Washblog

Summary
This amends IX.C.1 to explicitly allow (or require?) the various party organizations to have nomination rules included in their bylaws.

Reaction
The first observation is that the very next sentence in the charter requires that everything in local organization bylaws be consistent with WSDCC charter/bylaws, DNC charter and any rules that the state/national bodies have already passed in accordance with them.  

Which, in the present world with respect to nominations, means that the current nomination rules adopted by the WSDCC back in 2005 will be taking precedence over anything specified in local bylaws anyway.

So I'm not clear on what practical effect this amendment is actually supposed to have.   I.e., if the idea is to empower the local orgs to set their own nomination rules, this does not really do that, or, rather, it doesn't allow local orgs to do anything that they can't do already.

There's also some question about which jurisdictions these rules are supposed to affect, though one might suppose that, by default, each organization deals with its natural jurisdiction, e.g., LD orgs make rules for state house/senate races and so on.  Still, I tend to wonder about LD orgs making nomination rules for county races and vice versa.  And if both orgs have rules which ruleset wins?  But this is probably all moot anyway

Current Vote
No.

#2.  Primaries for selection of Delegates  (Kelly Wright)

Summary
Requires the use of the Presidential Preference Primary in apportioning delegates, provided this can be made consistent with DNC rules.

Reaction
That last clause is probably the killer.  It's pretty much required but the DNC will almost certainly insist that this means that the PP be the only means of apportioning delegates.

Note that on previous occasions the WSDCC has voted decisively against any use of the primary to determine delegate allocations, so if a change is necessary, one might suppose the Convention is the only way to accomplish it.  

On the other hand, I have reason to believe, given how everyone's experiences of arranging caucuses for 2008 are putting the sustainability of the whole caucus system in doubt, that a WSDCC vote and may yet go differently the next time around.  I'll note that in our own LD we rented pretty much every elementary school that wasn't nailed down and massively overflowed anyway; current take is basically:  what the hell do we do next time?  By all accounts, our experience was not unique and that if this amendment fails, then the WSDCC debate come January or April of 2011 is going to be most entertaining as I watch a whole bunch of formerly caucus-or-die people singing a different tune.  

I plan to have a full bag of popcorn.

Be that as it may, the Convention probably is the most appropriate place to be addressing this and I'm glad to have at least one substantive and major issue to tackle.  It's too bad I don't yet have a clue what the right answer is.

Among other things, this cycle has convinced me that if we can find some way to solve the burgeoning logistcal problems, caucuses are actually far better at keeping things from being dominated by party insiders, which is what we want in order to keep us as a viable political party rather than a navel-gazing society.  

It's true that you get better raw participation in a primary, but that does not translate to broader participation in the party.  Note that with delegate allocations being determined by the primary, the presidential-year caucuses revert to being like the off-year caucuses where there's basically no reason to show up at all unless you actually care about being a delegate and/or doing stuff with the platform.  Never mind that we could end up with a system where the campaigns are just choosing slates of national delegates directly, at which point the presidential process becomes entirely divorced from the caucuses -- this will particularly suck for bringing new people into the party.

I could perhaps see doing something where the primary vote determines precinct delegate allotments and then those folks elect the 3 layers of delegates as before, but that's probably too gnarly for the DNC.

Current Vote
Leaning no, if only because I'm as yet reluctant to be setting this in stone yet.

#3. Two members on the WSDCC from the YDs
#4.  Amending State Party Charter at the Convention
#5.  Amending State Party Charter by the WSDCC
#6.  Having Amendments take effect immediately

Summary
#3 replaces the one special YD representative (no proxy, no vote for chair), with two regular (full) YD representatives.

Further Background
A version of Amendment #3 was put forward at the 2006 Convention and received well over a majority present and voting.  It however was declared not to have passed due to the chair's ruling that "majority of all delegates to the convention" threshold meant something more than just majority of all delegates present.  

To be fair, the language in the charter is, to say the least, not entirely clear; it could have been intended to be majority of all delegates present, but it could also be majority of all delegates elected or even majority of all possible delegates to the convention, even counting the vacant slots that were never filled in the first place.

No one appealed the decision of the chair (perhaps a mistake, in retrospect).
The proposal was then forwarded back to the WSDCC along with a whole mess of other unfinished Convention business, and at the following WSDCC meeting it was handily rejected.

At this point, the various motivations of Amendments #4-#6 should become clear.

Summary (cont.)
#4 replaces "to the convention" with "at the convention", making it clear at least that vacant/absent delegate slots should not be counted in the computation of "majority of all delegates".

#5 replaces the "two-thirds of the entire membership" criterion for WSDCC-initiated amendments of the charter with a simple two-thirds vote (meaning two-thirds present and voting)

#6 is identical to #4 but inserts the provision "This amendment shall take effect immediately upon its passage" into the charter, which then makes that whole section read a bit strangely.  

Reactions
Amendments #4 and #6 are clearly attempts to address threshold problem for the Convention.  Amendment #5 is about being able to do amendments more easily in the State Committee.

I will dispense with #5 first:  

WSDCC meetings can turn out to be sparsely attended.  In fact, there is a provision of the state bylaws whereby special meetings can be called at a request of 25 members; this was even attempted recently.  Which then leads fairly easily to scenarios in which a charter amendment passes with 17 votes.  

So... Bad Idea.

#4, on the other hand, looks like a good clarification for the long term.  It retains the  "majority of all delegates" threshold while setting to be something that people can reasonably expect (also removes any temptation the  WSDCC/Eboard/Chair might have to pad out the delegate allocations just to make charter amendments gratuitously more difficult.
And I don't believe there's any similar danger of State Conventions being sparsely attended,

so this one gets a YES.

#6 looks unfortunately messed up.  As written it appears to make all amendments passed by the Convention take effect immediately, except that it neglects to strike out IX.A.3 which requires that all amendments take effect the following January unless explicitly specified otherwise.  Thus the overall language becomes at best unclear and possibly contradictory (as far as amendments passed by the Convention are concerned).

Anyway, I'm guessing #6 was a mistake or a victim of bad formatting, and that what was actually intended was to have Amendment #4 take effect immediately (i.e., the "this amendment shall take effect immediately upon its passage"  was not actually supposed to be in the amendment itself), so that the "to/at" change could then apply to reduce the threshold on the passage of Amendment #3, which I'm guessing was the whole point of this exercise.

One might suppose that the Powers That Be could rationalize things, combining #4 and #6 into a single vote on #4 along with (possibly) a subsidiary vote on whether #4 takes effect immediately (most likely being done as an amendment to the motion that introduces #4), in which case #6 can just be completely withdrawn.  

On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd want to count on this.  Strictly speaking, it's up to the amendment submitter to get stuff right the first time; the chair et al don't actually have the authority to change things in any substantive way.

Never mind that Amendment #3 might well come up for a vote first anyway.  Preventing that will be a matter of amending the Agenda (and someone will have to be ready at the microphone to do this when the agenda first comes up for approval if it's not already in the correct order).

At this point we're deep in Parliamentary Maneuver Hell.

Perhaps a better way to do this would be as follows:  

The very first amendment that comes up for a vote, whichever it is, will entail at some point a ruling from the chair as to what necessary vote threshold actually is, be it a majority of all delegates present, majority of all delegates elected, or majority of all possible delegates (1001).  If it's one of the latter, someone should immediately appeal from the decision of the chair, at which point the body -- which always theoretically has the final word -- then gets to vote on what the threshold will actually be.  This dispenses with the need for Amendments #4/#6 though it WILL require Someone Well Steeped in Parliamentary Shit being Very Quick on the microphone (I am not volunteering, mostly because I don't really qualify)

Anyway, I guess we'll see how this goes.

Current Votes
Yes on any agenda amendment to move #4 ahead of #3
Yes on #4 and on any amendment/specification that it take effect immediately
Yes on #3 (mainly on the basis that this should have passed in 2006)
No on #5