Tag Archives: elections

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Yes, a GOP Delegate Revolt is Possible

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English: Photo taken at the 1912 Republican Na...
English: Photo taken at the 1912 Republican National Convention held at the Chicago Coliseum, Chicago, Illinois, June 18-22. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee,  is heading toward July’s national party convention with a majority of delegates (as “bound” by state primaries and caucuses) in hand. But ever since it became clear that he would garner that majority, both he and the GOP leadership have spent a good deal of time trying to snuff out talk of a floor revolt by those delegates against his nomination and in favor of some other candidate’s.

“The Republican National Committee put out a statement ‘you can’t do it, it’s not legal, you can’t do it, you’re not allowed to do it,'” says Trump.

Is Trump right? Is it “illegal” for the delegates to do what they want instead of what Trump and the RNC claim the rules demand?

In a word, no.

Keep in mind that at a national convention, the delegates run the national committee, not the other way around. They make the rules. They can change the rules. They can suspend the rules. And even the rules as written leave room for a revolt.

In order to receive the nomination, Republican National Convention rule 40(d) requires a candidate to receive a majority of “the votes entitled to be cast.” In other words, the votes of a majority of the total number of registered delegates, not just of a majority of the delegates who happen to actually vote.

Rule 16, section 2, forbids the convention’s secretary to recognize the vote of a delegate bound to a particular candidate by a primary or caucus outcome if that vote is cast for another candidate … but no rule requires a delegate to vote at all.

If enough Trump-bound delegates with “votes entitled to be cast” decline to vote on the first ballot, Trump won’t get a majority on that ballot. And on subsequent ballots, delegates are no longer bound to candidates — they can vote for their nominee of choice.

100% possible, 100% legal … but how likely? Well, that depends on the party’s leadership.

Party officials enjoy quite a bit of power at conventions. At the recent Libertarian National Convention, there were times when a “quorum call” (a head count to ensure enough delegates are present to legally do business) would have resulted in adjournment. There were calls from the floor to make that happen … but the chair apparently just didn’t hear them (I’m sure you get my meaning). Supporters of Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 Republican presidential campaigns still complain about the party establishment’s dirty parliamentary tricks at caucuses and conventions.

The likelihood of a delegate revolt in Cleveland is really mostly a matter of whether or not Reince Priebus and Company WANT a delegate revolt in Cleveland. On that question, your guess is as good as mine.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Election 2016: Wherever You Go, There You Are

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English: ‘Down Goes McGinty’, This cartoon par...
English: ‘Down Goes McGinty’, This cartoon parodies a popular comic song about a foolish Irishman who undergoes a series of mishaps culminating in a fall into the sea, where he dies. McGinty here is Democratic presidential nominee of 1900, William Jennings Bryan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Six months ago, who would have bet on Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, even given juicy odds? But here we are.

Who would have predicted the last two Republican presidents, the immediate past GOP presidential nominee, and the Republican Speaker of the House declining even lukewarm endorsements for their party’s horse? Yet that’s what’s happening.

Over on the Democratic side, who expected Bernie Sanders to erase Hillary Clinton’s 50-point leads and go toe to toe with her — or for that matter to win a single primary other than perhaps his home state of Vermont’s? Well, guess what?

And then there’s Clinton herself, not just continuing to run but continuing to win. This, even as she faces possible compelled deposition relating to her use of, and an ongoing FBI criminal investigation into mishandling of classified information via, a non-secure, privately owned mail server — a server allegedly hacked by, probably among others, now-incarcerated Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, aka “Guccifer.” A confidential source that I just invented tells me Clinton shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. I’m skeptical. But not as skeptical as I would have been a year ago.

Over in third party territory where I live, some activists are convinced that all this  #NeverTrump #FeelTheBern #WhichHillary stuff portends a breakout year for the Libertarians or the Greens. Again, I’m skeptical. Again, not as skeptical now as last Christmas.

There’s a major crackup/realignment going on in American politics, from the parties’ rank-and-file all the way up to leadership. The nation’s transpartisan ruling class is in the throes of something approaching civil war. Maybe, hopefully not,  one as dangerous as the crackup preceding the REAL Civil War.

The pundits, myself included, have been churning out novel theories to make sense of all this for as long as it’s been going on. Each theory enjoys a half-life of a week or so as it decays into the next. Those of us who arrogate to ourselves the job of explaining stuff to the rest of you are at least as lost at sea as you are. Not, as you’re no doubt noticing, that it shuts any of us up.

It’s going to be a long six months between now and the election. Maybe at the end of it we’ll have some kind of epiphany or valuable takeaway to show for it. But I wouldn’t bet on that either.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Problem With Donald Trump’s Version of “America First”

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English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in...
English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In March, an open letter from 121 Republican “national security leaders” characterized GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision as “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” swinging “from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”

While it’s always wise to take proclamations from the people who brought us the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with a grain of salt, in this case they were right — and Trump himself proved it with his speech before the Center for National Interest on April 27.

“America First,” says Trump,  “will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

Some non-interventionists, especially those of a libertarian bent, cheer the use of that phrase, thinking back to the movement to keep the US out of World War II and even to Thomas Jefferson’s proclaimed policy of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

But neither of those remotely resemble Trump’s position, to the extent that he has a coherent position at all. Only two sentences after dropping the America First name, he lauds US interventionism in World War II and 45 years of  Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Later in the speech Trump condemns open trade lanes with other nations, complaining about a “manufacturing trade deficit” and  China’s “economic assault on America’s jobs and wealth” and proposing the most damaging version of international trade war since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act helped crash the US economy and usher in the Great Depression. So much for commerce and honest friendship.

And what about peace? Trump calls for US allies to increase their military spending while claiming that America’s own military — still by far the most expensive and powerful in the history of the world and the single largest line item in the federal budget — has been “weakened” and must be rebuilt.  This is not a proposal that NATO stand up while the US stands down — he calls for an escalation, not a drawdown, of military force.

Trump supports continued US intervention in the Middle East, including an obligatory tip of the hat to America’s “special relationship” with Israel, but he doesn’t support “nation-building.” In English that means he isn’t giving up on having the US armed forces run around the world killing people and breaking things; he’s only against trying to put the victim nations back together again afterward.

“Wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle” indeed. But it’s a heck of a personal branding escapade. Trump is just a run of the mill — if visibly unstable and irrational —  hawk trying to pass himself as the peace candidate. And it’s working, at least among people who believe me when I tell them the word “gullible” is written on the ceiling.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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