BREAKING: Idaho GOP Votes 137 to 79 In Favor Of Rule Change — Un-Elected, Private Groups No Longer Have Control Of The Idaho Republican Party
Conservatives have FINALLY taken back the Idaho GOP from the RINO’s!
Moments ago the Idaho Republican party passed a long awaited rule removing voting rights from non-elected members of the executive board.
Until today, the leaders of three private organizations - the Idaho Young Republicans, the Idaho Federation of Republican Women, and the College Republicans - held ex-officio voting rights on the state executive board. The other members of that board are elected - the chairs of the seven regions as well as the state party chair, vice chairs, treasurer, and secretary.
While this might seem like small potatoes, those three clubs didn’t think so. They spend countless hours (and dollars!) lobbying to keep their voting rights. They warned that it was the end of representative democracy as we know it if the Idaho GOP followed through. IFRW president Tracey Wasden published videos of herself nearly in hysterics, and the IYRs got a group of young liberal Republican legislators to sign an open letter.
Yet it was all for nought. The conservative supermajority led by state chair Dorothy Moon was never going to let threats and rhetoric distract them from their mission of ensuring transparency and accountability. Despite all the hand wringing, despite being tabled for six months to give the clubs more time to drum up public support, the vote was not close. The Idaho GOP state central committee voted 137 to 79 to remove voting rights from these private clubs.
This is a massive victory for true conservative values in Idaho. These private clubs, far from expanding conservative principles, have often fought against them, working to open the Idaho GOP to more moderates and outright leftists. Many of the Republican Women openly endorsed and campaigned for Democrat Tom Arkoosh against Raúl Labrador.
These clubs are much more sloppy than the state party as well. The IFRW allows out-of-state residents to serve as officers, while the IYR officer election earlier this year was fraught with problems ranging from carelessness to outright vote manipulation.
Allowing the leaders of these clubs to have voting rights on the state executive board was downright antithetical to republicanism.
As Kootenai County Committee Youth Person Dan Bell pointed out in his speech, these three clubs have recently acted in concert, using their influence (1/6 of the state executive board) to tilt the scales in a non-conservative direction. Removing their votes was the right thing to do - for fairness, and for conservative values.
We are in the midst of a long fight to transform the Idaho Republican Party from one that represents big businesses, lobbyists, and special interests, to one that truly represents the people. Today’s vote was a major step along that journey.