Can Republicans really change the rules in Cleveland to block Trump’s nomination?

 

 In a story titled “Five Ways the Republican Convention Could Still Be Contentious,” Jeremy Peters of the New York Times reported Sunday that at least some Republicans “hostile” to Donald Trump continue to daydream about derailing his nomination at the last minute in Cleveland. How? By changing the rules that govern the party’s nominating process.

Peters went on to outline two possible scenarios. The first, which he labeled the “nuclear option,” could only be “described anonymously” by a rules expert. “It is tantalizing,” Peters explained, “because it is so simple”:

Mr. Trump could be stopped with just a single-word change requiring the nominee to receive a supermajority of votes at the convention rather than the majority currently required. Mr. Trump, after all, had floated changing majority to plurality when it was not clear he would win the 1,237 delegates he needed.

The second option, according to Peters, will actually be proposed at the convention by a fellow named Curly Haugland.

(In case you missed it, be sure to check out this profile of Haugland, a “stubborn 69-year-old pool-supply magnate” who has become “North Dakota’s top Republican gadfly, its rule-mongering crank, its official state pain in the a**.”)

The existing rules require a candidate to win a majority of delegates in at least eight states or territories to be formally entered into nomination; currently, only Trump and Ted Cruz qualify. But Haugland wants to lower that bar so that any candidate who won a single delegate in the primaries could get in on the action. This, in turn, would open the door for Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson and others to be nominated — all on the theory that “more names in nomination mean fewer votes for Mr. Trump, and the remote possibility that he could be denied the majority he needs to prevent a second ballot,” as Peters puts it.

These are both intriguing hypotheticals — especially for political reporters (like us here at Unconventional) who are desperate for fireworks in Cleveland. But is any of this stuff possible? Can Republicans really change the rules in Cleveland to block Trump’s nomination?

The short answer is yes, they can — but the incentives not to are even stronger than anyone seems to be acknowledging.

Here’s how a rule change would happen. Every delegation going to Cleveland — all 56 of them, or one from each state, U.S. territory and Washington, D.C. — will elect a man and a woman from its ranks to serve on the convention’s Rules Committee. That’s 112 people in all. A few days before the convention begins, the Rules Committee will meet in Cleveland to decide how the gathering will operate. If the majority of the committee agrees on a rule change — like the ones floated above — it will be folded into a comprehensive 2016 rules package and presented to all 2,472 national delegates for approval. For the new rule to go into effect, a majority of those delegates will have to vote yes as well. Then the convention can begin.

Controversial rule proposals have provoked intraparty warfare at past conventions — but they have rarely determined the nomination itself.

At the Democrats’ 1932 convention in Chicago, forces loyal to Franklin D. Roosevelt fought to replace the party’s longstanding two-thirds policy with majority rule; back then, a candidate had to win over a supermajority of delegates to clinch the nomination, and Roosevelt was still dozens of delegates short. The proposal failed, but FDR won the nomination anyway.

In 1980, Ted Kennedy, who trailed incumbent President Jimmy Carter by hundreds of delegates when the primaries ended, was nonetheless convinced that a decisive number of Carter’s pledged delegates secretly supported him. So he swept into the convention in New York City agitating for a rule change that would liberate the delegates from their commitments to the candidates and allow them to vote their conscience. “It was a brutal political fistfight,” according to Harold Ickes, who helped shape Kennedy’s convention strategy and later became Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. The rule change never passed, and Carter clinched the nomination on the first ballot