LCRP September Meeting

For those of you who have been following my posts, I want to give a quick recap of what was shared at last night’s LCRP monthly meeting regarding the Pickens situation.

As you know, I previously reached out to our chairman, Mark Weber, with questions and concerns, but he never responded. Instead, this was the first time we heard his explanation in the form of his officer report.

Mark began his report by saying his goal was to help bring Pickens “back into the fold” of the Party, because he felt their three-month suspension was adequate “time served” for their supposed errors. He repeated the phrase “they did their time” throughout.

Let’s be clear: there is NO allowance for suspension of a county party in our SCGOP rules, and certainly no concept of a county party “serving time” for alleged offenses. The language itself reveals just how far outside our rules this entire process has been taken.

Mark then explained that he had prepared a motion (though he quickly corrected himself to say “we,” glancing over at Debbie Heim) that would censure the former Pickens chair for mishandling ReOrg, and then allow Pickens to be reinstated under the condition that the state GOP would run their next ReOrg in 2027.

He went on to describe how, during the break in the meeting, he “worked the room,” shaking hands and chatting with people on both sides of the issue. But when the meeting reconvened and he presented his motion, it did not move forward. Instead, the resolution that passed was to censure the former chair and require Pickens to redo their ReOrg within the next 30–90 days.

Despite his motion failing, Mark congratulated himself on having learned as a leader to “read the flavor of the room” and “work between the lines” to get things accomplished. The irony is hard to miss: no amount of handshakes or “reading the room” managed to secure his motion.

Mark then explained that an ad hoc committee was formed to facilitate the Pickens resolution, and he proudly shared that he had recommended our First Vice Chairwoman, Debbie Heim, as an appointee to the committee—a request that Drew McKissick accepted.

The irony here is also hard to ignore: Debbie (who broke the rules in her own county) acted as proxy for Lexington and voted in favor of suspending Pickens in the first place. And now, she’s been positioned on a committee supposedly to “help” them right their alleged wrongs and move forward.

This begs the question: how can someone who authored and promulgated her own interpretation of party rules and voted for the Pickens suspension be trusted to lawfully and impartially guide their reinstatement?

At the close of his recap, Mark reported that he proudly “corrected” two points in front of the EC body. One of those, he said, was dispelling the claim that delegates cannot be selected after ReOrg and the makeup meeting, calling it “not true.” He then declared that while some in the room may disagree, “we are part of the SCGOP, and their rules committee makes the rules and interprets the rules.”

The problem with his statement is twofold. First, it is simply false, as the rules are clear and explicit on the delegate election process. SCGOP rules AND our State Law are clear that delegates are ELECTED by the precincts, not selected under the “Chair’s purview and discretion,” as Debbie Heim claimed. Furthermore, if accepting delegates up to 5 days before convention is commonplace, then everyone should know about it, not just one slate.

Second, even if taken at face value, Mark’s logic is deeply flawed: the SCGOP Rules Committee is APPOINTED by the reigning chairman. To suggest that rules can be endlessly “interpreted” by whoever happens to hold power is to undermine the very idea of rules at all.

Rules are not political playthings. They are meant to be followed to the letter, regardless of who is in leadership. Anything less is not governance, but manipulation—and it veers dangerously close to authoritarianism.

At the end of the day, this issue is bigger than one vote, one county, or one chairman. It’s about whether our party values principle over power. We don’t need leadership that “reads the room” or interprets the rules to fit their agenda. We need leadership that upholds the integrity of the process, no matter the cost.

If we lose that, we lose the very thing that makes us worth following.