The #NeverTrump movement got the collective arses handed to them during votes of the Republican rules committee. The biggest loss was their attempt to unbind delegates at the convention. The bar for getting a floor vote on the rule change is actually very low, with #NeverTrumpers needing only 28 out of 112 votes in order to send the rule change to floor vote in which all delegates would then vote. They failed miserably.
Ken Cuccinelli led a movement to make all state voting closed by awarding bonus delegates to states that do not allow crossover voting. That would mean democrats could not create havoc by voting for a hopeless candidate such as Jeb Bush or John Kasich in order to give their candidate a clear path to victory. That also failed by a huge margin. On the other hand it would handicap candidates who can draw democrats legitimately to their campaign such as Trump and Reagan.
“We were trying to get an omnibus solution, and we gave up — areas of that we were aiming at RNC Party reform, encouraging states to close primaries with bonus delegates.”
“We weren’t messing around too much with the order [of primary states]. We did stretch out the calendar, so that more states could matter more and that would give people more of a voice. They didn’t want to do that.”
“Everything had been agreed to — a critical element and then they changed the deal substantially. And the ending division was between, like, 15 percent at large and 25 percent at large, and they just came up to me and said, ‘No, we don’t have a deal.’”
Cuccinelli says that he and his associates were not allowed in the same area as the Trump supporters who were holding the signs.
Although the rules meeting did not work out the way Cuccinelli hoped, he says he and his team are still putting a plan together for the convention, stating they will go “beyond” a minority report.
“This just proves that Donald Trump did not have the support of enough delegates to be the nominee,” Delegates Unbound co-founder Dane Waters said in a statement. “This act by the Rules Committee just highlights the hypocrisy of the RNC. If the delegates were bound as the RNC claimed why vote to bind them?”
“The fight is far from over in Cleveland.” Delegates will not be denied,” Waters added.
Waters reminds me of a scene from a popular movie: