Stunning news today as Republican Party of Los Angeles County Chairman Jane Barnett has sprung a surprise on everyone involved with County activities.
Jane Barnett issued an email from the County website asking people to re-elect her as Chairman.
She really threw down the gauntlet to all challengers.
Not only did she hype her own achievements, but she also included a list of her supporters.
In my opinion, this is clearly an attempt to intimidate any potential challengers.
(Easy to win an election when the votes are already in your pocket.)
I have written before about the chaotic situation at the County level for the Republican Party.
Lawsuits, threats, counter suits, etc....
The court battle continues on appeal.
My problem with this whole situation is the way that people went about it.
If some supporters weren't happy with the leadership, they should have done something five months earlier during the scheduled election in December of 2008.
But to come storming into a meeting in May of 2009 and say that you have the right to vote every officer out of his job? That is lunacy. The new officers, in my opinion, pulled off a coup d'etat that night. It was a sudden and illegal seizure of power.
Jane Barnett - Chairman, Gary Aminoff - First Vice Chairman, John Cozza - Second Vice Chairman, Alex Burrola - Secretary, Davina Keiser - Assistant Secretary, Leonard Lanzi - Treasurer, Gwen Patrick, Assistant Treasurer.
In the minds of these new officers, it was O.K. with them to justify invalidating the results of a legitimate election just because they weren't happy. If the above-mentioned officers were so set on controlling the County GOP, then why didn't they run for those posts in the legitimate December election?
Instead, they used the tactics of banana-republic dictators to achieve power.
Then at a later meeting, Jane Barnett and Gary Aminoff decided to throw out elected members of the County Central Committee. It was a shocking display of arrogance.
How in God's name did they feel they had the right to disenfranchise thousands of voters who actually elected Jose Aguilar and Robert Vaughn? On a mere whim of theirs?
Any person who participated in any of this nonsense is showing just how far they have strayed from Republican core values. Seeking power for the sake of being in power is not a Conservative value. It is the opposite of what we believe in.
The people who carried out this coup d'etat felt justified on a whim to invalidate the results of a legitimate pre-planned and announced election. They violated the personal freedoms of those officers to finish the terms they had been elected to...which had been agreed upon by all parties involved.
These plotters also failed to see the bigger picture and destroyed trust between the party and the voters by throwing elected officers out of the party, effectively saying to those voters that "you are unimportant and your voices are not worth listening to."
If this is what these people in power think it means to be a Republican in California, then I am ashamed to call myself one. If you can't follow the rule of law, then you have no business whatsoever being in power.
These new leaders have lost every single election they have injected themselves into, and I think it's time for a change. We need strong, principled leaders of character in our party.
Not ones who will blindly follow people like Whitman and Fiorina over the cliff.
