There are many willing to drop principle to facilitate the rise of Trump. One of those people is Reince Priebus.
“This is not a way to unify the party,” Guy Short, a national delegate from Colorado and member of the Republican National Committee convention’s Rules Committee, tells me. Short supported Ted Cruz during the primaries, but he’s a loyal partisan, hardly #NeverTrump.
“I’m an easy guy to get if you want to unify a party,” says the amenable Short. “I was on board for Dole and McCain. I supported Mitt Romney. None of them were my first choice, either. But the way this convention has been handled by the RNC, so heavy-handed, it’s going to be difficult to unify this way.”
When pro-Trump forces circumvented a roll call vote on the convention rules on Monday, a group of Colorado delegates walked out in protest. While they were lucky enough to avoid a torrent of stilted platitudes and clumsy tautology that dominated the convention, Short stuck around. But like other Colorado delegates I spoke with, he’s suspicious of the RNC’s tactics.
It was apparent that the RNC engaged in union-style steamrolling to save face. A roll call vote to challenge the rules would almost surely have failed, but it might have been less damaging to illusory “unity” than watching well-known conservatives like Mike Lee and Ken Cuccinelli screaming at the presiding officer of a convention to allow a delegate vote.
Imagine if all the petrified politicians who were avoiding the convention had participated in this effort. Perhaps conservatives would have had a chance to save their party from a half-empty hall cheering on a former sitcom actor and a plagiarized speech.
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It was “the most disgusting display of parliamentary abuse that I’ve ever seen in the 14 conventions" : https://t.co/T0umoHox5J
— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) July 19, 2016
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