Here’s a link to my full story at spokesman.com on how Idaho’s state Republican Party convention degenerated into a fiasco today after attempts to disqualify a slew of the delegates attending appeared to be succeeding – and the convention ended up adjourning without electing a chairman, setting a platform or doing any of it scheduled business. Far from uniting the deeply divided party, the gathering in Moscow degenerated into dysfunction - though the GOP is the party that holds every statewide office in Idaho, every seat in the congressional delegation and more than 80 percent of the seats in the state Legislature.

It also proved not to be the finest hour for convention chair and 1st District Rep. Raul Labrador, whom many looked to as the healer for the fractured party just a day after he announced that he's running for Majority Leader of the U.S. House; instead, he ended the convention facing jeers and walkouts from his own party members. 

State Senate Assistant Majority Leader Chuck Winder, R-Boise, said, “It’s a real shame that a convention comes to that stage, where there really wasn’t any real floor leadership, there wasn’t any fairness in the process, either in the credentials committee or on the floor. It was all pre-determined. It’s kind of ‘who’s going to have the power,’ rather than working together.”

Idaho EdNews reporter Clark Corbin also has a full report here on the convention fiasco, in which a frustrated House Speaker Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, says, "Is it a mess? Yes. That's my quote," and Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, calls it "a sad day for the Republican party." 

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