Last week, Congressman Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) made an audacious move for a second-term member in a chamber where seniority very much rules the day–he announced that he’s running to succeed Eric Cantor as House Majority Leader, the number-two post in the Republican caucus. Although Labrador is branding himself as the candidate of the party’s conservative wing, by all accounts he faces an uphill battle against current Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) But those hopes may have dwindled from remote to impossible this weekend, when Labrador presided over a state Republican convention in Moscow–home of the University of Idaho–that quickly degenerated into a comedy of errors.How bad did it get?? The convention adjourned without the assembled delegates voting on any significant business–including electing a new state party chairman or adopting a new platform.
Conventional wisdom holds that the tea was flowing freely in Idaho long before there was ever such a thing as a tea party. But for some time, there has been a civil war between the establishment wing and the tea party, largely mirroring the civil war in the national party. It boiled over in May, when establishment delegates took most of the seats at the convention. Undaunted, the tea party wing tried to take its revenge by having several delegates disqualified. The result was a raft of parliamentary games that made the gathering look less like a major-party convention and more like Student Congress at a high school debate competition. According to the AP, the disqualified delegates claimed that the credentials committee had been packed with tea party supporters.
By Saturday, the convention had degnerated into a farce when the entire delegation from Bannock County (Pocatello) found itself disqualified, and plans were in the works to oust the delegations from Ada (Boise) and Twin Falls counties as well. It was apparent that nothing would get accomplished by the time the convention was slated to end at 3 pm. When the inevitable motion to adjourn was made, a vote to overturn it failed after many of the delegates walked out. In what sounds like an understatement, one delegate described it as “a mercy killing.” Labrador himself told Idaho Public Television that he had fallen all over himself since the May primaries to “prevent what happened today.”
Boise State professor and longtime Idaho political pundit Jim Weatherby doesn’t think it’s fair to blame the convention on Labrador. However, he said, the weekend’s opera buffa didn’t help his “credentials for a national leadership position, either.” It’s hard not to agree. Labrador bills himself as being closer to the House Republican Conference’s right wing–a faction that is not only growing, but has a healthy amount of tea flowing through it. And yet, he can’t keep enough of a rein on his own state’s tea party, especially considering that Idaho has been one of the fountainheads of the tea party at the national level.
This latest instance of elephant-on-elephant violence appears to be a textbook example of why the tea party and its “compromise is evil” mentality should not be allowed within an area code of the levers of power. It also proves that Labrador may not be able to control the monster that Cantor helped create–a monster that ended up killing Cantor politically last week.
Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
