The chairman of the Republican National Committee has privately urged members of the party’s rules committee not to make changes to the guidelines governing the presidential nominating process, an effort to avoid the appearance that the party is seeking to block Donald J. Trump from becoming its nominee. The chairman, Reince Priebus, whom associates describe as increasingly frustrated by Mr. Trump’s criticism of the delegate-selection process, sent a text message last week to multiple rules committee members strongly suggesting that they not alter the convention rules when the party convenes next week for its spring meeting in Florida, according to two who received the message. Separately, a group of influential rules committee members held a conference call Thursday to prepare for the meeting and reached a consensus that they would derail any attempt at the gathering to make changes to the how the convention is conducted, according to a committee member on the call. “We’re not going to do anything with the rules next week,” said Rob Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party and a longtime member of the rules committee. “There’s no point because new rules will be written at the convention.”
The matter of convention rule-setting is the sort of arcane intraparty business that rarely draws attention from even the most committed political enthusiasts. But with the prospect of a contested convention and a divisive front-runner waging a high-profile campaign against the party apparatus, issues of how individual states select their delegates and who can or cannot be placed in nomination have become a high-stakes drama.
With Mr. Trump and his supporters on the lookout for any maneuvering that can be construed as a backdoor attempt to cheat him of the nomination, establishment-aligned Republicans see little to be gained by tinkering with procedures that could well be disregarded before the July convention.
While the standing rules committee of the party can set nominating guidelines, they are effectively only suggestions. It is a rules committee comprising 112 delegates that actually writes the rules governing the convention, and those are only implemented if they are approved by a full vote of all the Republican delegates in Cleveland.
Full Article: G.O.P. Chief Discourages Rule Changes That Seem to Block Donald Trump – The New York Times.