The new platform is another hard right turn off the rails and into the weeds
When a candidate for public office in the State of Washington declares on the ballot “Prefers Republican Party” they are signing up to support the legislative goals and values of the Republican Party. After all, for many voters party identity guides their voting choices. It, therefore, behooves voters to pay some attention to the Republican Party platform, the statement of goals and values of the party to which the candidate is signing on.
On Saturday, March 2, 2024, approximately 450 Spokane County Republican “precinct delegates,” i.e. the current party faithful, gathered at the Spokane Valley Assembly of God Church near the corner of Broadway and Sullivan (see P.S. for more detail). One task they undertook was to update the Spokane County Republican Party Platform, a platform that had not been adjusted since 2014. (As of this writing that 2014 Platform, not the updated one, is still the platform posted on the Spokane GOP website.)
Emry Dinman covered the March 2 SpokaneGOP Convention in his Spokesman article “Secession, fluoride and hand-counted ballots: Spokane County GOP adopts first changes to platform in decade.” Here are a few of the highlights [bold is mine]:
The [new] platform also calls for the removal of the United Nations Headquarters, currently located in New York City, from U.S. soil and strict limits on the power of the governor to act through executive order during emergency situations, a response to the authorities wielded by Gov. Jay Inslee during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Is this a result of the ongoing conspiracy-laden blither about “The New World Order” that has emanated from many right wing church pulpits?
On a more local level:
The county party now supports actions “up to and including secession from the State of Washington” in the event the state government “continues to infringe on our Constitutional rights or the Spokane County Republican Party Platform,”
Apparently there was some controversy over this platform plank calling for secession. Even the man who has been pushing for his “Liberty State” for years, disgraced former State Representative, current Republican PCO, and current “On Fire Ministries” self-appointed pastor Matt Shea, voted against putting secession in the platform. As usual, however, he declined to discuss his reasoning with reporters. It seems unlikely that he has given up on his pet “51st State” proposal but would rather it not be displayed as a plank of the official platform.
The another Republican’s argument against declaring “secession” as a party plank was even more revealing [the bold is mine]:
Alene Lindstrand, who had served on the platform committee tasked with compiling the suggested changes, called for the secession provision to be removed. She argued that Spokane, the largest city east of the Cascades, had “fallen to the Marxists,” weakening the position of a possible 51st state.
The Convention went on [the bold is mine]:
The prior [2014] platform already called for identification in order to cast a vote and supported a “physical paper trail” for ballots. Now, however, the party also calls for removing all “internet-capable machines, computers and software” from the election system, an end to mail-in voting and a return to hand counting ballots, all while reporting final election results the night of the election, a proposal that current and former election officials from both major parties called unfeasible and unnecessary.
Clearly, these people have watched Trump’s darling, Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked documentary “2000 Mules” way too many times. Sane, pre-Trump, former Washington State Republican elected officials Sam Reed and Kim Wyman went on record against this plank in Mr. Dinman’s Spokesman article.
And then there are the existing parts of the local Republican’s 2014 platformthat have taken on new importance now that the Trump/McConnell right wing U.S. Supreme Court, via the Dobbs decision, has stripped away a woman’s constitutionally guaranteed right to make medical decisions about her own body. In the 2014 platform’s third paragraph:
We recognize the right to life from natural conception to natural death as inalienable.
On the third page of the 2014 platform:
The Spokane County Republican Party believes that the State of Washington must act only in a fashion that protects all innocent human life in our state and we believe that the states must have the right to codify the sanctity of life from conception until natural death.
We see the practical results of “from conception until natural death” in Idaho (criminalizing the standard of women’s healthcare resulting an exodus of Ob/Gyn physicians) and in Alabama (giving embryos legal status resulting in the closure of in vitro fertilization clinics). Stand by to see Republicans trying to legislatively intrude on the private, end-of-life decisions of competent adults. So much for Republican claims to stand for “Freedom”. The “freedom” they endorse is freedom to impose their particular religious convictions on everyone else as a matter of law.
The Spokane County Republican Party has adopted an extremist platform. Voting for people who subscribe to this platform (“Prefers Republican”) is voting for a party that has gone off the rails.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. The process by which this new SpokaneGOP platform was adopted began with the Spokane County Republican Caucus on January 13 held at University High School in Spokane Valley. Theoretically, there were 451 tables, one for each voting precinct in Spokane County. Theoretically, each table would be guided by an elected Republican Precinct Committee Officer (PCO) presiding over a gathering of Republicans living in that precinct. Then those sitting at each precinct table would elect a delegate and an alternate to represent the precinct at the March 2 Spokane County Republican Party Convention.
Since there are only 251 of the 451 precincts have an elected Republican Precinct Committee Officer (PCO) there are 200 precincts with no PCO to guide the process of electing the delegates in those precincts. We know from the reporting of Aaron Hedges of RANGEmedia that sitting around at least one precinct table was only the PCO of that precinct. It seems clear that many precinct delegates elected at the January 13th Caucus turned out to be the PCOs themselves. Whether anyone from a precinct that lacked a PCO came to be duly elected as a delegate from the Caucus to the March 2 Convention is unclear.
We know from Mr. Hedges that the Spokane GOP had planned on 1000 to 1500 delegates coming from the January 13 Caucus to the March 2 Convention. When only about 450 delegates advanced from the Caucus, the venue (and expense) for the Convention was shrunk down from the original, the County Fairgrounds, to the Spokane Valley Assembly of God Church (where the former chairman of the SpokaneGOP, Brian Noble, was at one time a pastor).
The purpose of the March 2 Republican County Convention (see Section 11.2.1 of the Bylaws, the party rules that govern all of this) was mainly twofold: to elect delegates to the Washington State Republican Convention (to be held April 18-20 in Spokane) and “for consideration of a Convention Platform and resolutions.”
The delegates who advance to the State Republican Convention from all of the counties in the state will be winnowed down to 43 who will represent Washington State at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in June.