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crowonapost · #32 (**permalink**) 05-11-2008, 02:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SuperDelegate#12

Leave it up to you to engage in revisionist history. Let's see some proof.

Florida Gov. Republican Charlie Crist, center, signs a bill that moves Florida's presidential primary ahead of most other states on May 21, 2007.

Who sets the date for Florida’s Primary?
The state-run Presidential Preference Primary date is set by the Florida Legislature. In the 2007 legislative session, the Republican Speaker of the House made it a priority to move up the Primary to January, in violation of both Democratic and Republican National Committee Rules. The Legislature passed the bill, which also included the new requirement that all Florida elections have a paper trail starting in 2008. Governor Charlie Crist signed the bill into law in May.
Make It Count Florida - Florida Primary - Florida Democrats

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This epic moment in Democratic politics came May 21 when Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist signed legislation moving the Sunshine State's presidential primary to next Jan. 29. After that dramatic drum-roll buildup, this one-state shift in the primary calendar may seem comically anticlimactic, especially since the move got little attention outside of Florida. But six weeks later, it is slowly becoming apparent that Florida destroyed the last vestiges of sanity in the 2008 presidential calendar by moving its primary.

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Last summer, the Democratic National Committee, in the name of regional, racial and ethnic diversity, anointed four small states for special treatment in picking a nominee by barring all other states from holding caucuses or primaries in January 2008. According to the DNC calendar, the presidential race would begin with the Iowa caucuses as it has for three decades (Jan. 14), continue with the newly upgraded Nevada caucuses (Jan. 19), the traditional New Hampshire primary (Jan. 22), and then go to the South Carolina primary (Jan. 29), which had been moved up in 2004 to add a state with a heavy African-American vote to the mix.

The DNC, separate from Florida made the agreed to rules.

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But everything changed when Florida moved its primary as part of an overall electoral reform bill, which won unanimous Democratic support in the legislature because it also eliminated touch-screen voting. A binding Jan. 29 Florida primary is an explicit violation of DNC rules and should automatically trigger sanctions that would take away half the state's convention delegates and penalize candidates for campaigning there.

The Democrats in Florida supported it because of the Touch Screen debacle but they still shot themselves in the foot. The whole thing was wrapped in a larger reform package giving them little choice.

Here's the facts...

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The primary bill, which at this point had been rolled into a larger legislation train, went to a vote in both houses. It passed almost unanimously. The final bill contained a whole host of elections legislation, much of which Democrats did not support. However, in legislative bodies, the majority party can shove bad omnibus legislation down the minority’s throats by attaching a couple of things that made the whole bill very difficult, if not impossible, to vote against. This is what the Republicans did in Florida, including a vital provision to require a paper trail for Florida elections. There was no way that any Florida Democratic Party official or Democratic legislative leader could ask our Democratic members, especially those in the Florida Legislative Black Caucus, to vote against a paper trail for our elections. It would have been embarrassing, futile, and, moreover, against Democratic principles.
Make It Count Florida - Florida Primary - Florida Democrats

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Any possibility of the DNC brokering a fig-leaf compromise with Florida -- such as a non-binding "beauty contest" primary -- ended when Crist also scheduled a statewide vote on a property-tax limitation for Jan. 29. With state employee unions militantly opposed to this referendum, Florida Democrats will not agree to anything that would limit turnout on Jan. 29.

By putting the property tax limitation in the Republicans in effect put them in a bound corner.

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So it is hard to imagine how the DNC will prevail in enforcing its rules, which, incidentally, Florida originally supported. Asked in an interview for a scenario under which Florida would relent, Jim Roosevelt, the co-chairman of the DNC's Rules Committee, said bravely, "Maybe I'm an inveterate optimist, but I don't give up hope on that. Especially since the Democrats in Florida have played by the rules and the Republicans in Florida have put them in a difficult spot."

Florida election mayhem for 2008 | Salon News

There is no revision....it is only you whom revise history. I stay on facts.
Let me know when you can actually debate, Pink Bunny.