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.