Wesselhoft Being Asked To Abdicate House Committee Duties Over To A GOP Party Committee

Rep. Paul Wesselhoft, Chairman of House Elections and Ethics Committee

  So now that Chairman Weston's SB233 primary bill is in jeopardy, he claims that the House Elections and Ethics Committee must pass the bill in order give the State Committee an opportunity to voice their preference.
 Never mind that Weston had 2 years to convene the governing body for this issue, and instead he sought to sneak the bill through with smoke & mirrors.

  The house committee must finish it's hearings in the next 9 days, but the much-avoided OKGOP State Committee doesn't convene until the following weekend.
  For the past two years, very little of of the OKGOP policies were presented for a vote of the supreme ruling body of Oklahoma's Republicans (the OKGOP State Committee). Instead, several key decisions were simply edicts from Chairman Weston or sometimes he claimed his advisory board approved his view. 

  Well, now Weston is pitching the notion of moving our coveted 5th-in-the-nation presidential primary date back 5 weeks, beyond any competitive primary date of the past 40 years!

  No, Weston doesn't seem to like having the State Committee convene. Because when they do, he has to submit to them. Who likes that? Not Weston.

  I find this pleading to Chairman Wesselhoft for more time, to be a serious insult to the entire legislative branch of Oklahoma government. Why should Paul Wesselhoft and his colleagues on the house committee vote to approve a measure - not because they find it meritorious, but because they still haven't heard from the OKGOP State Committee.

Embattled OKGOP chair, David Weston

  Weston is asking a special favor of the committee, but more than that, he's asking them to break faith with their responsibility to fully research and approve bills which fully meet their best judgment of what benefits Oklahoma.  Instead, Weston wants the full house to vote for a bill based upon if a political party leadership committee likes it; not whether the House Elections and Ethics Committee has fully researched it's merits and found it advances the best interests of our citizens.

GOP Primary Year	Latest Competitive Date
1988	March 15
1996	March 19
2000	March 7
2008	March 4
2012	April 3
2016	proposed: April 5 ?

  And no one is asking the Democrat Party (who is also bound to this same primary calendar), what this does to their effort to select a mid western favorite in the DNC race for president.

  No, I believe the Oklahoma State Legislature has been played by Weston, and he's now asking the House Ethics Committee to do something entirely unethical. He wants them to abdicate their constitutional role over to a political party meeting which Weston now finally promises to convene.
  He wants the legislative committee to say that they approve his measure even though they neither approve his idea nor believe he has presented any evidence that either the GOP or Oklahoma Democrat Party have approved the idea in their supreme ruling bodies.  This is not the way good law is created and I urge the Elections and Ethics Committee to retain their dignity by carefully and thoroughly studying any bills before approving them.

David Van Risseghem