Texas Republican Convention

Last week, I was a delegate to the Texas Republican Convention in Houston.

The following is most of a e-mails I sent my parents and Nacho.

Wednesday, June 11:

I'm in my hotel room safely. Went straight from work at lunchtime and headed out. The speed limit for most of the way to Houston is 70, but I rarely did more than 60. The engine couldn't keep up with the demands on it, and most of the time when I tried to go faster, the vacuum pump couldn't keep up, the vent valves closed, and I lost A/C. So I kept a pace where I could keep a decent A/C level, and not melt en route.

I got to the conventiton center a little after 5, and got registered. When I got there, there were people handing out flyers about a meeting some people were holding at 7, so I took the time to wander around and figure out where most important rooms were. Wen I got to the meeting, I found that it was a group that's got some major complaints about illegal proceedings by the current leadership. Things like the Credential Committee chairman unilaterally dismissing challenges without allowing a committee vote, the Rules Committee ordering that no recording devices can be used in their meetings, and the order of events set up so that the new state party officers are voted on before the Credentials (which has had above disputes thrown out) have been approved by the delegates. You can see the details at fairconvention.org. I haven't had a chance to find out the leaders' position on all this, but so far this group (lots of whom, but not all, are Ron Paul supporters) seems to have some legitimate complaints.

I expect tomorrow to be pretty ugly. . . .

I'll let you know what happens,

Thursday, June 12:

Well, I survived Day One. The first General Session wasn't as bad as I was expecting.

The session started at noon (well, a little later than that). First, we had opening greeting/prayer. Then a guy gave a very good, detailed description of the origins of the Star Spangled Banner, including a couple details I didn't know about, before it was sung. Then came the speeches. There was the State Chair(wo)man, 2 guys from the Host Committee, Governor Perry (who made prominent mention of the Mansion being torched), the Agriculture Commissioner, the Railroad Commissioner (which is a much more important job that it sounds, he deals with most environmental issues), the Candidate Resource Committee "pass the hat" collection, the Attorney General (trivia: he was jogging one day shortly after graduating college, and an oak tree fell on him, partially paralyzing him, and he's been in a wheelchair ever since), Lt. Governor Dewhurst (who I like a lot more than Perry, anyway), a taped address by the President, and the Speaker of the State House (each whom announced onto the stage all the state Senate and House members and candidates who were there). Decent speeches all, but when we were supposed to be done with the session at 3, and didn't even had the call to order until almost 4, it got to be a little too much. Then there were the speeches by the two people campaigning for the State Party Chair and Vice-Chair positions. One each was the incumbent, and the others were Ron Paul supporters (the people I talked about yesterday). Then came the call to order (Finally!). We then had the "floor fight" I was worried about, but was much more abbreviated than I expected, mostly because the major issues the Ron Paul people were complaining about yesterday didn't come up in detail, plus I got a panic call from work in the middle of it to distract me. Once that was over, and the few challenges were all resolved as the Committee recommended, we finally got to go to our Senate District caucuses.

There, we were all grouped by county, and had to elect a permanent chair, officers, and permanent members to each committee (Credentials, Organization, Nominations, Rules, and Platform). My county chair (who was just elected, but was my Fed/State/Local Govt. teacher at LeTU and has been long involved) had been appointed temporary chair, and was unconstested for the permanent chair. Then the people who had been temp. members of the Credentials, Rules, and Platform committees were also re-elected, the Organization seat was uncontested, and it was a who-cares vote between two people for Nominations (which just takes the majority vote to the committee; I voted for one guy because in his stump speech he just made a couple jokes about being qualified to take something from one room to another because he runs a transportation service). The only slow-down was the actualy voting and tallying, because the rules say that an under-represented county still gets its fullly-allocated vote count (if you are entitled to have 10 delegates, but only 8 show up, you have to multiply it up to make an even 10) and that means doing it all by secret ballot. So while we waited for votes to be tallied, we got a few more brief speeches from candidates and current state reps. Finally got done around 7, and after some more wandering about I came back to the hotel. (Clarification: "Permanent" means "for the remainder of this convention," not "forever)

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. I'll be going to a prayer meeting at 7, then our 2nd state dist. caucus session is at 9 (elect permanent chair/vice-chair), then is our 2nd General Session. The speeches should be good; Newt Gingrich is first, and Mike Huckabee is 3rd. Plus, all the good parties are tomorrow evening; I'm probably going to at least part of the time go to the Young Republicans' Karaoke party, but haven't decided which to go to for the rest.

Will report tomorrow (probably late),

Saturday, June 14:

Sorry about that [not reporting in on Friday]. I didn't get back to the hotel until just past midnight, and had to be there at 8. The convention's now over, so I can finally breathe.

Yesterday, the day started early, with a prayer rally at 7. Then at 9, we went into State Senate District Caususes again, to nominate people for State Party Chairman and Vice-Chairman, and State Republican Elections Committeeman and Commiteewoman. One of the interesting things about the Chair/Vice-chair rules is that one has to be a man, and the other a woman. Once the ballots for each of the above elections has been counted, and numbers for each county in the district rounded up to give them full representation, our representative to the Permanent Nominations Committee (who we had elected Thursday) is sent off to the committee meeting while the rest of us do the SREC elections. Then while the Nominations Committee is meeting, we get to mingle around the trade show floor. Picked up decent amounts of swag, signed a bunch of mailing lists, etc. Also, Newt Gingrich showed up for a book signing (I kid you not, the line had to have been over 200 ft. long), and I got to snap a few photos; hopefully they'll turn out.

At 1, we had our 2nd General Session. First the speeches: Newt Gigrich talking about the org he's running now, American Solutions. He's pumping a new political slogan: "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less." He's also working to gather 3 million signatures to a petition to Congress to open up domestic drilling, which you can do at the website. Next up was the day's keynote by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (who I'm not a big fan of, given her abortion position). Then came Governor Huckabee, who by far got the biggest acclamation. I went down closer to the stage to get some better pictures. I'm starting to think about getting a non-compact camera, with a much better zoom. After Huckabee came the Land Commissioner, nothing special. Then came a surprise; the program said we were supposed to get into business then, but instead we got a great surprise: Senator John Cornyn, introduced by a new video (which is the headline on his website; take a look, it's good and very Texan). Cornyn is one of the conservative heroes in Texas, so having him come in unannounced made a huge uproar.

Then came business, and trouble. The Ron Paul people made the same arguments about Credentials, so getting through that took quite a while. Next was the Organization committee, which was quick and allowed the state chairman to hand off the gavel to the permanent chair. Then the Nominations committee came up, and the incumbent State Chair(wo)man was nominated for reelection. However, there's a rule that if another candidate wins at least 3 districts, that person can be nominated from the floor, which the Ron Paul people did for their candidate. That required a secret ballot...of 5800 delegates. So ballot slips had to be distributed, county chairs had to make sure they got their people's ballots, the votes had to be added up (and then multiplied up if they were an understrength delegation), numbers reported to the state district chair, and once everyone was done with that, the numbers had to be announced by each district chair to the session secretary (it's weird hearing someone announce 137.8 votes for someone, and I'm still trying to figure out how a 0.9 abstaintions is possible). Then they have to add it up, and announce the results. During all this, I was trying to pay attention to the rules and platform that had been left on every person's seat before the session started. Fortunately, after going through the rigamarole with the Chair, having the incumbent win (a woman) meant the vice-chair candidate for Ron Paul (also a woman) wasn't eligible, so we got through that part by voice acclamation. Next came the Rules Committee, which details each ammendment from the previous rules. By the 3rd ammendment report, it was moved that the report be approved in its entirety. After a fairly short debate, that was approved. Then the Platform came up, which I'd already found a couple things I wanted to try changing in the 4 pages I'd been able to read. However, the first motion was to accept the platform entirely, and was approved. So there was absolutely no debate of the Platform, which I was rather ticked about.

At that point, it was about 6, we were 2 hours late to dismiss, and we still had 4 10-minute speeches to go. 2 for candidates for the National Committeeman, and 2 for the National Committeewoman positions. A lot of people just got up and left, since there the big-deal Banquet was supposed to start at 6:30. However, afte the speeches, they announced that the banquet would open doors at 7:10, and begin at 7:30. But that was a semi-moot point, because after the general session was over, we went to Congressional District Caucuses, which are completely separate from the Senate Districts (though Gregg county is in District 1 for both) and are one-person-one-vote instead of full-strength. Fortunately, all we had to do was elect a caucus chair and a delegate to the National Nominations Committee. We went through that in near-record time. Then the people with tickets went off to the banquet, but they were sold out long before I registered. I looked through all the evening's evens, and went to the only one I knew the price on: the Young Republicans karaoke party ($5) at a hotel about 3/4 mile from the convention center. I hung around there until after 11, and did my normal party thing (not very much besides sit around the the occasional small talk). Then it was back to the parking garage, and here to the hotel. The one good thing about staying so late is that I managed to miss the traffic from the Astros/Yankees game a few blocks from the convention center.

Today started off with the 2nd Congressional District Caucus, in which we voted on National Committeeman and Committeewoman, and then selected delegates for our district to the National Convention (3 delegates, 3 alernates). Again, the Ron Paul people put candidates up for most of the slots, but lost all of them. My County Chair was elected unopposed to the 3rd Delegate slot, which he had told me on Thursday that he'd wanted to go. Then we had a break for the committee to meet, and into the final general session, where we were now arranged by Congressional District (different seating blocks for everyone). We had speeches by the Agriculture Commissioner and Chairman of Texas Victory 2008 (guess what they're doing), then presentation of the US House members and candidates who were there, then likewise for the State Supreme Court (who are all elected in Texas) and Education Board (where they just won a big fight this week, and are re-introducing old-style English requirements like grammar and phonics to the '09 curricculum). Then we had to wait because the Nominations Committee hadn't finished, which took quite a while. We were all expecting another floor fight by for at least one of the National Committee slots, but were almost astonished when the Committeewoman loser came out right after the official Nomination was announced and gave a concession speech. Then there was no opposition for the Committeeman, and were able to dive into Delegates. That was more time-consuming than difficult; the biggest thing was that there were a bunch of misspellings of people's names that people brought up, until it was announced that they could do that at the mandatory delegate meeting after dismissal. We finally adjourned at around 4, but I didn't get to I-10 to get out of downtown until 5 (mostly waiting for the flow of cars from the parking garage to abate so I could back out of my space).

Then it was back to the hotel, where I've spent the past hour writing this e-mail. So now I'm going to go find some dinner, and tomorrow I head home. I'll let you know when I get there; feel free to ask any questions.

Sunday was nothing special. Just get up in the morning (after catching up a tiny bit on sleep), pack up, load up, and head home. Made better time and higher speed with my old truck on the way back.

I'll have another major announcement in a couple days. Just getting the last bits into place.

[Ed.: tweaked quotes. All the paragraph breaks got lost]