CDP inside baseball time.

I made a post earlier about the CDP Legislative Action Committee that I refuse to link to because it was that shoddy.  Essentially, the piece implied that there was a subcommittee meeting in Sacramento this upcoming Tuesday because John Hanna was unhappy with the way the Committee currently functions.

That’s not at all true, and I apologize for the implication.  After further discussions with more of the people involved, I have come to realize that there are plenty of issues with the Legislative Action committee as it currently stands that need resolution, including, but not limited to:

Message consistency.  The Party already has two policy committees–platform and resolutions.  Should the Legislative Action committee be a third policy committee, or a legislative action “branch” of the other policy committees?  Should the Legislative Action committee only support bills for which it can find a precedent for party support in a resolution or in the Party Platform?

What types of bills?  Should the committee consider federal, state and local bills, or just state bills?

Gut-and-amend.  If the committee supports a bill that then gets gutted and amended in a legislative session, how can the Party’s support of the bill be rescinded?

Propositions.  Should the LAEOC consider ballot measures?  Technically, props are legislation, but currently those decisions are handled by the Resolutions Committee.  There’s some inconsistency there.

Those are some of the key issues, though there are plenty of other logistical issues involved as well–and in this, we haven’t even discussed the “action” portion of the Legislative Action Committee’s responsibility.  Bear in mind that I still stand by everything I wrote about John Hanna’s solution to these problems–his emails do speak for themselves, after all–but it was severely wrong of me to imply that that’s the only reason the Rules Committee was meeting on this topic.

If it were up to me, the Legislative Action committee would convene to decide a slate of key California bills (including propositions) the Party should support, in conjunction with the Resolutions and Rules Committee, and should then be tasked with developing a Legislative Action Plan to promote the passage of those bills.  If any of these bills were to be substantially gutted and amended, the Chair would have the discretion to rescind the Party’s support.

Maybe I’ll submit that as written testimony–even though I’m not any committees any more.