Accountability Rule Information Sheet

Are you ready to bring accountability to Republican officials?

Are you tired of Republican officials ignoring our platform, manipulating elections, and deceiving low-information voters?

The Accountability Rule, which will be proposed at the 2023 GA GOP State Convention, provides a solution.

The Accountability Rule Would:

Advance Election Integrity, by allowing the GAGOP delegates to refuse to qualify candidates who couldn’t continue winning in an honest election.
Protect the Republican brand, by ensuring socialists and communists don’t run as Republicans and then enact policies that destroy our country and ruin our brand.
Allowing the most informed Republicans in the whole state (convention delegates) to take responsibility for the party as gate-keepers for low-information Republican voters.
Advance the America First agenda by Providing a party-imposed “term limit” on incumbents whose bad behavior proves they no longer represent the principles of the Republican Party.
Give the Republican platform teeth. If a politician doesn’t advance the platform, the activists in the party would have significantly more leverage.
Restore power to the people instead of the political industry and big corporations.
Give Average Georgia Patriots A Real Choice. Currently a few hundred kingmakers, Politicians, political consultants and media personalities decide who is a “viable candidate”. It’s time to expand the “kingmaker caucus” from a few hundred politicos to thousands of delegates from around the state.

How would it work?

The Accountability Rule would specify the process for how the Georgia Republican Party can block a candidate from qualifying for office in future elections. We say “specify” because this is an inalienable power that the state party already possesses — a fact that has been recognized in our legal constitutions. This proposed rule’s language only clarifies the procedure regarding how it may be exercised.

This proposal is 100% constitutional and has strong legal precedent. It is based upon the right of “freedom of association” in the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from the Bill of Rights as well as the parallel “freedom of association” clause in the Georgia State Constitution. U.S. Supreme Court upheld this right in the year 2000 in the California Democratic Party v. Jones case, and lower-level appellate courts have upheld it for many years.

The Accountability Rule would not be easily subject to abuse because state conventions typically have over 1,500 delegates (and if this rule is adopted, it will motivate even more people to participate). It is difficult to bribe or otherwise corrupt that many activists from one end of the state to the other so that they oppose the same candidate. A politician would have to do something very egregious for a consensus of delegates (who have to be re-elected every year) to resolve together to take this drastic action. We anticipate that this power would not need to be used very many times. The threat of being disqualified by the party will remove imposters and likely help to motivate politicians’ good behavior. It wouldn’t take long before Republican officials would start to take the Republican Party platform seriously. That is how accountability works.

This is not a revolutionary idea. Currently, the Executive Committee of the GA GOP (28 people) already sets who is allowed to appear on the Presidential Primary ballot in Georgia. So only 15 of them could vote to block a candidate from running in the Georgia primary for POTUS. In Virginia, their state convention doesn’t just have the power to prohibit certain people from running for public office; it actually can select the nominee.

This proposed rule would not be used to block Donald Trump in any way whatsoever, especially since recent polling shows he is extremely popular with grassroots activists. It would be impossible to get 1,000+ grassroots delegates to oppose his candidacy.

Third, this rule would checkmate Republican legislators who refuse to take action on issues important to the grassroots, such as election integrity. You cannot cheat in a Republican primary election if you aren’t allowed to qualify to run as a Republican in the first place.

A candidate could still qualify to run as an Independent Candidate with the Secretary of State’s office, but they could not run under the “Republican” banner if the convention delegates wanted to disqualify them.

The Rule guarantees that you can stop fake-Republican candidates from getting in office, raising a bunch of money from lobbyists by voting for corporate cronyism and tax-increases that hurt citizens, then spending it all in falsely convincing voters that they are actually Republican.

If the Accountability Rule passes, you’d simply be able to make a motion at the GAGOP convention to not qualify a certain person, debate the motion, and if it passes, that person would not be able to qualify as a Republican unless rescinded by a future GAGOP state convention. You would have the power.

Not political industry lobbyists and consultants. Not the media or corporate interests.

Informed Republican activists, principled people like you, elected from local communities throughout the state for the convention process, would have the ability to hold politicians accountable.

If you have questions about this exciting rule proposal you can check out our FAQ below or email us at: ajohnson@georgiara.com

If you are a delegate at the state convention this year, and you believe in accountability, we urge you to support the Accountability Rule on the convention floor.

FAQ

Q: What does the rule say?

Answer:

PROPOSED RULE CHANGE TO GAGOP RULES – 2023

I move to amend the GAGOP Rules by adding the following section:

10.4 THE ACCOUNTABILITY RULE FOR REPUBLICAN INDIVIDUALS IN GEORGIA BY THE STATE CONVENTION

A. At all GAGOP State conventions, delegates shall be allowed to move that the GAGOP does not qualify specific individuals for public office as a Republican.

B. Any such motion that passes by a majority vote of those present and voting shall prohibit the GAGOP or any of its subsidiaries from, through action or inaction, qualifying that person for office, doing anything to help that person qualify for office, or to seek or achieve political office unless a majority of delegates at a future state convention votes to allow that person to qualify for office again.

C. Nothing in these rules shall prevent a county GOP from refusing to qualify someone for county office.

D. Neither the state nor the executive committee of the GAGOP may vote to prevent someone from qualifying for office or to rescind or repeal such a decision made by the state convention.

E. Any GAGOP officer or employee who takes any step toward qualifying someone prevented from doing so by a vote of the state convention, or assists them in doing so through action or inaction, shall be deemed to have automatically and immediately resigned from the GAGOP, and their actions shall be considered void and without authority.

F. This rule (10.4) may only be amended or removed by a vote of the state convention

See the actual submitted proposal document here.

Q: Have other political party organizations been able to successfully disassociate from a candidate of whom the party did not approve?

A: Yes, indeed, even in our own state of Georgia! For example, in Chattooga County in Georgia in 2014, the local Democrat Party voted to ban the incumbent County Commissioner from running again as a Democrat after he was observed helping a Republican run for re-electio n. The Democrats reasonably “said campaigning for ‘the opposition’ breaks county Democratic Party bylaws, and the executive board for the party voted Winters out for any future elections.” We agree, and would also suggest that advancing the opposition party’s platform of policies and principles, that are contrary to our own party’s platform, has the same impact.

In addition, the Wyoming GOP voted in 2023 to no longer recognize former Congresswoman Liz Cheney as a Republican. (See NPR article “Liz Cheney Will No Longer Be Recognized by the Wyoming GOP”.) In this instance, the party organization censured her, and then she was rejected by the voters in the next election. This is also a useful approach that Georgia could follow to empower the grassroots and protect the Republican brand.

Remember, too, that in the Jones case, a political party’s right to disassociate was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Q: If this Accountability Rule is adopted and exercised against a particular candidate, isn’t that likely to lead to lawsuits?

A: When our GRA President Alex Johnson proposed the Accountability Rule, he also submitted another rule proposal in which any candidate who seeks to qualify to run for office as a Republican has to consent to waive their right to sue the state party. This will the reduce the likelihood of lawsuits. You can see the text of that rule proposal at this link.

Even so, it is possible that some politician will unlawfully attempt to sue over an exercise of this inalienable right of the Georgia Republican Party. As we have discussed above, the U.S. Constitution and the Georgia State Constitution both protect a group’s “right of association,” and recent “case law” has upheld that right. Any litigation will eventually affirm the legality of the Accountability Rule, and we have attorneys ready to volunteer their service pro bono to see any such cases successfully litigated.

Q: How Would this Rule Affect County GOP Organizations?

A: The Accountability Rule would protect the right of county GOP organizations to determine if a candidate for local office (such as a County Commissioner) could qualify to run on the Republican Ballot in that county. Section “C” of the proposal makes it clear that this rule is not usurping the jurisdiction of the County GOP organizations.

Q: I’ve been told that back around 1992 there was a “Dukes” case appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court whose precedent would damage our ability to successfully implement the Accountability Rule. Is that true?

A: The “Dukes” case was not decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on the merits. On appeal, the higher court refused to hear that case, so they lost by default without any review on the merits. But in the more recent Jones v. Democratic Party (2000) case, SCOTUS did review on the merits and affirmed the constitutionally protected right of political parties to disassociate, if they so choose.

Q: I have read that the Georgia state code requires Republican nominees to be decided by primary elections. Does that code prevent the Accountability Rule from being legally adopted by the Republican Party organizations?

A: No, it does not for at least two reasons: First, these code provisions are not necessarily in conflict with the Accountability Rule because already these code provisions allow for legal exceptions to exclude certain candidates from qualifying to run for or to serve in office. For example, Title 45 of the Georgia Code bars anyone who was convicted of a felony of “moral turpitude” from running for office. Likewise, if a candidate has already been elected, his peers can vote to have him impeached and removed from office. These kinds of provisions are not in conflict with the general state code provisions on primary elections, and so we should not infer that application of the Accountability Rule would be in conflict either.

Second, however, if the courts were to find that the exercise of the Accountability Rule was in conflict with this state code, under the Supremacy Clauses of the U.S. Constitution & the Georgia Constitution, the constitutional protections of the right of freedom of association trump state code provisions. So the state code would have to yield to the constitutional provisions under that legal hierarchy.

Q: Why does the GA GOP need an Accountability Rule that bypasses the GAGOP State Committee and the Executive Committee and goes straight to convention delegates?

A: We conservatives have heard the excuses from Establishment Republicans for years. Whether it’s promises to repeal Obamacare, promises to secure Georgia’s elections, “Give us the House and Senate, we’ll do ________ .” Or the infamous “Read my lips, no NEW taxes.” It is clear the Republican Party desperately needs accountability. This is your chance to empower the grassroots delegates from each county in the state.

This rule would return power to the people, not the political industry (lobbyists, consultants, staffers who work for politicians, etc.) who have an inherent conflict of interest.

If you are a delegate at the state convention this year, and you believe in accountability, we urge you to support the Accountability Rule on the convention floor.