Skip to main content

Utah's GOP and the Limits of "Public" Participation

I caught this via Paul Rolly this morning:

Mike Ridgway has been an outspoken and obsessed pain in the neck for the Utah Republican Party for many years. He has taken over Republican meetings to call out what he believed were violations of party bylaws, unfair officer selection practices and cliques taking over the party.

The result has been resolutions barring the former central committee member, legislative district chairman and U.S. Senate candidate from holding office in the party and even attending Republican meetings.

Party leaders have justified the banishment by saying Ridgway has been too disruptive, and by pointing out the party is a private organization and can institute its own rules.


Rolly's conclusion is right on the money:

But what do you call it when it becomes increasingly apparent that the dominant political party can use the police and courts to harass someone its leaders don’t like?...Ridgway was summoned to the justice court in Lehi (Lehikistan?) Wednesday to face a charge of disturbing the peace. The complaint was filed after tea party organizers claimed he came to the private Challenger School in Lehi during a meeting where he was not welcome. [The charges were later dismissed]


My reaction to this is twofold: first of all, despite Rolly's misgivings (and I understand them perfectly) the Utah GOP is well within its rights, as far as I can tell, to "banish" Ridgway from its proceedings, since the Utah Republican Party has never claimed, and probably never will claim, to be open or transparent. After all, the GOP holds a closed convention and primary vote, which is why the eventual candidates that emerge from primaries here (Mike Lee et. al.) tend to be more extreme than even the mainstream Utah political scene.

This new wrinkle - Ridgway being dragged into court for attempting to "disrupt" a Tea Party meeting he wasn't invited to - is a cause for concern, though. Unlike the Utah GOP, the Utah Tea Party has made many loud noises about government accountability and transparency, not to mention its calls for limited, non-intervention-oriented government*.

To flex your muscle and use local political clout to jail a gadfly (Rolly refers to him as a "dissident," but I think that's too strong) smacks of the worst totalitarian impulses of politics and government, the same worst impulses the Tea Party supposedly exists to resist.

As a civil libertarian, I have to say that it drives me up a damn tree that Utah Tea Partiers (not all of them, but the vast majority) hate and fear government...EXCEPT when it comes to valid threats to liberty like the surveillance state or the militarization of local police or the slow erosion of due process and/or civil liberties. One exception that I'm very pleased with is the blowback Orrin Hatch may experience over his continued support for the PATRIOT act. As long as Tea Partiers are consistent in their concern about government overreach into the private lives of citizens, they have a friend in me.

Comments

  1. Are you trying to earn cash from your websites/blogs by using popup advertisments?
    If so, did you try using Clickadu?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apparently, Liberals Are The Illuminati

posted 10/5/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, sheeple, from my stronghold high atop the Wells Fargo Building in downtown Salt City, where I type this before a massive, glowing bank of monitors that display the ongoing progress of my 23-point plan for complete social control. Whether you want to demonize me as a "liberal," or prefer the Glenn Beck update "progressive," we all know the truth, and it's time to pull the curtain aside: like all left-leaning persons, I am actually a member of the Illuminati. How else to explain how much power my side of the aisle wields in U.S. American politics? According to conservatives, liberals/the Illuminati control the media * , science * , academia in general * , public schools * , public radio * , pretty much anything "public," the courts * , and Hollywood * . Hell, we pretty much control everything except for scrappy, underdog operations like WND and Fox News, or quiet, marginalized voices like

The Garden Is Dead, Long Live The Garden

posted on 8/30/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  The last two times that I wrote about gardening, the tone was uncharacteristically less “playful whimsy” than “agonized demon howl.” This is with good reason. The cockroach-hearted fauxhemian Whole Foods crowd at Wasatch Community Gardens, you see, did a terrible thing to me and many other people – they decided that agreements are for suckers and that what the world really needs is another blighted patch of asphalt rather than a large and vibrant community garden, and so they killed my garden (and the gardens of many others) dead, dead, dead. Forgive my bitterness: there is something about loving a patch of actual soil, about nurturing life from tiny green shoots to a luxurious canopy of flowers and vegetables that brings out a protective streak in a human being, and also a ferocious loyalty. The destruction of Sugar House Community Garden did not, however, end my gardening career – heavens, no! Instead, I and a handful of

Cult Books: One Good, One Terrible

  I’ve finished writing a new novel (stay tuned for details) in which the massacre at Jonestown in November 1978 plays a pivotal role. Both to research it and because the phenomenon interests me, I’ve read more than a few books on cults and cultic ideology over the last year.