Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 16, 1994                   TAG: 9405170013
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE GRAND OLD VOLUNTARY ASSN.

But these days, the Virginia Republican Party - or club, or society, or whatever it thinks it is - is outdoing itself. It's pretending that it's not a political party.

That's the excuse party officials offer for the stiff- and shameful - tariff of $45 per head charged any delegate to its state convention; that is, any Republican who wants to exercise the privilege of helping select his or her party's Senate nominee.

The fee is under challenge in a lawsuit filed the other day in Charlottesville by three University of Virginia law students. One of the three also claims that the North campaign offered to pay his way, after he indicated he might support North against rival candidate James Miller.

"Our process could hardly be labeled 'exclusionary,'" sniffed state GOP Chairman Pat McSweeney in response to the suit. "There are more than 14,600 delegates already certified to our June convention."

Au contraire, Chairman Pat. You could certify 100,000 delegates and it would still be exclusionary, a fraction of the number of Republicans in Virginia who could participate if the selection of a candidate were by primary election rather than state convention. It's not just the $45 fee (which, for 14,600 people, comes out to the more than $650,000.) It's also the cost, in time as well as money, of an out-of-town weekend. The system skews the process in favor of the party hacks and true believers for whom the price is a bargain.

Granted, much the same can be said any time a convention is used to select statewide candidates - which Virginia Democrats, despite their admirable turning this year to a primary election to choose their Senate nominee, are as prone to do as the Republicans.

But the state GOP has a little twist in the way it does its convention business that makes the process particularly ugly. The dirty little secret about the big state-convention crowd of which McSweeney brags? They get the crowds by rendering their local caucuses meaningless.

Virtually anyone can be a fractional-vote delegate to the state convention, provided he or she is willing to meet the expense (or, ominously, accept the vote-buying gratuity from an interested campaign). But no one goes to the state convention as a pledged delegate, or one otherwise bound by local-caucus instructions. In other words, you must go to the state convention to have a say; a Republican who can afford to attend only the local meeting is shut out of any voice.

Regardless of how the court case is decided, the $45 fee thus smells very much like a poll tax. Not so, McSweeney said in his statement, because "we are a voluntary association conducting our own nominating convention, without any participation by government" - unlike a primary election, he said, in which the taxpayers pick up the cost.

So, OK, $45 isn't a tax; it's, oh, club dues or something. But if the Republican Party of Virginia is indeed to be merely a voluntary association, unconnected to government, then there is much work to be done.

Consistency demands, for example, that legal requirements for Republican representation on election boards and as election observers be abolished. All Virginia officeholders elected as Republican candidates should consider resigning on the grounds they were unwittingly elected under false pretenses, since it turns out that it wasn't a political party that nominated them but merely a voluntary association. (They could then run in special elections as independents.) Work should begin on constructing a true Republican party in Virginia, which perhaps should sue for copyright infringement against the voluntary association that currently calls itself "The Republican Party of Virginia." The five non-Democrats in Congress from Virginia should withdraw from the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate until such time as they can be nominated by a Republican political party rather than a voluntary association. Much else, no doubt, could be added to the list.

Ridiculous? Of course. But no more ridiculous than the fiction that a major political party is simply a voluntary association, or that there's very much good about the exclusionary, corrupting system that the Virginia GOP is using to select its Senate candidate.