Kucinich Sues Dems to Get on TX Ballot

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 3:55 PM on January 4, 2008.

Judging by what I'm reading today, the primaries are all wrapped up. Apparently, 300,000 mostly white, largely rural Iowans will decide our choices for president.

And Ron Paul, with $20 million bucks raised in a quarter, 10 percent of the Iowa vote and a legion of loyal fans, isn't being allowed to debate on Fox News in New Hampshire. ABC is cutting Kucinich, Gravel and Repub Duncan Hunter from it's debate.

But this might be the most annoying bit of BS out of all of it. AP:

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, along with supporter Willie Nelson, have filed a lawsuit to get Kucinich on the ballot in Texas after they say the Texas Democratic Party rejected his application.

The civil lawsuit was delivered late Wednesday afternoon to U.S. District Court for the Western District of the United States, Kucinich spokesman Andy Juniewicz said late Wednesday evening.

The lawsuit says that Kucinich was informed by the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday that his application was "defective" because he crossed out a loyalty oath in the application that said he would swear to support whoever the Democratic nominee for president might be.

A loyalty oath? A fucking loyalty oath? To support whomever the Dems might put up there? My God, did they translate it from some old Ba'ath party paperwork they found in Baghdad?

The lawsuit asks that a temporary restraining order be issued to stop the Texas Democratic Party from certifying to the Texas Secretary of State a list of candidates and to restrict the secretary of state from accepting any list that doesn't include the name of a qualified candidate who refuses the loyalty oath.

Kucinich, a congressman from Ohio, also wants the court to declare that the oath requirement violates the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment in the Constitution.

"He's right to challenge a blind loyalty oath to the Democratic Party because it's un-American," Willie Nelson said in a news release from the Kucinich campaign.

Calls for comment made to the Texas Democratic Party and the secretary of state's office after business hours on Wednesday were not immediately returned.

That anybody considers this country to be anything more than a nominal democracy is a sad, pathetic joke.

Tagged as: dems, kucinich, nightmare

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.