OT(?)
Reform Party Implodes -- Again
by Jack Breibart
(AR) -- The fate of the strife-torn Reform Party could be decided in Nashville next month. Or maybe it won't be Nashville. Or maybe it will be decided before then. Or not at all.
Things are squirrelly in the party right now.
For instance:
The party's executive committee -- or at least the Ross Perot faction of it -- voted last week in a teleconference to hold an emergency national committee meeting Feb. 12 in the land of the Grand Ole Opry to decide, among other things, the site of its 2000 presidential nominating convention.
This was after the Jesse Ventura faction hung up their telephones in protest.
The 150-member national committee (three members from each state) is the party's second highest governing entity -- next to the national convention -- and a step above the 11-person executive committee. This would be the first time the national committee has met person-to-person outside the party's national conventions.
Nonsense, says Jack Gargan, the embattled, gregarious, colorful party chairman, who has been in office since the first of the year and is part of what's known as the Ventura or Minnesota group.
"The executive committee meeting was illegal," Gargan told the American Reporter in a telephone interview from this Cedar Key, Fla. home. "There's going to be a national committee meeting, but I'm going to call it."
For one thing, Gargan said, the meeting was illegal because he and his three backers on the committee exited before he called the meeting to order. Other participants said he called the meeting to order and they left.
In a long, rambling conversation, Gargan also said not enough time was given to members to study the agenda or enough notification of the meeting.
"I've ruled that there will be regular and open meetings and that emergency meetings were illegal."
After Gargan and his followers dropped out of the session, according to meeting participants, the Perot faction introduced an 11-point resolution, which Gargan said, "was out to get mine and Ronn Young's scalp."
Included in the resolution was a clause that would prevent Gargan and Young -- the party's treasurer -- from spending any of the (cont)
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