Never-Trump GOP's New Plan

MI2AZ

Active Member
Donald Trump gets to pick his own apprentices on reality TV—but the rules are different at the Republican National Convention. Anti-Trump Republicans trying to keep him off the GOP ticket have a Plan B: reject his vice presidential pick if they consider the choice unacceptable, NBC reports. In both parties, choosing a vice presidential nominee is already technically up to the delegates in both parties instead of the candidate—Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to pick his own running mate—and the rebel Republicans want to change the GOP's Rule 40 to make it easier to dump Trump's choice. Among the several suggested changes: The rules currently state that any candidate for president or VP must have the support of delegates from eight states. The anti-Trump GOPers want to lower that number to three.

A source from the "Free the Delegates" group tells BuzzFeed that installing an alternative VP is seen as the "arranged marriage" option. "It’s the grassroots saying if you're going to do this, you're going to do it with our pick," the source says, describing the three-state threshold as "high enough to weed out crazy people, while low enough to let a few states come to terms" with a rival candidate. Another proposed change is this addition: "The preference of any candidate seeking nomination for president of the United States shall have no bearing upon the submission of names for nomination for vice president of the United States nor the recording of votes for the same." With just a week until the convention begins, NBC reports the suggested changes will be debated this week by the Rules Committee.
 

bbfreeburn

Active Member
"Among the several suggested changes: The rules currently state that any candidate for president or VP must have the support of delegates from eight states. The anti-Trump GOPers want to lower that number to three." Wouldn't that make it Easier for him to select a VP?
 

AlwaysWrite

Addicted Member
Dear MI2AZ:

How can something like that actually succeed? Even if potential changes are offered by the Rules Committee, such recommendation must be ratified by a vote on the full convention floor, and the Trump delegation holds far too much delegate strength to allow it to happen.
 

9andaWiggle

Addicted Member
They're trying to be cute with the wording. K.I.S.S. Just say what you mean; the members of Bushwood, and ONLY the members of Bushwood will decide who the Republican candidate AND VP pick will be from now on. "The People" will only be allowed to vote for who they're told to vote for!
 

MI2AZ

Active Member
MORE:

Next week, the party of “four score and seven years ago” and “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall” is set to become the party of I’m building a wall and the judge is Mexican.

Real estate developer-turned-reality TV star Donald Trump, barring an unlikely revolt by convention delegates in the coming days, will officially become the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

The party founded to abolish slavery, and which five decades ago became the home of modern conservatism, will be led for at least the next four months, and possibly the next eight years, by a bullying entertainer with a checkered business record, little apparent knowledge or interest in governing, a long history of insults toward women and marginalized ethnic groups, and a professed admiration for dictators.

“The Republican Party is supposed to be the party of conservative principles. What’s happening right now is a meltdown of the Republican Party,” said New Jersey’s Steve Lonegan, who supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s bid for the nomination and is now running a super PAC to help party activists trying to strip Trump of the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

“We’re going to be looking at this for years, trying to understand this,” he added. “It will be analyzed in the books for a decade or two or three.”

Republicans like Lonegan, of course, have a more immediate question: What now?

How does a party that sent Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan to the Oval Office retake control from a man who has compared his fears of venereal diseases with fighting in a war and who accused the last Republican president of intentionally lying to the country to win support for an invasion ― but who went on to win the nomination anyway?

“I cannot in good conscience support someone that I know will be a disaster for our nation and our party,” said Beau Correll, a Virginia convention delegate who is suing that state to invalidate a law requiring him to vote according to the result of the March 1 primary, which Trump won.

“If we continue with Trump, it’s going to be total annihilation,” he said.

Many Republicans also worry that Trump’s disorganized campaign and high disapproval ratings make a victory all but impossible, but others have an even more fundamental concern.

“There’s even a greater fear,” one Republican National Committee member said. “What if he really gets elected? Now what do we do?”

Other Republicans are less shy about that possibility. It would be a catastrophe, they say, and it cannot be allowed to happen.

“Whatever Hillary Clinton’s faults, she’s not ignorant or hateful or a nut,” wrote Mark Salter, who was a senior strategist to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “She acts like an adult, and understands the responsibilities of an American president.”

In such a partisan time, and with as polarizing an opponent as Clinton, relatively few Republicans are likely to openly back the other side. Preventing Trump from remaking the party in his own image, however, is a much more readily accepted goal across the GOP’s spectrum.

“This is a pivotal moment in history,” said Kendal Unruh, the Colorado leader of the “Free the Delegates” movement to encourage fellow delegates to modify the convention rules in the coming week to dump Trump.

Yet reaching a consensus on what should replace Trump’s agenda could prove more difficult than imagined ― for the same reasons that Trump was able to win the nomination in the first place. Trump’s victories in the primaries revealed an enormous gulf between what GOP leaders believe their voters want and what those voters actually want.

All of Trump’s rivals for the nomination hit the usual themes that appeal to the Republican “three-legged stool.” They warned social conservatives about threats to religious freedom, guaranteed economic conservatives big tax cuts and rallied foreign-policy conservatives with promises of a more aggressive use of the military.

Meanwhile, Trump smashed the stool until it shattered, focusing his campaign largely on building a wall along the United States’ border with Mexico, raising tariffs, and bombing and torturing terrorists and their families.

The message resonated with the rarely acknowledged fourth leg of that allegorical stool: a segment of the white population, disproportionately Southern and disproportionately undereducated, that has little interest in lower capital gains taxes or fewer business regulations.

Rather, Trump’s racially tinged promise to “make America great again” harkens back to a time when a high school diploma, and sometimes not even that, was all that was necessary to make a middle-class living in a country that was overwhelmingly white.

“What they want to do is go back to 1956. And it’s just not going to happen,” said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican consultant who served as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s campaign manager in 1994. “If that’s who we are, then we’re headed for the ash heap of history.”

Unfortunately for Republicans like Stipanovich, those white, working-class, resentful-of-how-America-has-changed voters appear to make up between 25 and 35 percent of the Republican base. They are the thousands of supporters who fill gyms and arenas around the country to take in Trump rallies. They are the reason the South, despite its high proportion of religious conservatives, supported a thrice-married New Yorker with a shaky theological background who has said he has never sought God’s forgiveness.

Should the “Dump Trump” activists succeed in the days ahead, the party faces the real possibility that the millions of GOP voters who support Trump will stay home in November, almost certainly guaranteeing a Democratic Senate and possibly even a Democratic House.

“If they try to yank it from him, it would be utterly catastrophic for them,” said Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “You would have at least 1,000 delegates on the floor who were strong supporters of his go ballistic. There would be blood on the floor. It would be a bigger disaster for them than swallowing hard and running with Trump on the ticket.”

That Trump will lose this fall seems a foregone conclusion to the anti-Trump Republicans. The only question is by how much, and whether the size of that defeat will affect how quickly and effectively the party can rebuild for coming elections.

Stipanovich believes it would be best for Trump to lose big ― to be “clubbed like a baby seal,” as he likes to put it.

“There’s been this mythology that the reason we haven’t won big races is because we haven’t been crazy enough,” he said, adding that a crushing loss should teach a valuable lesson. “I hope this puts that to rest. ... It’ll be good for the party in the long-term. To get this idea that ‘we have to be crazy in order to win’ out of our system.”

Lonegan is not sure about that theory. A blow-out Trump loss would endanger Republican control of both chambers of Congress, in his view. The only path to take back the White House is replacing Trump at the convention with an actual conservative candidate who has a fighting chance of beating Clinton, Lonegan said, adding that such a candidate would, win or lose, certainly help retain the Senate and House.

In any event, an aggressive “Dump Trump” movement will at the very least start the post-election reconstruction process.

“It’s a necessary battle because we can lay the groundwork for rebuilding,” Lonegan said. “I think the country benefits when you have a liberal Democratic Party and a conservative Republican Party.”

The two views reflect the stark split between the party’s establishment and cultural wings. It was the establishment group ― including allies of Jeb Bush and his brother, former President George W. Bush ― that wrote the “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. That 2013 “Growth and Opportunity Project” report urged an immigration overhaul that provided legal status to some 11 million undocumented immigrants. In the view of the authors, a more inclusive party that drew in Latinos and members of other racial groups was the only long-term solution.

But that, according to Lonegan and others in the Cruz wing, was exactly the wrong approach. The Senate’s failed “Gang of Eight” legislation helped alienate the voting base, as did the inability of a Republican-led House and Senate to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law or cut spending or follow through on any of the other promises they made in the 2010 and 2014 midterms to block Obama’s agenda.

GOP voters could be forgiven for seeing little difference between the parties, Lonegan said.

“To the average voter, it all looks the same in Washington,” he said.

On the far side of that intraparty chasm, the establishment wing blames that all-or-nothing, no-compromise tone for setting unreasonable expectations in the first place, and Cruz is seen as Exhibit A for how not to move the party forward ― sort of a Trump figure with a somewhat more civil tongue.

This rift should sound familiar to those following the GOP in recent years. It’s been cleaving the party since the George H.W. Bush presidency 25 years ago, and has become an open civil war since the second George W. Bush term a decade ago. In that period, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Stipanovich wondered when the message that the party needs to grow its base, not retreat into it, will sink in.

“I don’t know how many more times that we need to go to the polls before we convince them of that,” he said.

To Ornstein ― who over the years has come to believe that a dysfunctional Republican Party is largely to blame for official Washington’s failure to solve the nation’s biggest problems ― the party factions’ inability to agree on how to deal with Trump foreshadows the difficulty they will face regrouping after November.

The worst possible outcome for Lincoln’s party: It will have learned nothing from its hostile takeover by a celebrity entertainer with a gift for loudly repeating the things its voting base wants to hear, Ornstein said.

Unfortunately, the way battle lines are being drawn already, and with the all-but-certain-to-continue agitation by talk show hosts and others in the conservative ecosystem, the same factors that allowed a Trump nomination will remain in place after November, Ornstein predicted.

“I just don’t see any resolution to this for a long time,” he said.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
 

MI2AZ

Active Member
GOP still working the angles on Trump:

A GOP delegate from Virginia who says his conscience won't let him vote for Donald Trump scored a big victory in federal court Monday. The judge ruled that Virginia can't force Carroll Correll Jr. to vote for Trump because a state law requiring Republican National Committee delegates to back the primary winner imposes a "severe burden" on First Amendment rights, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Trump campaign was "morbidly humiliated" by the result, Correll, a Ted Cruz supporter, tells NBC. "They put all their chips on the table and they lost all of them—if I were them I'd go hide in a closet in Trump Tower," he says.

Correll urged national political figures still on the fence about Trump to "take a step forward from the darkness and into the light" and "deliver this Republic from the abomination of a Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton presidency." The judge's decision, however, did not address state party or RNC rules, which the party says take precedence over state laws, the Journal notes. The RNC's Rules Committee meets later this week and if at least 28 of 112 delegates on the committee support unbinding delegates from primary winners, the question will be put to all 2,472 delegates at the convention last week, giving the "Never Trump" movement a final shot at installing another nominee.
 

9andaWiggle

Addicted Member
The judge ruled that Virginia can't force Carroll Correll Jr. to vote for Trump because a state law requiring Republican National Committee delegates to back the primary winner imposes a "severe burden" on First Amendment rights, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Bullshit. He knew the rules when he took the job. He doesn't have to cast his own, personal vote in November for Trump, but he has to succumb to the will of the people if he's their assigned delegate for the primary (as the law states).

Fuck him AND the judge. Represent The People as you agreed to, or GTFO!!
 

AlwaysWrite

Addicted Member
Bullshit. He knew the rules when he took the job. He doesn't have to cast his own, personal vote in November for Trump, but he has to succumb to the will of the people if he's their assigned delegate for the primary (as the law states).

Fuck him AND the judge. Represent The People as you agreed to, or GTFO!!
... but then again, Barack Hussein Obama and his minions often don't "succumb to the will of the people" ... far from it.
 

AlwaysWrite

Addicted Member
GOP still working the angles on Trump
Anyone with common sense -- and I'm certainly not saying that all politicians have common sense -- should realize that the only candidate who can POSSIBILY defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton is Donald John Trump.

Even IF -- and it's a BIG, BIG IF -- the "Dump Trump" segment of the party can coalesce behind a candidate, such a large segment of the GOP base (and independents) would be totally at odds with a non-Trump candidacy, and so many (including myself) wouldn't vote on the presidential ballot at all, come November.
 

bbfreeburn

Active Member
Anyone with common sense -- and I'm certainly not saying that all politicians have common sense -- should realize that the only candidate who can POSSIBILY defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton is Donald John Trump.

Even IF -- and it's a BIG, BIG IF -- the "Dump Trump" segment of the party can coalesce behind a candidate, such a large segment of the GOP base (and independents) would be totally at odds with a non-Trump candidacy, and so many (including myself) wouldn't vote on the presidential ballot at all, come November.
Good for you. It's you ball, now go home.
 

AlwaysWrite

Addicted Member
Good for you. It's you ball, now go home.
Dear bbfreeburn:

Regardless of your political views and how you intend to vote (or not vote), would you not agree with my statement (posted above)? The statement that reads ...

Anyone with common sense -- and I'm certainly not saying that all politicians have common sense -- should realize that the only candidate who can
POSSIBILY defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton is Donald John Trump.

[I'm not saying that Trump will defeat Hillary by any means, but I am saying that he's the GOP's only hope to defeat Hillary, even if his chances are minimal.]
 

bbfreeburn

Active Member
To answer your question Bill, I think Trump is someone who cannot possibly defeat Clinton. There are R's who might, but not him. (Kasich comes to mind).
 
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