Another awful state platform committee meeting

The Iowa Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (IDP) State Plat­form Com­mit­tee met again on Sat­ur­day, March 17, to fin­ish our work on the IDP State Plat­form Com­mit­tee report to the IDP State Con­ven­tion on June 21. The dead­line for sub­mit­ting the report to the IDP is May 23. The room was sched­uled for 8.5 hours, We start­ed at 10:00 a.m., but we spent the first hour hear­ing from “impor­tant” peo­ple instead of get­ting to work. Then, we spent two hours on the first sub­com­mit­tee report (Agri­cul­ture and Envi­ron­ment) of six reports, and then took an hour for lunch. So, we killed four hours and only got one sub­com­mit­tee report fin­ished and still had five sec­tions left to go. If you’re doing the math, that would be 10 more hours, but the room was only avail­able for anoth­er 4.5 hours.

So, we sped up a lit­tle and did the next two sec­tions (Econ­o­my, Com­merce and Labor; Edu­ca­tion) in less than an hour each. How­ev­er, when we got to the Gov­ern­ment and Law sub­com­mit­tee report, that sub­com­mit­tee had not reduced their report to the sug­gest­ed word lim­it and we spent anoth­er two hours on that report, which put us right up to 6:00 p.m. While this was going on, the Health and Human Ser­vices sub­com­mit­tee decid­ed to leave the room and re-write their sub­com­mit­tee report, leav­ing us short on mem­bers who should have been pay­ing atten­tion to the Gov­ern­ment and Law sub­com­mit­tee report instead of doing the work they should have done before the meet­ing. When they came back in at 6:00 p.m., some­one said they had done such a good job re-writ­ing their sub­com­mit­tee report that we should just accept it with­out see­ing it. I saw a plank on med­ical cannabis I did not like in that sub­com­mit­tee report before it got re-writ­ten and it was still poor­ly writ­ten after they re-wrote the report, so I made an objec­tion I had planned to make ear­li­er. My objec­tion was upheld by the group and we pro­ceed­ed to review the sub­com­mit­tee report. So, here was my objec­tion:

In the 2012 IDP Plat­form, we had
Page 20, Line 367, Health & Human Ser­vices, Plank 159
We sup­port: med­ical cannabis

In the 2014 First Dis­trict Plat­form, they had
Page 9, Line 417, Gov­ern­ment & Law
We sup­port: Legal­iz­ing mar­i­jua­na
Page 11, Line 514, Health & Human Ser­vices
We sup­port: Fed­er­al and State laws allow­ing med­ical use of mar­i­jua­na

In the 2014 Sec­ond Dis­trict Plat­form, they had
Page 9, Line 385, Gov­ern­ment and Law
We sup­port: Cannabis legal­iza­tion, reg­u­la­tion, tax­a­tion
Page 13, Line 565, Health and Human Ser­vices
We sup­port: Legal/accessible med­ical mar­i­jua­na (MMJ)/derivatives

In the 2014 Third Dis­trict Plat­form, we had
Page 8, Line 359, Gov­ern­ment and Law, Plank 15
We sup­port: legal­iza­tion of mar­i­jua­na, with reg­u­la­tion and tax­a­tion
Page 11, Line 470, Health Care and Human Ser­vices, Plank 8
We sup­port: legal­iz­ing med­ical mar­i­jua­na

In the 2014 Fourth Dis­trict Plat­form, they had
Page 11, Line 470, Health and Human Ser­vices
We sup­port: Resched­ul­ing cannabis to a sched­ule 2 sub­stance

The Health and Human Ser­vices sub­com­mit­tee want­ed to go with “resched­ul­ing cannabis to sched­ule 2” or some­thing like that. I object­ed to it and said we should have “med­ical cannabis” instead, because most peo­ple don’t know what sched­ule 2 is. I said I had endured all of the delay to make this one objec­tion and I was­n’t going to be cheat­ed out of it. I won the debate and we changed it to “med­ical cannabis.” But, there was a lot of oth­er stuff in that report that end­ed up being amend­ed, and it was prob­a­bly 8:00 p.m. before we moved on to the last sub­com­mit­tee report, Inter­na­tion­al Affairs. We end­ed up leav­ing at 11:30 p.m. and we were still well over the word lim­it of 3000 words. We start­ed out in the morn­ing at 3600 words and we nev­er addressed that issue through­out the day. I’m guess­ing we left that meet­ing some­where around 3300 words. And, because the meet­ing was announced as being over by 6:30 p.m., a lot of mem­bers had left when these impor­tant votes were being tak­en. These meet­ings have not been brought to order prop­er­ly, so I have writ­ten a Plat­form Com­mit­tee Bill of Rights which you can find at: http://platform.idp3.org/.

I am pre­sent­ing my Plat­form Com­mit­tee Bill of Rights at our Polk Coun­ty Cen­tral Com­mit­tee meet­ing on May 22, 2014, and again at our Third Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict Cen­tral Com­mit­tee meet­ing on May 31, 2014.