Cleveland
“No!” “Objection!” “Point of order!” “Mr. Chairman!”
The mild-mannered Mike Lee is not one to shout, but the Utah senator and delegate repeatedly yelled at the top of lungs Monday afternoon at the Republican National Convention in objection to what he saw as an unprecedented attempt to break RNC’s own rules and steamroll dissent.
“I have never in all my life, certainly going on six years in the United States Senate, prior to that as a lifelong Republican, never seen anything like this,” Lee told reporters on the floor of the convention after the chair—Arkansas congressman Steve Womack—declined to recognize their objections and walked off stage.
Womack had just held a vote to adopt the RNC’s Rules Committee package, but the result of the voice vote was not obviously clear—both ayes and nays generated loud cheers. The chair nevertheless ruled the ayes were in the majority, prompting an uproar from convention delegates demanding a roll-call vote. The uproar in turn prompted Womack’s departure from the stage.
“There is no precedent for this in parliamentary procedure,” Lee told reporters. “There is no precedent for this in the rules of the Republican National Convention. We are now in uncharted territory. Somebody owes us an explanation. I have never seen the chair abandoned like that. They vacated the stage entirely.”
Lee’s goal was to force convention-wide vote on the rules governing convention, and he and a band of grassroots and anti-Trump activists believed that they had done what was necessary: Present to the secretary of the convention the signatures of the majority of delegates from at least seven states. “We’ve got 11 states,” Lee told reporters.
Delegates said that the secretary of the convention had gone in to hiding, but RNC officials eventually delivered petitions to the secretary. As the raucous scene on the floor persisted, Arkansas congressman Steve Womack eventually returned recognized the leader of Utah’s delegation, who requested a roll-call vote.
Womack then declared that the RNC had received petitions of nine states but three had withdrawn their petitions, leaving the effort for a roll call vote one state short. Lee objected that the chair never even identified which states revoked their petitions, and an RNC official told Time magazine’s Zeke Miller that the RNC would not release a list of withdrawn signatures and delegations invalidated. (BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray reports the states were Alaska, Minnesota, and Iowa.)
Was there anything delegates could do to challenge what had just transpired? “I have no idea,” Lee told THE WEEKLY STANDARD as he walked off the floor.
While some delegates said they intended to stage a walk out of the Republican National Convention, Lee said he would be sticking around.
What prompted the rancor over the rules on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena? It all began Monday afternoon when the convention held a voice vote on adopting the rules package that came out of the RNC Rules Committee last week—a package that expressly prohibited delegates from voting their consciences on the first ballot, a goal of the anti-Trump delegates. But the effort wasn’t entirely about ditching Trump.
There were several objections, including opposition to the committee’s decision to refuse to close primaries to Republicans or at least reward closed primaries with extra delegates. Virginia delegate Morton Blackwell, who strongly opposed unbinding delegates to allow conscience voting, strongly objected to the RNC’s proceedings. “Crooked @GOP establishment breaks its own rules and denies roll call vote on @GOPconvention rules,” Blackwell wrote on Twitter.
TWS spoke to a handful of delegates from Montana who fully supported Donald Trump but intended to vote against the rules committee’s report as an effort to retain grassroots control and close primaries only to registered Republicans. But they never got the chance to cast that vote.
