How an obscure committee could decide the GOP nomination
The convention’s 112-member Rules Committee wields enormous power to influence the outcome of the party’s nomination fight, including the authority to undo policies requiring most of the 2,472 convention delegates to abide by the will of the voters — freeing them to vote according to personal preference — or to erect all kinds of obstacles to Donald Trump’s nomination.
.. “By majority rule, they can do anything that they want,” said Barry Bennett, an adviser to Donald Trump who’s coordinating the mogul’s convention strategy. “They can throw out the chairman. You can throw out the RNC members. You can do anything.”
.. The committee doesn’t actually exist yet — and it won’t for months, at least until state-level primaries end in June.
But the campaigns are still working feverishly on a state-by-state basis to line up steadfast allies for delegate slots, and thus possible appointments to the rules panel.
.. Whichever campaign is most successful at getting its loyalists appointed could broker a set of rules that deny Trump a path to the nomination — or ensure that he has one.
.. “It’ll be a bloodbath,” said Tom Lundstrum, an Arkansas Republican who served on the convention Rules Committee in 2012 when rules changes surrounding Ron Paul supporters created a dust-up.
.. Trump’s campaign intends to appoint first-time delegates wherever it can, which means those delegates won’t be beholden to party traditions. But they’ll have little institutional knowledge of the rules process.
.. The simplest way to do it would be to manipulate the so-called eight-state threshold. That rule, rewritten in 2012 by Romney campaign allies, required any candidate eligible for the Republican nomination to win a majority of the delegates from at least eight states or territories. Back then, it prevented Ron Paul from sharing the stage with Romney
.. A more cataclysmic battle could occur over two other rules that have been widely accepted – in public – as unchangeable. One binds delegates to vote according to the outcomes of the state primaries and caucuses. The other permits states to award delegates on a winner-take-all basis.
.. Every delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention is a completely free agent, free to vote for the candidate of their choice on every ballot at the convention in Cleveland in July,” he wrote. “Every delegate is a Superdelegate!”
.. “I think if there was a way they could rig it, without hurting the RNC’s integrity — if there was a way they could rig it to make probably a Mitt Romney or a Jeb Bush or a Marco Rubio win — there’s a good chance they’d do it,” said Spies, the former RNC counsel.