so that the national leadership hear our voices. A group of Democratic Party clubs in Northern California have decided to communicate with one another via a list-serve hopefully that will link together all of the Democratic Clubs in Northern California or even possibly the whole state. The motivation for this is from a strong sense that the clubs have traditionally been used to support the national party and receives instructions from the state and national party but that mechanisms for communicating back up were lacking. Especially in recent months we have seen some of our more active members leave because of frustration with the actions of Democratic representatives in Congress. Recently our club has started to take on national positions and communicating them to the state and national level. Surprisingly, we have received some feedback indicating that our voices are being heard. Therefore, we decided to set up a communication network with other clubs to let them know what we are doing and to invite them to also take such actions and let us know what they suggest. Hopefully, collective action from multiple clubs could get our voices heard, especially over all of the opaque lobbying activities that seem to determine the outcome of so much congressional action. We see this as an extension of the grass-roots and net-roots efforts to influence national party position on major issues.
As an example our first suggestion is to send letters to our representatives urging them to try to constrain an out-of-control Bush-Cheney from going to war with Iran. Our club sent:
“The Executive Board of the Davis Democratic Club in Davis California has expressed serious concern about the numerous threats made by US officials against the nation of Iran. Among other actions we are seriously concerned by the recent Kyle-Lieberman amendment that declares sections of the official Iranian military forces as a terrorist organization. We believe that given the wording in the authorization to engage in military action against Iraq from October of 2002 that this latest vote could be interpreted as expressing the will of congress to engage in military action against Iran. Last winter many of us as individuals voiced our concern about this dangerous situation and were reassured by some that congress was working on a resolution to request direct authorization for military action against Iran. This putative resolution was inexplicitly tabled by Speaker Pelosi.
In light of these concerns the Executive Board of the Davis Democratic Club has passed by a vote of 15 to 0 a resolution urging that Senators Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein and our Representative Mike Thompson work on reinstating a resolution and work on passing the said resolution that resolves the following.
1) That no previous congressional resolutions have authorized the Executive branch of the US government to engage in military action against the state of Iran.
2) No military action against the state of Iran will be conducted unless congress exercises its constitutional prerogative to declare war against that country.”
And we would urge others to do likewise.
This will be a pass-word protected list-serve where one person from each club will have posting privileges. If you belong to a club that might be interested in joining please contact Claude Garrod at: Garrod at pro2 dot abac dot com. Include in your message the name of your club and the name and email address of the person who will represent the club and have listing privileges. This project is still being put together and we invite any suggestions for ways that it might be improved.