Convention Debrief—The Editing

Debriefing last week’s convention is going to take a couple of posts. That’s the Republican Party of Texas Convention—probably the biggest political gathering in the nation, or maybe anywhere. I think we had around 8,900 delegates. 

This first post is about my participation as editor of the platform—I know; not that interesting to everybody. But it’s what I experienced, and it’ll do me good to debrief. In the next post I’ll cover a few details about the Rules and Legislative Priorities reports, and then a fair amount about the content of this year’s state platform. So come back for that content.

 

That's me, at the 2022 Republican Party of Texas Convention
at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

I spent day and night caught up in convention things this past week, quite literally. Editing the platform involves a lot of late-night work. We take the document as it is at the end of subcommittee meetings, clean out all the unused resolutions and keep only the words the subcommittee wants. Then we review that with the subcommittee chairs, to make sure we haven't lost any of their wording, and to get approval for any word edits we make. That version then goes online (except for the Government section, which had some formatting issues we couldn’t wade through at 3:00 AM Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. We got it ready just in the nick of time for that section to come up in Temporary Committee of the Whole, toward Wednesday evening.

The same process happens after the Temporary Committee of the Whole, getting their report ready for the Permanent Platform Committee on Thursday.

In case you don’t understand the temporary and permanent process, we’ll go through that quickly. The committees that do most of the work are appointed people, representing each of the state senatorial districts. They get time to look over the files ahead of the convention, and then they start their meetings on Monday of convention week. This is true for other committees as well, mainly Rules and Legislative Priorities. But my experience is with the Platform & Resolutions Committee. Delegates are welcome to come and observe and testify on those first three days, but most delegates arrive at convention on Thursday.

The platform is divided into a Preamble & Principles page, which changes very little from year to year. (An added paragraph this year was probably the biggest change I’ve ever seen in it.) The other nine sections relate generally to state senate committees, so the ideas can get aimed to the right places to get legislation passed. Of these nine, five meet as subcommittees on Monday, and the other four meet on Tuesday. The 31 committee members are divided up, so they’re on one committee each day.

Their starting point is to look at the planks of the previous platform. And they get all the resolutions submitted from around the state placed nearby to help them make decisions about what they want this year’s platform to say (over 3500 resolutions; placing those kept a team of us volunteer editors busy for over a month). They can strike a plank, keep it as is, or amend it. And they can add additional planks, if the resolutions add ideas that seem to require their own plank.

The system, you can see, tends to grow the platform each year. This year the Committee Chairman gave a directive to shorten the platform—each section by 10% or more. They did—sort of. The committees did their part by making fewer planks. We went from 337 planks to 275 (I believe that will be the final count, after floor debate, where two planks were added.) But a word count and page count of the document shows the platform actually grew—again—despite having fewer planks. Many ideas were combined into larger planks with multiple bullet points. That is probably helpful in the long run. But it didn’t shorten the platform.

The Temporary Committee of the Whole goes over the subcommittee reports, now put together into a full platform document, during their meeting on Wednesday. They take more testimony (testimony was given in every one of the subcommittees earlier), and they propose any additional changes. Their work (after our all-night editing and their morning review) becomes the starting document for the Permanent Committee.

Permanent committees—again, for Rules, Legislative Priorities, Platform, and Nominations (and maybe Credentials, although I’m uncertain about them) get elected in the Senatorial District Caucus, which is one of the first things to happen after most delegates arrive on Thursday. Usually these Permanent Committee members end up being the same people who did the work all week—the Temporary Committee members. But sometimes there will be some changeouts.

I don’t believe there were any changes among Platform Committee members this year, but last convention I think we had two or three. In Legislative Priorities I know there was a changeout in my district, because the man on Temporary Committee had a number of other responsibilities once all the delegates arrived at the convention, so he amicably asked for another person to be nominated for the Permanent Committee. A changeout, then, can be for a benign reason, or because a district didn’t like the work of their Temporary Committee appointee.

This is the view from my seat next to the Committee Chair.
It was standing room only during public testimony during the 
Permanent Platform Committee meeting on Thursday, June 16, 2022.

The Permanent Platform Committee will take testimony again, and go through each section to discuss any last-minute changes. They also go through additional resolutions submitted by delegates that day.

This meeting was supposed to start at 2:00 PM on Thursday. But SD (senatorial district) caucuses weren’t all done by then. And one of the late ones was being held in our meeting room. So it was closer to 4:00 PM when we got underway. We were scheduled to go until 11:00 PM, a necessary deadline to get the document to the printer, to make it available to delegates by 8:00 AM Friday.

Drama came for me because of this deadline. I had tried to do all the necessary preparations, so that our post-committee edit and formatting would be brief, maybe an hour or an hour and a half. Experience helps. Back in 2018, my first year editing, we had to change from Google Docs—the preferred format of RPT, who was controlling the file that year—to Word, in order to provide both plank numbers and line numbers. That took some intense—and imperfect—work to accomplish the tasks between the end of the meeting at midnight and the 2:00 AM deadline. So I did a lot of things ahead of time this year—including using Word the whole time to avoid formatting issues. At least that was the intention, but we had some editors use Google in subcommittees for reasons we had to compromise on in a pinch. And that led to us all learning some new tricks for overcoming the formatting problems that brought.

Anyway, I was assuming I probably had a 2:00 AM deadline, but it was fine with me if they got done at 11:00 or before, and I would be done earlier than expected.

Then, at 8:01 PM, an RPT staffer came in to let us know, “Oh, by the way, you have until 9:15 PM to get the file turned in for the printer.” No compromise. No explanation for the change from expectation. We hadn’t taken a dinner break yet. (Well, I had; I changed out with another editor to get some fuel in me around 6:30.) And we still had a third of the platform to go through, plus amendments proposed by committee members.

We ended the committee at 8:45, with two sections completely untouched by the Permanent Committee. And those resolutions lined up to be handled—didn’t get handled.

The moment the meeting adjourned, I started the clean-up—removing strikeouts, notes, and highlighting, keeping the approved language.

I had been expecting a chance to go through the copyediting that I needed approval on. Those are changes bigger than commas or spelling (which I simply authorize), but are wording changes I think are acceptable but ought to be looked at. So the “track changes” were still in the document. The Committee Chair did a blanket approval, so one click accepted all those changes. (There was a miss or two, places where we’d done an actual strikethrough, rather than allowing “track changes” to do it. We’ve caught those now in our errata.)

Then, with an editor on each side of me, we did the formatting—which, at this point mainly involved adding plank numbers—only on planks, not on any extra paragraphs in a plank, so you have to pay careful attention—and on deleting extra line spacing that is used for working in committees but not needed for printing. And we try to catch any other things out of place. We faced a few formatting issues, and dispatched with them pretty quickly. No time for an additional careful edit. This is about 40 pages. It should not have been physically possible to meet the deadline. But we did.

I was anxious to see it printed the next day. I missed the morning SD Caucus, when we elect our SREC (State Republican Executive Committee) representatives, and the SDs vote for state party chair (unopposed this year) and vice chair (which had 3 candidates). That started at 8:00 AM, and I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night all week. So we (my husband and I; he is also a delegate) aimed for the afternoon general session.

After a number of speeches—including, just as we walked in, the booing of Senator Cornyn, who signed onto gun control legislation last week—the Rules Committee presented their report. But their printed report wasn’t available.

It didn’t dawn on me right away. They faced the same deadline change in the middle of deliberations that we had. I wasn’t sure the reports were being printed together, and maybe they decided to blow off that stupid deadline and finish their work. But I soon learned—the printer failed to deliver. After the deadline change. After stopping deliberation so that several hours of important, planned and paced-for work was jettisoned.

And it turned out, most convention goers couldn’t get their copy of the Rules Report on the internet, because of system overload. My husband got it on his phone, but I just got an error message on mine. They conducted some of the business, but the delegates were frustrated at not being able to see more than what was on the big jumbo screen. So the remainder of Rules discussion was postponed until Saturday.

So the biggest drama for me was that impossible deadline—which we met—followed by the breach of contract by the printer. I don’t know where to place fault at this point. But I’m thinking there will be some combination of RPT staff firing and/or lawsuit for breach of contract.

OK. Now I’ve let off a little steam, and given a peek behind-the-scenes.

The editorial team has been growing. There were just two of us in 2018, the first year there was an editorial team, and we only did copyediting. There were four of us in 2020, and I led, because I was the only one with experience from 2018. I was asked to come and lead again this year. And we had a great team. I don’t have an exact count, because we got some early help from people who had to drop out, and then we had an extra or two join last minute. Some only did secretarial duties (keeping minutes, managing and recording testimonies), and most did all duties. All were a joy to work with. So hard working. And skilled. Two of this year’s team were on the 2020 team. And now we’ll have quite a lot of experience going forward. We're all thinking of ways to improve the process.

I was surprised at how excited people were to do this, and to learn from me and the others around them. They thank me as if I gave them a great privilege, instead of causing them to do hard labor for zero pay. I even had someone come up and ask me, “How do you get to do what you do?” You get invited, or found. You let it be known you’re willing. But I’m surprised we somehow made typing and staying up all night at our computers look fun. For me it is fun. And exhausting. The intense focus is something my brain enjoys doing. But, does that look like something a young person wants to get the chance to do?

Anyway, there are some weird people like us out there. And several on the team have said they want to be called again next time. Just to work with them again, the late nights and tight deadlines would be worth it.

What did all that typing and editing and formatting produce? I’ll talk about that in Part II.