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.
The Party Still Decides
Trump, though, is cut from a very different cloth. He’s an authoritarian, not an ideologue, and his antecedents aren’t Goldwater or McGovern; they’re figures like George Wallace and Huey Long
.. A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own. And there is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party.
.. What Trump has demonstrated is that in our present cultural environment, and in the Republican Party’s present state of bankruptcy, the first lines of defense against a demagogue no longer hold.
.. But the party’s convention rules, in all their anachronistic, undemocratic and highly-negotiable intricacy, are also a line of defense, also a hurdle, also a place where a man unfit for office can be turned aside.
The Party Can No Longer Decide
The front-runner’s inability to muster testimonials was a big deal to political scientists and journalists who have touted the idea of an “Invisible Primary” where various candidates jockey for position outside of public view to get the best staff members and the most money.
.. There certainly is data behind that supposition, even though the number of open nomination contests in history is still rather small. Nonetheless, the notion that party grandees were the main determiners of their own standard-bearers caught on among journalists like wildfire. The title of a 2008 book, The Party Decides, became a mantra that was almost inescapable up until Donald Trump’s victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
.. The question of why the Republican powers-that-be didn’t spring into action until Trump had notched victories in three separate elections is one that journalists and historians will be asking for many years
.. Drezner offers two reasons why no one decided to act. The first is that it attacking Trump was not in the interest of any of his rivals individually. Not too long after he entered the race, it became clear that Trump was very adept at using his speaking and adversarial negotiation skills in the political arena as he demolished the poll numbers of Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson. Beyond that, many of the campaigns and their supporters remained convinced that Trump wouldfinally say something so outrageous that his candidacy would implode and therefore they had best play nice so that they could inherit Trump’s voters.
.. This created a social dilemma in which all of the non-Trump candidates wanted the same outcome but were unwilling to cooperate in order to attain it.
.. The candidates, donors, and their consultant remoras never bothered to take action because each of them figured that someone else would do it. Everyone figured out that the party would decide, somehow, that it would get rid of the interloper.
.. While conservative activists, commentators, and journalists seem to think of the establishment as official Republican Party functionaries, the authors of the now-maligned theory have a much more sophisticated and inclusive definition which also includes the very same talk show hosts, television commentators, and writers who erroneously believe themselves to be outsiders looking in.
.. When the question of right-wing consensus is looked at in this light, it becomes obvious why Donald Trump has done so well. The party has decided that it doesn’t like Trump, but it is incapable of deciding how to rid itself of him.
.. A functioning and healthy party would have avoided the situation in the first place by creating new policies that better serve the public and Republican voters. That the party then declined to do anything against him when it could have suggests that regardless of whether Trump actually gets the GOP nomination, the American right is in need of wholesale reform at the very highest echelons. That’s because Donald Trump is not the cause of the right’s problems; he is the consequence of the right’s problems.
Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump
The wiser and most honest conservatives among us have been acknowledging, in the past few weeks, that the ascent of Donald Trump is a huge and historic mistake—but they also want to insist that he’s not just their huge historic mistake. They’ve been passing the blame around. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written, rather movingly, of how Trump’s ascent seems alarmingly to affirm bad things that liberals have said about Republican racial attitudes in the past, with the strong implication that this was, until this very moment, unfair—without stopping to ask how different things might be if the Journal’s editorial page had, in 2012, really condemned Romney’s embrace of Trump at the height of his most rancid “birtherism.”
..The same people who have long scoffed, often with reason, at the “root causes” theory of terrorism or crime or whatever—emphasizing, instead, individual responsibility for whatever it is we choose to do— have now become full-fledged rootsers.
.. Or else it’s said that there is a “systematic rot” in American politics, of which Trump is merely a symptom.
.. And that there is economic anxiety is obvious. If this were a sufficient explanation, though, one would expect Trump’s own peculiar brand of Home Shopping Network crypto-fascism to track those anxieties, and one would expect the most marginalized and threatened among us to be most taken with it.
.. If there’s one thing that economists, right and left, agree on, it is that, as Paul Krugman puts it, globalization “is not a problem we can address by lashing out at foreigners we falsely imagine are winning at our expense.”
.. Hitler’s appeal, as any reader of “Mein Kampf” can find, was very marginally about economic grievances, almost entirely to feelings of aggrieved identity and unavenged humiliation.
.. Fascism may have appealed to the economically insecure, but it did not appeal by giving them an economic answer. It appealed by giving them an enemy.
.. one can recognize the grievance without entering into a sentimental view of the aggrieved.