What really happened at the RNC platform committee

I became involved in politics in 1988. Over those years, I’ve done everything from chairing a precinct meeting to serving as a statewide elected leader in the Texas Republican Party. I’ve seen my share of political games. I understand the interactions between campaign consultants, party leadership, and grassroots activists. I’ve lived it. But what I experienced in the closed-door meeting in Milwaukee on Monday was something new.

I was elected by Republicans in Texas as one of two to serve on the National Republican Platform Committee. I’ve been elected to do this at five previous national conventions. We heard there would be well-organized efforts to remove or weaken the traditional pro-life and pro-family planks of our existing platform, and I was sent to the national convention to help protect those areas. With other pro-family leaders from across the country, we began coordinating efforts ahead of the committee meeting to keep those planks strong.

Our party should always follow its own duly enacted rules — including those requiring transparency. We should not violate or set them aside in deference to any candidate.

We knew that the Trump campaign was working in several states to get hand-picked delegates on the platform committee, blocking other elected delegates, and even at times holding unauthorized parallel conventions where campaign officials didn't follow GOP guidelines or rules to achieve their goals. In many cases, these delegates were more loyal to the campaign than to the process. It soon became obvious that the campaign had a clear majority.

All 112 platform committee delegates met in our Sunday evening orientation meeting, where the committee chairman was supposed to give us the initial draft platform for us to review overnight so we could begin our subcommittee work the next day. But that did not happen this time. We were given no platform to review. And all of our committee proceedings were ordered closed.

According to party rules, national platform proceedings have traditionally been streamed live, usually on C-Span, for all the world to see. This time they were not.

Each delegate entering the room the next morning to begin work on the platform was required to place his or her phone and smart watch in a sealed Faraday bag that only the RNC or campaign staff could open. In fact, when one committee member later took out his computer to make notes for himself, eight staffers and two security guards came over and physically took his computer from him. Yet the RNC and campaign staffers were allowed to retain and use their phones and devices.

At least 50 RNC staffers lined the walls. They walked around watching and monitoring delegates as if we were schoolchildren locked in detention, ensuring no one was using a hidden phone or computer.

The RNC dispensed with the usual subcommittee meetings and went directly to considering the platform wording, which none of us had been allowed to see previously. Of course, we had many questions and objections, but the committee chairman quickly shut us down. Delegates Tony Perkins of Louisiana and state Sen. Jim Dotson of Arkansas both attempted to speak and ask questions. They were quickly quieted by the chairman and voted down by the campaign-picked delegates.

Whenever a vote was taking place, the campaign had a staffer at the front who walked around holding up a sign that read, “Vote Yes,” instructing campaign-picked delegates how to vote on each issue. One first-time delegate asked a seatmate why they were doing that. The response: “They don’t think you’re smart enough to think for yourself.”

Our traditional values side never had more than 29 votes against the campaign’s strong-arm efforts. The intimidation was simply too much. In fact, when votes were taken, staffers took pictures of delegates who voted against the campaign and the RNC’s heavy-handed process.

Ironically, the platform passed with less than an hour of actual voting and debate time. Not a single change to its campaign-written content was allowed for consideration. To put this in perspective, the four previous conventions allocated a full week to build the platform from the grassroots up, starting with subcommittee meetings and then having the full committee approve and release the final product.

This cycle’s process was fully orchestrated and executed by the campaign and RNC staff, down to every motion, every second, and every vote. It was a brilliantly executed political strong-arm move by the campaign and RNC leadership; it also completely killed the transparent grassroots process that has been a hallmark of the Republican Party platform process.

When the meeting adjourned, more than 20 of us signed on to an unofficial “Platform Minority Report,” which read in part:

The Declaration is the heritage of all Americans, always true but likewise always straining to be realized, for the slave as well as for the free, for women as well as for men, for the poor as well as the rich. For Republicans, from the very inception of our party, the words of the Declaration took form in two overarching moral propositions, that is, the rejection and elimination of what our very first platform in 1856 called “the twin relics of barbarism”: slavery and polygamy. We note with sober reflection how vast a cost the people of the United States paid for the achievement of that platform’s commitments, and how long a period passed before those goals could be achieved.

Today we observe the vitality of a more recent but analogous set of commitments, embodied most prominently in the promise of the Republican Party to preserve the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death. That commitment made its way into the platform of 1976, twelve decades after that original session in Philadelphia. That commitment to a human life amendment and a call for the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection application to children before birth has been repeated in every platform since and, by this declaration of principle, we extend it now. In no season, under no rationale spurred by the exigencies of a political moment, can or should we abandon the high principles that have created and sustained this party, with God’s grace, into a third century.

I will be actively involved from now to November, but I also believe we must always look beyond the next election and work to preserve and promote the enduring ideals that ensure life and prosperity for future generations. I further believe that the end does not justify the means, even if it is for our side.

To be clear, I am not indicting this year’s platform but rather the process. The positions on pro-life, pro-family, and pro-Israel were definitely weakened, but there are still many, many aspects of the platform’s 57-item agenda I enthusiastically support. This includes Donald Trump’s plans for fighting crime, increasing energy production, securing the borders, de-federalizing education, protecting women’s sports, and many other issues that Republicans and common-sense Americans believe to be important.

If Republicans remain silent now, our opportunity to have a voice of influence in the party platform in the future may be gone.

The long-term danger of this platform process is that it sets a precedent for future Republican presidential nominees to turn the platform into their personal campaign agendas. While all campaigns should have and publicize their agendas, the Republican Party's platform has historically been a statement of the beliefs and principles of Republicans, not of a single candidate. This tradition dates to the first platform penned in 1856. Our principles should always transcend and go beyond the term of office of any individual candidate.

To ensure grassroots influence in the future, the average Republican must contact his state RNC members and insist on reclaiming the process. Our party should always follow its own duly enacted rules — including those requiring transparency. We should not violate or set them aside in deference to any candidate.

Going forward, Republicans in states across the country should reaffirm their commitment to the principles of life, family, and Israel through their own state party platforms and by expressing their thoughts on the process and the platform to RNC leadership. If Republicans remain silent now, our opportunity to have a voice of influence in the party platform in the future may be gone.

Having said this, the difference between the choices in November remains stark and clear. Former President Trump is by far the strongest candidate in the race on pro-family issues, and for four years in office, he demonstrated his support for these issues, including through his judicial nominees. He also knows there are only two sexes; that parents’ rights over their children surpass those of any government official; that the U.S. Department of Education is unconstitutional and must go; that weaponization of the government must stop; and much else.

President Trump covers all of this in his 2024 campaign platform — which every American should read.

Then read Joe Biden’s and the Democrats' platform. Their most recent is 2020; it will be the end of August before they have one for this campaign.

Then make your choice and vote — and make sure your friends vote, too.