The Mobile County Republican Executive Committee declined to remove two of its members who had come under fire for favoring a Constitution Party contender over the party’s own nominee, and in the same session it joined a growing conservative campaign against national education standards.
Michael Burdine and Lee James had faced calls for their ouster after they declared Constitution Party candidate Bill Atkinson the true conservative on the ballot, in preference to Republican nominee and ultimate winner David Sessions, in a special election for House District 105 earlier that year. Burdine had himself sought the GOP nomination.
An ouster falls short
Meeting that month, the committee failed to record the two-thirds vote its bylaws required to rescind the pair’s membership. As a result, both men remained on the committee despite the controversy over their conduct in the special election.
The seat had opened because former state Rep. Spencer Collier vacated it to accept Gov. Robert Bentley’s invitation to join the administration as director of the state Department of Homeland Security, setting off the special election that produced the intraparty friction.
Ballot access and party business
The committee also handled the mechanics of the coming presidential cycle. Members conducted a grassroots effort to place the names of presidential contenders on the Alabama Republican Party ballot, a process that required petitions bearing set numbers of signatures along with a substantial qualifying fee. The committee forwarded the petitions it gathered to state party officials.
In addition, the body passed a pair of resolutions, one honoring the life and service of former state Sen. Hap Myers, and another that thrust the committee into a statewide policy fight.
A stand against Common Core
The second resolution asked the Alabama State Board of Education to rescind its 2010 vote adopting the Common Core State Standards Initiative. In doing so, the Mobile County committee joined the state GOP executive committee and many other county committees in opposing the standards.
Committee Chairperson Terry Lathan, a former schoolteacher, described a massive movement across Alabama to rescind what she called an ObamaEd program. The initiative, she argued, amounted to a one-size-fits-all approach that would nationalize curriculum and textbooks, potentially allowing a committee in Washington to determine what was taught while leaving state and local officials on the sidelines. It had been adopted, she contended, through the administration and committees rather than by Congress or a vote of the people.
A broader campaign
Lathan said state legislators were also pressing the Board of Education to reverse itself, and that candidates for the state school board were being questioned about their positions on the standards. She anticipated that the issue would surface at upcoming gatherings of Republican organizations, including a biennial convention of Republican women and the state party’s winter meeting.
Taken together, the committee’s actions reflected the currents running through local party politics, from lingering tensions over the House 105 race to a coordinated effort to roll back education policy. For the Mobile County GOP, the meeting underscored both its internal divisions and its alignment with a statewide conservative push on schools.