On Monday, most narratives about the leadership split within the Michigan Republican Party tended to avoid referring to Kristina Karamo as the former chair of the party.
That all changed by Tuesday afternoon, with the difference being a court order, which Mark Brewer thinks is a worrisome precedent.
“I’m very concerned about a court now second guessing internal decisions of a political party, whether it’s the rules or whether it’s a parliamentary procedure ruling,” he told the Michigan Advance. “Political parties have First Amendment protections from the government, and that includes the courts telling them how to operate.”
While one might think that Brewer, the former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party who now serves as an elections attorney, has a partisan interest in seeing continued discord within the GOP, he is adamant that is not the case.
“My concern is not partisan, it’s institutional that this is a real threat to any political party,” he said. “That any internal dispute over how the rules are interpreted and applied could end up in court with a judge second guessing how that political party operates. I think that’s very dangerous for political parties as institutions.”
At issue is a ruling Tuesday by Kent County Circuit Court Judge J. Joseph Rossi that Karamo had been legitimately removed as chair during a Jan. 6 meeting in Commerce Township. That effort was led by a group of party members upset that Karamo’s leadership had “put the Party at an imminent risk of defaulting on its line of credit and potentially needing to declare bankruptcy,”
That same group later voted for former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra to serve as the party’s chair and then filed a lawsuit in Kent County against Karamo when she refused to accept that she had been properly removed.
Judge Rossi further prohibited Karamo from identifying herself as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, accessing the MIGOP bank accounts or from doing any business in the party’s name. An appeal by Karamo was also rejected Thursday by the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Rossi’s ruling came just days before the two factions within the party each planned to hold their own caucus convention. Karamo scheduled one for Saturday at Huntington Place in Detroit, while Hoekstra announced it would instead be held the same day at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids.
Because Hoekstra is recognized by the Republican National Committee (RNC) as the chair of the MIGOP, only those delegates selected in Grand Rapids will be credentialed by the RNC at their national convention in July in Milwaukee.
While most party members appear to understand that and plan to attend the Grand Rapids convention, there is still an ardent group of supporters for Karamo who say they will still show up in Detroit. In fact, a countdown clock to the Detroit event remains running on what has traditionally been the party’s website: www.migop.org.
Multiple conventions
In fact, as of Friday morning there are indications that there may even be a third convention.
“The 1st Congressional District Republicans will be holding their Presidential District Convention in Houghton Lake, MI on Saturday, March 2nd, 2024 at 10:00 am, in a move to accommodate the voting rights of their disenfranchised delegates who were denied credentials to attend the Convention of the Districts at the DeVos Place in Grand Rapids,” states a press release sent from Chris Holz, secretary of the 1st Congressional District Republican Committee.
According to the release, the due date for delegation credentials to be turned in to the MIGOP was Feb. 21, prior to Rossi’s court order on Feb. 27.
“Hoekstra denied any grace to the delegates who hadn’t submitted their names to him, as they were recognizing Karamo before the court order, and he moved the convention to Grand Rapids, completely abandoning the prepaid location and accommodations in Detroit,” said the release. “With this decision, over half of the delegates allotted to the 1st District would be turned away by the Hoekstra administration, some having to travel as much as 10 hours to Grand Rapids from the western Upper Peninsula.”
Daire Rendon, a former state representative who is currently facing criminal charges as the result of an investigation into potential tampering with election equipment, says there are 24 counties in the position of not being represented at the convention.
“The grassroots are watching their party being stolen from them,” said Rendon, who chairs the 1st Congressional District Republican Committee.
Duplicate delegate disputes
This fracture within the party has created a scenario in which delegates selected in Detroit, or for that matter Houghton Lake, may show up at the national convention in Milwaukee claiming to represent the Michigan Republican Party. While the RNC has made clear they wouldn’t be recognized as such, it would be an unwanted distraction amid an effort to unify behind the party’s nominee, widely expected to be former President Donald Trump, in a potential rematch against President Biden in November.
With those stakes, Dennis Darnoi, a GOP strategist with Farmington Hills-based Densar Consulting LLC, says bad precedent or not, the situation required the type of immediate intervention only a court could provide.
“I’m never really happy if a judicial opinion has to settle what should be inter-party squabbles, but I think this is really an extraordinary case, and the fact that you have one individual who seemingly will only accept an answer where she is in the right,” Darnoi told the Advance. “So it unfortunately was required, but I don’t think it really is the place for the judiciary to get themselves involved.”
Darnoi says while the precedent is worrisome, he is doubtful such an extraordinary situation would reoccur.
“I think in order for that to be the case, this has to happen again, and maybe you’re going to have individuals running for state party chair who not only get elected, but then perform so poorly that they’re forced out of their position and they then refuse to go,” he said. “Maybe I’m being naive when I say I think this is a one-off, but I obviously don’t like the precedent it sets.”
However, Brewer says no matter how unique the situation, there are internal party controls that weren’t properly utilized.
“I’m not aligned with any faction here,” he said. “I believe that courts should stay out of these kind of internal fights and that the parties should have mechanisms to resolve it.”
For Brewer, his opposition isn’t so much that a judicial resolution to the dispute was sought, it’s that the court in this case accepted that role.
“I think ideological or policy differences are not the kinds of things inside a political party that should be resolved in a court,” said Brewer. “They should be resolved internally inside the party. So I don’t think the court should have taken jurisdiction on this case at all.”
To that point, Brewer says one must understand that while courts intervene all the time in bylaw disputes involving private organizations, political parties are in a class by themselves.
“I’m not talking about a corporation or a condo association,” he said. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that political parties are some of the premier political organizations in the country that have First Amendment rights that a corporation and a condo association don’t because of the function that a political party serves.”
Ironically, that is the same argument Karamo’s faction made to the court in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the issue is an internal party matter and not for the courts to decide.
“(T)he matter concerns a political question, and has been resolved by the Michigan Republican State Committee that is the sole authority for interpreting its own bylaws,” according to the motion filed Jan. 20 by Daniel Hartman, who at the time said he was the Michigan Republican Party general counsel, even though the members who voted to remove Karamo also voted for his removal.
The motion was denied by Judge Rossi prior to holding the multi-day hearing on the preliminary injunction request.
Regardless, the court intervention in this matter isn’t over. While Karamo is prevented from representing the party and accessing party resources, a final decision on ownership and control of those resources won’t occur until June, when Rossi will conduct a non-jury trial on the lawsuit filed by Malinda Pego, who was named acting chair of the party after Karamo’s removal, and now serves as Hoekstra’s co-chair.
Darnoi says the ultimate effect is a situation that no court can truly sort out.
“The longer this draws out, what’s going to happen in Republican primaries? Is there going to be a Karamo Republican versus a Hoekstra Republican?” he asks. “I mean, we’re already divided. We’ve got RINOs (Republicans in name only), we’ve got everything going, and now we’re going to divide even more into these little factions, or are they going to eventually coalesce and say, ‘look, we are part of the Michigan GOP and that’s the banner that we’re running on under, and this is what we stand for?’ I don’t know. I’m going to find that to be interesting as this continues to play out into primary season.”