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The Republican nomination process may be flipped on its head if a proposed amendment is passed just days before the convention, an amendment that is showing some support among party members. Curly Haugland, a member of the GOP's standing rules committee, sent a letter to all GOP presidential campaigns and Republican National Committee members in November that he plans to present an amendment that essentially will allow any candidate who received a delegate to be placed back on the first ballot. That means even candidates who have dropped out of the race could be considered for the nomination.

Let me begin by saying I am convinced candidate Donald Trump will get the 1,237 delegates he needs, so this outline could be just an intellectual exercise. However, last night on Sean Hannity RNC Chairman Reince Priebus discussed the delegate math and state of the GOP race headed toward the presidential nomination. RNC Chairman Preibus and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan are best friends having grown up in the same town in Wisconsin and attending High School together. Please focus your attention to the specific wording he uses @05:34. Close attention: (direct video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h7TBNnEqOE)

Yeah, no. “He was speaking figuratively” is the one argument you can’t make in defense of what he said this morning on CNN. You can say it’d be unjust if he ended up with 1,200 delegates and lost the nomination anyway in a floor fight. Some would disagree, but Trump would have a lot of support on that. You can say that he wasn’t condoning riots as a reaction to losing the nomination, merely observing matter of factly that they’d happen with or without his approval. There’s truth to that too, although it’s harder to give a candidate the benefit...

Republican National Committeeman Curly Haugland of North Dakota sent a letter on Friday to fellow RNC officials arguing that current party rules allow 2016 Republican National Convention delegates to vote for the presidential candidate of their personal preference during the first round of voting, rather than voting along with the will of voters in their states. Haughland wrote in a letter published by The Daily Caller that the party’s Rule 38, also called “Unit Rule,” specifically allows Republican convention delegates to vote their conscience in every vote at the convention. “Every delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention is a...

The Republican Party is launching a campaign to try to derail President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, teaming up with a conservative opposition research group to target vulnerable Democrats and impugn whomever Obama picks. A task force housed within the Republican National Committee will orchestrate attack ads, petitions and media outreach to bolster a strategy that Senate Republicans adopted as soon as Justice Antonin Scalia died last month: refusing to consider an Obama nominee out of hopes that the next president will be a Republican. The RNC will contract with America Rising Squared, an outside group targeting Democrats...

Truth be told, last summer when Cleveland announced we had won the RNC Convention, I cringed. Don't get me wrong there are many reasons I love living in the Greater Cleveland area, but Cleveland proper isn't my most favorite reason. Cleveland has worked very hard to turn the city around. New business and convention areas, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, beautiful newish stadiums, etc. and a few higher rent living districts. But Cleveland still has many areas in need of improvement and a few that should raise concerns for what is starting to appear to be a violent election...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus insisted Thursday night that the Republican Party would embrace its nominee, even if it was Donald Trump. "This party is going to support the nominee, whoever it is, 100 percent," Priebus said to tepid applause on stage in Miami before the latest GOP debate. "No question about that." Republicans have struggled for months on whether to embrace Trump, the controversial businessman leading the GOP race, or rally around one of his rivals. Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) is the closest to knocking off Trump based on the number of accrued delegates, and has expressed openness...

Mission: Destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy at all costs… How? Pour millions of dollars into commercials propping up failed Faustian sell outs like Marco Rubio; spread disinformation that Mr. Trump is a racist, an artificial conservative with mob ties, who just might be the second coming of Adolf Hitler. As Trump continues to gain steam with victory after victory, look for the GOP Establishment’s tactics to change to outright voter fraud, criminal shenanigans and a brokered convention where Mitt Romney or some other puppet will be introduced to the world as the new GOP candidate. Who are these people? Who are...

No one who has not participated in the rules-making process for the national Republican Party is likely to understand all provisions of the current rules, much less how those rules, whether as they now read or how they might be changed, would affect what happens at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Changed or not, The Rules of the Republican Party will have huge effects not expected or predicted by any of the national pundits who make their livings now commenting on the Republican presidential nomination contest. Some surprising aspects of these effects are already becoming better known. A...

A preview of the mayhem that is likely to envelop the 2016 GOP Convention in Cleveland will be seen this Friday when Trump holds a rally in Chicago. The Facebook page soliciting 'non-violent protesters' to attend the rally has over 7000 people promising to attend, and another 7000 are "interested". The escalation of disruption and the provocation of violence has been on view over the last few weeks, in several Trump rallies. The Black Lives Matter activists have been the most visible disruptors, but there are others as well. The BLM movement was involved in fulminating full on riots (arson,...

Reagan’s challenge to then-President Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries represented the next great antiestablishment challenge by the party’s conservative wing. That battle went all the way to the national convention in Kansas City, where Ford prevailed. When Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter, Reagan and his anti-establishment conservatism laid claim to leadership of the party and eventually to the presidency. In the eyes of anti-establishment Republicans, the election of George H.W. Bush in 1988 restored the establishment wing to power. Within two years there was another revolt, this one led by then-representative Newt Gingrich when Bush abandoned his...

"The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.“ A revolution is upon us. A peaceful populist uprising is taking place across the country, led by a nationalist, red, white and blue billionaire who is beholden to no one, certainly not the corrupt nobility in the GOP. According to the Republican Establishment, Trump isn’t a true conservative like Jeb!, Mittens. Rubio, Paul Ryan, or whoever else they can dig up to be slaughtered by Trump at the ballot box. But, that’s all disinformation, a giant psychological operation with one goal, to deceive the voter. It’s not about being conservative....

Mitt Romney has instructed his closest advisers to explore the possibility of stopping Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, a source close to Romney's inner circle says. The 2012 GOP nominee's advisers are examining what a fight at the convention might look like and what rules might need revising. "It sounds like the plan is to lock the convention," said the source. Romney is focused on suppressing Trump's delegate count to prevent him from accumulating the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination. But implicit in Romney's request to his team to explore the possibility of a convention...

Top Republicans — including governors who convened an emergency conference call on Monday on which Trump was Topic A — expect the real estate mogul to carry as many as 10 states on Tuesday night, an outcome that would deal a body blow to Sen. Ted Cruz, who has staked his campaign heavily on the Southern states holding nominating contests, and to Sen. Marco Rubio, who has yet to win a primary and isn’t expected to do so on Tuesday.” “Trump’s march to the nomination has set off a wave of anxiety across the Republican Party establishment as top officials...

Below is a post I made to the National Review article which calls Jeff Sessions a sellout for supporting Trump. I figured it warrants it's own thread since we all see the Republican party fracturing into multiple pieces and this may be a good vehicle to discuss that.All the Cruz supporters who would post and cite NRO as a weighty source should feel embarrassed. However, one claim they made is absolutely true. NRO IS the intellectual bedrock of the modern "Conservative Movement". NRO originally defined the founding principals of Conservatism and continues to extol the "virtues" of that philosophy unashamedly....

A super PAC supporting Republican Marco Rubio's presidential campaign released a new commercial Monday that slams Donald Trump for his refusal to disavow ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke during a weekend television interview. The ad from the Conservative Solutions PAC opens with CNN's Jake Tapper describing how he asked Trump three times whether he would reject the support of Duke and the KKK. The ad then cuts to Trump, saying, "Well, I have to look at the group."

America once had a president who sought peace, but with a firm hand; a president who vowed to crush the Federal Reserve, who warned the nation about secret societies, who wanted to shut down the military-industrial complex and the CIA itself; a young president who wanted nothing to do with the killing fields of Southeast Asia. That president made a lot of enemies, people who were much more powerful than his wealthy Boston-Irish family. The enemies included Big Oil, the Joint Chiefs, the military-industrial complex and the intelligence community, and one very sick and twisted Vice President, Lyndon Baines Johnson....

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson told supporters Saturday in Irving that he has heard plenty of calls to drop out of the Republican presidential primary. Some "special interests" have even made personal appeals to him, he said. "I've got unanswered calls on my phone right now, 'Oh, if you did this or did this, and did this, or if you drop out and support this guy, we'll give you all this money and we'll make sure you're a senator here,'" Carson said.

The topic of Rule 40 for the convention has come up a few times over the last several months, and I feel this rule is misunderstood. The rule in question in the one requiring 8 majority wins for a candidate to have their name entered into nomination. I call it the "Magic 8" rule. Below please find my attempt to explain the rule simply, and also include some analysis of where the race stands now in terms of this requirement. The critical language of Rule 40: A candidate shall demonstrate the support of a majority of the delegates from each...

Donald Trump has steamrolled toward the Republican nomination by lambasting all things political establishment, and now that establishment thinks it can convince their insult-wielding front-runner he needs them. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus has begun stating in private meetings that the party has sway over its at times unwelcome front-runner because it has tools Trump will need to use to win a general election -- voter data and field, digital and media operations that a nominee typically inherits from the party infrastructure. Dangling access to these resources, Priebus thinks he can help steer Trump toward partywide policy goals and...