art credit: plymouthministorage.com
Okay, Ann Coulter is a bomb-thrower, but she also
can hit the nail squarely on the head. Her column the other day was about the “voterless”
primary elections, in which GOPe “leaders” are giving delegates to candidates
whether the electorate likes it or not. Wisconsin. Colorado. Wyoming. Is West
Virginia next? Here are extracts from her column
Another
misconception sweeping the nation is that when state Republican parties
disregard the voters and give all their delegates to Cruz, they are merely
following THE RULES, and Trump is an idiot for not knowing THE RULES.
That's what
the Colorado GOP did, what the Tennessee and Louisiana parties are trying to do
-- and what many other states may do, all under the careful tutelage of Tracy Flick Cruz.
I
keep asking someone to send me a copy of THE RULES that direct state parties to
ignore the voters and pick their own slate of delegates, but no one can cite such
a rule. So I read through "The
Rules of the Republican Party" myself -- and guess what? There's no
rule instructing state parties to ignore the voters!
To the contrary,
the rules were recently rewritten so that delegate selection would "reflect
the results of statewide presidential preference elections," according
to a statement by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. (The
nerds will tell us, that's "legislative history," not THE RULES.)
Apparently,
what people mean by THE RULES is that there is no RNC rule specifically prohibiting a
state party from giving all the delegates to a single nominee, even if that is
demonstrably at odds with the will of the voters.
The state
parties are given a lot of discretion, so Cruz harasses and cajoles the local
party until it awards all the state's delegates to him. Trump keeps winning
elections, and Cruz keeps winning sneaky procedural victories.
Until Cruz won a primary in mean-as-a-snake Wisconsin, he hadn't won a single primary -- i.e., an "election" -- outside of his home state, a sister state and a state where Trump didn't campaign. In fact, until cantankerous Wisconsin, the only primary where Cruz managed to surpass 34 percent of the vote was his home state of Texas -- where he got 43.8 percent.
(Contrary to lies
you read in The New York Times, Trump has not complained about any of those
races. And you know why? Because they were elections, not corrupt backroom
maneuvering. Hey - does anyone know if the general election is won by
influence-peddling with tiny groups of insiders or is it by winning elections?)
It's as if
Cruz and Trump are playing different sports: Trump keeps belting home runs,
while Cruz is berating the umpire until he calls a balk, then prances to home
base, telling everyone he hit a grand slam.
True, there's
no rule explicitly disallowing a state party from rigging the delegate
selection. There's also no rule explicitly disallowing a state party from
giving all its delegates to Kim Kardashian.
Cruz is bragging about winning
delegates in “voterless” elections, as the Drudge Report and other media dub them.
Trump's “campaign strategy is to win with the voters.
Ted Cruz’s campaign strategy is to win despite them.”
Does anyone really
believe GOPe chairman Reince Priebus when he says “It's not a matter of party insiders. It's
a matter of 2,400 grassroots activists, and whatever they want to do, they can
do.”
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