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Never Trump Forces Halted on Convention Floor
Many were predicting a floor battle Monday at the the Republican National Convention and they certainly got one.
A group of delegates, led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia, sought to unbind delegates from voting for the presumptive Republican nominee. A majority of delegates from nine states had agreed to their plan for a roll call vote on the official party rules, and they only needed seven states to make the plan stick. Another key part to their effort was to encourage states to hold closed primaries, allowing only Republicans to vote.
Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas was presiding at the time and insisted on a voice vote only. Many Never Trump supporters in the crowd shouted “roll call vote” and “point of order,” while pro-Trump delegates chanted his name to shout them down.
Womack abandoned the stage, leaving both sides in confusion wondering what was going on. After several minutes, he returned and announced that that three states had withdrawn support for a roll call vote, which means the measure had fallen short of the seven-state threshold. Another voice vote was held (the volume of which sounded even from the televised coverage), and Womack quickly declared the “Free the Delegates” plan dead and buried.
The crowd loudly expressed their pleasure and displeasure as Montana Sen. John Barasso took the stage for a low-energy speech demanding unity. But there were few signs of it on the convention floor.
“I have never seen anything like this,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a close ally of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a rival to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“There is no precedent for this,” Lee said.
…After being denied the roll call vote, most of the delegation from Colorado walked off the floor in protest, leaving behind rows of empty seats.
…”It’s certainly disrespectful of the grassroots,” said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an influential rules committee member who had worked to whip enough support from the rules vote. “You win races with people, you lose races with people.”
“It’s all on them,” he said of the RNC before acknowledging the fight was over. “There’s nowhere to appeal.”
…While one angry delegate was speaking to the media about what just transpired, another Trump-backing delegate interrupted.
“Get over it!” she yelled.
Another delegate screamed “Go home!” at another anti-Trump delegate conducting interviews on the convention floor.
Delegates furious over the roll call vote insisted they were not giving up their efforts, but at the same time did not exactly know what their next move would be.
“Stay tuned. There’s a Plan B,” said Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate who co-founded the “Free the Delegates” movement. “We’re going to go back, we’re going to strategize…what they chose was to play hardball to make sure there wasn’t dissent, and now they’re going to get it.”
Reince Priebus and the GOP Establishment is now completely committed to the candidate which vilified them throughout the primaries. It’s Donald Trump’s party now.
Published in General
The Never Trump crowd should’ve begged for the voice vote.
Nobody has presented a credible case that there is going to be a different nominee. People would’ve had to go on the record and there would be some rule changes for 2020 that are arguably much needed, but nominating someone other than Trump was destined to fail and that would’ve only added legitimacy to Trump’s campaign.
According to Jim Gereghty’s (sp?) Morning Jolt, it wasn’t about the Trump nomination, it was about promoting closed primaries by giving states with Republican primary voters a bonus in their delegate count. Those of us in favor of closed primaries can’t understand why the DC Rs are so blind as to the damage open primaries do to our nomination process.
I’ll post the relevant portion of the Jolt in the next comment.
From today’s Morning Jolt:
Eric Stahlfeld, an at-large Republican delegate from the state of Washington and regular Morning Jolt reader, writes in with his perspective on yesterday’s fight on the convention floor:
The fundamental disagreement is who ultimately runs the Republican Party — the delegates to each national convention, or those who take care of things during the intervening four years.
This played out in the rules fight. Within the Washington State delegation, I and others wanted to adjust rules so that those states which used a “closed” system (that is, only Republicans would get to choose who is the Republican nominee) would play a more significant role. For example, one proposal would give those states a fifteen per cent bonus when calculating the number of delegates allocated to such states.
But those running the Party during the periods between the conventions do not like such a suggestion. They seem to believe, to put it charitably, that a Republican nominee can get elected only if he or she appeals to a “broader” group than Republicans alone. So who gets to decide such a fundamental question?
to be continued…
cont’d…
The rules were drafted by a committee composed of those who run the party between the conventions. Those who are part of the 2016 convention rules committee mostly saw them only four days ago. When that committee didn’t agree to rules acceptable to us, we wanted the convention to decide. The convention chairman called for the voice vote, ruled the rules were adopted. He immediately followed the parliamentary sleight-of-hand and ruled that the motion for reconsideration (none really is ever called for) was denied, and “without objection, so ordered.” The trickery is that the chairman can say that he didn’t hear any objection.
But that trick works only until delegates know they have to make sure that their objection is heard.
This time, the chairman didn’t “hear” any objection and attempted to move on to the next order of business. Only by making that impossible could those of us who want the convention to decide the rules.
As it turned out, the process was delayed until some delegations could be convinced to no longer support the effort. I was told on the floor that Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, and D.C. …switched, but that list is slightly different from what has been reported.
But the dispute on the floor was caused solely because the chairman didn’t want to hear any “objection” from the floor. And fundamentally, those on the floor should get to make the decisions about how the party is run.
@ Queen Hotchibobo 1725 less 15%= 1466 Trump wins anyway! So you want to show the nation how Trump shouldn’t be the nominee. Why, so they will vote for Hillary?
The libertarian in me says, if you want a closed primary, don’t use tax dollars to do it. If you use tax dollars, you give up control.
The primary reason MN just switched from a caucus to an open primary is that the party leadership on both sides preferred that the state pay for the election.