From Bryan Fischer, Idaho Values Alliance

Seventy-one Republicans did the GOP and the Democrats alike a favor yesterday by filing a lawsuit in federal court to protect First Amendment rights to freedom of association. The lawsuit seeks a court order to require the state of Idaho to honor the rule adopted by the Idaho Republican Party last month, which calls for closed GOP primaries.

Open primaries look like a form of political insanity to the outside observer, who must wonder why any political party – be it Republican, Democrat, Green, or Libertarian – would want to allow members of opposing parties to help them select their candidates for office.

As Boise Weekly’s Bill Cope makes clear, cross-over voting does happen under an open primary system. In a column you can access below, Cope, a die-hard, life-long Democrat, trumpeted his intention to vote in the GOP primary in 2006, in order to put the most liberal Republican candidate on the general election ballot. And his only purpose for making it the subject of a column was to get as many of his liberal friends as possible to imitate his example.

Cope says, regarding cross-over voting, “I’ve done it plenty of times. In fact, when it comes to primary elections, I’ve probably voted Republican more often than Democrat. And I know I’m not the only one. There is somewhat of a tradition among Idaho Dems to go Rep in the primaries, and it goes back many election cycles.”

The suit was made necessary by the failure of the Idaho legislature to act on the issue this year. As House Majority leader Mike Moyle (R-Star) said in today’s Idaho Statesman, “I was hoping we could resolve it without going to the courts. The Legislature couldn’t perform. I don’t think the lawsuit is necessarily a bad thing.”

Secretary of State Ben Ysursa, with the help of Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, both Republicans, appear prepared to fight the suit in court, creating the odd spectacle of elected GOP officials fighting fellow Republicans over their own party’s constitutional right to freedom of association.

The GOP elite in Idaho, for reasons perhaps known only to them, seem bizarrely opposed to restricting the choice of Republican candidates to members of their own party. The bulk of support for closed primaries comes from the grassroots of the party – the farther down the GOP food chain you get, the more support you find.

This also is a likely indication that closed primaries will make it easier for genuinely conservative candidates – that is, true believers in the party’s platform – to successfully navigate the primaries, and thus closed primaries are likely to be a good thing for the pro-family community in Idaho.

In some way, closed primaries must represent a threat to the ability of Idaho’s GOP elites to control the direction of the state party. Or perhaps they recognize that closed primaries may make it more difficult to get candidates of their own choosing through the primary system.

But the issue of closed primaries is hardly a partisan issue. The Democrat Party in Mississippi just successfully sued to get closed primaries there, and in West Virginia, Democrats conduct closed primaries while Republicans don’t.

The Supreme Court has ruled that resistance on the matter is ultimately futile, since no state has the constitutional right to abridge a party’s associational rights by dictating party policy to them. If a political party wants closed primaries, it has a constitutional right to them.

Even if the suit is successful, Democrats will still be able to hold open primaries, and Idaho’s system will then resemble Utah’s, where the GOP holds closed primaries and the Democrats do not.

Supporters are hopeful that they will get injunctive relief in time to close the primaries in May, 2008.

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