From Reince Priebus of the GOP to Debbie Wasserman Schultz of the Democratic Party – the American citizenry is ready to toss both aside and take America back from the shenanigans that both parties have perpetrated against America for years! The big question is: can’t America do better than Donald Trump, with a variety of baggage including court cases from theft of money of average Americans to sexual misconduct against an underage female, to the email scandal and Benghazi questions plaguing Hillary Clinton? We have the worst of the worst candidates that would ever consider running for the office of President of the United States.
With either one of these candidates, we will be guaranteed higher taxes to pay for the social programs that Hillary wants, and the financing of Planned Parenthood that both candidates support. The media will have controls placed upon them so no clear evidence of extra-curricular illegal deceitful actions would not be reported, while a person’s 2nd amendment rights will be curtailed, if not completely restricted. With higher taxes, more division, and higher poverty rates, America will see less creation of jobs by small businesses, and America will look more like a 3rd world weak country, instead of the most powerful, greatest Republic to ever be created.
A few months ago, conservatives desperate for a white knight to ride into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and rescue the party from presumptive nominee Donald Trump turned to House Speaker Paul Ryan. Help us, Paul, they cried. You’re our only hope. Ryan turned them down flat. But a scenario is shaping up that may force Ryan to play the white knight after all. As chairman of the convention, Ryan will command the podium in Cleveland. He will hold the gavel. His face will be front and center on primetime TV. And if a group of renegade delegates from the speaker’s home state of Wisconsin gets its way, Ryan’s duties won’t stop there. He will also, they hope, allow his fellow Wisconsinites to block Trump from winning the nomination
These Constitutional Conservatives do not want to be railroaded into having to accept Donald Trump as their nominee. They disagree with his more than liberal leanings, his tenor while dealing with Republicans as a whole, and his hateful rhetoric for his competitors, to those who find themselves unable to agree with him. Various Dump Trump efforts are afoot — and various delegates from various states support these efforts. As a result, there is a non-zero chance that something might happen between now and the final hours of the convention to upend expectations and loosen Trump’s grip on the nomination.
Will delegates unbound be able to pull any of this off? They are, at the very least, a serious group. Their leader is Eric O’Keefe, a respected political activist in Wisconsin who worked aggressively to bolster Gov. Scott Walker during the 2012 recall campaign, and they are “rumored to be better organized than the more publicized efforts focused on the Rules Committee,” according to Ward. The numbers, meanwhile, suggest an uphill battle — but not an unwinnable one. A whip count of the delegates conducted this week by a pro-Trump member of the Republican National Committee found large numbers in favor of an open vote, plus many hundreds more up for grabs.
Typically, the chairman of each state’s delegation announces how many delegates each candidate won in his state. But according to Rule 37, “if an exception is taken by any delegate from that state to the correctness of such announcement by the chairman of that delegation, the chairman of the convention shall direct the roll of members of such delegation to be called.” In other words, if a delegate bound to Trump wants to abstain, he can object to his state’s tally — and force the “chairman of the convention” (i.e., Ryan) to conduct a recount. If there are enough of these abstentions in Cleveland — and enough of these recounts — Trump could lose.
“Delegates have the right to object and challenge the authenticity of their state’s announcement of votes cast for the possible nominee,” Yahoo News. “There are a significant number of states where delegates have made clear their intent to challenge the number of votes announced if they have been stopped from exercising their right to vote their conscience.” “The last thing I would do is tell anybody to do something that’s contrary to their conscience,” Ryan told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “I get that this is a very strange situation. He’s a unique nominee.” Translation: Cleveland could still be crazy. And Paul Ryan might be in the middle of the melee.
While this is happening for the GOP, we see presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton not completely out of the water with the email scandal, as Trey Gowdy, from South Carolina had gotten director Comey of the FBI to admit that Hillary lied under oath. Perjury and lying is punishable by law and covers a prison sentence. She is laying in a pool of her own legal and ethical bile after the beat down FBI director James Comey took this week in front of the House Oversight Committee. Comey labeled Hillary as “unintentionally criminally negligent” (whatever the Sam Hill that means) and said she likely wasn’t “sophisticated” enough to recognize classified email markings. Because nothing says “forward” and “progress” like the get-off-my-lawn grandmother who just found out they have the inter-webs on computers now
The buzz all weekend has centered on the rumor that Donald Trump is seriously considering selecting a pro-choice registered Democrat, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, as his VP. As if being a pro-choice registered Democrat were not enough, Flynn was basically fired from his post for allegedly being too lose with information in the presence of Vladimir Putin. As you might have expected, this move is causing a pretty serious backlash among GOP delegates, who are considering rule changes to block any Trump pick.
Now that Donald Trump’s black hole of presidential suckitude has led to the strange cocktail of anti-Semitism mixed with tunes from the “Frozen” soundtrack, not to mention the painting of Saddam Hussein as some sort of Davy Crockett, it is once again time to go over some #NeverTrump math. Because when it comes to the possibility of a delegate uprising in Cleveland in less than two weeks, all signs point to ‘Make it so.’
The man in charge of Trump’s very own delegate-whipping team told the Wall Street Journal that the Republican immolation-in-chief, I mean prospective presidential nominee, is still almost 350 committed delegates short of securing a victory. So let’s be clear to those who would like to paint the 2016 election cycle as some sort of fate accompli: Not only isn’t this close to being over, but the momentum in no uncertain terms favors the will and the wisdom of delegates who are free to vote their conscience.
Trump was even confronted in a recent interview with the rumor that he might not elect to serve as president if he ultimately won the election. His response, according to the New York Times, and mind you this is coming from a man who is down in almost all of the polls taken in the last two months: “I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens.”
This is the asinine threshold at which the delegates stand. The delegates are being lectured about the supposed improprieties of voting their conscience, while Trump giggles through a question about whether this is all a big game to him or not. They are being threatened with legal claims that they should face possible civil and criminal penalties if they choose to vote for a candidate other than Trump. Yes, it is understandable that crossing such a threshold is filled with some degree of uncertainty and trepidation about how the future will unfold and how honestly it will be reported. But none of that should delude the increasingly obvious fact of how clear the path actually is for the delegates to do what posterity demands.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there are already 20 members of the RNC Rules Committee willing to change the rules to unbound the delegates, and it only takes 28 to bring such a rule change to the floor for a vote of the entire delegation. So Trump requires 1,237 to secure the nomination yet his 890 supporters are surrounded by a ring of fire that includes 681 confessed anti-Trump delegates, and roughly 900 uncommitted delegates. Who are no doubt silently praying for anyone or anything to rescue us from the bizarre and horrid sweet meteor of death that is Trillary 2016.
When the undecideds are the largest contingent in a delegation that is less than two weeks away from making a decision about who should be President of the United States, then that delegation really isn’t undecided. No, it is empowered. The delegates must not make this opportunity more complicated than it is. #NeverTrump is, in fact, the easiest call to political arms in modern history. The numbers reflect that. It is simply time for the delegates to seize the day and trust, as so many heroes of mankind have done before them, that there is never a wrong time to do the right thing.
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