Had someone forward me an e-mail that the State GOP had supposedly sent out to delegates/precinct committeepeople last night. Which despite my status as a precinct person who was in an contested election and won, I did not receive.
Even did a search of my e-mail, but no e-mail from the party yesterday.
Which is kind of odd, since I registered. Have the e-mail receipt that I did register to go along with my certificate of election from Brookings County. (Cool fact, the County Finance Office here in Brookings laminates these here, which I find tremendously amusing).
Which brings up questions to me about how well the convention is being managed, how well they are following their bylaws, and what else they are forgetting to do.
Such as this rule under the State Republican Party bylaws:
C. Committees: Prior to the state convention, the state chairman shall designate the members of the platform committee, rules committee, resolutions committee, and credentials committee. The platform committee shall conduct hearings around the state prior to the state convention. The convention chairman shall appoint any other convention committees.
You can read that here as filed with the Secretary of State.
Does anyone recall the State Party hosting the required platform committee “hearings around the state prior to the state convention?” Me neither.
On the news and press release and calendar sections of the SDGOP’s website, they spend a lot of time contemplating the lint in their navels, but nothing about the required platform committee meetings. Hm. There’s no provisions for these to be done via zoom, so they’re supposed to have honest to god hearings.. which don’t seem to have happened?
Does this mean that they won’t be able to put forth a platform, since they haven’t followed their own platform rules? How is that going to affect the legitimacy of the entire convention?
Because, now that they’re in charge, I’m sure the people in charge of the convention wouldn’t want to be accused of screwing things up. And not following their own rules.
Their Zoom meeting they have planned must be the “statewide” meeting they are going to hold?
They did the meetings online and shuffled around people chairing committees last minute. I was supposed to be on one of the committees until it suddenly changed.
Some people got the emails and some people didn’t. I did not, but my wife did and we listened to the end of the zoom call which was informative. There’s this thing called process that must be followed in any organization or else chaos will ensue. You can change the rules, but you can’t change the rules on the fly. If the rules were not followed in the processes of the committee hearings, then there cannot be any amendments or changes to the rules from the last convention. The voting of constitutional officers remains the same and will be conducted with process. I for one am hoping for a smooth and orderly convention.
I remember previous conventions had platform committee meetings set up multiple regions leading up to convention. They would be held in a public place and all Republicans were invited to attend. This state party threw out a zoom invite at the last minute and expects that to satisfy the bylaw requirement. What a joke.
I thought all the “on-line” provisions were removed from the by-laws once COVID was over.
Hopefully, someone has a copy of the approved bylaws from the last convention. I wouldn’t put it past the current monkeys in charge of the SDGOP circus to do a little CYA tweaking…. Might be a situation to compare today to yesterday.