I heard from Moon Griffon a few days ago that the Lafayette Republican Parish Executive Committee (RPEC) went back and changed a vote after a meeting to endorse Jean-Paul Coussan in the Public Service Commission District 2 race.  While I am not from Lafayette, I have served as an RPEC member.  This makes all Republican PEC’s look very bad.  This type of shenanigan does not help our party…

Let me go back and set the stage here.  I don’t have all of the details and am trying to piece this together (it was apparently supposed to be kept quiet), but I am confident that I can give you the gist of the story.  Earlier in the week, the Lafayette RPEC held their regular public meeting where they voted on whether or not to endorse the Republican candidates in the PSC District 2 race.  Those candidates are state senator Jean-Paul Coussan and former state senator Julie Quinn.  It is reported that Coussan was allowed to speak to the committee to try and win their endorsement while Quinn was not given that opportunity.  Oh, by the way, Coussan is the sitting state senator from a Lafayette district, so that is his home PEC.  Quinn is from Baton Rouge.  Are you beginning to get the picture?

Somewhere along the way, the plan seems to have derailed, because nine votes were needed for an endorsement and neither candidate got the nine votes needed.  The word is that the vote was 8-6.  So, no endorsement was made.  This sent something of a shockwave through the party, since to those of us outside of Lafayette, we assumed it was a done deal and the Lafayette RPEC would vote to support their local senator.  The fact that Coussan could not get that endorsement in the public meeting raised a lot of eyebrows.

Apparently, this was not acceptable to the Lafayette establishment.  The next day (or so the story goes), someone changed their vote and the endorsement was awarded to Coussan.

This clearly looks bad to the public.

Let’s be blunt, it stinks to high heaven of backroom dealings.  This makes our party look like we are not trustworthy, and with good reason.  But I will go one further.  I am not an attorney or a parliamentarian, but it appears that this vote went against RPEC rules and procedures even if it did meet their local bylaws, and was quite possibly not even a legitimate vote.  The RPEC rules provided by the state Republican party (in the LA GOP, the RPEC Handbook) have no provision for handling committee business outside of an official meeting where there is a quorum present.  It doesn’t seem that there is any way that this vote change occurred in a meeting with a quorum present since no one knew about it until after the fact…

This type of action certainly is prohibited by Robert’s Rules of Order, which governs most RPEC’s.  Here is the excerpt that addresses vote changes:

Robert’s Rules of Order, Article VIII, Vote, 46. –  A member has the right to change his vote up to the time the vote is finally announced. After that, he can make the change only by permission of the assembly, which may be given by general consent; that is, by no member’s objecting when the chair inquires if any one objects. If objection is made, a motion may be made to grant the permission, which motion is undebatable. 

Again, it seems pretty clear that this can only take place during the meeting.  We claim to be the party of law and order, and of fairness, but how can anyone take us seriously when our leadership pulls stunts like this?  We simply have to be better than this as a party.  Thanks a lot for the big black eye, Lafayette.