(Anyone who was at the SDEC meeting Saturday understands how important this issue is to discuss. So please do. - promoted by BOR)
Yesterday, January 12, 2008, the state chair of the Democratic Party and the majority of the SDEC disenfranchised me. Yesterday the Texas Democratic Party embraced heavy-handed procedural tactics worthy of Tom Craddick.
My residence is in Senate District 25. Zada True-Courage is one of my SDEC representatives. At yesterday's SDEC meeting Zada's husband John Courage - who has run two inspiring, spirited campaigns against Lamar Smith for U.S. Congress - sat in Zada's place by lawful proxy and served as my representative.
John Courage is the founder of an organization called the True Courage Action Network. In just one year's time, TCAN has taken the lead as a single-minded champion of campaign finance reform. John is of the opinion that the influence of big money in our political system has corrupted the system and is destroying democracy. Does any reader of this blog disagree? |
| In just one year's time, TCAN has built and organized broad support for legislation to provide public financing for election campaigns. Several weeks ago, John submitted to the TDP a proposal that the Democratic Primary ballot include a referendum proposition to assess the support of Democratic Primary voters for public campaign financing. Yesterday, the TDP decided that the TCAN proposal had been submitted to the wrong committee among the SDEC's several standing committees. So at the last minute, with John Courage waiting patiently in the wings to state the case for the proposal to let Democratic Primary voters register their opinions on public campaign financing, his proposal was switched to a different committee.
The TCAN proposal has sterling support. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, for example, came to the SDEC meeting yesterday to plead the case in favor of public campaign financing, in support of John Courage's request to put the issue on the Democratic Primary voters' ballots. Ronnie Earle has enormous insight on this issue, having been the lead law enforcement authority in Texas over the past 20 years in prosecuting political corruption.
The SDEC standing committee on "nominations and legal" tabled the proposition. Please don't ask me to try and understand their reasoning. Some people always want to protect the status quo once they get a little whiff of the intoxicating, and usually self-deluding, elixir of thinking they are inside movers and shakers.
After the committee meetings were over, the full body SDEC business meeting convened. During the meeting, John Courage as the representative of Democratic voters in Senate District 25 rose and offered a motion to the full body of the SDEC to place the public campaign financing referendum on the Democratic Primary ballot. Incidentally, this is not unusual. Often the Primary ballots of both Democratic and Republican parties contain referendum questions. It is a time-honored way to gauge public support in our state for possible legislative action.
Texas Democratic Party chairman Boyd Richie denied John Courage the right to present his motion. Boyd Richie ruled the motion out of order on the grounds that a committee had tabled the motion thus it could not be brought to the SDEC meeting floor. The full body then acquiesced in Richie's ruling, despite John's accurate quoting of a Party Rule stating that no action of a lower committee can be made superior to the action of the full SDEC.
The result was that a full voting member of the SDEC was denied the simple right and courtesy of being able to present a motion and state his case for his motion. As a constituent of that member I was disenfranchised. Some defenders of the status quo argued that the full body's vote to sustain the chair's ruling satisfied democracy. HOGWASH. Representative democracy includes the right to be heard, the right of the representative's constituents to have a voice through the representative's voice. By virtue of being ruled out of order, John Courage was denied any opportunity to state his case, to discuss his motion, to have his colleagues on the SDEC at least hear his arguments for placing his propositions on the Primary ballot.
One SDEC member told me his vote to sustain the chair was a vote to sustain the "committee system". More HOGWASH. The State Democratic Executive Committee is not the U.S. Congress or the Texas Legislature. My representative's arguments for his proposal needed to be heard by ALL the members of the SDEC, not just the handful serving on a little subcommittee. As his constituent I had a right to have all members of the SDEC hear my representative, as my voice, state his arguments. In the Texas legislature there are checks and balances. For example, bills that were blocked in committees often get attached as amendments to other bills on the floor in the closing days of the session, thus enacted into law in spite of the lower committee action. Therefore to say that committee action is the final action in the legislature is a demonstrably false statement. There are other checks and balances at work, including the existence of two different major political parties to counter-balance each other. There are no functional checks and balances at the SDEC.
The excuses will be whatever they will be. The action was that a member of the SDEC was not permitted to offer a pertinent and legitimate motion to the SDEC on an important and legitimate issue. Yesterday, the Texas Democratic Party failed to live up to itself. If you want to preach about democracy and openness, you need to practice what you preach. |
