I don't really care about immigration policy all that much, but Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo does. So he tried to get his views adopted in the Republican party platform.
When that failed, he decided to see if he could gin up a floor fight at the convention. This was more political theater than anything else, but even so he ran into an unusual problem:
There are two ways to bring a matter to the floor: One is to convince six state delegations to support the motion for a floor debate—a virtual impossibility, Tancredo realized; the other is to get 19 members of the platform committee to support bringing a matter to the floor. This latter route seemed doable to Tancredo, save for one problem: The congressman couldn't find out who, exactly, was on the platform committee. Running the platform process with all the discipline and secrecy that's come to be expected from the Bush White House, the RNC, citing security concerns, refused to divulge the identities of the handpicked delegates who served on the platform committee—even, in some cases, to other members of the platform committee.
The names of the platform committee members are a secret? For “security reasons”? Has the party leadership gone completely insane? (That's a rhetorical question, of course. No need to answer.)
And this is democracy, how exactly?
Of course they have to keep it a secret. The platform committee is comprised of active duty military personnel….
btw, did they ever reveal the names of the Republican delegates from Florida, Michael?
That is hard to believe. Please tell us where you got that info, Mr. Lukasiak.
actually, the first line is a joke. The RNC was telling the press that 3% of its delegates were active military personnel. Turns out they were talking about Reservists….and I haven’t heard back from them with regard to my question about how many of these are Selected Reserves (there are special reserve “units” for politicians where they don’t have to train…)
the second line is not a joke. The Florida GOP refused to release the names of its delegates to the convention (at one point) for “security reasons”