Republicans asking for too much in primary fight

After the ruling by Judge Thomas Zilly earlier this month striking the "Top Two" primary down as unconstitutional, you'd think the GOP would be happy. But they're not:

A Republican Party rule says a candidate must obtain at least 25 percent of the votes at a GOP caucus or convention to run under the Republican label. But in issuing a permanent injunction yesterday in the parties' successful challenge of I-872, Zilly chose not to give them the power they sought -- to decide which candidates get to use a party's name.

Although Neil Modie wrote "they" in his article, he does, thankfully, mention, that our party has no such rule:

It didn't matter to the Democrats, who allow anyone to run as a Democrat. But state Republican Chairman Chris Vance, with the caveat that he hadn't yet checked with his lawyers, said, "This means the political parties therefore are going to have to make a decision whether or not to file another piece of litigation."

The issue, again is the Republicans' own rule that a candidate needs to have 25% of the votes at a party sanctioned caucus or convention - before they can run in the primary.

The Democrats have no such rule.

The backlash against the parties is, we think, bad enough already. No political party should be asking for more at this point: their chief objective should be fighting to keep our open primary system in place on appeal, and nothing else.

But the Republicans just want more, and more, and more:

Vance said the Republican Party also wants a list of which voters choose its primary ballot, something the law doesn't allow.

That means a closed primary, in which voters actually have to register for a political party in the primary - their choice of party ballot is therefore not secret.

When are these guys going to be satisfied? The Republicans need to stop trying to extract victories. Getting the open primary system back was hard enough. Now they're trying to go even further by getting Judge Zilly to rule on their 25% rule and pushing for a closed primary.

As Modie noted:

However, Grange officials have said they might file yet a new initiative, one that could pass constitutional muster by having candidates file for all elective offices on a non-partisan basis. The Grange sponsored the initiative that led to the blanket primary in 1935 as well as last year's Top Two initiative.

The Republicans are asking for this. They need to settle for the open primary system we just got back and focus on keeping that system in place. All their other demands should be dropped.