Increasing the Visibility of Washington State Democrats’ many progressive resolutions

Hundreds of active members of the Democratic organizations in Washington State devote substantial time and energy into attending party meetings, working in committees, vetting candidates, knocking on doors, making phone calls, and debating resolutions. Legislative district orgs, county orgs, and state caucuses pass resolutions and send them on to the state Democratic Central Committee, whose members include state committeemen and state committee women elected by precinct committee officers in legislative district organizations.

At meetings, like the one that was held in Pasco on April 7, 2019, the WSDCC passes resolutions which are meant to express the will of the party.

Despite the large number of resolutions passed, and the substantial effort gone into their formulation and approval, it’s not clear that the contents of the resolutions are widely known or that the lawmakers pay attention. To a large extent, the resolutions end up in a black hole. Part of the problem is that the Left needs to build progressive media that they control, to get their message out.

With the intention of remedying that disconnect between the grassroots voice and public awareness, this article makes some suggestions about the format of resolutions and aggregates the various platform planks and resolutions from the state party website https://www.wa-democrats.org/issues/.

I suggest that the state party should stop requiring activists to prepare resolutions in PDF format and should stop requiring them to remove hyperlinks. PDF is slow to load, difficult to read, and can’t easily be copy-and-pasted. They should store the resolutions as regular HTML files, which also have the advantage of being easier to produce and manipulate. Requiring activists to produce PDFs is tedious, time-consuming and inconvenient. Printed copies are needed for some purposes but should be secondary in this day and age. Resolutions should be online mainly, where they are more easily viewed, edited, and shared; having paper copies is expensive and wasteful, and it forces the writers to remove hyperlinks or place the link contents in footnotes. Also, the way the resolutions are stored on the website https://www.wa-democrats.org/issues/ forces viewers to do many mouse clicks to view a resolution. For example, to view this resolution WSDCCRES 924 190405  PASS  MIL – Resolution on Military Spending you have to make an extra click: the intermediate page is unnecessary.

The party and activists should make efforts to advertise the contents of these resolutions and to hold lawmakers more accountable for following them.

The state party website says:

Resolutions are displayed in their entirety. However, only the paragraphs beginning with the word “therefore” have been formally adopted by the WSDCC.

But, in fact, some of the resolutions on the website omit the WHEREAS clauses. I don’t know if this is because the state party staff thought they were too verbose or because they thought the contents of the WHEREASs was too controversial. I suspect the latter in the case of the resolution above about military spending, for which you can see the WHEREASs here.

Maybe we can make a resolution to to remedy these problems.

To see the resolutions in a use-friendly format visit This link.