The fight over the 2024 national Republican platform

Watching the 2024 Republican National Convention from Milwaukee brought back memories of my two times attending the RNC, as a delegate in 2004 in New York City and as a reporter in 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Those links will lead you to BatesLine coverage of those two conventions.

On X (Twitter) on the opening night of the convention, Lafayette Lee complained:

There's widespread frustration with the RNC right now because everyone is craving something more... they just witnessed a miracle, and all the fluff and cringe feels like an insult.

I replied: Conventions are always fluff and cringe. Stage-managed to the Nth degree. No spontaneity allowed. Entirely under the control of the presumptive nominee's team. He dictates platform, rules, who speaks and when. National conventions are fun, but delegates are really just a studio audience for a four-day infomercial.

Officially, the Republican National Convention conducts serious business. Each state elects the number of delegates allocated to each state by the previous convention's rules, according to the rules of each state party. In Oklahoma, each congressional district convention elects three delegates and three alternates, the state chairmen and two national committee members are automatically delegates, and the state executive committee proposes a slate for the remaining delegate and alternate slots which is ratified by the state convention. Each state designates two members each to serve on the Rules Committee (which includes party rules for the 2028 presidential nominating process and convention), Platform Committee, and Credentials Committee. The committees convene the week before the convention to debate and approve a report to the convention. At the convention itself, the delegates vote to approve the committee reports and for nominees for president and vice president. The convention delegates could, theoretically, amend or reject the committee reports.

In reality, the convention is not a deliberative body, and I can't think of a minute of the convention sessions that hasn't been stage-managed since 1976. Some debate has occurred in the Platform and Rules Committee meetings, but because fundraising for national and state party typically depends upon the charisma of the nominee, the nominee's team dictates terms. States run by the grassroots tend to send principled conservatives (e.g. Morton Blackwell of Virginia, head of the Leadership Institute, on the Rules Committee; Tony Perkins of Louisiana, head of the Family Research Council, on the Platform Committee) to these committees, but most states, particularly the states with withered, top-down parties, send placemen who will do what they're told.

An individual delegate can do nothing. In 2004, I wanted grassroots delegates to push for reform of the 2008 primary rules before the 2008 campaign began. But delegates are basically spectators. An individual delegate has no way to reach delegates from other states to organize before the convention. An individual delegate will not be recognized to speak from the floor or even to move for debate prior to a vote or to demand a roll call vote. All I could do was publish a blog entry, like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean. I seem to recall exactly one reply of interest from a delegate from Iowa.

Delegate "power" is much like the power of the United Kingdom's House of Lords which is much like the life of Schrödinger's cat. It exists theoretically, but if an attempt to exercise that power comes close to success, the Powers That Be will change the thresholds to ensure that the next attempt fails as well.

This year, even committee deliberations were curtailed. Here is how the Platform Integrity Project (archived here) described the RNC Platform Committee meeting:

On Monday, July 8th, 2024, the Republican Party Platform Committee voted to adopt a streamlined national party platform that cut much of the pro-life language that has historically been included, some of it for nearly fifty years since 1976. The process was unprecedented; instead of being allowed to deliberate for two days, the 112 elected Platform Committee members, two from every state and territory, were sequestered without their cell phones. They were not given time to review the draft platform, allowed to form subcommittees, or given the opportunity to offer and openly debate amendments with media present; instead, this year's private meeting proceeded to a short period of speeches followed by a final vote on the platform. The RNC draft was adopted 84-18. You can read it here (PDF).

Tony Perkins spoke to Todd Starnes of Newsmax on July 10th detailing the top-down, dictatorial process imposed by the Trump campaign on the platform committee.

The group circulated a platform committee minority report, which needed to be signed by 25% of the committee members in order to come before the convention as an alternative. What follows is not a minority report as such -- that would be in the form of an alternative platform or amendments to the majority report -- but more of a minority protest of the actions of the majority.

The undersigned, a minority of the committee, elected to the 2024 National Republican Platform Committee, not agreeing in totality with the majority, desire to express our views as follows:

Not having an opportunity to entertain amendments to the "draft" platform document, we submit the following expression for the continued protection of the unborn through support of a human life amendment.

Less than one week ago, our nation celebrated the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That founding document proved a watershed moment in world history. It planted and reinforced in the minds of men and women everywhere the conviction that each of us is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The Declaration is the heritage of all Americans, always true but likewise always straining to be realized, for the slave as well as for the free, for women as well as for men, for the poor as well as the rich. For Republicans, from the very inception of our party, the words of the Declaration took form in two overarching moral propositions, that is, the rejection and elimination of what our very first platform in 1856 called "the twin relics of barbarism," slavery and polygamy. We note with sober reflection how vast a cost the people of the United States paid for the achievement of that platform's commitments, and how long a period passed before those goals could be achieved.

Today we observe the vitality of a more recent but analogous set of commitments, embodied most prominently in the promise of the Republican Party to preserve the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death. That commitment made its way into the platform of 1976, twelve decades after that original session in Philadelphia. That commitment to a human life amendment and a call for the Fourteenth Amendment's protection application to children before birth has been repeated in every platform since and, by this declaration of principle, we extend it now.

In no season, under no rationale spurred by the exigencies of a political moment, can or should we abandon the high principles that have created and sustained this party, with God's grace, into a third century.

In the coming years, we pledge ourselves to continue to work for the good of every child, every parent, and every family. We rededicate ourselves to the core policy positions endorsed through deliberation and transparency with ever-increasing clarity in previous platforms, with respect to the funding of abortion domestically and internationally, the expansion of alternatives to abortion, support for credits for adoption and all children, ending the exploitation of embryonic human beings, and above all recognizing the application of 14th amendment protections to our developing offspring. These are issues for the ages and not for any single cycle in our national life.

With heaviness of heart but fullness of optimism that the defense of life will inevitably prevail, we resubmit these ideals to our fellow Americans. As before, we do fondly hope and fervently pray that the scourge of abortion will speedily pass away, and to that end we renew our perpetual devotion and ceaseless labor to the cause of life.

Last Friday on X (Twitter), Perkins identified 20 platform committee members who had signed the report. (Archived here.) Mark Allen, one of Oklahoma's two committee members, signed on to the minority report, but the second member, Taylor Broyles, had not.

Alaska: Loran Baxter
Arizona: Alex Kolodin, Susan Ellsworth
Arkansas: Jim Dotson
Georgia: Suzi Voyles
Hawaii: Mark White, Mary Smart
Iowa: Brad Sherman, Tamara Scott
Kansas: Tim Huelskamp, Kristina Smith
Louisiana: Tony Perkins
North Carolina: Kevin Austin
North Dakota: Lori Hinz, Steve Nagel
Oklahoma: Mark Allen
South Dakota: Sandye Kading
Texas: David Barton
Utah: Gayle Ruzicka
Wyoming: Robert "Bob" Ide

Rule 34(a) of the rules approved by the 2020 convention to apply to the 2024 committees not only requires 25% of members to sign a minority report, but requires them to submit that report and signatures within one hour of the committee's vote on the majority report:

(a) No resolution or amendment pertaining to the report of the Convention Committee on the Platform or the Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business shall be reported out or made a part of any report of such committee or otherwise read or debated before the convention, unless the same shall have been submitted to the chairman, vice chairman, or secretary of such committee or to the secretary of the convention in writing not later than one (1) hour after the time at which such committee votes on its report to the convention and shall have been accompanied by a petition evidencing the affirmative written support of a minimum of twenty-five percent (25%) of the membership of such committee.

I have read somewhere that the rules approved by this year's convention raises the threshold for 2028 to one-third (33.333%).

The effort to present a minority report was dropped in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump:

"Given today, and everything that has occurred, if the opportunity were there [for a floor fight] we wouldn't take it at this point," Perkins told POLITICO. "Don't take our silence as being indifferent to what took place, it's just timing."

The Tulsa County Republican Party faced a similar platform challenge in 2012. The platform committee that year replaced the one-page Statement of Principles that had introduced our platform for over a decade with a shorter preamble focused on economic issues. Gone were references to the sanctity of human life, public integrity, religious institutions, and the foundational role in society of families and marriage between a man and a woman.

But the County Convention rules (unlike RNC rules) did not prevent debate and deliberation. Steven Roemerman and I managed to get sufficient signatures from his fellow platform committee members to put before the convention a minority report that restored the previous year's Statement of Principles. Steven and I spoke to the convention on the importance of the principles that had been deleted and stayed focused on the substance of the platform. A libertarianish delegate who liked Ron Paul but not his opposition to abortion spoke in favor of the stripped-down preamble; she didn't want Republicans taking a position on the issue. The author and leading proponent for the new desiccated preamble seemed to be driven by a narcissistic concern about his pride of authorship (he had been pushing to replace the entire platform with his preamble since at least 1999) rather than the substance of what was removed from the platform and spent most of his speaking time complaining that the minority report was a personal attack. The minority report was approved by a wide margin.

What we did in Tulsa County in 2012 would have been much more difficult, maybe impossible, if the pressure for the new language had been coming from the party's presumptive nominee and biggest fundraiser, so no disrespect to the national platform committee members who caved to the Trump campaign. As long as unsuccessful and badly run Republican state parties have as much representation on national convention committees as successful state GOPs, we're not likely to see any improvement in the situation. It will take party chairmen from states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida to rally enough delegates from enough states to challenge party rules from the floor in 2028.

MEANWHILE: Since I started writing this last week, Joe Biden has been ousted as the presumptive Democrat Party nominee, overthrowing the results of the Democrat primary season ("fortified" to protect Biden from a primary challenge). Without following any sort of democratic process to choose a replacement, party leaders have anointed Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee, and the most vocal Democrat voices on social media seem to be OK with that -- Black Lives Matter excepted.

• The DNC refused to host debates during the primary, even though a vast majority of Democratic voters wanted them. This would have likely allowed America to see the decline of Joe Biden in 2023.
• The DNC changed the primary schedule and created rules that made it almost impossible for non-Biden candidates to appear on the ballot, effectively clearing the field of any challengers to the incumbent president.
• Following the primary where millions of Black voters weighed in, after one poor debate performance, the DNC Party elites and billionaire donors bullied Joe Biden out of the race.

Erick Erickson reported a rumor that Bill and Hillary Clinton came to Tulsa to get George Kaiser's help to push Biden out.

Rumor has it that the Clintons went to Tulsa over the weekend to try to get George Kaiser to commit to helping fund a new path for the Democrats around Biden.

Nothing more democratic then seeking the help of a billionaire banker to override an entire primary season.

I've seen this sort of thing on a small scale: Incumbent that is the prohibitive favorite to win renomination drops out last minute to give his preferred successor a head start over potential opponents. (See J. C. Watts's handoff to Tom Cole in 2002.) Or incumbent school board member wins re-election then quits to allow the insiders to appoint a replacement, who goes into the next election as the incumbent, rather than allow candidates to compete as equals for an open seat. It's not like Democrat leaders were surprised that Biden was losing his marbles.