More well-read advocates of closed party primaries in Louisiana, particularly Republicans, may have become excited needlessly by a recent, if misleading, article about the possibility of applying these to all elective offices in Louisiana by the waving of a magical judicial wand.
Last year, when state lawmakers made considerable revisions to election process, they carved out closed primaries for certain offices – U.S. Senate, U.S. Representative, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Public Service Commission, and the Supreme Court, joining that of presidential electors – while excluding any local, all other judicial, statewide single executive, and legislative offices. Conservative activists in particular were pleased to see this move away from the state’s nonpartisan/nonpreference election system – technically not even a primary election (although often referred to as a “blanket primary”) but rather a general election with the possibility of a runoff where candidates regardless of party affiliation ran together – as it would produce candidates with greater ideological fidelity without members of the other major party able to exert influence selection of favored candidates.
Party activists generally had hoped to see closed primaries applied to all elections, but political realities – specifically, the legislators and governor involved in making this change all had come into office under the blanket primary, so they felt their office selection method not broken and needing no fixing – intruded. But recently, some false hope was offered for extension of closed primaries from a posting by a special interest group advocating legal and policy reforms through increased transparency.
Citizens for a New Louisiana circulated a piece by its executive director, Michael Lunsford, regarding Republican state Rep. Dixon McMakin’s HB 200, which would have imposed additional requirements onto the Republican Party East Baton Rouge Parish Executive Committee. The state generally regulates the governance structures of its recognized political parties, through demanding a state plenary organ, defining offices and their selection methods, and specifying parish-based equivalents with attached powers and duties. The bill would have made certain elected officials part of the parish party’s governing body, but was defeated in committee.
However, Lunsford, while apparently disagreeing with its content, spun the bill as a method to advance closed primaries to all elected offices in the state. He attempted this leveraging with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut, which affirmed that parties had the right of free association in terms of whether they could allow nonparty members to participate in their nomination processes. Specifically, a state couldn’t force a party to accept, or to prohibit, unaffiliated voters participating in the elections for elective office nominations.
But Lunsford then makes a complete apples-to-oranges leap. At its core, Tashjian is part of a line of cases dealing with a political party’s freedom to associate with or disassociate from voters and has nothing to do with state regulation of nomination processes. While the First and Fourteenth Amendments grant associational rights to parties, at the same time there is an extensive history of judicial affirmation that states may make parties quasi-agencies of the state, regulating their structures and nomination processes so long as they demonstrate an interest in the regulation that corresponds to the severity of the burden imposed in the interest of conducting elections.
Lunsford also mentions Eu v. San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee, but that case also has nothing to do with nomination process regulation, instead focusing on internal party governance in a decision that said the state could not justify such a heavy-handed approach in that kind of regulation in the interest of producing a fair and orderly election. Much more relevant to the question of nominations are California Democratic Party v. Jones and Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, which placed guardrails on a state’s regulation of nominations but reaffirmed that the state had the right to impose an electoral structure for nominations, including the use of a blanket primary system that Lunsford claims cannot be imposed if parties don’t want it.
Most baffling, while none of this is new or difficult to find, still Lunsford flatly states through “research associated with” HB 200 that “political parties are private associations with the constitutional right to determine their internal leadership and nomination rules” (emphasis in the original), and in case readers missed it, “a political party (not the state) decides who participates in its nomination process” (emphasis in the original). Yet any basic textbook on American political parties (a course I have taught since 1989, three years after Tashjian and before the other cases noted above) will tell almost the exact opposite: with the exception that a state cannot completely close primaries, i.e. mandate that unaffiliated voters may or may not participate in a state-authorized primary election, states are free to regulate the nomination process as they see fit, so long as the methods don’t create disproportionate burdens (for example, creating processes for participation of unaffiliated candidates in general elections so restrictive as to make that almost impossible). Or, if you like, I wrote about this 15 years ago.
So, no, there is no back door or magic bullet to having Louisiana institute closed primaries for all of its elections. If they come about, they will through the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box by voters who favor universal closed primaries putting in office enough lawmakers who agree with them on that issue and act upon that.
No comments:
Post a Comment