Thread: How the Elite Plan to Steal Election From Trump

A Brokered GOP Convention in 2016?

There's an overlooked RNC rule that could wreak havoc on the 2016 primary.



An obscure rule could turn delegates into kingmakers in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

By David Catanese
March 11, 2014, at 5:53 p.m.

As the dust settled from the fiery rules meeting at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, the leading storyline that emerged was that establishment forces had once again quashed insurgent outsiders by instituting two critical changes to the way the GOP nominates its presidential candidate.

One new rule cracks down on delegates who are inclined to peel away from the electoral outcome in their state, a direct response to the rabble-rousing supporters of former Rep. Ron Paul. The other rule allows the Republican National Committee to change a certain set of rules between conventions with a three-fourths vote of membership, disseminating power from the rules committee which previously held sole jurisdiction.
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But there was a third overlooked change that could potentially have the biggest, most dramatic effect on the 2016 primary fight and some RNC members believe it could render irrelevant the concerted, well-laid efforts to shorten the nomination contest.

Officially, it’s Rule 40 in the RNC handbook and it states that any candidate for president “shall demonstrate the support of a majority of the delegates from each of eight (8 or more states” before their name is presented for nomination at the national convention.

In a scenario with a commanding front-runner, this doesn’t seem like a high threshold to cross. But with the absence of an heir apparent standard-bearer and the most wide open nomination battle in decades looming, some RNC members think Rule 40 could crack open the door to the possibility of a convention floor fight. The theory: If no one candidate has secured eight states, it invites a free-for-all without a reason to get out. Conversely, if multiple candidates garner eight victories and accrue hundreds of delegates, each could claim a right to soldier on. For instance, it isn't inconceivable to think that Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., could dominate the Northeast, with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. performing well in the South and Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wisc,, racking up victories in the Midwest.

So much for an orderly primary.

This storyline would cause considerable heartburn for a good number of Republicans who are at pains to streamline and sanitize the primary process in the wake of the long and draining 2012 slog.

But not Curly Haugland, the 14-year committeeman from North Dakota. A staunch traditional conservative, Haugland knows the rule book better than many of his colleagues and is poised to use it to his advantage to empower delegates over primary voters in the next nominating process.

“Every primary, every caucus, will essentially be a beauty contest,” Haugland says of 2016. “Now, those results will be persuasive to delegates that go to the convention. But the delegates to the Republican convention are going to choose the next presidential nominee. Nobody will have the majority of delegates from eight states before the convention.”
At first listen, the notion seems laughable.

A four-month primary schedule that doesn’t matter? A multiple candidate field devising a delegate-driven strategy for a convention fight? Not in today’s top-down, tightly scripted political era.

But Haugland, wielding the 2012 rule book in his hand, merely refers back to the RNC’s own rules, created and ratified by its own membership to defend his game-changing assertions.

“The RNC has no option except to follow these rules, until they convene in 2016,” he says.

“They can’t wish it away. All the campaigns have to operate with the knowledge that this is the current rule, to get to the eight-state threshold.”

Asked how widespread his interpretation of the rule is, Haugland responds with a grin as wide as a Cheshire cat: “I don’t need any support. All I need is Rule 40.”


Curly Haugland, shown here at the North Dakota state Republican convention in 2010, wants RNC delegates, not primary voters, to ultimately decide the Republican nominee in 2016.


The irony is that the origination of the new Rule 40 came from the epitome of the establishment: Super Republican lawyer and lobbyist Ben Ginsberg, who served as Mitt Romney’s counsel in 2012 and guided the successful Florida recount on behalf of the GOP in 2000 that made George W. Bush president.

Ginsberg, seated two rows behind Haugland at that Tampa meeting, spearheaded many of the rule changes in order to protect Romney’s 2012 convention and what was assumed to be his re-election campaign in 2016. He proposed increasing the amount of states required for an aspiring nominee from five to eight. He also changed the requirement from a simple plurality -- any leading percentage of the vote under 50 percent -- to a harder-to-attain majority. It was all meant to insulate Romney from an intraparty threat. As pugilistic as he is savvy, Ginsberg got almost everything he wanted.

Reached by phone, Ginsberg declined to comment on the record for this story, but multiple committee members cited him as the driver of most of the amendments to the rules. Not all blame him for his maneuvers – his primary and rightful concern at that time was protecting Romney – but now several think Rule 40 should be revisited, even if they see Haugland’s scenario as unlikely to materialize.

Place Morton Blackwell, the grizzled veteran Virginia committeeman who has sat on the RNC Rules Committee since 1988, in that category.

History lends him to believe a clear nominee will become apparent by June after four months of aggressive campaigning, but he acknowledges that it’s possible the rule could wreak unnecessary chaos.

“It’s conceivable the application of this rule could result in nobody having a majority. It needs to be clarified. The problem is it’s not clear,” he says, adding that a slew of Ginsberg’s “unbelievable power grabs” in Tampa need to be repealed.

“That’s a very interesting question,” responds New Hampshire RNC member Steve Duprey when presented with Haugland’s reading of the rule.

Duprey predicts one of the candidates will in fact achieve the eight-state requirement by June, in part based on the assumption that most states holding contests after March 15 will move to winner-take-all delegate models rather than proportional allotment.

“Somebody will get eight,” he says. But even so, he still reveals a bit of concern of where Rule 40 could leave the party in an unprecedented race. “We’re lucky we got a rule that allows us to amend it. Whew!,” he adds.

It’s true. If the RNC sees Rule 40 as enough of a hornet’s nest, they could vote to change it again – but in another esoteric provision, they won’t be able to do so until on the eve of the next convention, slated for midsummer 2016. A change that late in the game could set off another firestorm within the party with candidates enlisting delegates to defend their interests.
Haugland is currently in the process of reaching out to the potential 2016ers to inform them of the rule and how to use it to their advantage. In 2012, he personally urged Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stay in the primary race even when Romney was close to becoming the presumptive nominee. He maintains that a united front by those candidates would have prevented a cascading effect toward Romney, who formally secured the necessary delegates to become the presumptive nominee in late May of that year

“A group of educated candidates, having seen that experience, won’t have that happen again,” he promises.

John Ryder, the RNC’s general counsel from Tennessee, calls Haugland’s reading of the rule “a theoretical possibility … but extremely remote.”

Sure, the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada could split their preferences. But once the larger states begin dispersing their delegates in March and April, a clear winner is more likely to emerge.

Yet even the RNC rules for those winner-take-all states are murky.

A February 2011 memo penned by the RNC counsel’s office instructed that states that wanted to distribute all of their delegates to the first place finisher could do so only if they received “no lower than 50 percent.”

Mitt Romney didn’t begin regularly capturing more than 50 percent of the primary vote until April 2012. If, as assumed, the 2016 field is larger and more competitive than 2012, getting to the 50 percent mark regularly could be a tall task for even the leader of the pack. This fine print could prompt the RNC to reassess the parameters for delegate allocation.

Ryder maintains Rule 40 is not a “realistic concern,” but then invokes the fail-safe defense of convention-eve amendments. “It’s liable to be changed in 2016,” he adds.

To understand Haugland’s motives in this pursuit, one must be aware of his deeply-held belief that the current primary process is not reflective of the party’s core conservative elements. He thinks the open primaries conducted in New Hampshire and South Carolina – where any John Smith is allowed to vote, not just Republicans – derives from a progressive-era notion that dilutes the importance of an organized political party.

“I don’t like people ordering my meals for me, I like to make my own choices. I don’t like people nominating my candidate for me. Political parties are private associations,” he says. “The progressives have long had the idea that the voters should choose the candidates for office. That’s simply not found to be a proper understanding of the role of political parties. We’re not a direct democracy, we’re representative … We can’t all participate directly.”

A delegate driven process would force candidates to devote significant time to a smaller group of party elites around the entire country rather than spending a disproportionate amount of time in a handful of early key states that receive the bulk of the media attention.

If that sounds undemocratic, Haugland flips the argument and argues that the real modern day party bosses are the high-charging consultants and large dollar donors who power campaigns through an avalanche of television ads.
Having to chase delegates on a convention floor would suck the money out of the process and replace it with a market of ideas, placing poorly funded candidates on equal footing with the well-financed titans. Yes, Haugland’s self-aware enough to realize how quaint and unrealistic this sounds to naysayers in today’s era.

Haugland’s colleagues respect his intricate knowledge of the RNC yet they don’t believe one hiccup in a rule couldn’t possibly upend the entire system.

But a source tells U.S. News RNC Chairman Reince Priebus was interested enough in Haugland’s analysis of the rule that he summoned him to Washington for a dinner in late December that lasted several hours to talk it over.

Haugland won’t address that but says he’s getting through to enough Republican heavyweights to make them squirm.
“They’re like a duck on a pond. They appear calm on the surface and underneath they’re swimming like hell. They don’t know what to do,” he says.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/...ention-in-2016

The usnews article was interesting for sure with the cast of characters including Mitt Romney and Ben Ginberg, the lawyer that met with the Republican groups this year (2016) after the CNBC debate upset. He is establishment all the way.

January 2016. Here is another recent story on Rule 40 discussions during RNC Winter meeting. They were going to change as I read it, then put it back. There can be some mischief from the RNC and friends to elect their chosen candidate.

Threat of Brokered Convention Fuels GOP Rules Panel

By Emily Goodin
January 15, 2016


NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. – The most important time during the Republican Convention could be the week leading up to the convention.

That is when GOP delegates and Republican National Committee members will gather to work out the rules governing the four-day gathering this summer.

They are numerous and convoluted, which is causing confusion among the ranks but giving an added incentive to lower-tier presidential candidates to stay in the race long enough to bank a bloc of delegates to put into play in Cleveland.

That confusion was on display during the RNC’s Winter Meeting here when the Standing Committee on Rules met Thursday. The meeting stopped at three different points for the parliamentarian and committee members to debate the rules behind changing the rules.

At one point the committee approved an amendment that would have negated a subsection of the controversial Rule 40, which requires the GOP presidential nominee to have a majority of support in eight different states. Upon realizing what they had done, the committee membership quickly proposed an amendment to the amendment to put the subsection back in play.

Several times during the almost two-hour meeting, RNC members asked for clarification on what was being debated and what part of the rules would be affected. A few of them asked to leave the microphone so they could move closer to the enormous projection screen on the wall displaying the proposed amendment. “I can’t see the screen” was heard more than once.

Even Rules Chairman Bruce Ash of Arizona had to check his notes -- and with the parliamentarian -- on what to do next, apologizing at one point for his “brain fart” as he ruled on various motions. Officially, party members don’t want to talk about a brokered or, as they prefer to call it, a “contested” convention, downplaying the possibility it may happen. But the hallways of the luxurious Belmond Charleston Place buzzed with chatter about it.

Several times when two or more attendees gathered, the talk turned to convention rules. And no two seemed to agree on the best way to handle the chaos that would come if there is no presumptive nominee before the party gathers in July. The discussions were more theoretical than contentious but there was a slight sense of urgency along with rumblings about what the plan would be should a contested convention occur.

The real decisions will come in Cleveland – just a week before the convention starts on July 18. That is when the Convention Rules Committee, made up of two delegates from each state, will decide upon the rules governing the gathering. That part is complex too. The RNC Rules Committee makes recommendations on the convention rules to the national party, which then makes recommendations to the Convention Rules Committee, which then recommends a slate of rules to the delegates to approve on the first day of the convention.

A lot can happen in that process and that’s where some of the lower-tier presidential candidates could prove influential in the nominating process.

One of the items likely to be tackled at that time is the aforementioned Rule 40. The brainchild of GOP uber lawyer Ben Ginsberg in the 2012 Convention Rules meeting, it was designed to keep supporters of Ron Paul from putting on a display on the convention floor that might distract from the Mitt Romney narrative. Although it achieved this goal, the rule upset many of the party faithful—and the Republicans are apparently still stuck with it.

And in 2016, with 11 presidential candidates still in the race, several influential party officials worry that the eight-state majority requirement is too restrictive. Most presidential candidates win primaries with pluralities instead of majorities. And, if the GOP primary drags on, it could prove harder and harder for one contender to hit the eight-state threshold.

Even Rule 40 itself is open to interpretation. During Thursday’s meeting, RNC General Counsel John Ryder, the interpreter of the rules, argued that a “majority of support” could actually mean the presumptive nominee has demonstrated “enough support” in eight states. His argument: If delegates elected to support a presidential candidate who bowed out of the race moved their support to the presumptive nominee, that could count toward the majority.

That’s where the power of the lower-tier candidates could come into play.

Say, for example, John Kasich stays in the race through Ohio’s March 15 primary. As governor, Kasich is likely to win his home state and its winner-take-all 66 delegates. He’s also polling above 10 percent in New Hampshire, which is the threshold to win some delegates there in its proportional allotment system. Several other states have proportional primaries (with various thresholds to actually win delegates), giving Kasich several opportunities to pick up delegates here and there. Theoretically, he could do well enough to amass 200 or so (1,237 delegates are needed to win the nomination outright).

The same could apply to Jeb Bush. If he stays in the race until Florida’s March 15 primary, there’s a chance he could win his state’s 99 delegates in its winner-take-all contest. With Sen. Lindsey Graham’s endorsement of him on Friday, Bush could be poised to pick up a few in Graham’s home state of South Carolina, which awards its delegates proportionally. Bush could come out of the early primaries with a sizable bloc of delegates without winning anywhere but his home state.

Scenarios like that could make either man a power broker at a convention without a presumptive nominee. In a multi-ballot convention, which hasn’t happened for Republicans since 1948, the candidate who gathers support on the second or third ballots could end up as the nominee.

Kasich, Bush, Chris Christie or any other lower-tier GOP contender who has the money and the will to stay in the primary long enough to amass a few hundred loyal delegates could also prove to be a power broker in deciding a nominee by pushing their support toward one contender in the second round of voting.

“This time it could happen,” Morton Blackwell, an RNC member from Virginia who is a longtime Rules Committee member, said of a multi-ballot convention. And the candidate with the most delegates going into the convention wouldn’t necessarily end up as the nominee.

“At some point the second ballot or multiple ballot could yield someone who was behind that might end up winning,” Blackwell said.

The real worrying could come in March, when most states shift from proportional to winner-take-all, giving lower-tier candidates a better shot at winning more delegates.

Those candidate-loyal delegates also could prove helpful if they end up on the Convention Rules Committee, where, theoretically, rules could be made to prevent a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz from becoming the nominee, should one of them be leading in the delegate count.

Delegates to the Convention Rules Committee are picked by the delegations to the convention. Each state has its own rules on how the members are selected. But it is all theoretical until voting starts – Feb. 1 for the Iowa caucuses and Feb. 9 for the New Hampshire primary.

While waiting for the voting to begin, a little preparation doesn’t hurt, as anything could happen no matter how small the odds. As one RNC member warned the Rules Committee on Thursday: “Perfect storms come at the most inopportune times.”

Emily Goodin is the managing editor of RealClearPolitics.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...el_129335.html

Here are 2 older articles, but we learn more about Ben Ginsberg, the revolt against his shenanigans to craft rules that would benefit the establishment choice for President.

How the Establishment Stole the GOP

Thursday, 30 August 2012
Republican Convention Rules Changes: How the Establishment Stole the GOP

Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.



On August 28 the Republican National Committee (RNC) allowed representatives of the Mitt Romney campaign to seize control of the Republican Party. As The New American has reported, Ron Paul delegates from Maine were improperly denied credentials, robbing Paul of a majority of that state’s delegation. One disgusted Maine delegate described this decision as a “huge slap in the face.”

That slap hit more than just Maine. Maine’s Ron Paul delegates were roughly shoved out of the Republican Party’s quadrennial convention, and as a result of events surrounding the proposal and adoption of new rules to govern the presidential nomination process, every potential Republican presidential candidate with a message that doesn’t parrot the party line has been effectively ostracized. Forever.

The story of how a very small cabal of monied Republican activists carried out their coup d’etat has been chronicled in every major news outlet August 28 and 29.

The New York Times reported, “Over loud boos Romney supporters pass new rules.”

The Washington Post wrote, “Amidst a contentious scene on the floor of the convention, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) ruled that the committee rules had passed by a voice vote — despite loud protest from many in the arena.”
The Los Angeles Times reported “the RNC laid the groundwork to change its rules in a maneuver that would effectively make it harder for a Paul-type candidate in future elections.”

In order to make the nomination of Mitt Romney a fait accompli and to ensure that only those in his mold would ever carry the banner of the GOP, the RNC sacrificed adherence to its own rules on the altar of obedience to the Establishment.
In an exclusive conversation with The New American August 29, a longtime Republican activist recounted a tale that is at once incredible and unconscionable.

Richard Engle has served the Republican Party in Oklahoma diligently since 1988. His role in moving the Sooner State to the political right cannot be overstated. He has represented Oklahoma in the Republican National Committee and has sat on the RNC’s standing committee on rules.

Engle is intimately familiar with the proper Republican rules-making process — he has participated in it — and he recognizes how that process was hijacked by members of the Romney inner circle at the meeting of the Convention Rules Committee.

Before rules are considered by the Republican Convention Rules Committee, they percolate up from proposals made by the state delegates of the Standing Rules Committee. This group of dedicated Republican officials meets three times a year to discuss suggested changes and prepare a draft of new rules to be considered by the Convention Rules Committee that meets every four years.

Unlike the RNC’s Standing Rules Committee, the Republican National Convention Rules Committee (“Convention Rules Committee” for short) meets only once every four years and is composed of two delegates from each state (one man and one woman). These people are "good Republicans" and are unquestionably well-intentioned, but they often have little or no experience with the party’s rule-making procedures. This body is an ad hoc committee brought together for the sole purpose of receiving and reviewing the rule changes proposed by the standing committee.

As the Convention Rules Committee met August 28, the Romney campaign lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, showed up and in the words of Engle, “pressured for significant and dramatic” changes to the party’s rules governing the binding of delegates and the way rules are to be revised in the future.

According to the revised Rule 15 (to be renumbered as Rule 16 in the new rule book) as proposed by Ginsberg, every state must amend its nominating process to ensure that their delegations are bound to vote in accordance with the winner of the popular vote as cast at state caucuses or primaries.

Ginsberg’s version of Rule 12 empowers the RNC to bend its own rules to suit their needs at any time without submitting the changes to party members gathered at the quadrennial convention. This unprecedented revision places the control of the GOP in the hands of the Establishment candidate without suffering the inconvenience of listening to dissenting voices. As Engle reckons, in the future the nomination of an incumbent Republican president is guaranteed and upon leaving office, he will be able to name his chosen successor through manipulation of the party rules.

When it comes to all this “radical” rewriting, Engle admits that he doesn’t know whether Ginsberg acted on his own or on behalf of Governor Romney. He does know, however, that the sweeping revisions of Rules 12 and 15 (now 16) “changed the nature of the Republican Party and returned it to the smoke-filled rooms of the past.”

So drastic were the revisions that Engle compared the convention to the Soviet Politburo, a sham with no more legitimate power than to rubber stamp their leaders’ directives.

To their credit, Engle relates that upon hearing Ginsberg’s suggested rules changes the delegates on the Convention Rules Committee “of every stripe” reacted negatively. All of them realized that if the changes were adopted by the convention, the populist influence would be eliminated and all non-Establishment voices within the Republican Party would be silenced. Engle worries that the rules package proposed by Ginsberg would have the effect of putting “a certain type of party member in charge of the GOP.”

Evidence of the delegates’ displeasure is found in the attempted filing of a Minority Report. According to Rule 34 of the Republican Party rules in effect at the August 28 meeting:

No resolution or amendment pertaining to the report of the Committee on Resolutions or the Committee on Rules and Order of Business shall be reported out or made a part of any report of such committee or otherwise read or debated before the convention, unless the same shall have been submitted to the chairman, vice chairman, or secretary of such committee or to the secretary of the convention in writing not later than one hour after the time at which such committee votes on its report to the convention and shall have been accompanied by a petition evidencing the affirmative written support of a minimum of twenty-five percent (25%) of the membership of such committee.

The Minority Report opposing the Romney lawyer’s rule changes was signed, sealed, but was never delivered. Curiously, the delegate in possession of the Minority Report was riding a bus denied entry to the Tampa Bay Times Forum.

Virginia delegate Chris Stearns was on a bus of delegates blocked from stopping at the Convention. “They're keeping us all on a bus and not allowing us in the security perimeter,” Stearns posted on his Facebook page.

Without a timely filed Minority Report, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) proceeded to call for a vote on Ginsberg’s rewrite of the Republican rulebook.

Standing at the podium and reading from a teleprompter, Boehner instructed those in favor of the rules to say “aye” and those opposed to say “nay.”

According to Engle, who was on the floor at the time, “in my hearing the ‘nays’ had it.” He admits the vote might have been close and as such Boehner should have called for a roll call vote rather than a voice vote. In another example of unexplained deviation from applicable Republican Party protocol, Boehner ignored the dissenting delegates for "division," which is a roll call vote.

Whether it was the will of Mitt Romney or the independent work of one of his key counselors, Engle fears that the new rules governing the Republican Party’s method of selecting a presidential candidate nailed closed the coffin of the GOP. This week observers may be witnessing “the last Republican National Convention as we know it,” he added.

A small coterie of Establishment Republicans have wrested control of the GOP and formed the mold into which any Republican wanting to run for president from now on must fit.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews...-stole-the-gop


Undoing the ‘Ginsberg’ rules at the Spring RNC meeting

Morton Blackwell's charge to restore power to the grassroots

By: Matthew Hurtt (Diary) |
March 25th, 2013 at 08:41 PM

There was plenty of coverage of the rules changes during the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa (where I was an at-large delegate from Virginia). Erick Ericksonblogged about it. The Blaze picked it up. Daily Beast, too. NBC. HuffPo.
Long story short: The Romney campaign, through D.C. attorney Ben Ginsberg (and then-surrogate John Sununu), strong-armed the Rules Committee into changing a number of rules that would consolidate power with the campaign of the incumbent (thinking ahead to 2016, Romney’s second term). Once the changes made it out of committee and to the floor, there was considerable objection as John Boehner presided over the vote to approve the rules. Virginia was unanimous in our opposition.

But Romney didn’t win. And the rules changes won’t have their intended effect.

Morton Blackwell, Virginia’s Republican National Committeeman and a long-time Rules Committee member, led the fight in the lead-up to the battle and has continued to work to undo the damage from the 2012 Convention. In January, Blackwell penned a letter,which he posted here at RedState, urging the RNC to change the rules back to the way they were before the Convention.

The time to make that change is now. The RNC will convene in Los Angeles on April 10-13 for their Spring meeting. Blackwell will attempt to reverse the rules.

This week, he wrote an email to GOP Chairman Reince Priebus. Blackwell writes [emphases mine]:

Dear Reince,
You will recall that I have submitted a motion to be considered by the RNC to repeal all the changes which the RNC can reverse which were made by the 2012 Convention Rules Committee to the Rules of the Republican Party as forwarded to the Convention Rules Committee by unanimous vote of the RNC.

My motion would repeal all changes made by the Convention Rules Committee to Rules 1 through 11 and Rules 13 through 25.

Prepared with assistance I received from your Legal Counsel office and attached is a copy of the Rules of the Republican Party as they would stand if my motion passed.

The power grab initiated by Ben Ginsberg at the Convention Rules Committee outraged many RNC members and millions of grassroots Republicans across the country. It caused thunderous opposition when the Convention Rules Committee report was presented to the National Convention in Tampa.

What Ben Ginsberg did was an abusive overreach which he achieved only because he represented himself (correctly) as the designated spokesman of the Romney campaign to the Convention Rules Committee. There is general agreement that his power grab was a terrible mistake. It repealed good reforms passed by the RNC Standing Committee over the previous four years and passed unanimously by the RNC the day before. It hurt the Romney presidential campaign.

Ginsberg’s effort was to further centralize power in the Party and to make it more difficult for power and influence in the Party to flow from the bottom up.

What he did certainly hurt our presidential campaign in Virginia.

The wording of the new Rule 12, which he strongly supported, puts Rule 12 and Rules 26 through 42 beyond the reach of the RNC and its Standing Committee on Rules. Nevertheless, it is highly important now that the RNC immediately show grassroots conservatives unmistakably that the national Republican Party rejects what Ben Ginsberg did.

You and I have had some discussion about my motion, and I’m happy that you said you agree 100% with me. But it is not clear whether or not you support my motion. Several people have told me that you believe that minor changes to a couple of the Rules will fix the problem.

That would not work.

We must clearly demonstrate that we entirely repudiate and reverse all that we can of what Ben Ginsberg did. That precedent would strongly discourage the campaign of future presidential candidates from using their immense clout to centralize power in the Party just before national conventions. Nothing less will reassure the large numbers of grassroots conservatives that we are serious about welcoming them into participation in our Party.

Any amendment to the Rules must first pass in the Standing Committee on Rules, and then it must pass by a 75% vote of the entire 168 members of the RNC.

The influence of the RNC chairman is so powerful that no amendment to the Rules is likely without your personal support. As national chairman, you have effective control over large sums of money essential for state parties and for Republican candidates, not to mention your control over RNC hiring and other powers. Certainly no proposal you oppose could pass. Your neutrality would probably defeat any proposed amendment which is in any way controversial.

I do appreciate the fact that you told me you would support a record vote on my motion. I consider it very important that everyone knows how their representatives vote on reversing Ben Ginsberg’s power grab in Tampa.
One effect of my motion would be to restore the change passed by the 2008-2012 Standing Committee on Rules (and unanimously passed by the RNC) to provide for the election of the chairman of the RNC Committee on Resolutions, rather than fill that position by appointment of the national Party chairman.

Chairmen of the Standing Committee on Rules are elected, and election of the RNC Resolutions Committee chairman would be no great limitation of the national Party chairman’s power.

So I ask for your open, strong support of my motion when the RNC meets in April in Los Angeles.
The new Rule 12 was sloppily worded, and it would be helpful if you would let RNC members know in advance your interpretation of how it will work. On its face, Rule 12 says proposed amendments to the Rules of the Republican Party first have to pass the Standing Committee on Rules and then must pass by a 75% vote of the entire membership of the RNC.

That would seem similar to the process by which the U.S. Constitution is amended: The Congress approves an amendment, and then it goes to the state legislatures for ratification. Before it is ratifed, 75% of the states must approve an amendment, and the states may not amend in any way what the Congress has proposed.

Would you rule, contrary to the amending process for the U.S. Constitution, that the RNC could amend, by majority vote, proposed amendments to the Rules submitted by the Standing Committee on Rules for RNC approval? Would only final passage by the RNC require a 75% vote and amendments by the RNC to what the Standing Committee has proposed require only a majority vote by the RNC?

The email goes on to address a number of other issues pertaining to the Republican Party. Blackwell references a series of changes in the email, which he attaches. Those can be found uploaded to my Scribd account here.

I will travel with Blackwell to Los Angeles in April and provide updates via my Twitter account. Longer updates will be posted here on my RedState diary.

http://www.redstate.com/diary/matthe...g-rnc-meeting/

One would think there would be no way to get away with this but still to many people out there want to ignore politics as much as possible. They will vote and listen to a few points but if its not covered by mainstream media most people won't know what happened and simply buy into *Trump lost* crap.

I hope IF this happens to Trump he not only files a suit against the GOP but runs as an independent and I'm hoping Cruz would back him (we know the GOP won't give the nomination to Cruz either) on getting screwed over by the same GOP demanding loyalty before.

all obama did was lie to us & he still lie

Just vote for Trump, then he'll get far more than the 54%, and no one has to worry about a brokered convention. United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g-gl7o2csqk


http://mediamatters.org/embed/static/clips/2016/02/26/44987/gcn-alexjones-20160226-stonesteal

related:
http://www.alipac.us/f8/plan-romney-.../?#post1493691