Fourteen Republican State Senators in New Hampshire have introduced SB 271. It is a very short bill concerning national conventions of political parties. It says, “The New Hampshire delegates shall be seated and have complete voting rights.”
The motive for the bill is the expectation that in 2024, the Democratic Party will refuse to seat some or all of the New Hampshire Democratic delegates who will have been elected in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. The national Democratic Party has recently determined that it wants South Carolina to hold the first Democratic presidential primary, so assuming New Hampshire holds the first presidential primary, the New Hampshire action will violate Democratic national party rules.
Three times, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that national party conventions are free to set their own rules about which delegates get seated. Therefore, SB 271 cannot be enforced even if it is enacted. In 1972 the Democratic national rules did not permit winner-take-all presidential primaries, but California had such a primary, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Democratic national convention to refuse to seat all the California delegates. It also upheld the right of the party to refuse to seat the Illinois delegation, which had broken national party rules on the required diversity of state delegations to national conventions. Those cases were O’Brien v Brown in 1972 (the California case), and Cousins v Wigoda in 1975 (Illinois).
In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled in Democratic Party of the U.S. v La Follette that the 1980 convention had the right to refuse to seat the Wisconsin delegation, because the national party rules banned presidential primaries which were open to all voters (later the Democratic Party gave a waiver to the Wisconsin Democratic Party to allow the open primary to continue to be used).
ONE MORE MACHINATION REASON TO ABOLISH THE EC 12-23 AMDTS AND ALL THE ROT WITH IT –
DEAD OF WINTER PREZ PRIMARIES / ETC / ETC.
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NONPARTISAN EXECS/JUDIC VIA APPV – PENDING CONDORCET — RCV/IRV DONE RIGHT.
If the Republican sponsors really wanted to be vindictive assholes, they could add a 2nd statement of “any national party organization that denies seating the state’s delegates and voting rights forfeits their ballot access to the next presidential election”.
This probably won’t go anywhere anyway, but would get more media headlines that way. Republicans in New Hampshire if Democrats do as they intend are going to win the presidential vote anyway in my opinion, ditto Iowa…ditto South Carolina but that’s another story.
We’ve known for years that the New Hampshire legislature thinks that they rule the entire country in terms of presidential primaries.
New Hampshire Revised Statutes 653:9 says, “The presidential primary election shall be held on the second Tuesday in March or on a date selected by the secretary of state which is 7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election, whichever is earlier, of each year when a president of the United States is to be elected or the year previous.”
I would love to see some other state adopt exactly the same law. Then we could watch as they try to leapfrog each other, scheduling their respective primaries earlier and earlier, until one of them winds up scheduling its primary for a day that has already passed.
Primaries are unneeded.
So, what do they propose to do if this law is violated?
Run around in circles and be mad, or sue in federal court?