Folks – this is what the Contract with the CRA fought for.
This is what the Consultants sued the CRA to stop.
David Stafford Reade, Karen England and some of their lieutenants were expelled from CRA for 5-10 years for fraud. Had the below package of CRA by-laws been in place, Reade may still be a CRA member – but it is more likely he’d have had nothing to do with CRA at all.
A one-day CRA Convention was held at the LaQunita Inn on Century Blvd right outside of LAX. All we did was debate By-Laws. (and endorse Linda Ackerman and Shawn Steel for re-election to their CRP positions) This convention occurred on 11/19/2011.
We did a fix to our by-laws to get ourselves in compliance with state law (heaven forbid we get sued over that) – by making deputy senate district directors voting board members and limiting presidential appointments to the board to 10. The first three are confirmed with a simple majority of the CRA board, the remaining 7 require a 2/3 vote. The amendment also eliminated non-voting board members in their entirety.
This also addresses past practices of loading the CRA board with political allies by a CRA President.
In addition, another by-law amendment was passed that clarified how vacant CRA board seats that vacate mid-term are supposed to be filled. This is a transparency move.
One By-Law Amendment that was submitted by Mike Spence and deliberately targeted at George and I was destroyed outright and a second by-law amendment concerning confidentiality was referred to the board. In the version written by Mr. Spence – that by-law amendment could have prevented revelation of the fraud that was attempted at the April 2011 convention in the name of confidentiality.
The biggest amendments that passed were:
Changing the timeline for an email / online CRA board vote to 5 days instead of 15. This was one thing the lawyers for Karen England and the fraudsters hung their hat on in order to sue us.
We also modified the notice requirement for discipline to include phone calls, email, faxes, alternate mail, regular mail in addition to Certified Mail. This is a matter of efficiency and a cost-savings to the CRA. Again, this will protect the CRA from being sued over what constitutes “notice”. It still requires a 2/3 CRA board vote to act on any request for discipline.
We banned unit proxies. Mike Spence showed up with 2 unit proxies and Gwen Dyrud (who led the Chartered Busses that transported the delegates from dubious SoCal CRA units to the April 2011 convention) had 3. People saw this and this basically made the case for the ban.
Later analysis has shown that several units had less than 11 members paid and were being kept alive by Peggy Mew (the deposed former membership secretary) for purposes of giving her extra convention votes or to be given to Mike Spence. Those were to have been a significant part of the “delegates” Karen and the fraudsters were counting on in order to maintain the fraud in the CRA.
We toughened the requirements for chartering a new CRA unit. In most cases, it will take 4 meetings to charter a new unit and will require notifying more than one CRA Board member of said meetings. This adds a considerable amount of effort to what it takes to charter a new CRA unit.
The primary reason why Karen England and her lawyer friends sued us was that we attempted to create a residency rule requiring the convention delegates to actually live within the boundaries of the unit they purported to represent.
We did two things to address the grounds upon which Karen England and her fraudsters sued us over –
1. We modified the by-laws to include a provision that explicitly allows the CRA board to establish standing rules. This way, no lawyer can claim that a board rule is in violation of the CRA By-Laws, and:
2. We installed a 2/3 residency requirement for delegates of CRA units for Conventions (local and state) to have to reside within the boundaries of the CRA unit they represent. This would have rendered almost all of the fake CRA units useless to their Consultant Masters.
The CRA is already growing- this is because we have taken bold moves to address the problems that had beset the CRA over the last 10 years. Now, we have reforms in place to ensure that the CRA is run by activists and to make consultant manipulation extremely difficult.
A CRA endorsement will mean something again – and this is why the Consultants are creating a new Conservative “Group” (that I refer to as “CROCK”) to protect their commercial enterprise.