Besides a growing “whip” vote-counting operation, one official said the Trump campaign has assigned sympathetic delegates to ride herd on specific rebels in an effort to communicate and keep tabs on them.
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Next week’s Republican convention will feature an eclectic lineup of speakers, including UFC president Dana White, former National Football League quarterback Tim Tebow, a bunch of Trump employees, the guy whose wife and father were both insulted by Trump, and eccentric gay billionaire (and Gawker slayer) Peter Thiel.
Thank you for reading and relying on TulsaWorld.com for your news and information. For one, conventions are typically a chance for defeated primary candidates to have a brief moment in the sun, and no Minnesota Republican ran for president this year.
As the committee kicked off its business Thursday morning, chairwoman Enid Mickelson announced that a malfunctioning printer delayed the proceedings for just “ten minutes” and that the four-hour delay was due to private meetings to resolve potentially convention-busting issues.
It takes at least 28 votes from the Rules Committee – a quarter of the total 112-member panel – to win a minority report.
Those setbacks led Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a member of the rules committee who is close to Cruz, to complain that the panel was displaying “a trend to rejecting those amendments that tend to disperse power”. Trump probably would have loved to have actual sports icons and A-list movie stars adding a dash of glamour to the Republican convention but – and this is key – actual sports icons and A-list movie stars don’t like Donald J. Trump.
A leader of those conservatives is Ken Cuccinelli, who was a campaign adviser to Texas Sen. Proposals floating around include closing GOP primaries to independent voters, with whom Trump performed well, or making some changes that would not take effect until after this convention.
It’s hard to pin down vote counts ahead of the Rules Committee meetings because delegates can change their minds and are notoriously fickle, said Ben Ginsberg, a former RNC legal counsel, convention veteran, and top aide to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
And while they’d like to win rules changes that specifically unbind delegates, they also insist the current rules already let them back any candidate a reading that RNC general counsel John Ryder derided Wednesday as “idiosyncratic”.
Most surprising, perhaps, is the appearance of “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, Trump’s most vicious and hated opponent during the primaries. “We’ve got the votes”, he said. “There’s nothing to negotiate”. IL delegates are looking at more than $300 a night for hotels, plus a $600 flat fee for food and transportation to and from the convention, not to mention flights, gas, parking or any other costs.
There’s really been a kind of a lot of conversation, like, ‘What is a super delegate?’ To some degree, that happens every four years from people who aren’t winning the nomination (who) begin noticing the system suddenly, they didn’t notice it three years after the last nominating convention, they only notice it four years afterward.
“The convention’s theme, ‘Make America Great Again, ‘ will focus on the core themes of Republican Presidential Nominee Donald J. Trump’s campaign: national security, immigration, trade and jobs”, said Jeff Larson, CEO of the 2016 Republican National Convention, in release an initial list of speakers.
If it is, it seems likely to lose. Anti-Trump delegates plan to protest the convention’s nominating roll call next week if they’re not allowed to vote for whomever they want.
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“You can vote your conscience, you are not bound by your state laws or state party on how you vote”, said Kimball citing rule 37 and 38.
