Between drama at the state convention, lawsuits and an actual fistfight at a county party meeting, the Saline County Republican Committee has had a tumultuous six months.
Feuding reached fever pitch this week when the Republican Party of Arkansas voted to dissolve its Saline County committee and bar MAGA firebrand Jennifer Lancaster from party leadership for 20 years.
As the state Republican Party was voting on these measures Monday, Saline County Republicans were protesting at the Capitol, to no avail.
Word went out overdue last week that the executive committee of the state party would meet at 10 a.m. on Dec. 2 to vote on dissolving the Saline County Republican Committee. Around 9:30 a.m. on Monday, “dozens of RPA members from at least five different counties filled the hallways” in front of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ office to oppose the state party’s actions, according to political gadfly Jimmie Cavin’s recap of the Republican infighting. Many carried signs asking the governor for facilitate.
“While the Governor’s staff was cordial,” Cavin wrote, protestors “received little more than lip service and it became crystal clear that despite their pleas for help, Governor Sanders had no intention of giving any.”
As the peaceful protest was unfolding at the Capitol, state Republican committee members voted 16-3 to declare the Saline County Republican Committee vacant, party chairman Joseph Wood told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. They also voted, by a count of 19-1, to remove Jennifer Lancaster from her position as Second Congressional District chair of the Republican Party and bar her from holding party office for the next 20 years.
The vote to dissolve the county committee was the latest in a series of battles between Saline County Republicans and the state party as a whole.
It started in June, when Lancaster, a lawyer from Benton, surprised party leaders by beating Wood for chair of the party’s bi-annual convention. Lancaster ran for the position after party leaders declared the convention delegates would not consider certain proposed changes to the party’s platform and rules. Once elected by the delegates, Lancaster shepherded multiple rule changes through the convention, including one that would have closed Republican primaries in the state and allowed only registered Republicans to vote in them. (There is no requirement in Arkansas that a person register as a Republican or a Democrat.)
Following the convention, two things happened, one petty and one substantive. First, a few days after the convention kerfuffle, the Republican Party of Saline County — a distinct entity from the Saline County Republican Committee — evicted the committee and the Saline County Republican Women from the county Republican headquarters.
Second, and more importantly, state Republican Party officials claimed Lancaster’s actions at the convention were improper and declared the efforts to close Republican primaries were invalid and would require a change under state law before they could take effect. On July 25, in a closed-door meeting, the state party’s executive committee voted to reopen the primaries.
Lancaster, in her capacity as Republican Convention chair, along with 22 other Republicans, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the state party and the secretary of state’s office in August, arguing the party leaders’ desire to reopen the primaries could not override the convention’s decision. The suit said Wood violated party rules by refusing to acknowledge the convention and its proceedings, choosing “to pretend as though it never happened,” and refusing to acknowledge the newly adopted rules or “respond to the convention chairman’s multiple emails, texts and calls.”
Less than two weeks later, tempers flared at a Saline County Republican Committee meeting. Cavin, who lives in Conway but attended the Saline County meeting, took offense to comments and physical threats from Jon Newcomb toward Kandi Cox. (Cox and Cavin are co-plaintiffs in Lancaster’s lawsuit against the state party.) Cavin threw and landed the first punch as others at the meeting quickly tried to separate the two men.
This fight led to Saline County officials to call for the Saline County Republican Committee to be abolished. It also prompted Clint Lancaster, an attorney and husband to Jennifer Lancaster, to file a complaint with the state party against the eight members of the Saline County Republican Committee. No complaint was filed against the committee as an entity, however, only against the individual members.
Under party rules, when a complaint such as Lancaster’s is received, Wood as party chair must appoint a rules review committee. Party rules further required that Jennifer Lancaster be named chair of that review committee.
Among the people Wood chose to fill out the committee was Bilenda Harris-Ritter. Previously, Sanders named Harris-Ritter as a special justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court in the challenge to the proposed 2024 amendment that would have expanded medical marijuana in the state, and Harris-Ritter was also a leader in the state Board of Election Commissioners’ decision earlier this year not to allow electronic signatures on voter registration forms.
Though she was not the chair of the rules review committee, Harris-Ritter took it upon herself to prepare a report regarding Clint Lancaster’s complaint. On Nov. 7, she emailed this report to Wood.
In her report, Harris-Ritter accuses Jennifer Lancaster of bias because she is married to the person who filed the complaint. “Jennifer Lancaster should have recused from chairing the Rules Review Committee because she is biased against the defendants,” Harris-Ritter wrote. She also recommended dissolving the county committee, despite no complaint being filed against the committee as an entity. (Cavin obtained a copy of Harris-Ritter’s report, which can be found here.)
Two days later, Jennifer Lancaster, as chair of the review committee, submitted her report to Wood. In it, she said the complaint against Saline County committee members, which her husband had filed, was vague and should be dismissed because it did not inform the committee members of specifically what actions allegedly violated party rules.
According to Cavin, Wood distributed Harris-Ritter’s report among executive committee members on Monday, but he did not distribute Jennifer Lancaster’s report. Clint Lancaster, as the complainant, was given five minutes to speak at Monday’s meeting. He argued that the county committee should not be dissolved because, among other things, they had not been provided proper notice that dissolution was on the table and had been denied due process when they were not given notice and an opportunity to be heard before a decision was reached.
Despite Clint Lancaster’s arguments, the executive committee voted 16-3 to adopt Harris-Ritter’s recommendation and dissolve the Saline County Republican Committee. In a separate vote, they also removed Jennifer Lancaster as chair of the Arkansas Second Congressional District Republicans and barred her from holding any party leadership positions for 20 years.
By dissolving the county committee, the state party essentially ejected more than 200 Arkansans from the Arkansas Republican Party, according to Jennifer Lancaster. She said this is about retaliating against her for speaking publicly about the executive committee in the past.
“I have been directly told I shouldn’t be talking about what we do on the executive committee,” she told the Democrat-Gazette. “It seems like the body prefers to keep all that hidden and that the people who we are elected to serve should be kept in the dark about our actions, and I fundamentally disagree with that. I believe in transparency, which is one of the principles that we espouse.”
But Frank Curtis, chairman of the now-dissolved committee, said the Lancasters have no one to blame but themselves. In a statement released Monday night, Curtis wrote:
Jennifer Lancaster is the beginning & the end of the trouble at SCRC. Due to a power struggle within herself, she caused a mutiny of the committee back in July which spilled over into the entire state. She broke many of the RPA rules & was banned for 20 yrs from any involvement.
The door to shutting down the committee was opened through a frivolous complaint filed by her husband, Clint, in which Jennifer herself requested that the SCRC be shut down. The RPA decided to dissolve the entire committee. The last time Arkansas has seen a couple this dishonest was the Clintons.
It is unclear what, if anything, Jennifer Lancaster plans to do in response to yesterday’s vote, though simply taking her lumps and going away does not appear to be in the cards.
“I will continue to fight,” she told the Democrat-Gazette. “I don’t have to be within the Republican Party apparatus. As a matter of fact, the shackles are now off.”
