by Mark Rhoads
Once upon a time many years ago in 1973, I served on the RNC Rule 29 Committee, chaired by then-Gov. Kit Bond of Missouri. The committee was supposed to examine new ways to promote, but not to guarantee, a wider diversity of delegates and alternates to national conventions. The Rule 29 report came up with some sensible and balanced recommendations that still respected the critical role of the state parties as independent organizations from the RNC. That was consistent with GOP principles at the time.
But over the thirty-eight years since the Rule 29 report, the empire-building staff at both the DNC and RNC have often used the goal of diversity as camouflage for their repeated efforts to bully the state legislatures and make state laws irrelevant to the party nomination and delegate selection rules. OK, I concede that party affairs are often a hybrid of party rules and state laws. But just who do these RNC staffers think they are anyway? They are burning up the wires to state lawmakers and party officials in Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other states trying to dictate their self-invented arbitrary rules about delegate selection, the timing of primaries, selection of presidential electors, and all manner of schemes to make the RNC more powerful at the expense of state parties.
They do this all in the name of worshiping at the altar of some fake God-like "calendar" that they themselves created based on their own notions of what an orderly nomination process should look like. Forget about orderly, they are supposed to be about freedom and freedom is sometimes a messy, or even a chaotic state of nature. State party officials are supposed to be accountable first to party voters in their states. But the RNC and the DNC want to co-opt state parties to dilute their voice at national conventions in order to boost the power of free-rider groupies who get appointed, and not elected, as delegates and alternates.
They always claim that some unelected party officials, or some elected public officials are entitled by Divine Right to be delegates without facing the voters because they were elected to some other office at some time. But that is not the point. They were NOT elected for the purpose of nominating a presidential candidaate at a party convention just because their voters wanted them in a public office. What if voters want a different nominee than the preference of self-appointed party insiders such as Members of Congress or governors? If anything, those free-ride officials should take a back seat to delegates directly elected by GOP primary voters for the sole and exclusive purpose of voting at a national convention, rather than sleeping late before a busy night of lobbyist-paid dinners.
I was an elected delegate for Reagan at the 1980 GOP National Convention in Detroit and I know a convention can be fun to attend. But fun is not supposed to be the only purpose of attending. The purpose is far more serious and that is nominating a president and recommending a platform and you need to be awake for that on the floor or in committees, not playing golf with lobbyists or attendng their parties.
Why do so many party officials fear the primary voters and do everything in their power to avoid an honest decision at the ballot box?
Enough is enough, it is way past time for conservatives to honor conservative principles and to push back very hard on the power-hungry RNC staffers and their misguided allies in some but not all state parties.
