By Avoiding A Roll Call Vote, The RNC Has Made Things Worse for Themselves

First things first: watch this video right now.

This is just shameful. We’ve seen the Left use similar tactics for years, attempting to shut down debate, silencing their critics, and declaring the issue to be settled, but this is the most vivid display imaginable of the leadership of the Republican Party, in conjunction with the Trump campaign, attempting to forcibly silence all dissent. According to multiple reports from both media outlets and delegates on the floor of the convention, the secretary of the convention was actually in hiding, surrounded by armed guards, for some time during the lead up to the voice vote, in an effort to prevent the necessary petitions from being submitted before the deadline.

Once the petitions had been submitted, the leadership of the party and staffers from the Trump campaign were actively pulling delegates from the floor and attempting to coerce or outright threaten delegates to remove their names from the petitions. Additional signatures were then ruled invalid, finally bringing the number of delegates who supported holding a roll call vote below the necessary threshold.

Again, this is all according to both multiple news reports and delegates on the floor of the convention. I won’t speculate on the convenience of having just enough signatures invalidated to ensure that a roll call vote would not occur.

The whole reason the Trump campaign wanted to avoid a roll call vote on the rules was to avoid the embarrassment of having a significant number of delegates, perhaps upwards of six hundred according to some sources, vote to unbind themselves and thus signal a lack of “unity”. But by rejecting an honest vote and cutting off all debate entirely, the strategy backfired.

There may never have been enough votes to reject the proposed rules package. If opponents of the package had fallen short in a roll call vote, the story would have been entirely about that failure. Now, the story is about the near-riot on the convention floor, party leadership turning off the microphone of a sitting U.S. Senator, and the unwillingness of that same party leadership to listen to any dissenting views. A roll call vote would have allowed delegates to air their grievances, have a healthy discussion, and in the end brought the party together.

Now both delegates and conservative voters are more disgusted and enraged than ever, the likelihood of additional turmoil at the convention has increased, and the false narrative of party unity has been shattered. It has become clear that true unity is impossible when encouraged at gunpoint.

Hopefully the delegates will continue to remind both Donald Trump and Reince Priebus of that fact on the convention floor, especially during the officially nominating vote later today. As long as the principled members of the convention haven’t all already walked out, that is.