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GOP Platform revolt brewing
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 Date: November 8, 2016 |
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This article covering the 2016 presidential election was written outside the scope of Ballotpedia's encyclopedic coverage and does not fall under our neutrality policy or style guidelines. It is preserved as it was originally written. For our encyclopedic coverage of the 2016 election, click here.
July 13, 2016
By Jim Barnes
Cleveland, Ohio— Frustrated by the Republican platform committee’s intervention into a number of issues with policy prescriptions viewed as too detailed, roughly a third of the committee’s members tentatively signed onto a proposed minority report at conclusion of the drafting on Tuesday that would replace the document hammered out by 112 GOP convention delegates with a 1,200 word statement of party principles.
“Let’s not be specific,” said Rhode Island platform delegate Giovanni Cicione who backed an effort and said that after the committee’s deliberations on Tuesday that 37 delegates on the committee were backing the effort—28 signatures are needed to file a minority report which would then go to floor of the convention for a vote by all 2,472 of the Republican delegates. At several junctures during the full platform committee debate, several delegates groused that the party manifesto was getting too much “in the weeds” of public policy. Cicione, who was a delegate to the 2008 GOP convention and is a former Rhode Island state Republican Party chairman, nonetheless said, “I’m surprised 37 people signed onto the minority report.”
But there has since been push back against the dissidents’ effort. According to CNN, when pro-LGBT forces latched onto the statement-of-principles campaign, some of its supporters defected.[1] Likewise, some social conservatives on the platform committee are striking back at the dissidents’ proposal.[2]
One notable aspect of the 2016 Republican platform debate was the lack of intervention by the Trump campaign. While some Trump staffers monitored the deliberations, they didn’t try to dictate outcomes. That hands-off attitude is likely to change before Monday, July 18, when the full convention opens and any minority reports to the platform need to be formally presented with the requisite signatures from the platform committees’ ranks.
At the close of the committee’s work, its chairman, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, seemed to discourage any revolt. Upon being informed of the potential minority report by Cicione, Barrasso warned the delegates that such an effort would be the first time a dissent to the platform went to the floor of the convention since the contentious 1976 party confab when Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully challenged incumbent GOP president Gerald R. Ford for the nomination.
James A. Barnes is a senior writer at Ballotpedia who has covered every Democratic and Republican national convention since 1984. He is in Cleveland and Philadelphia for Ballotpedia in July.
See also
- The Republican Platform and RNC Platform Committee, 2016
- Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016
- Republican National Convention, 2016
