Kathye's report from the DFL Senate District 50 convention
OK, so in a fit of giddiness after Minnesota's caucus in February, Seth and I signed up to be delegates from our ward/precinct to the DFL (Democrat Farmer Labour) Senate District 50 convention.
I wore my Order of the Stick "I'm participating" tshirt and Seth wore a Vote Saxon shirt. We had fun, but it was very much like watching a trainwreck. Really, they spent so much time trying to include everyone, that no one was in charge, and nothing got done on time.
The call to order was supposed to be at 9am. Around 9:10 someone got on the mic and told us too many people were still trying to register, so we would start late. We were supposed to have a credential's report before doing any voting. But, they were running late, so we just went on and did stuff. Every so often we would have a special guest come in, and they would interrupt what we were doing to let them talk. The chaos actually was fun, since we had no place else to be.
I got to shake hands with Al Franken (he's running for US senate from Minnesota, and he showed up to give us a speech and meet-n-greet).
To decide who we would send to the state convention, we did a "walking caucus". It's an amazingly complicated process (just tried several times to type it up, and I'm giving up). Basically, some of the people there wanted to support a specific candidate or issue, and they had to get a minimum of 17 other people to group up with them in order to get a delegate to represent their candidate/issue at the state convention. There was a lot of negotiating between groups to get people to join up to get the minimum. Some groups at the end had very long names, representing all the sub-groups that had merged together (we were Franken/Fiscal responsibility, Supporting business in Minnesota, social justice, and veteran's benefits).
After all that, we had to go back upstairs to vote on resolutions. At the first caucus, anyone could get up and read a proposal, and if the room voted that it was ok, it went on to the district resolution committee to get merged with all the other groups in our district. So, you could stand up and say "Be it resolved that the Minnesota DFL party supports legislation banning the SciFi channel from cancelling any more shows", and if enough people in the room agreed, it would go on.
At the convention, we voted for which issues were most important to us, then we were supposed to get a chance to discuss any of those we wished to, and vote as to whether we wanted them to go forward to the state and then national platform. Unfortunately, the disorder that we'd had all day meant that we were way, way behind at this point, and only had about 30 minutes to discuss everything before we had to clear out of the high school we were in.
Here's a real resolution (didn't get beyond our group):
Be it resolved that the DFL party will not support any legislation that bans ownership of any breed of domesticated species and subspecies in the family Psittacidae, specifically parrots and parakeets.
Didn't know the anti-parrot lobby was so powerful.
So, we participated. Don't really feel the need to do it again, now that I see how it works (kept wanting to take control and get them organized, but I think they like not being organized).
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dubghall) wrote,
