Convention Reform

My friend Ted over at The Real Sporer has an excellent post about changing the way we run our party conventions. Over the years I have chaired our State Convention Platform, Nominating and Rules Committees. (I am still not in charge of seating.) I am also serving on the SCC Organization Committee and if there are changes in the way we run our conventions, this is committee that will be involved in the process.

I agree with most of what Ted has to say.

District Conventions

Ted suggests having the District Executive Committees run the District Conventions. When I first read the RPI Constiution and By-laws. I was surprised to learn that we even had District Executive Committees. I could not recall ever hearing of one meeting.

The District Executive Committee in each congressional district consists of the county chairs and co-chairs plus extra representatives for counties over 50,000 in population. Ted suggests that these committees could be given a budget and then charged with the planning and execution of the district conventions. A side-effect would be to empower these county leaders and get them working together in a meaningful way.

District Delegates

In my first SCC meeting, I asked why we even bothered to hold the District Presidential Caucuses (the Friday night meetings before State Convention). I agree that the right place to elect district delegates and alternates to the National Convention is at the District convention. I am in the 2nd District and we got out Friday night well after midnight. At a district convention, ballots could be counted in the background while other business occurred (like the platform debate).

The selection of district delegates and at-large delegates to the National Convention is tightly regulated by RNC rules 11-10. As I read it there is no way to increase the number of delegates selected by the districts even with a commensurate reduction in those selected by the State Convention.

These ideas came up in the Organization Committee meeting on the Friday night preceding the SCC meeting so the establishment is certainly open to considering change.

State Convention

I agree with Ted that for the most part the SCC (or the Organization Committee of the SCC) could and probably should work with RPI staff to plan the State Convention. As I mentioned, I have not served on the Permanent Organization Committee but it seems to me that the SCC might be better equiped to handle these duties.

I do want to vigourously disagree with Ted on one issue — the Platform. In my opinion, the platform committee needs to be elected by the District Conventions. Appointing the Platform Committee removes the platform from the grassroots and makes it a product of the party establishment. While this could be done without changes to the RPI Constitution or By-laws, I would argue that it would be unwise to do so.

This is an important discussion that we are having in the SCC and the Organization Committee in particular. I would certainly appreciate any input or suggestions for future conventions.

Comments

[Nicole Baker]

After reading TRS, Andy's comments and yours, I thought I would post my thoughts here:

First I like the thoughts on the District Conventions. In fact, I proposed a platform plank to be discussed at the convention along those exact same lines. However, even though it was submitted properly with the correct number of signatures, it was not brought to the floor for discussion. I do not say this to complain, only so that those who wish to confirm my statements can verify them. My intention to bring this to the convention was for the purpose of discussion, so that the delegates could voice their opinions on the issue. Since it was tossed out when the delegation voted to only discuss 13 of the 60+ planks; that discourse did not occur at the convention.

As to the suggestions about the state convention, I will have study that further. At first glance though, it seems to me that things could much more easily be handled by simply assigning an SCC member or District Committee member to be the chair of each committee. And,in keeping with our by-laws and constitution, each SCC committee should have 2 members of the SCC on it. In my opinion we should keep the rest of the process the same, and have the SCC only appoint chairpersons to those committees.

I whole heartedly agree with you David, we need to keep the grassroots involved in the process. Changing all of the convention committees to appointed positions would take the grassroots out of our process. It is necessary to have grassroots participation in all of the committees.

Moving the nominating committee elections to the 1st district meeting would definitely increase grassroots participation. Then the nominating committee would have the time from the District to the State conventions to do their work. The current process only allows them from Friday night to Saturday morning to accomplish their work. Obviously, non-elected persons have already started the work beforehand, which does not seem like grassroots but top-down management.

Hope this helps you in your endeavors to make our state party organization work better.

[Andy Cable]

whew David- the rules for selecting National Delegates 11-20 could put one to sleep in a hurry or in my case create a headache just trying to keep straight what they are saying.
While it does appear that each District is limited to selecting three Delegates and the formula for picking the remaining at large Delegates in numbers is pretty straight forward, I think after just one reading there are some possible solutions not addressed unless I missed them and therefore I would suggest open to interpetation.
It would appear that the selection of the Alternates is possibly not under the same scrutiny that Delegates are and perhaps the Districts could split some of the Alternates that are presently selected by the Nominating Committee- just a thought.
I feel the most important thing the SCC can inact though is the moving of the election of the District Delegates and the Nominating Committee to the District Convention. It only makes sense on so many levels. More participation, better exposure within the District and would create more understanding of the process to the District Delegates.
Hopefully this will be addressed by the SCC and even though some will not want to loose the potential to control the process in a single evening in a single location with smaller participation common sense and what is truly best for a statewide grassroots Party will prevail.