Here’s Why The RNC Didn’t Want A Reset Of The Convention Rules — It Was About Ted Cruz!
The RNC worked hard to make sure the RNC convention rules weren’t reset at the convention on Monday, but their reasoning wasn’t about protecting Trump from possible threats against his nomination. Rather, it was about trying to keep Ted Cruz from becoming the nominee in 2020!
YAHOO NEWS – For the first time in 36 years, there was a vote on the floor of a party’s nominating convention this past Monday that actually held an element of suspense.
In the hour or so ahead of a vote in which insurgents were attempting to reset the convention rules, Republican National Committee operatives circulated the floor and the back halls of Quicken Loans Arena, buttonholing delegates to argue why they should retract support for the motion, and getting them to sign their names to withdrawal forms. Trump aides, by contrast, bullied delegates with vague and ineffective threats.
In one corner of the arena floor, near CNN’s broadcast booth, delegates from the District of Columbia listened to appeals from high-ranking RNC officials.
The RNC’s argument to the D.C. delegates boiled down to this: A vote for the rules reset would open the door to Ted Cruz becoming the GOP’s nominee four years from now.
Cruz is already laying the groundwork for another run for president in 2020, but a top RNC official told Yahoo News that they expect him to run even if Donald Trump becomes president this fall. That would represent the first major challenge of an incumbent president from inside his own party since Teddy Kennedy ran against President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
“If Trump wins, you better bet your ass Cruz is going to primary him,” the RNC official told Yahoo News.
And so the RNC officials told D.C. delegates that a rules reset would open the door to an effort by a key Cruz ally, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, to close primary contests in several states to independent and Democratic voters. Cuccinelli and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pushed for the closed primary in the convention rules committee meeting last week.
Closed primaries would exclude independents and limit the nomination process to registered Republicans, a more conservative voting group overall, which would favor Cruz.
Well well well. The RNC actually wants independents and Democrats voting in certain state Republican primaries in order to thwart true conservatives from winning! And since the believe Cruz is going to run in 2020, they want to make sure he can’t win!
That’s what this is all about, rigging the system against conservatives!
