Valar morghulis, y’all.
Robert Morrow
The brief, zany tenure of Travis County GOP Chairman Robert Morrow came to an end Friday, as party officials made clear the conspiracy theorist abandoned his post by running for president and he accepted their conclusion without question.
Inside a nondescript office park in Austin, party officials convened reporters to lay out their case, saying Morrow’s application to be a write-in candidate for the White House, filed last week, “resulted in an immediate vacancy” at the top of the county party. Waiting in the lobby afterward was Morrow, wearing his trademark jester’s hat and carrying the “Trump is a Child Rapist” sign that had got him booted from a rally for the Republican presidential nominee Tuesday in Austin.
“I’m in complete agreement with them because I’m running for president,” Morrow said of party officials’ conclusion. “It’s clear: You can’t be the president of the United States of America, or even run for president, and be the chairman of a political party, and I’m fine with that.”
It marked a relatively noncontroversial finish to Morrow’s controversial tenure, which was sparked by his surprise victory over incumbent James Dickey in the March elections. Alarmed by Morrow’s conspiracy theory-fueled bombast and disinterest in actually running the organization, party officials created a steering committee in June that handled many of the duties typically reserved for the chairman.
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The writing was on the wall Thursday, when word got out that the secretary of state’s office accepted Morrow as a write-in presidential candidate. By the end of the day, the county party was getting backup from the state party, whose chairman Tom Mechler issued a statement affirming that Morrow became ineligible to serve as county chairman upon filing for president.
On Friday, Morrow did not exactly say whether he knew that when he applied to be a write-in candidate he was effectively resigning from the county party. “I knew in the back of my mind,” Morrow told reporters, “it might cause a problem.”
That’s a slight change from what Morrow had been saying on Thursday, when word of this development first came to light.
In a statement Thursday afternoon, state GOP Chairman Tom Mechler said Morrow “became ineligible to hold the office of Travis County Republican Chair” upon filing Friday to be a write-in candidate. Morrow told The Texas Tribune earlier Thursday he could not be ousted.
“They don’t have the grounds to do that, and anybody who says so is probably lying,” Morrow said. “The case law on this is probably extremely thin.”
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A party spokesman declined to elaborate on the announcement, but a person close to the party said the news conference will likely be about Morrow’s fate. It was not immediately clear how the process of Morrow stepping down would unfold, and at least one party official cautioned that the party was still conferring over the issue.
The county party nonetheless has the support of Mechler.
“There is absolutely no place for rhetoric as distasteful as Mr. Morrow’s in the Republican Party of Texas,” Mechler said in the statement. “We are excited to move forward with the Travis County GOP and the new incoming Chair as soon as an election is held to fill the position.”
The bombastic Morrow fired back on Twitter by asking Mechler to perform a sex act on him. Morrow remained defiant as speculation built Thursday afternoon that an effort was afoot to see him out as chairman.
“If other people attempt to pull a coup like this, there will be trouble,” Morrow added. “The bottom line is the Texas voters, the Republican Party, have spoken.”
It’s hard to know what might have happened between Thursday and Friday to facilitate Morrow’s change of mind, probably because as Dave Barry once said about Lyndon LaRouche, where you and I have a brain, Robert Morrow has a Whack-a-Mole game. Be that as it may, this is a terrible loss for people who need some cheap, tawdry laughs in their political news consumption, a group in which I include myself. Also, too, did you know it only took 38 signatures to “appear” on the ballot as a write-in candidate for President, by which I mean “have the write-in votes that are cast for you included in the official count by the Secretary of State”? And that Morrow met that threshold, but Evan McMullin did not? I can’t wait to see if Morrow manages to exceed 38 actual votes this November; the low total among 2012 Presidential write-ins was 87, so I’d say he has a decent shot at it. We may never see his like again, that’s for sure. The Austin Chronicle has more.