Should a political party be run "by the party elite, who may have the long-term interest of the party at heart," or should it be run by grass-roots delegates "who may have only a short-term commitment to the party" but may be in better tune with regular citizens? asks Patterson, who also directs BYU's Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy.

That struggle is again breaking out for the Utah Republican Party.

Last year, state GOP leaders asked the party's Constitution and Bylaws Committee, made up of six party insiders, to rule on who has the legal power to recommend changes to the party's constitution and bylaws.

The committee ruled that only the Constitution and Bylaws Committee itself could pass along recommended changes to the GOP state convention delegates — where, by a majority vote, such changes could be approved.

In years gone by, individuals or groups of delegates would suggest changes to the party's constitution or bylaws. And all such items filed by the party's deadline would be heard by delegates in the state conventions.

Sometimes those suggested items proved an embarrassment to many Republicans as some items were on the fringes of Republican ideology or had little or nothing to do with the purported main goal of a state political party: electing its candidates to public office.

By having the C&B Committee filter such items, conventions could move beyond debating societies to taking the hard votes on candidates in an election year; picking top party officers in off-election years, leaders argued.

However, many delegates were not happy with the change last year. In 2005, the C&B Committee killed several proposed constitutional changes — even one that would have clearly given delegates the power to hear all proposed changes to party bylaws — and those amendments never got before the convention. But then delegates themselves, at the August convention, passed a resolution saying they had sole power over such changes, not some party committee.

Now the C&B Committee has, again, refused to recommend a proposed 2006 change for delegates to hear all amendments. And another resolution, proposed this year by Lord, has been prefiled that says delegates to Saturday's convention have sole discretion over constitution and bylaw changes — basically a replay of what happened last year. "We are in a Catch 22 — we pass resolutions and (party leaders) ignore them," Lord said.

"We have to have a way to vet proposed amendments," says Hartley. And the state GOP Central Committee believes the current C&B Committee procedure is the best way, he adds. "Resolutions are, at the end of the day, nonbinding. And we believe this vetting process works," says Hartley.

But Lord and her supporters say if delegates don't take a stand Saturday — and force a constitutional change over leaders' objections — the next step by leaders will be to say that intra-party actions taken by future delegates must be ratified by the state Central Committee. And that will be the end of party control by the delegates, says Lord.

A political party may be a private entity, says Lord, "but it has to be run as a quasi-public entity — because (the state party) has the power to place and remove (GOP) candidates on the ballot."

And in Republican-dominated Utah, that is a serious power, political observers say.

---

E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com