Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 5, 1995 TAG: 9510050041
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Is it also illegal?
The answer to that question, argued this week before the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices opened their fall term, is murkier. The status of political parties in America, and in Virginia, is too ill-defined for certainty.
Political parties are not simply arms of the state. If they were, it would greatly strengthen the arguments of three University of Virginia law students who are challenging the fees as an illegal poll tax. The role of parties - at least in the sense of permanent, national institutions - isn't mentioned in the Constitution. The nation's founders tended to think of parties as "factions."
Neither, however, are political parties - the two major ones, anyway - merely the "voluntary associations " that Virginia GOP officials like to claim in arguing a First Amendment right to handle the party's affairs as they see fit. Parties do not, for example, have the right to exclude blacks from their conventions.
The parties are accorded special status by Virginia elections laws. When a party chooses a primary to select its candidates, the machinery of the state is employed to do so. In many states, parties are required to nominate candidates via primary elections - which inarguably fall under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court's decision may rest, therefore, on the justices' view of how closely GOP state nominating conventions resemble a primary.
Party officials were proud of the huge size (some 15,000 voting delegates) of the 1994 convention that gave rise to the lawsuit (and that nominated Oliver North for the U.S. Senate seat ultimately retained by Democrat Charles Robb). That very size, however, weakens the argument that this was nothing like a primary election.
Moreover, for a Republican in Virginia to have a voice in the selection of a nominee, he or she had to attend the state convention. Party rules made no provision for local conventions or caucuses to commit delegates to specific candidates at the state convention. If you wanted to vote for North or his opponent for the nomination, you had to pay a fee for the privilege. It didn't help that campaigns picked up the tab for some supporters to attend.
The legal battle would be rendered irrelevant, of course, if the GOP dropped the fees, $45 per person in this instance. Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, the fees cast the party in a poor light.
An even better answer - and this goes for Virginia Democrats as well - would be a commitment to nominating candidates by primary election rather than conventions. Even without formal fees, conventions by their nature make it difficult for many to participate. The time, travel and cost of attending a nominating convention tend to magnify the influence of partisan, economic and ideological elites.
Primaries are no panacea, to be sure, for the ills of the body politic. But the political parties - those hybrid creatures that are sort of governmental and sort of not - have an obligation to try to include rather than exclude, and to make citizens' participation in the exercise of democracy less rather than more difficult.
by CNB