Liberty Maven

The Nevada GOP continues toward it’s own demise. Now look what they are doing.

Citing a lack of interest, the Nevada Republican Party has called off its state convention and will instead pick its delegates to the national convention by private conference call.

The state party broke up its original convention in April when supporters of Ron Paul local reports. hijacked the proceedings and tried to elect delegates for their candidate to the national GOP convention in September. Party officials tried to reconvene on July 26, but they needed a quorum of 675 and received only 300 RSVPs, according to

“With so many people concerned about the economy, it simply wouldn’t be fair for us to ask delegates from all over the state to spend money to attend a convention if we know that a quorum won’t be present,” state party Chairwoman Sue Lowden said in a release.

The news provides further evidence of a fractured and unenthusiastic Republican Party in some parts of the country. Last week, the GOP nominee in a North Carolina congressional race suspended his campaign while he confronted fissures in his own party. Polling suggests a significant “enthusiasm gap” on the part of Republican voters this year, which has left the party’s candidate, Sen. John McCain, trailing Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama in the presidential contest.

Paul’s outsider candidacy, meanwhile, attracted an unexpected seam of support in the party as he stressed strident libertarian themes in his run for the Republican nomination. Although the Texas representative has dropped out of the presidential race, his standard-bearers in Nevada continue to press his cause, hoping to shift the Republican Party toward the libertarian positions he advocated in his campaign.

During the Nevada GOP State Convention seven delegates had been elected before the convention was postponed due to time constraints (or at least that was the excuse). Since that time a large group of Ron Paul supporters reconvened the convention and elected delegates. Now the GOP establishment refuses to reconvene an official convention and instead is opting to select delegates via private conference call. I immediately thought that this must violate some kind of law.

As it turns out a lawsuit has been filed by some Nevada GOP delegates against the state party.

Nevada State Republican delegates are filing a complaint tonight, saying yesterday’s decision for the Nevada Republican Executive Committee to appoint delegates for the national convention is in violation of state law.

Republican delegate Wayne Terhune says more than one thousand delegates have been silenced with the decision and deprived of their ability to select national delegates.

“The State Executive Committee announced yesterday that they won’t bring the Nevada State Republican Convention out of recess,” said Terhune, a Republican activist in Washoe County.  “They shut down the Convention in April, and now they aren’t giving delegates a chance to have their voices heard.  This is a violation of the law.”

Mike Weber, a local Republican who has served on the National Republican Rules Committee, announced early today he is shifting the focus of his State Assembly race to make sure state delegates have their voices heard.  “Most Republicans are getting fed up with party leaders because of underhanded tactics instead of principled leadership,” he said in a press release. “The announcement that national delegates will be appointed by a small group behind closed doors only reinforces this distrust.”

There is little hope that this will end up favoring the Paul delegates, but they aren’t going down without a fight. The question is… can the Nevada GOP come through this unscathed? Only time will tell.

(Thanks to George Dewey for alerting us to this story)