| I put the [sic] in to fix the AP style: all small "d" democrats are celebrating this!
Frankly, I'm stunned that the courts would jump in the middle of party rules even though they do award caucasian Austin more than twice the delegates per citizen than in the Hispanic districts in San Antonio and along the Rio Grande: The party rewards past performance so Austin got 7 DNC delegates while overwhelmingly Hispanic El Paso with a similar size got 3. Of course, this IS Texas, so it might be a good idea to make sure institutional racism or its appearance is cast out of the state party.
I spent months working with Texans on the campaign, first on the ground in El Paso, then on caucus fraud and irregularities, then with Texan networks through Denver. I can say, this is the best news we've had in over a year.
While I was working on a documentary, I also had the pleasure of becoming friends with two great Democrats, Carl Davis and Roy Laverne Brooks, the first two African Americans to be top officers in the TDP. It probably isn't a surprise that they might have a thing or two to say about institutional racism.
What I learned from Roy, Carl, and the Dem stalwarts in South and West Texas was the party has cynically used race to pit Hispanics and African Americans against each other, and successfully minimized the power of both. Get this, Vice Chair Brooks ran to unseat white good old boy Boyd Richie. In a year when our first African American candidate was on the way to the presidency, a highly popular African American woman was effectively not allowed to run for office. Let that sink in.
According to Brooks, she ran on a platform of reforming caucuses so she could enfranchise the sort of voters who are the subject of the LULAC suit, but was the subject of a wave of abuse from the good old boys and the Obama campaign, who had traded endorsements. Richie would endorse Obama before the state convention in the heat of the allegations of irregularities and the Obama campaign would support Richie over his African American challenger. Brooks, a superdelegate who had endorsed Obama, was threatened with having her DNC credentials stripped if she carried out her campaign for office. At the Austin convention, Vice Chair Brooks' state convention credentials were "lost" for something like 7 hours so she could not even enter the venue to campaign.
In interviews for the film, I kept hearing the same disheartening complaint, that caucuses were invented to favor the white male insiders already in power, and the system this year did nothing to change the dynamic. The irony was not lost that Barack Obama's coldly exploitative caucus machine would use an artifact of institutional racism to disenfranchise other minorities.
So, wow. I've said no one goes to jail for what happens in a caucus, but this might be the next best thing, the courts directing the Justice Department to dismantle what amounts a discriminatory invitation for wholesale vote theft.
Fingers crossed. This is an excellent step. |
