CLEVELAND — It was a farce and an embarrassment.
They made a motion from the podium. When objections began raining down, they said, “without objection, so ordered.” When the objections got louder and more visible — hundreds of delegates screaming and chanting and shaking their state sign posts — they called a voice vote.
Both the Yays and the Nays were drowned out by the objections, but they still said, “the Ayes have it.”
Then the party leaders ran off. They went backstage. They just disappeared. For nine minutes, the podium stood empty. Rep. Steve Womack, the man with the gavel, had been yanked from the stage. Pandemonium broke out on the floor. Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general, threw his credentials on the floor and began to walk out. Delegates got on chairs and chanted and yelled.
In the vacuum created by Womack’s retreat, TV networks began interviewing the dissidents, including Cuccinelli and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.
The leaders tried to make the rank and file shut up and go away, but the result was the opposite: the rank and file now had a monopoly on media coverage and the leadership had gone away. With the podium empty, Mike Lee and Ken Cuccinelli had effectively taken over the convention — in the eyes of the nation, the rebels now held the floor.
The floor rebels weren’t staging a coup. They weren’t trying to replace the nominee. They were asking for a roll call vote on the rules package that had passed the Rules Committee a couple of hours earlier. It was a very modest request. But it was something the party leadership and the Trump campaign didn’t want. No matter how small, it had to be quashed. Give them an inch….
Backstage, the leaders were putting their final touches on the counter-rebellion. The rebels had submitted petitions with enough signatures to force a roll call vote. But the moment the rebels had handed the paperwork to the party leaders, the petitions had become a whip list. One by one, party leaders called, pigeonholed, cajoled and threatened the signatories. When Womack finally returned to the podium, he explained that enough of the petitions’ signers had withdrawn their names that the motion no longer stood.
The leadership won. But what had they won, and why did they fight?
Again, they were blocking a simple roll-call vote on the rules. They almost certainly would have won the vote. There was a three hour recess scheduled into the day, which could have absorbed any lengthening of the proceedings.
So why not allow the rebels to make their motion, hold the vote, win, and move on?
Because a recorded vote would have shown, in view of C-Span cameras, that the party was not unanimous. The leadership’s gambit obviously backfired, as the raw dissension made good television out of a typically boring process. So again, why did they behave this way?
One easy explanation is the authoritarian streak in Trump world. Trump makes known his admiration for Vladimir Putin’s and Saddam Hussein’s effectiveness. Campaign manager Paul Manafort literally made a living advising and flacking for foreign strongmen.
But heavy-handed, knee-jerk opposition to public debate and disagreement is not just a Trump thing. It’s increasingly how the Republican Party works.
This wasn’t the first time Mike Lee found himself ignored by the presiding officer as he sought debate or invoked parliamentary procedure. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has run the upper chamber — created by the Founders as an oasis for measured and extended debate — in the same heavy-handed way.
The times are long gone when senators could freely offer amendments. Amendments from the rank and file, you see, might divide the party. Both parties’ leaders fill all amendment slots and pull parliamentary maneuvers to prevent intra-party floor debates.
Debates must happen behind closed doors, the thinking goes, and parties most always show unity to the public. This isn’t a bad idea in many circumstances, but the GOP seems to have made it an absolute rule.
You don’t get unity by silencing dissenting voices and curbing debate. You get unity by allowing all voices to be heard, and building consensus. Quashing dissent undermines unity, because it transforms dissidents from a minority within a larger group to personae non gratae.
Party leaders and Trump campaign officials thought a public vote on the rolls would harm the party. As they drive away grass-roots activists, Trump and the GOP establishment may find that holding too firm to power is the best way to lose it.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
