Democracy just died in Massachusetts

Secret meetings. Parliamentary maneuvering for power grabs. Removing accountability. Nope, I’m not talking about Cheney’s energy task force, Frist’s nuclear option, or Bush’s handling of Abu Ghraib. I’m talking about the party of which I am a member, the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

The Massachusetts Democratic Party just held its 2005 convention and jammed through a series of egregious charter amendments to fundamentally change the governance of the party, consolidating power within the Democratic State Committee and stripping out accountability and transparency, even changing the open meetings rule to a secret meetings rule. To do so the chair of the convention had to engage in bald parliamentary maneuvering.

The details of the changes to the party charter are below the break.

The changes (which are not available online, because the MDP only distributed them to delegates in hard copy) include:

• The party, at all levels, can now make any meeting (and its minutes) secret  (old rule: all party meetings were open to the public).
• The party establishment must grant permission in advance for any amendments introduced at convention (old rule: anyone getting 500 signatures was entitled to a floor vote).
• The party incumbents get longer terms: 80 two-year seats are converted to four-year seats, making challenges more difficult (old rule: there were 80 two-year seats up for challenge in early 2006. The new charter is ambiguous on when those seats elected in 2004 expire).
• Independent voters who support a Democratic candidate discouraged from joining the Democratic Party. Independent voters must decide by Xmas this year whether they want to attend the gubernatorial nominating convention in June 2006. In 2002, potential Reich delegates could switch from independent status to Democrat until the day before the caucuses — which brought in many hundreds of newly registered Democrats in a few weeks prior to the 2000 caucuses. One might naively think that the party establishment would LIKE something that brought in many hundreds of new party registrants. No, they see that as a threat to be stopped, and have now stopped it.
• The signature requirement for platform amendments will become a much higher bar. It stayed at 500 signatures. But the number of delegates is going to drop, from about 3,000 to about 2,000 (that number is not in the charter, but is determined later this year). This year we needed to get signatures from about 1/6 of the delegates — in the future, that rises to 1/4. And it’s worse than it sounds, because MOST of the delegate cuts come from regular elected delegates, while the party establishment seats do not get cut.
• The party can endorse a candidate who lost the Democratic primary. The old rule was that Democrats were barred from endorsing anyone running against the duly-nominated Democratic primary winner. But that was before a progressive became a duly-nominated Democratic primary winner, in a race against a member of the party establishment. In 2004, a strong progressive beat an establishment candidate in the state rep primary in Somerville/Medford, and the establishment candidate ran in the general election as an independent. Party members could not endorse him. Now they can.
• The worst rule change of all is very subtle. It says that the state committee can override the convention. The old rules were that the convention was the highest authority in the party — we cited that often when the state committee tried to overturn the convention’s decision in support of the Mass Scorecard. Now they can overturn anything the convention decides. It makes future conventions pretty much meaningless, which is another step in the establishment’s long-time goal of abolishing conventions altogether.