http://www.weeklystandard.com/its-time-to-dump-trump/article/2002839/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=t.co&utm_campaign=20160615_TWS-blog-dump-trump-at-rnc-3_twitter&utm_content=TWSIt's Time to Dump Trump
At the Republican National Convention12:05 PM, JUN 15, 2016 |
By JAY COST
Donald Trump is on course to be routed at the ballot box in November. He trails Hillary Clinton by 12 points in the latest Bloomberg News national poll, and has only led her in four polls out of thirty three since April, according to Real Clear Politics. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that his favorable rating has dropped to a paltry 31 percent among registered voters, with 69 percent viewing him unfavorably.
This is hardly surprising, given that he continues to make outrageous comments. Most recently, he seemed to accuse American soldiers of embezzling aid money earmarked for war-torn Iraq—something that he has done before. His fundraising is anemic, and some insiders are wondering if he will have to accept public financing for the general election, which would leave his cash-strapped campaign totally unable to take on the Clinton juggernaut.
The Republican party deserves better than Trump, and it is not too late to get rid of him. The delegates at the GOP convention in Cleveland this July can and should select somebody else as the presidential nominee.
The process of dumping Trump is not all that difficult. The delegates are not technically bound to vote for the winner of the primaries and caucuses. Under the rules of the Republican party, they first have to vote to bind themselves to those results—meaning that they are, in truth, free to do whatever they like. There was an effort during the pre-convention maneuvering in 2012 to bind delegates formally, but this endeavor was unsuccessful. So, the delegates have the sovereign authority to choose somebody other than Trump.
This can happen one of two ways: the party's rules committee can draft a report that unbinds the convention delegates, or a majority of the delegates can vote to do that from the convention floor itself. Either way, the primaries and caucuses are non-binding "beauty contests," until the delegates affirmatively declare them otherwise.
What about the republican principle that the majority should rule? This is, after all, the backbone of our experiment in self-government. Is it not deeply unfair to suspend that standard to stop Trump? It might be, except that Trump did not actually win a majority of the vote. In fact, 55 percent of Republican voters supported somebody else. Trump backers like to boast that nobody in party history has won so many votes, but this claim is misleading. In fact no presumptive GOP nominee in the modern era has won as small a share of the primary vote as Trump.
The principle of plurality rule may be invoked to defend Trump's nomination, but it is hardly decisive in the American electoral system. California and Louisiana employ "jungle" primaries, where the top-two finishers in multi-party primaries advance to the general election, ensuring that the ultimate winner has received a majority of the vote. The U.S. Constitution contains a similar procedure to govern the election of the president. While each state legislature is free to allocate its electors however it wants (including by plurality rule), a candidate cannot become president unless he has received an outright majority in the Electoral College. Otherwise, the House of Representatives makes the final decision, and it is not bound to the candidate who won the most electoral votes. Similarly, the rules of the House require a speaker to have received support from an outright majority of all members—a plurality is insufficient.
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