GOP lawmakers open door to brokered convention

While still unlikely, the idea got a big boost from some Republicans in Congress who are grasping for some way, any way, to deny front-runner Donald Trump the party's presidential nomination.

Capitol Hill was set abuzz this week by a Washington Post report that GOP party elders including Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had discussed the possibility of a contested convention.

A small chorus of voices even floated new Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as a possible nominee if no-one captures the majority of the 2,470 delegates by the time the convention kicks off.

If it happens, it would be the first floor fight for the presidential nomination of a major party since President Ford held off an insurgent challenge from Ronald Reagan in Kansas City, Mo., in 1976.

There are other signs Republicans are gearing up for a potential brokered convention. One member of the GOP leadership team, Rep. Luke Messer, told The Hill heâ€™s planning to run for a delegate seat in his home state of Indiana next year in anticipation of a possible floor fight in Cleveland. And many of the 14 remaining GOP contenders are plotting primary campaigns well into the summer of 2016, lawmakers have been told by candidates.

"I have broad disagreement with Donald Trump. If he is our nominee, I think he loses, I think Republicans lose the Senate, he puts the House at risk and sends the party into the wilderness for the next decade," said Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.), a Jeb Bush backer who this week called for Trump to quit the race.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3370679/posts

The GOP Establishment Thinks Trump Can’t Beat the Empty Pantsuit and They’re Talking About Romney...

Rush Limbaugh | December 9, 2015

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/ryan-transfers-2-million-to-nrcc-announces-romney-as-speaker-at-major-fundraiser-216533#ixzz3tu9P8hMd

Ryan transfers $2 million to NRCC, announces Romney as speaker at major fundraiser

By JAKE SHERMAN 12/08/15 09:24 AM EST

Speaker Paul Ryan told his House Republican colleagues Tuesday morning he is transferring $2 million in cash to the party’s campaign arm, and has secured Mitt Romney as the speaker at a major March fundraiser.

(snip)

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Buzzfeed-Mitt-Romney-Loyalists-Launch/2015/12/11/id/705430/#ixzz3u6p9OY00

Mitt Romney Loyalists May Launch WH Bid at Convention Floor

Friday, 11 Dec 2015

A group of former GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s wealthy donors and loyalists are planning to push for his nomination from the convention floor next year in Cleveland, the author of a new book about the party’s plans to take over the White House claims.

“In recent months, Romney loyalists have told me (on condition of anonymity) that [Donald] Trump’s rise has added urgency to their strategizing,” Buzzfeed writer McKay Coppins says in a Friday article.

“One former Romney fundraiser said he was in contact with several serious 2012 donors and fundraisers - particularly wealthy Mormons and people in private equity - who were ‘keeping their powder dry’ in hopes that Mitt would enter the race.”

(snip)

The GOP could survive a Trump, Carson, or Cruz nomination and loss, if that actually happened. What it cannot survive is one more blow to the trust they have already squandered among conservative voters.

The reason decent people hate the establishment is exactly this sort of behavior. The insiders want to control the process with as little input from voters as possible, just as FedGov wants to control our lives with as little input from free Americans as possible. The establishment is the enemy, even though they pretend (and a few may actually believe) that they are ruling us and micromanaging us for our own good.

Now that is the sound of desperation. At the moment, The Donald is the runaway favorite of largest plurality of the Republican primary voters, and since so many of these primaries are based on “winner take all” even with no more than a plurality, the GOP establishment has once again managed to stack the cards AGAINST themselves. Right now, they are locked into the rules they themselves set up.

In a way, this has forced a LOT of ventilation on issues that had not seen the light of day for decades, most particularly on problems with immigration, and formation not of a “melting pot”, but stratified and isolated identity pockets of special interest groups. Many have grown comfortable, perhaps far too comfortable, in maintaining these artificial barriers between “classes” of people, and the growing tendency of raising the class barriers even higher over time.

This is not America, or at least not the America of our fathers and grandfathers. We had a brief “morning in America” under Ronaldus Magnus, and while there may be some grumbling and criticism of how “bad” things were for certain of those “special interest” groups back then, on average, most folks were much better off in January 1989 than they were in January 1981.

Bush-41, bless his heart, could not and did not maintain that momentum, and we very nearly came to crash and burn after his departure from the Oval office, with Li’l Abner and Daisy May of Arkansas ascending in proper Peter Principle fashion, to a position far beyond their abilities to govern or even carry out the daily duties of “heads of state”. Only because the Former Occupant of the White House, 1993-2001, came up against some very stark political realities, that we pulled back from the edge then.

This policy fiasco and farce was followed by an apparent return to “normalcy”, if not the heights of the Reagan era, at least a promise of modest prosperity and relief from onerous micromanagement of daily life. All that blew up with the destruction of the World Trade Center and the assault on the Pentagon, and subsequent misplaced response to the situation, by attacking Iraq (as part of the aborted effort that was stopped in 1991 before then displacing Saddam Hussein), and the step by step dumping of relatively secular regimes throughout the Middle East with virulently zealous and bloodthirsty Islamist terrorist regimes. The “mission creep” became more and more evident, as there were repeated attempts to impose “democratic” reforms in a part of the world that had no concept of shared power, only to have a new and even more autocratic regime replacing the old ones, and an even more repressive enforcement of something called “Shari’ah law”, based on writings in the Koran and its various interpretations known as Hadiths.

Which brings us to the Current Occupant, who seems to be all too willing to simply capitulate to the newly empowered theocratic-centered Islamist terrorist states, and even at times to be assisting in the ongoing turmoil of the Middle East.

Going to be tough putting those worms back in the can.

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