Barbara Alby has been the elected Republican National Committeewoman from California since 1996, and she penned this important perspective piece. It shares her take on this notion that non-Republicans should be included in the upcoming Republican Presidential primary in California…
CAVEAT EMPTOR WHEN DECIDING TO CHANGE THE RULES TO ALLOW DTS VOTERS TO SELECT CRP DELEGATES TO THE NATIONAL CONVENTION!
Here we go again: another scheme to save us. Should we risk changing our CRP Rules to allow the Decline to State (DTS) voter to help rule us? This is one of those times when I can’t help but jump in on the debate.
Some are suggesting that there may still be time to change the CRP Rules to allow DTS voters to “help us” select our California delegates to the next Republican National Convention. To comply safely with the RNC Rules, we would need to make that change prior to the next CRP Convention. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that clever lawyers might find some way to raise doubt about the meaning of the plain language of Rule 15(e), which says that our delegate selection rules must be in place by September 4, 2007, we cannot assume that the delegates at the Convention will blindly accept their legalistic arguments and seat our delegates accordingly. It is hypothetically possible that the nomination for President will depend on which slate of California delegates are seated at the Convention, so we have to consider the possibility that there could be a challenge to our delegation (and perhaps competing delegations) if we deviate from or get creative with the RNC Rules in any way. Remember the ultimate rule: he who has the votes makes the rules!
From my perspective, regardless of changing the rules, nothing good can come from allowing DTS voters to select delegates to the REPUBLICAN National Convention. In my humble opinion, doing so signals the beginning of the end for the Republican Party as an institution. The Convention not only nominates the President and Vice President, but also adopts the Party Platform and the Party Rules. We cannot afford to turn these matters over to people who have no commitment to our Party and our Party’s future. (Some say that we cannot win elections without holding ourselves hostage and allow DTS voters to vote in our primaries and delegate selection, but that sort of reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles when the Sheriff holds his own gun to his own head to get the crowd to go along with him. Sorry I digress.)
Many will argue that we already allow DTS voters to select our Republican nominees for Legislative and statewide office, so we might as well allow them to select our National Convention delegates as well. However, we do NOT allow DTS voters to select our County Central Committee members, which is a better analogy to national convention delegates.
We have already given up our constitutional right to select our own nominees in return for unfulfilled promises of political gain. Now, an outright majority of new voter registrations have gone to Decline-to-State voters statewide, and Decline-to-State voters outnumber Republicans in several counties and Legislative districts. Voters have quickly realized that they can get ALL of the benefits of registering Republican by registering Decline-to-State, with one exception: they cannot participate in the presidential delegate selection. Now some want to give away that benefit, too.
The last decade has seen a number of schemes to “help” us. In 1998, it was the open primary and mercifully, the court ended that experiment. In 2004, it was the pill that would certainly cure us, the jungle primary. It was a pill alright! Thankfully, on election day, the voters repudiated the crazy idea.
Now, here we go again. This one is as good an idea as campaign finance reform.
(You can write to Barbara Alby, via the FR, here.)
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