UPDATE AT BOTTOM.Yesterday the Working Families Party announced a big win. A NYS appellate panel in Albany found in its favor and dismissed a law suit which charged that the WFP had interfered with the internal workings of another party. This victory may well come back to bite the WFP with a vengeance.
Last year, the WFP spent almost $130,000 on mailing to enrolled Democrats which helped the WFP favored candidate in the Democratic Party Primary. The WFP’s actions, the appeals court agreed, violated a provision of NYS’s election law which barred one party from trying to affect the workings of another party. However, the court struck down that provision as an unconstitutional abridgement of the WFP’s free speech rights.
You can read the decision here if you wish:
http://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/ad3/Decisions/2006/98847.pdf
How may this decision bite WFP or any political group? As I see it, each political group is now a free fire target for every other one. Republican and Conservative party funds may now freely be spent trying to take over or dominate the WFP’s party. Free speech sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. Have you ever been in a group threatened by takeover from the outside?
As it happens, the WFP is now experiencing the joys of threatened takeover. Paragraph below is from the WFP's Bacon & Eggs (thanks Alex N) and originates from the Times-Union. It is a story of an attempted conversative attack on the WFP:
An emerging battle over control of the Working Families Party in Rensselaer County is spilling into the 106th Assembly District race. The struggle came to light Wednesday when Assemblyman Ronald Canestrari, D-Cohoes, who had been endorsed by the WFP and petitioned for the line, abruptly declined to run on it this fall. That avoided a primary with Christopher Consuello, whose name was on another set of WFP petitions circulated by a well-known GOP player... Consuello's petitions were carried by none other than Bob Mirch -- an enrolled Conservative, Troy's public works commissioner, majority leader of the Rensselaer County Legislature and a $30,000-a-year constituent liaison for Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick... Mirch also circulated petitions to create a Rensselaer County WFP Committee. The WFP generally has multi-county chapters, not county committees... "That's absolutely false," Mirch said. "(The WFP) has a philosophy ... of grassroots local involvement. They have a problem with grassroots working families following state Election Law and constituting a party?" Karen Scharff, co-chair of the WFP's Capital District Chapter replied: "We don't feel what he's doing is grassroots organizing. Bob Mirch wants a ballot line he can control."
And he may get one.
