#ncgop-con: Eleven hours, THREE VOTES. (WTF?) Brody, Triumphant. (Chu? Robbed.) Bags on heads.
Let’s see. It appears the NCGOPe — now allegedly a super-efficient, finely-tuned machine since Hasan Harnett is out and Dallas Woodhouse’s grandpa is in charge — took ELEVEN HOURS to hold THREE votes. THREE. Count ’em. (Even Jones Street can do better than that. And they said HASAN CAN’T RUN A MEETING ???)
What were the three votes, you ask? One was a voice vote on a back-room, machine-approved slate of delegates to the national convention in Cleveland. One was for 
national committeeman. (State Rep. Mark Brody handily defeated David Lewis surrogate Greg Gebhardt.) The third?
The third was a highly dubious vote for committeewoman. Everyone was thrown for a loop when Ada Fisher nominated herself for reelection from the floor. EVERYONE had expected Fisher to drop out in favor of the treacherous Zan Bunn — sidekick to the even more treacherous Ma Cotten.
A paper ballot vote was held for the committeeman race. But, for some reason, they decided to do a standing vote (stand if you are in favor) for the committeewoman position. (At least they didn’t make people mark paper ballots IN PENCIL, like they did in the questionable Hasan ouster meeting last weekend.)
Miriam Chu — president of Moore Tea Citizens — offered up a spirited challenge to Fisher. In the end, Fisher edged her out by THREE VOTES. (Of course, calls for a recount were denied.) 
Interestingly, THREE members of the Moore County delegation — Harold Mendelson, Bob Tweed, and Lorraine Tweed — refused to stand in support of Chu. You wonder what could make some people so bitter and petty as to sabotage an opportunity for an RNC committeewoman from your own county.
It was also interesting to see few if any votes for Chu from the Randolph County delegation. Sources tell me members of the Randolph Tea Party were withholding votes from Chu as part of a grudge they held against Moore Tea Citizens when Dee Park was president. (Park has little to nothing to do with MTC anymore.)
Well, Fisher — who has been a loyal servant for the NCGOPe AND the GOPe during her time on the RNC — got rewarded for her past treachery. In the 2012 election cycle, she was caught on numerous occasions acting on behalf of the GOPe and against the directives and wishes of state party leaders.
We should celebrate the elevation of Brody. All indications are that he will be a principled conservative voice at the RNC. The NCGOPe got somewhat of a firewall — by a margin of 3 votes — with the reelection of Fisher.
The Hasan Harnett ordeal and this committeewoman race have helped identify TWO conservative stars to rally behind in the NCGOP — Lee County’s 
Jim Womack and Moore County’s Miriam Chu. Hopefully, both of them will keep holding their heads high and stay in the fight.
Party Unity? Here’s some video evidence of that party unity Becki Gray was chirping about on NC Spin.
I was a delegate on the floor who voted for Ms. Chu. The standing vote was a result of a poorly planned and executed meeting that was rapidly running out of time and delegates.
The decision to have a standing vote occurred because the convention was running over time already. Many delegates had gone to the dinner or gone home, the convention was less than 150 delegates from losing quorum. The rule change to use a standing vote passed overwhelmingly, and the main objection was about the candidates getting an opportunity to speak. If there wasn’t a standing vote, there would have likely been no vote at all.
The chair said (unofficially), that in the case of no vote being held, Fisher would retain the seat for 4 more years under the PoO. If it was an establishment ploy, Ada’s supporters would have just left en masse, called for quorum, and she would have kept the seat by default.
The length of the meeting was the result of some serious stall ball by the establishment crowd around Robin Hayes. Either Hayes cannot run a meeting or this was deliberate. One example is that credentials dragged on longer on each occasion than I have ever remembered credentials doing in the past. That ate up some serious time.
Other delays were deliberately engineered by establishment operatives, enabled by Billy Miller. For example, the convention had voted to proceed with the National Committeeman and National Committeewoman races then move to the national delegates, but Kim Cotten-West manuvered to vote on the prevailing side so that she could move to reconsider that vote and do the delegates first, and proceeded to force a new vote on what the convention had just voted on. That whole process ate up a good part of an hour. Zan Bunn, Kim Cotten-West, and Robin Hayes were determined to do the National Committeewoman race last and all put their comments in on that. From that point on, it was clear they had something planned for that race. Changing the voting procedure to one that would be easy to manipulate turned out to be their scheme.
Also, in spite of the Executive Committee setting up a system that allowed a rival slate of national delegates to be offered from the convention floor, the establishment pushed aside those rules so that only the establishment slate got nominated and was then immediately voted on. Billy Miller helped facilitate this. This was very heavy handed machine politics.
While I agree with many of your comments, I do not agree with “poorly planned and executed.” The lengthy credentialing, protracted votes, and Kim Cotten-West’s redo on a vote were all intended to winnow the crowd of potential votes for Miriam Chu. Yes, the meeting was a disgrace, and the “standing” vote was not just a way to save time, it was a way to ensure that Dr. Fisher won. No one can ever prove the accuracy of that vote.
On Friday they pour the liquor for everyone and on Sat they conveniently run out of time. Happens every year.
No resolutions again, establishment wins again!
Why do we pay $90.00 ?
I’m afraid that this may well be the end of what was,once, an effective political force in North Carolina. It’s only a shadow of what it once was, and it’s now run by shallow, and dense operatives. They all need to get a real job, for once in their lives!
Mark Brody is a class act and will be an excellent committeeman!
Party elections start next spring. Want to change the Party? Be there, and take people with you.
I think these results bode well for conservatives next year. In spite of all the establishment tricks, Brody won and they had to pull some really stinky shananigans to barely edge out (or at least claim they did) Chu. What this shows is that if conservatives can organize better next time, we can show the establishment the door. Miller’s move against those paddles used for signalling by the Cruz crew shows that the establishment is scared. One key is that conservatives need to be organized to take every congressional district organization. The rinosaurs now running our districts need to go.
Yes, that is so true…..and so many people voted for Chu and didn’t even k ow who she was….their facade has cracked and it is now or never. We can’t back down at this point.
I can think of one district that I can say with high confidence is going to be taken over by conservatives next year (not talking about the 12th). I just hope it’s not the exception.
Good plan!
Warning to Donald Trump! Better have several crafty and talented Parliamentarians if the NCGOP Convention is a foretaste of what is to come. Motions from the floor will steal the nomination from you faster than a greased pig. The sleazy tricks of the NCGOP elite are a microcosm of what is in store for the “people’s choice.” Also note that Joyce Cotten is listed as a delegate for Trump, while her daughter, Kim Cotten-West, is a delegate for Cruz. Don’t turn your back, Donald!
Speaking as a non-delegate who used to attend every year, everyone should file a class action suit to get their $90 back.
You go there to get business done ONCE a year. You are denied the opportunity whether through incompetence or intentional tactics when the credentials report is delayed. (I volunteered as a database expert to build an application than can do credentialing, minus challenges, instantly, but was rebuffed repeatedly.) There was no debate on platform, rules, resolutions, NOTHING, except for a slate of delegates, a vote for National Committeeman, and a rigged vote for National Committeewoman.
I stopped going when the games got to be too much. I honestly do not believe any effective change can be made through the current set up. The hacks have too much to lose. The grassroots have jobs and families. Time just to walk away from it, stop funding it, and let it die.
That is exactly what we important people want you little people to do. Don’t go away mad, just go away. We do not want you or need you. Just leave and do not bother us any more. Let us hold on to power in the NCGOPe while we do nothing in the face of the serious crisis confronting our country. Let us keep rigging meetings to keep control like the rigged election of the National Committeewoman at this convention and the removal of Hasan as chairman after he would not follow orders from us.
A computer guy named Ken posting on here? We must always be skeptical of someone named Ken who offers to build databases…or hack computers!
Different Ken.
No, I live in Charlotte, and I’m not a “professor”.
The sad thing is the credentialing process would take less time without computers than it did there…
The problems will never be fixed under the current leadership. They are totally incapable of running an event efficiently. (How can they run government?) Remember Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
There will be a lot of (justified) griping about the convention and Woodhouse, but let’s see calls to action. Let me start. Get a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised. Read them. There are some online tutorials to get you started. Get the party’s organization documents. Read them. The Plan of Organization is only 32 pages. When you next observe the party’s misdeeds, you will be able to make knowledgeable comments about them.
Remember that s/he who laughs last, laughs best. As Republicans, we can always become unaffiliated and not support the party. Being unaffiliated obviously does not prohibit us from voting for a solid Republican slate of candidates.
The standing vote scheme was not something that just came up on its own. The establishment was smart enough not to use a Central Committee member to make the motion, but the fact that it was a planned scheme was clear from Billy Miller’s response to someone who made a parliamentary inquiry on the subject. In Miller’s response, he admitted being aware that something like that was likely to come up and having pre-researched it. It would not have been an average delegate that would have tipped off Miller that this was going to come up and to be ready. It would have been someone from party leadership.
Earlier, the establishment got caught short and in their scramble had to show the faces of Central Committee members, including Kim Cotten-west and Robin Hayes. That was when the convention passed a resolution to move to the national committee elections before the national delegates, and they moved to reverse that, so that could hold the National Committeewoman’s vote for last. Cotten-West made the motion to do that, and Robin Hayes took the very unusual step for a state chairman of speaking for a procedural motion like that. The fix was in on this race and it went right to the top.
Given all of that, there may well have been incopetence on other things like the credentials mess, but when other parts were clearly part of an organized plan, how likely is it that something that benefitted that plan really just happened by incompetence?
I am in NO way defending the party. In fact, I hope that these matters are aired in a court of law. However, I doubt anyone will push that hard even if there is a basis for filing a suit.
It was a LONG day, and it would not have been hard to predict that such a motion was pending. That’s not to say that what you suggest is not 100% correct. It is to say that accusations are flowing right and left, many being nothing more than conjecture.
It is not conjecture that Kim Cotten-West and Robin Hayes had their fingerprints directly on the motion to shove the National Committeewoman’s election to the back of the line, which was a key move to facilitate the change in election procedures, or that Miller admitted that he had been told ahead of time that a move to change the election procedure was coming.
The use of written ballots has been a huge time waster at conventions since they started doing it. That is what needs to go. In this instance, caucusing in counties and reporting the vote would have taken about the same time as the standing vote, but it would have had safeguards on accuracy and honesty that the standing vote did not. That is especially true since the establishment named the tellers. But the establishment did not want to go that way, nor did they want the candidates to have a chance to address the convention (except that Fisher was going to get around that by nominating herself). The whole scheme stunk.
So how many people attended this mockery of procedure? I remember the Fetzer-Adams chair battle brought close to 2000 delegates.
Well, Friday afternoon there were 1000 credentialed…..however, the first counted vote showed a out 460 on the room….then, Saturday morning, there were only about 970 credentialed….and Saturday afternoon, there were 1040. .. I don’t think they re ally know how many were there. I honestly think they were trying to pad the numbers… So that, they could call Quorum counts if they needed to.
The highest delegate count that I saw from the credentials committee was 1040, as I recall.
To clarify, there were actually four votes taken yesterday, the additional one being for two Electors. For some reason, probably ego or payback, delegates found it necessary to nominate 12 slates for this procedural position. The Chair would not close nominations so they were able to waste over an hour on this while we did the nomination, and “stand and be counted” bit.
Another chunk of time burn came in the morning when there was an attempt to take out a sentence in the rules which disallowed a delegate being on more than one slate for the RNC. The rumor was that the Cruz team (headed by Zan Bunn, Duane Cutlip) was trying to put together a “Constitutional” slate padded with more Cruz, never Trump delegates, and darn, if some of the names appeared on both slates, that was a big no-no, and could hurt their ability to have several shots at stuffing more Cruz supporters into the RNC delegation. So more convention time was wasted on that issue, which thankfully failed, and brought us to 12:30 and lunch time.
I would also like to second the high praise for Jim Womack. As the speaker for the defense at Hasan’s kangaroo court, and also at the convention, he is showing us how a real leader behaves.
Only two that mattered.
“chunk of time burn came in the morning when there was an attempt to take out a sentence in the rules which disallowed a delegate being on more than one slate for the RNC”
The line went against holding a open and honest delegate election. This line being ADDED was a game being played and it went against the intent of the executive committee discussion when the Ex Comm tried to set up a FAIR PROCESS for EVERYONE….. EVERYONE…. and I mean EVERYONE
The Ex Comm was trying in the process to make sure that absolute power of the chairman’s list did not corrupt absolutely and that was for this year and every year in the past
only someone with blind support of the committee list would have supported this line in the rules
if you wanted a open and honest transparent process with no funny business you would have struck that line on first reading it
Zan Bunn was not part of the Constitutional Conservative group organized by former Cruz activists. In fact, Zan was voting opposite of the position of the Constitutional Conservative group’s green and red paddle signals while those were still in use on Friday. Zan Bunn was consistently voting with the Central Committee establishment crowd, as was Garry Terry, Ada Fisher, Kim Cotten-West, and Joyce Cotten.
Your smear on the Constitutional Conservative group is factually wrong.
The Constitutional Conservative group wanted to get solid conservatives in the delegation to vote on things like the Platform and rules, the latter being a huge issue for future presidential campaigns. Romney’s people badly screwed up the rules four years ago. The establishment slate had way too many moderate / liberal Big Government Republicans like Tom Stark, Thom Tillis, Robert Pittenger, and Tim Moore, who I would not trust voting on rules or the platform, but these people were railroaded in as national delegates.
I have, thru out my life, tried to abide by the principle that right is right and wrong is wrong. It appears, that I may have been wr wr wr WRONG. So I ask, is right wrong and wrong right????? Observation and participation of the mechanics of NC politics during my last Friday and two Saturdays seems FOR SURE to suggest that wrong IS right but I guess that depends on ” what the definition of is IS.”
Browny Douglas
I bet Billy could define “is” for you. And then tell you, “but only in certain situations, then it’s defined completely differently”. 😉
Billy is quite a piece of work. He likes to cut off motions and other matters from conservatives before they get their entire point out by ordering them to ”suspend”. That way the bulk of the convention or meeting never fully understands the point they are making before Billy rules against it. This convention, he did the opposite for the establishment. One of them made a motion in a way that it would not appeal to the members, and even though the motion was not debatable, Miller invited him to ”explain” it. That allowed the establishment to get in debate on a non-debatable motion, but of course, no one was allowed to debate on the other side.
Correction: Randolph Tea did support Chu. Just got corrected by someone talking to one of them this morning. Just the estabs voted Ada. Including Alan McNeill.
its simple all Chu needed was bigger stickers and she would have easily won
and she should have apologized for her braces and how they might impact her speech at the very beginning of her speech because I think her braces impacted the tone of her speech to some people
but it was a rushed process at the very end of the day
Deliberately so. That allowed getting in a voting procedure that was subject to manipulation.
Patrick, I didn’t miss the humor in your post, but I know of two people complaining right now that Chu lost. Both were eligible to attend the convention as delegates, but they chose not to go. Had they and two more like them attended and voted, the outcome MIGHT have been different.
I totally agree and if you were a delegate and you did not go you cannot complain about the results unless you have a really really good reason for not attending like in ICU
we paid our $90 and we tried not to help ourselves but to help our party and our state and nation
and then this morning upon waking up I hear that Trump said:
“”It’s not called the Conservative Party,” he told ABC. “This is called the Republican Party.”
yea well if this is going to be the case we will have even more troubles because I am not going to blindly follow a party or a person I want every thing we do to stand on strong and real conservative principles based on the Judeo-Christian ethic that made this country so great for so long
After attending a convention or other meeting one person will say it was a room full of apples and the other person a room full of oranges but in reality the lack of logic in the room leaves these gatherings mostly bananas
Now you know three, and I was there.
Outcome would not have been different. It could have been 15 or 20 off and you would not have known. No way to validate. A friend walked up to Dallas after event and asked him why there couldn’t be a recount – from a learning perspective. He said, it wouldn’t come out the same. WtF??
As a Delegate I looked and did not see a table at the Convention for M. Chu info. I also did not find her. I was looking as I tried to do my homework before the Convention, and had also found very limited info on her web-page. Gotta get the word out!
The funniest part of the convention was when the Prosecutor for Hasan, Scott Cumbie, nominated his enabler and co-conspirator Tom Stark for Committeeman, and no one seconded. Stark actually did speak on his own behalf, and then finally did withdraw before the vote. Pretty humiliating.
Also, for the record, the credentialing dude Lemon wasted loads of time, thinking himself a stand-up comic. It was not appreciated by the long suffering delegates who just wanted to move on to business. Hayes, get your boys under control and run a professional meeting, one respectful of the time of the delegates.
That Cumbie – Stark charade was strange to me, too, until I considered that all it accomplished was eating time off the clock, which was precisely what the Central Committee crowd that both Stark and Cumbie are part of were trying to do, so they could facilitate the altering of the voting procedures for National Committeewoman. Since it accomplished nothing else, that would seem to explain what they were up to.
I also found it interesting that Billy Miller threw Stark under the bus on a key point earlier in the convention. I wonder if those in Haywood County who have filed the bar association ethics complaint picked up on it and are amending their complaint?
When someone on the floor queried Miller about his ruling on what ”2/3” meant in the PoO on impeachment proceedings, he replied that he had conferred at the April 30 meeting with ”the General Counsel” (Stark) on the subject and Stark agreed that it meant 2/3rds of those who showed up. Now, at that April 30 meeting, Stark was serving as co-prosecutor with Cumbie against Hasan Harnett. Wasn’t it a major conflict of interest for him to be making any sort of rulings, officially or privately, on a matter with a huge bearing on the outcome of that prosecution? Isn’t that particularly true when his ruling, opinion, or whatever it was, directly contradicted a ruling by a previous General Counsel on the same PoO provision in a matter in Haywood County? If the GOP followed the existing precedent from the previous General Counsel’s ruling, Stark’s prosecution of Harnett was dead in the water as he had no chance of getting enough votes to meet the threshold of 2/3 of the whole membership (as had been ruled to be the meaning of that provision by one of Stark’s predecessors as General Counsel in the Haywood County matter). As he was prosecuting the matter, should Stark have been allowed to stick his nose into ruling on a key procedural point with a direct bearing on the outcome of that prosecution? Does that reek of conflict of interest to you?
What the heck happened in Moore County? We’ll never know since our weekly rag, The Pilot, doesn’t report on politics.
There’s always a couple of people. We had a good turn out, but more of us should’ve been there. 3 votes. Decisions are made by those who show up, in numbers, to thwart sabotage.
The whole point of the excessive and abusive $90 registration fee for the business session, which came from Dallas Woodhouse and the Central Committee was to discourage grassroots delegates from attending.
Hasan Harnett tried to fight against that scheme and got thrown out of office for it. It has now come out that not only did the Central Committee deliberately set the meeting to remove him on a day they knew Hasan would be out of the country on business, but Hasan did not even receive a copy of the complaint against him. The terms kangaroo court and Stalin Show Trial both fit what happened Saturday a week ago very well.
Btw~ We never voted on switching the NCW vote till after the NCM vote. If you see Billy, tell’im I said “Boooo!” He’ll know what you mean.
Billy was definitely playing games this weekend, as he did the weekend before.
One of them was in the series of ”what if” parliamentary inquiries which served to eat up the clock and to plant certain notions in delegates minds. Asked what happened if this convention did not elect a National Committeewoman, Miller claimed Ada Fisher could then serve another 4 years, since a committeewoman served until her successor was elected. Talking to someone more knowledgable after the convention, it seems this is not true. At worst, next year’s state convention could take up this unfinished business. Yet the threat of 4 more years of Ada was used as a threat to change the method of voting which did give us 4 more years of Ada under very questionable circumstances.
Brad,
You are correct, but, IMO if the vote tally had reflected a 30 vote difference either way the final result would have been the same. Intentions were fulfilled. Put another way the ” end was justified by the means”. In the eyes of some that is.
Browny Douglas
So, who actually runs the NC Republican Party?
The paid staff (en-total or just the lawyers? or just the Executive Director?), the elected Chair and Vice-Chair (obviously not), slumming consultants, the Executive Committee, the Central Committee, the Governor’s office or is it “We the People”? Or someone else? George Soros (I’m not kidding)? I know it is spelled out in the PoO but the PoO doesn’t seem to reflect what really happens anyway.
If “we” can’t muster the gumption and the know-how to get control of our party back within NC soon how, in the name of the Almighty, do “we” hope to turn this nation’s politics around to leave a decent legacy for our children and grandchildren?
Who are the ones that need to be unseated? Let’s do it! Let’s not have a repeat of this year at next year’s State Convention. In a Constitutional Republic the power belongs to the people: next year is an NC state, District, County and Precinct leadership election year. Out with the garbage!
And, also, this business about Resolutions being ignored even after they are voted for has always shown that the organizers of the annual Conventions just view us, the hard-working Delegates, as sheep to be fleeced. They only want our money. Conventions are money-making machines. Well, folks, many more conventions like this one we just had and the tale of the goose no longer laying gold eggs will have a new meaning for the Republicans of North Carolina.
Interesting that this little display of bullying by our party leadership happened the same weekend as our federal government attacked our state (Republican) leadership for passing the common sense “Bathroom Bill”. At least that is something we Republicans can be proud of. Don’t cave, Governor McCrory. We need your inspirational leadership to grow stronger, not weaker, in these challenging times.
THREE CHEERS FOR THE THREE PEOPLE THAT HAD THE BACKBONE NOT TO STAND UP AND VOTE FOR MIRIUM CHU
signed THE IRISH PRINCE
Well that was smart
Signed
Somebody that was once on The Uncle Paul Show
Wish we could watch this clown show on video! It would be fun to get to see all NCGOPe members bending over backward and contorting themselves into pretzels to evade the will of the people.
I can hardly wait for next year’s show!
Who did you get your info about those with Randolph? There was only 1 Randolph TEA party member in attendance. Even the chairman of Randolph GOP has snubbed the Randolph TEA party and that was campaign suicide for him causing him to lose twice for county commissioner seat. As far as Dee, the Randolph TEA has NEVER had a problem with her. Daily haymaker, get your facts straight!