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Never Trump Delegates Have One Last Chance to Stand Up to Trump

by AngelinaMcAlexan Posted on July 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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After their revolt was crushed at the Republican National Convention on Monday, Never Trump delegates are planning one final push to deny Donald Trump the nomination on Tuesday in Cleveland. There’s little likelihood of success—and the effort may be nothing more than symbolic—but it appears the movement will go down swinging.

On Tuesday evening, the convention will be gaveled into session for the roll call of the states, when the delegates’ votes will be counted in order to officially make Trump the nominee. According to Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate and a leader of the dump Trump effort, her movement will use this final procedural vote to stage their last stand.

During the roll call of the states, the head of each delegation will declare his or her states’ vote breakdown. But delegates who are bound under convention rules to vote for Trump—but who personally oppose him—plan to register their dissent at this time using a specific parliamentary procedure.

“There’s a process that you use,” Unruh explained. “You have to actually directly challenge at the microphone to the chairman and say a specific phrase or they are going to call it out of order.” She declined to state the phrase, citing strategic reasons.

Technically, delegates bound to Trump by their state party rules must vote for him. But Unruh contends that there is nothing a state can do, and little the national party or state parties can do, to sanction rank and file delegates if they want to challenge this rule individually and vote their conscience. They are unlikely to stop Trump from reaching the 1,237 votes necessary to officially become the nominee, but the televised show of dissent will be an embarrassment to the Trump campaign and tarnish the image of unity the Republican National Committee is struggling to project this week.

The lingering tensions within the GOP were on full display on Monday, when Unruh and her allies made their first attempt to derail Trump’s nomination, briefly sparking chaos on the convention floor. That revolt failed after Republican National Committee officials and Trump aides persuaded delegates to abandon the anti-Trump delegates’ plan—an effort that Unruh claimed RNC chairman Reince Priebus was personally involved in.

After Tuesday’s vote making Trump’s nomination official, the Never Trump effort will finally be out of procedural weapons to use against Trump. But Unruh says that won’t stop them from planning more symbolic shows of opposition to Trump in Cleveland. “We have to hold them accountable for how they’ve treated us,” she said of the Trump campaign and the RNC. “There’s still ways to show discontent, and that’s what we’re discussing.”

“We’re dealing with a narcissist,” she continued. “There’s one thing he’s really gonna hate and that is people trying to embarrass him and not pay attention to him.”

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Never Trump Delegates Have One Last Chance to Stand Up to Trump

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Inside the Never Trump Movement’s Last Stand

by HenriettaMacGil Posted on July 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon, after the Republican National Convention officially opened, a series of speeches and pre-recorded videos by popular GOP politicians publicly conveyed a unified front for the GOP. But that lasted a short while. Within hours, a last-ditch effort to defeat Donald Trump exploded into shouting and protests on the convention floor—with the Never Trump movement ultimately failing to block Trump’s path to the Republican nomination.

The final stand by Never Trump delegates focused on an effort to block the convention from adopting rules that would force anti-Trump delegates to vote for the real estate tycoon. Many delegates are required to vote for Trump because the rules of their state parties compel them to follow the will of the voters in the state. If the delegates were freed to vote their conscience, then it was possible that Trump would fail to garner the 1,237 votes needed for the nomination. In this Hail Mary scenario, delegates would have then held a series of votes until a nominee was chosen.

In order to free up convention delegates, the Never Trump movement hoped to reject the convention rules package on the floor. First, the anti-Trump delegates had to force the party to hold a roll-call vote, instead of a voice vote, on the rules. This required Never Trumpers to obtain the signatures of the majority of delegates from at least seven states. After that, anti-Trump delegates would have needed a majority of all the delegates to reject the rules package. It was unclear whether the anti-Trump forces could have bagged a majority of all the delegates. But Carl Bearden, a Missouri delegate and a member of the Never Trump movement, believes that had his side forced a roll-call vote and won, the convention would have reverted to a previous version of the rules, under which delegates bound to Trump could instead vote their conscience.

This was all a bit complicated. But what wasn’t was the emotion and passions expressed as Never Trump delegates huddled in the halls and back rooms of Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena to put their plan in motion.

Their scheme had come together on the fly. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who became a vocal Never Trump advocate last week, met throughout the afternoon with a small group of conspirators, including former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli and Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, at the back of the convention floor. They eventually rounded up the support of eight states—Washington, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Wyoming, and Maine—plus Washington, DC, two more than necessary. They handed off their petitions to Gordon Humphrey, a former US senator from New Hampshire, to deliver them to the convention secretary, Susie Hudson.

But Humphrey and his co-conspirators couldn’t find her. The Never Trump delegates scoured the convention hall for her, and they texted around a photo with a small headshot of Hudson. They feared that she had gone into hiding to avoid receiving the petitions. (At one point, the Never Trump effort circulated a photo that purported to show Hudson hiding behind a curtain.) When Eric Minor, who led the Never Trump faction of the Washington state delegation, learned, secondhand, that Humphrey had finally handed the petitions to a Hudson emissary, he gleefully relayed the news to his colleagues. But he was only cautiously optimistic about their efforts. Would it work? “Who knows?” he said. “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

It didn’t work. Trump operatives, fearing an insurrection, pushed hard to peel off support from the anti-Trump crowd. Rick Dearborn, chief of staff to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, warned delegates that backing a roll-call vote for transparency purposes would undermine the convention by turning the attention of the network newscasts to the fracas. (Cuccinelli told reporters that Trump backers had threatened political retribution against Virginia delegates who supported a roll-call vote.)

Chaos ensued when the rules were ultimately brought up for a voice vote, as delegates from Virginia and a handful of other states chanted “shame!” and “I object!” and “no!” A frustrated Cuccinelli—in an apparent dig at Trump’s complaints during the primary process—said, “Disenfranchised! I seem to remember hearing something about this.” He took off his credentials and tossed the badges to the floor, appearing to concede defeat. Yet he was quickly persuaded to fight on, and he began waving the Virginia placard back and forth as if it were a flag.

Delegates from two states, Iowa and Colorado, walked out in protest. The roll-call backers who stayed behind struggled to get Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, who was overseeing the process, to acknowledge their objections. One Virginia delegate proposed throwing something on stage to get the chair’s attention. (He elected not to.) The chants for recognition from the anti-Trump delegates were drowned out by a shouts of “We want Trump!” in the risers behind them. And the unamended rules were approved.

On the floor, anti-Trump delegates were furious. “That was so egregiously bad,” Minor told a group of reporters huddled around him. “They do not want Trump to be embarrassed and they want to ramrod him through as the nominee.”

Minor contended that the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign had not operated in good faith regarding the petition for the roll-call vote: “They have operated completely dishonestly from the get-go here.”

Minor couldn’t say whether the anti-Trump delegates would try to hold a walk-out or other form of protest later. (They had not yet had time to convene and discuss other options.) He wasn’t even sure if he would remain a delegate. “I wouldn’t be surprised based on this display right now if they try to yank my credentials, and I could not care one bit about it,” he said. “There’s no party unity for me.”

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Inside the Never Trump Movement’s Last Stand

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