensive immigration reform" crowd continues to try an put some form of "The Texas Solution" into the Texas platform as they did in 2012 when they deceived the grassroots delegates into thinking it was something it was not. This push flies in the face of grassroots sentiments, and ignores the data of massive defeats in elections going back to McCain and Romney, and more recently Jerry Patterson in Texas, and the complementary data of massive victory in Texas of "secure border" candidates like Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, and Senator Ted Cruz. These victories were across all demographics, but the
"comprehensive immigration reform" crowd keeps on pushing in the platform and elsewhere none the less.
Back to rules. Though SD7's
Clint Moore and many others argued calmly but passionately about the violence such a 2/3 rule would do to the platform, the concept of majority rule, and the fact that it flies in the face of what is in the platform on the Texas Senate "Rose Bush" rule, the committee passed it, ironically, in a simple majority recorded 16-15 vote.
The GOP activists observing this did not take kindly to it, to say the least. When the committee returned from a break, there was a successful motion to reconsider, followed by additional debate, followed by a revote where the 2/3 requirement was set aside and a simple majority was implemented instead, this time by a 21-10 vote (5 votes switched sides.) Those SD's that voted AGAINST the simple majority the second time, and hence were in favor of retaining the absurd 2/3 vote requirement were
SD 1,4, 5, 6, 14, 17, 18, 21, 29, and 30. They are represented on the committee by the temporary members below.
SD Temporary Rules Committee Rep & Contact info.
29
Tom Reynolds (915) 585-8997 -- not submitted --
NOTE: Of course, these members stand for election once their delegates arrive and Caucus by SD on Thursday. When a similar situation happened two years ago on issues of immigration and marijuana on the Temporary Platform committee (similar in that the temporary members were voting against the will of the grassroots), five or six of the offending members lost their seats and were replaced on the Permanent committee.
Should there be any major developments in either committee, we'll share via email and on FB (at the page "Senate District 7").
Please be sure and thank
Alex McCoy and
Clint Moore for their tireless efforts this week when you see them Thursday or later.
Sarah Singleton (SREC SD7) is also in Dallas and reported many of the details above.
