To all SD11 constituents, we wanted to make sure you all got a report from our latest SREC meeting which we had on October 1st in Austin. The meeting went well and we had a lot of good discussions. As usual we had committee meetings all day Friday and then had our general meeting on Saturday.
One of the first issues that we had to deal with was the national convention and the presidential primary in Texas. We had to pass several procedural resolutions dealing with the presidential primary such as filing procedures and proper forms that need to be filed out for the Secretary of State.
We also had to approve the new rules of how our delegates to the national convention will be selected at our state convention. The RNC passed several rules last year stating that if a state's primary was prior to April 1st, unless you were a selected state, you received a penalty of how your delegates got seated at the national convention. We kept our primary on March 6th so we had to modify our delegate selection process to a weighted process in place of our historic winner take all primary. So this cycle our delegates will be distributed by how well each candidate does. We will distribute these delegates over the congressional and state wide delegates until all that are supposed to have a delegate is allocated. I can send you a copy of the rule if wish to see it now.
We also passed resolutions that stated if the Texas Senate has to select a new Lt. Governor and / or a new Governor we asked our Republican Senators to have a caucus prior to voting and select only Republicans to these offices. We also asked that all votes be on record and that they all promise to vote for who the caucuses want to select. We wanted to avoid a repeat of the situation in 2001 when one Republican and all the Democrats elected the Lt. Governor. Another resolution passed was a resolution is support of Israel.
An issue that we spent a lot of time on was how to deal with a platform plank that asked that we publish a report on the votes for our legislative priorities list described in the platform. Most of the debate was centered on what we could or could not publish. Representative Wayne Christian who chaired our platform committee at the last convention had the Young Conservatives develop a score card which he wanted to publish. State Chairman Steve Ministari ruled that this report card could not be published since it would violate our bylaws. He did create a committee to look into this issue and asked them to report back to us. At the time of our meeting they reported that it was a violation of our bylaws to publish this score card and had not completed any further investigation in developing any options we may have to publish some type of report. We decided to make this committee a formal Ad Hoc Committee to investigate options including any bylaws changes that may need to be made to publish some type of report. In the meantime we added a link to the State of Texas website for the Legislature where all recorded votes are currently on line to show all citizens what those votes were. This information has been on line for years and has been a good resource to determine how your elected officials are voting. This issue also brings up how we want the party leadership to be involved in primary races, a score card which was ruled a violation of the bylaws would provide an opinion of what these votes mean and how each member should be viewed. A report of their votes may not be a violation and will provide you with the information to decide how you think you elected officials are voting.
We also discussed the redistricting lawsuits going through the court system. As we met we heard that a court in San Antonio ruled that the districts drawn by the legislature violated voting rights and asked the suing parties to draw some lines for the court to look at. It was a bad ruling for us. The court will look at these maps and may use there maps are draw their own maps. There could be some movement in the maps in our area but most of the discussions are on districts outside of SD11. Please pass this report along and make sure everyone signs up at www.srecsd11.com to keep up with what is going on in SD11.
Thanks,
Dennis Paul
Sheryl Berg
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