Last week, a Superior Court judge ruled against two Republican State Committeemen and efforts to call a Special Meeting for the purposes of conducting a fresh AZGOP election. Yesterday, that decision was appealed and at least one legal mind says the appeal has a good chance of overturning the judge’s initial ruling.
“The problem with the judge’s ruling is he basically said the court doesn’t have a role in the affairs of the AZ GOP and that the State Committeemen already have a remedy, which is to gather signatures and call a Special Meeting to fix things or to remove the officers who are obstructing their Special Meeting. But of course that ignores that they had to go to court because they already gathered signatures and called a Special Meeting, only to have the call unilaterally set aside by their Chairman and Secretary. So the judge’s proposed remedy is to just repeat the process, and that’s no kind of remedy at all.”
The case was filed by State Committeemen Bill Beard and Sandra Dowling, who have been the public leaders of the effort to audit the party’s January 23rd election, as per its bylaws. As Chairwoman Kelli Ward dug in and refused to follow the bylaws, an initial lawsuit was filed to force her to comply and allow the audit. That case is still alive in the courts as this appeal was on the second case that was filed after Ward and Party Secretary Yvonne Cahill declared that there were insufficient signatures to call a Special Meeting.
Interestingly, the appeal points out that the judge’s ruling acknowledged that there were enough signatures from enough counties to warrant the meeting, but that in spite of that, the judge wrote that he did not feel the court had any role in forcing Ward or Cahill to comply with the Party’s bylaws.
For their part, Ward and the AZGOP Communications Team wasted little time in trumpeting their victory in the first round, sticking with their message that the State Committeemen pushing for a new meeting were sore losers who needed to simply move on. No word yet from the AZGOP on this appeal.
The hearing date has been set for June 9th.