The Washingtonian reported a month ago that the DC delegation to the Republican convention was so unhappy with Donald Trump as their party’s nominee that they could make trouble in Cleveland. The District’s Republicans only gave Trump 14% of their votes in the primary. Their 19 delegates were awarded to Marco Rubio (10) and John Kasich (9).
But there was a problem.
Even though all 19 DC delegates are pledged to either Rubio or Kasich, DC’s party bylaws dictate that if only one candidate is up for nomination at the convention, delegates are obliged to support that candidate (read: Trump). It’s one of the main reasons DC real estate agent Kevin Cain gave up his spot: “I do not want my name on record in any way as having ever voted for, contributed to, or otherwise assisted [Trump] or his campaign,” Cain announced in a Facebook post last month.
Bob Kabel, a DC GOP delegate who secured a coveted spot on the convention’s Rules Committee, says he has some sympathy for the crisis of conscience in which some delegates find themselves, but ultimately, the rules are the rules. “It’s an unhappy situation,” he says. “But they know the rules. They’ve bought into it. They’re all adults.”
Bob Kabel was right that the delegates are all adults but he was wrong that they’d bought into the bylaws. When it came time to declare their votes during yesterday’s roll call, they announced their support for Rubio and Kasich.
But their protest was not honored.
The D.C. delegation is outraged at the RNC and accusing the convention organizers of “grabbing” its 19 votes for Marco Rubio (10) and John Kasich (9) and giving them all to Trump. When the District was called, its delegation clearly stated the tally for Rubio and Kasich, but the votes were recorded instead for Trump. Some members of the delegation booed, and delegate Chip Nottingham told reporters on the floor that the RNC’s move was “outrageous, it’s petty, and it’s unnecessary.”
It’s actually not outrageous or necessarily petty for the chairman of the convention to honor DC’s bylaws, but this was one more sign of party disunity.
It was actually the Alaska delegation that got more attention.
Just as Paul Ryan was ready to confirm Donald Trump had clinched the nomination at the Republican Convention, Alaska stepped in, claiming that all of its votes were incorrectly recorded for Trump.
While a change in the count wouldn’t alter the ultimate outcome — Trump had many more delegates than the required 1,237 — the state’s delegates were insistent on a recount…
…The delegation was particularly upset –- some were even in tears — that the RNC would, in their view, decide to ignore the will of the voters.
In this case, the fairness of the decision was considerably more contentious. The Alaska bylaws provided rules for dividing up delegates earned by candidates who dropped before the state convention (Rubio) and after the state convention (Cruz, Kasich). Both rules meant that Trump should get all of Alaska’s delegates.
The issue was that Alaskan delegates claimed to have suspended these bylaws at their convention, meaning that they should not have been operative during the roll call.
Regardless of the merits of these cases, it’s clear that majorities of both the DC and Alaska delegations traveled to Cleveland intent on registering their official opposition to their nominee and instead had their votes forcibly cast for him. They are obviously displeased, to put it mildly.
To get a sense of how they feel, let’s look at that June 17th Washingtonian article again:
Kris Hammond was never shy about his opposition to Donald Trump.
Back in March, campaigning to be a Republican delegate for DC, Hammond passed out business cards with the #NeverTrump hashtag splashed across them. The cards stated that Hammond was open to supporting any candidate at the party’s July convention on the second ballot — be it Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich — but not Trump. That platform resonated, catapulting him to the top of the field for a delegate slot. Kris Hammond was going to Cleveland…
“I was elected on a mandate to oppose Donald Trump,” Hammond says. “And that’s what I’m going to do. I have iron knees. I will not buckle.”
Here’s how that turned out:
Minutes after the vote, first-time D.C. delegate Kris Hammond told ThinkProgress he felt insulted and excluded by his party and its nominee.
“How is [Trump] going to listen to us if he’s elected president, if he’s not listening to us now?” he fumed. “He’s not allowing dissent. He’s not going to allow anything other than subservience to Donald Trump.”
Hammond and delegate Chip Nottingham claimed that they were privately assured that, despite the bylaws, they’d be able to vote their conscience and have their votes counted. Maybe that’s true or maybe it’s not, but either way they feel violated by the process because DC did not vote for Trump and yet they’re now on the record as unanimously supporting his candidacy.
It’s a minor thing in the greater picture. In one sense, the rules are the rules. In another sense, the Trump forces chose to meaninglessly pad their stats rather than to be magnanimous. In fact, they may have gone a bit further than that.
It was one final indignity for Republicans who opposed Trump, and D.C. Republicans are among the most establishment members of the party. Even a couple hours later, Dana Hudson was still seething.
“Party bosses are colluding with Trump to subvert democracy,” she said. “The Republican Party is the party of liberty and freedom. If they don’t listen to us, why are we here?”
Hudson, a lobbyist, said she and other Trump opponents had been threatened and intimidated. She was the subject of rumors linking her romantically to Marco Rubio, which she says were false. And after those threats, she had no interest in [Speaker Paul] Ryan’s call for coming together.
“I have been waiting for our presumptive nominee to unify the party and I will not vote for anyone who is not unifying the party,” she said. “That opportunity was lost today. That opportunity was lost yesterday.”
Delegations from several states, including Utah, Iowa, and Colorado have been similarly displeased with how the convention rules have been interpreted.
In fact, during the roll call, those three states, plus DC, Alaska and Virginia vacated their spots on the convention floor.
If you want to know why the primetime speeches last night were delivered to a half-empty cavernous-sounding Quicken Loans Arena, it’s because so many delegates feel disempowered, disenfranchised and disrespected.
been up to, there and on twitter: Garry Marshall dead at 84(?*).
*creator of “Joanie Loves Chachi”; just heard on NPR, didn’t take notes!
All I can say is that this was all brought on by the GOP itself. They voted for Trump lord knows they had plenty of other candidates to chose from. To strengthen America I hope this means the end of the GOP.
The alternatives were not 7 dwarfs this time. They were 7 microbes.
Isn’t it telling that of all those candidates, Trump was the only one talking about jobs and how outsourcing was destroying America? I do think that Jeb! poured out the snake oil about trickling down (not sure). The good news is that Republican voters are finally sick of being trickled on. Perhaps, if Democrats were not obsessed with demonizing old white men, some would have crossed over. You are planning on it for Fall, aren’t you?
It isn’t Democrats demonizing old white men. Its old white men who have demonized themselves with 30 years of hate media, 235 years of independent power, 100 years of lynchings, and now … sensitive tears over mens rights, all lives matter, female enhanced emasculation and whatever other stupid meme the RW intelligencia can come up with.
Get off the high horse, Voice. You’re in the wrong on that comment.
You think you can get people to vote for you by telling them that they are crap. I greatly doubt it.
Republicans make it happen every time. They just project it onto “others” to fool the imbeciles.
Mentioning that Trump noticed all those generally GOP voters that Poppy lost in ’92 and went after them is a big step from concluding that he gives any more of a damn about than either Party or any of the other candidates except for Sanders and Stein. Nothing in Trump’s bidness career exhibits any concern about working stiffs. In fact quite the opposite.
I’m sorry that old white men feel left behind by both parties and have now resorted to supporting an incompetent, nutso old white man. However, in 1968 and 1972 they were blinded by the white and in 1980 they moved in droves to support another nutso old white man. In doing so, they ended up decimating the ranks of Democratic politicians that adequately represented working folks and that paved the way for the neolibs to take over the Dem party.
Those on the left are too small in numbers to do all the heavy lifting to effect a meaningful political change for working folks. And for the first time since 1972, those white workers had a chance to join with those that have kept the faith and succeed. But did they? No — they trotted out and voted for a bozo that mirrored their Id.
Time for you to stop excusing their self-defeating and irrational behavior.
See my reply to DerFarm above.
sorry to see you jumping on the neo-liberal train.
You know I didn’t do that and you also know that I’ve long decried the dismissal of white working class people by the Democratic Party. The Dem Party elites (once known as Rockefeller Republicans) have finally taken full control of the Party and the combination required to maintain that doesn’t need working class white men as long as half of them hold onto their delusion that women and working class POC are the enemy.
However, I’m not about to excuse those white men for the role they’ve played in bringing US politics to this point. Power doesn’t care where it has to sit to get and keep it. Power just has to adequately exploit factions of the people achieve it. Income/wealth for working class white men began the demonstrable decline in 1972 and they’ve responded by doubling down on Nixon decade after decade as if more of the same would produce a different result. As if their behavior didn’t contribute to opening the space in the Democratic Party for the neoliberalcon takeover of it.
Let’s be fair, Trump is like the perfect foil for the neoliberalcon Dem elites. Perfect enough to shove one of the worst Dem candidates ever down all our throats.
usage of “effect” right!
Getting it mixed up with “affect” is so common these days (seems like I see it wrong a majority of the time, but perhaps that’s just perception, driven by the fact that the error in either direction is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me).
Granted, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a small one, but appreciated nonetheless.
No easy way to think through that usage of effect. And if I’d thought about it without checking a reference, a chance I’d have gotten it wrong.
Would guess that readers more often use affect and effect correctly.
The only situation (that I’m aware of!) in which “effect” correctly functions as a verb, rather than a noun, is one analogous to your usage, i.e., when “to effect” is roughly synonymous with “to cause/to bring about” some result, often “change”.
Conversely, the only time (that I’m aware of!) when “affect” correctly functions as a noun, rather than a verb, is in the psychological sense, when it’s roughly synonymous with “emotion” (think SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, using the adjectival form derived from the noun “affect”.)
So, at least as a general, practical rule, “affect” = verb, “effect” = noun, with the aforementioned exceptions.
You’re correct. I probably never thought about nor made an affect v. effect error until I was a psych student. Screwed me up for a while.
Except these were the Republicans who didn’t vote for Trump.
Of course, one might think that realizing that their party’s leadership is following rules intentionally rewriting their votes would make them wonder how that attitude plays out in running the country.
But I suspect that doesn’t occur to most of them.
I can imagine the discontent at state delegations that voted for Sanders having their votes recorded for Clinton.
BTW, that isn’t going to happen, is it? One never knows how far the demands for obeisance will go.
If something like that happens at the Dem convention we mustn’t say anything about it because Evil Trump and Supreme Court and Nader Nader Nader.
I guess you’re really into pre-emptive resentment.
Did you discover it by looking in your mirror?
RE: recent, repeated, hard trolling (quite arguably revealing “pre-emptive resentment”?) on your part, just in case that’s not obvious.
If you have been to a convention, you know this is inaccurate:
There are about 2500 GOP delegates, of whom about 1500 were won during the primaries by Trump.
At any convention most of the people in the seats aren’t delegates and alternates. They way it works at Democratic Conventions (I assume it is the same way at GOP conventions) is rest of the hall is filled with either activists or donors.
My guess is that this is a logistical fuck up – but in some ways it is more telling. At Democratic Conventions the candidates are very sure to make sure there will be a fanny in every seat. The morning of the convention passes are distributed to the state delegations to pass out, and others are handed out through the financial committees. The last resort is to have the local party find people to fill the seats.
Now usually campaigns know when they are in trouble. This is what led to the late shift in 2012 of the Obama final night (when it became obvious there would be empty seats in the football stadium, save me the bullshit explanation about weather)
So the fact this isn’t managed is a telling sign that no one is minding the store.
Like the Academy Awards, though there the fannies are gowned and tuxedoed, playing musical chairs.
This is the first I’ve heard of the half-empty arena during the prime time speeches last night. The coverage I saw, for a limited time last night, on Msnbc and CNN and the morning NPR program, didn’t mention it. Just more discussion of the Melania plagiarism and several Repub commentators on National Polite Republicans doubling down on the anti-Hillary propaganda for their party.
No mention at all also on these outlets of what’s going on outside the arena and the heavy police presence watching the protesters.
If you want to know why the prime-time speeches last night were delivered to a half-empty cavernous-sounding Quicken Loans Arena, it’s because so many delegates feel disempowered, disenfranchised and disrespected.
Did someone play a super-small violin for them? Now they know how a great many Americans feel. I don’t think they’ll come to that full realization though.
This is the most hate-filled political convention I can recall, certainly considering the nasty vitriol directed explicitly at the other party’s nominee. Comparison with Nazi party rallies I find not far off the mark.
2012 had some nasty moments for sure, but they were overshadowed by the bizarre Clint Westwood performance that failed spectacularly. 1992 was mostly just brownshirt Pat Buchanan, which backfired on the party. 1988 — all I can recall was the controversy over the Quayle selection, and the Read My Lips speech by Poppy.
1964 usually goes down as the nastiest, but most of the anger was directed at the “liberal” news media not so much at Lyndon. And of course the headlines coming out were about “extremism in defense of liberty” being no vice.
A lot of partisan hatred of Hillary being whipped up by the GOP demagogues. If this continues through November, which it undoubtedly will, and she gets elected (more likely than not), I think she’ll be more at risk of assassination than even Obama.
Not necessarily about the half-filled arena or the delegates who feel that they are being robbed, but related:
Go here and take a good look at the sad, shoddy, incompetent (as far as the borrower’s experience) business practices of Quicken Loans. It is a snapshot of the thoroughly fucked up, over-centralized, computer-damaged, depersonalized big business system in the U.S. today.
People have no voice in this system; they have been reduced to numbers residing within huge algorithmic calculations. It hurts to realize this. The RatPublicans are doing the same thing to their loyal workers as businesses like Quicken Loans do to their customers. Tell ’em whatever it takes to keep them quiet long enough to make a profit and if they pitch a bitch, off-line them any way that they can be off-lined.
The real reason behind the massive dissatisfaction with both parties is thatthey are both operating within the same system. Ordinary citizens feel depersonalized, and they don’t like it. Some fall for the Trump line about how he doesn’t need the system because he’s so wealthy, others for the Sanders gambit…a much more honorable and truthful one than Trump’s in my own estimation, but in the end just another advertising meme for the DemRats…that he wouldn’t take corporate money.
The DemRats will be at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. Wells Fargo is headed in the same direction as Quicken Loans. Bet on it. It’s the U.S. in a nutshell today. Layer after layer of computers between real life and “business.”
Plus…
Read about it here:
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Bet on that as well. It’s an iceberg the bottom of which will never be uncovered by people who want to know what is really happening. Layers upon layers of secrecy will prevent full disclosure forever.
Yeah. The Clintons aren’t part of this. Riiiight…
Wrong!!!
Enjoy the DemRat Convvention, bubbas. We’re the good guys, right? That’s certainly the overall arc of the media storyline, anyway.
But always remember:
When the front people get together to party, that’s when the real “Happy Days Are Here Again” song begins its jive wail in earnest.
Yup.
AG
Every single post by AG these days is in service to Trump’s electoral prospects. Does he respond to this post about the dumpster fire/Bund rally that is the RNC convention by taking Trump and the Republican Party to task? Not really. Instead, we’re treated to a not at all justified bashing of the Clintons.
The link attached to the litany of hostile financial institution business practices leads us to a lengthy list of filings and successful conclusions to lawsuits filed by Federal and State law enforcement officials. Doesn’t match the picture of complete unaccountability Arthur paints? Oh well.
And has Hillary been in charge of the Justice Department? No. So what justifies AG going on like this?
One gets the unavoidable picture of Arthur slathering at the screen as Chris Christie ran his subnormal show trial with the Convention Delegates yesterday, Arthur shouting “GUILTY” and “LOCK HER UP” when the corrupt Governor cued him to do so.
Every post of Arthur’s these days is in service to Trump’s electoral prospects. Arthur supports Cliven Bundy, supports voter suppression laws, and remains a strong advocate for Ron Paul’s world view. He represents himself as having a highly developed awareness of the electoral views of white voters he knows (and doesn’t know, for that matter), but is unwilling or unable to relate the electoral views of non-whites in his multicultural neighborhood, and unwilling to speculate on the electoral views of non-whites he does not know. Unavoidable conclusions are drawn from these things.
You are a piece of work, centerfield. I’ll give you that.
How anyone could come to the conclusions you have come to about my views is…I just don’t know how to express it.
Obsessive?
That’s close.
Rigidly Dem-centrist? You know, someone who thinks that everything not complimentary to HRC and the neolib Dems who are running the party is a front for supporting the right centrist wing of the Permanent Government or even worse, the nutcase wing of the right?
Yes, I support the right of people…llke the Bundys…to protest against the overgrowth of Big Government and by extension Big Corp, which owns Big Gov lock, stock and barrel. i have done my share of protesting the same w thing over the years. left or right, correct is correct. Ron Paul’s statements are consistently correct as far as I am concerned. Big Gov has polluted the earth both physically and politically by its militarily-supporetd economic imperialist policies. War after war after war…environmental pollution on an unimaginable scale!!! Producing enemy after enemy after enemy in a geometric progression until most political systems that stand against the NATO powers devolve into vicious gangs of angry relatives. S
o-called neoliberalism is wrong, centerfield.
It’s wrong on the following basis:
It plainly isn’t working!!!
Duh.
And you want more of the same.
This is obsessive-compulsive action on your part.
As Einstein noted, a good definition of insanity is repeating the same actions even when they do not work.
You dere, baby.
Bet on it.
But…rest assured, you are by no means alone. The entire U.S. is fast becoming a gigantic lunatic asylum.
Welcome to 1984.
It came a little late this century, but here we jolly well are.
Aren’t we.
Big Brother with a reality show twist:
Enjoy him, fool. If he wins it will have been the support people like you for the previous…and rapidly failing as we speak…control mechanisms that made his success possible.
He’s yours, bubba.
Not mine.
Enjoy the fruits of your labors.
AG
This is where you lose me (and possibly others):
The rules and regulations concerning federal lands were established before the living Bundys were born and before any of their ancestors were within a thousand miles of where they feel entitled to steal those lands and resources.
There are doubtless a couple of million “rules and regulations” concerning everything from federal land use to coming to a full stop at a stop sign, extra-judicial killing of American citizens, etc., etc., etc. If someone wanted to take a stop sign ticket all the way to the Supreme Court on the grounds…true on every level everywhere that I have ever lived…that said law is very laxly enforced, I’d be with them as well. The Bundys and their ancestors have been using those lands absolutely unimpeded for going on two centuries now. When were the laws passed that limit their use and did they and their neighbors have any useful say in the writing of those laws? Were they written by a bunch of legislators far away who were elected because they took money from vested interests in order to be able to get elected? If they were not enforced…like the mythical speed limits on highways that are broken 10-20MPH consistently across the entire country…then why would the ranchers think it was OK to use the land as they had for hundreds of years? Some political bureaucrat in DC suddenly decides otherwise and the ranchers stand to lose their livelihood over the change? I’d be pissed off, too.
It’s crooked all the way up and down the line, Marie. Only organized protest…which is exactly what the Bundys were doing just as it was exactly what MLK Jr. was doing on another level and with a different tactical approach…can change this system. The plain fact that about 2/3rds+ of the U.S. electorate no longer believes in nor approves of the federal government, the fact that Trump and Sanders together rode that disapproval…from the right and from the left, and that’s not counting the people of color who neither of them reached in any appreciable way…to an unprecedented numerical challenge to the Permanent Government speaks to the depth of disapproval (well-earned disapproval in my view) of that government now extant among the people of the U.S.
If there was an honest flash vote taken today about ripping the whole system down and building a new, better system…a new Constitutional Convention…the vote would be very Brexit-like. Fedexit, call it. The controllers have seriously overplayed their hand.
AG
“…why would the ranchers [not] think it was OK to use the land as they had for hundreds of years?”
Why would they think that they are entitled to use it for free?
Oh, and can the “hundreds of years” bs. I’m not going to excuse or rationalize the inadequate management of the federal lands (all of which were stolen from those that did use them for hundreds of years). Much, much, better stewardship of those lands are required which also includes proper collections of fees and rents and disbursing those monies as just compensation to the rightful heirs.
The Bundys have the same mindset as those that stole the land in the first place. Thus, they are part of the problem and have no place in the solutions — both moral and economic — that we should be grappling with.
Do you really think that the people who “manage” federal lands are doing it at least partially because they want to to pay back the Native Americans for centuries of mistreatment?
Please!!!
This is the corporate-owned-and-operated federal government that we are referencing here. If that were its primary goal the whole reservation disaster would have been fixed decades ago. Terrible schools, terrible unemployment, terrible drug and alcohol problems…it’s just another low rent ghetto to the Feds, Marie. Always has been. More conveniently skin-marked cheap labor. Nothing more.
The Feds want to control the ranges because there’s money in it. Money and power. It’s what Big Gov does. Reflexively. It accrues power. In terms of land, it monetizes it. That’s the game. The Native Americans and the white cowboys can all go to hell as far as Big Gov is concerned. They’re both just inconvenient little specks of dust in a multi-trillion dollar corporate hustle.
AG
From Antiwar.com
You think it’s going to get better w/Hillary?
Think again.
She has a Hilitary mindset.
AG
Hilitary mindset:
Bet on it.
AG