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Now Can We Please Fix the GOP Nomination Process

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Several years ago I joined a poker game with a group of people I'd never met before. The stakes went up and up and at one point a pot reached over $1,000. I had what I was fairly certain was the winning hand, but the dealer, who was a friend of my remaining opponent, "accidentally" flipped his last card up, not down. Normally the rule is that the misdealt card is "burned" and a replacement card is dealt face down. ‎No harm, no foul.

In this instance, I was informed "house rules" say the player gets to choose whether he wants the card or a replacement. This effectively gave him two last cards, and sure enough he pulled his full house after rejecting the first card.

Cheated, I high-tailed it out of there and ‎never went back. The "never-Trump" movement would have said, 'Too bad. You should have known the house rules before you sat down.'

For four months I (mostly) kept my mouth shut during the GOP presidential delegate chase, but now that it is over, I want to shout it from the rafters: the nomination process is the most corrupt, elitist, anti-democratic system for choosing a president imaginable. It is rotten to the core.

It is what millions of primary voters are rebelling against -- even as 35 states had lined up for Trump, super PACS, professional politicians, and party hacks conspired on how to overrule the will of the voters and pick the candidate THEY wanted.

Donald Trump was never my first or second or even third choice. This isn't about Trump, though. It's about restoring basic fairness and voter empowerment going forward.

This year the party chieftains wanted to tell millions of voters, who sometimes waited two hours in line across the country to cast their ballot, that their vote doesn't really count. A record turnout of voters went to the polls who naively thought that Republicans believed in one man, one vote. The insiders replied, 'Sorry, it doesn't work that way. You should have known the rules.'

There were probably six people in the whole United States who could make heads or tails out of these convoluted convention rules.

And by the way, as we learned this year, it doesn't matter what the rules are because the insiders are empowered to rewrite the rules when they don't like the way voters are voting.

Another story:‎ A few weeks ago a long-time conservative friend, who is also a Virginia delegate, told me proudly that she and all her delegate friends intended not to vote for Trump at the convention.

Wait a minute, I reminded her somewhat stunned, a plurality of voters in Virginia chose Trump. She launched into a tirade that she has been an activist in the party for 20 years and how dare all these new Trump voters just storm into the party and vote for someone other than HER first choice. She all but blurted out, 'My vote should count more than theirs.'

Apparently, in the GOP rulebook, all voters are created equal, but some voters are more equal than others.

Many people are intensely unhappy with the outcome and they feel entitled to a "better" candidate. But imagine that it was Ronald Reagan who had won Florida, New York, Illinois, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Massachusetts, California (where he was up by 25 points), and at least 20 other states. But the party hacks said, sorry, we nominate George Bush. See you in November.

Conservatives would have gone ballistic and justifiably so. Since when do we as conservatives believe the ends justify the means? I was so sick of people rationalizing their attempt to steal this election by saying, it was by defying the will of the voters that Abraham Lincoln became president. I suppose we should do away with democratic elections.

It seems like just yesterday Republicans were making fun of Democrats for rigging the system for Hillary Clinton, and the voters be damned.

Now the other argument in favor of the corrupt nomination process is that the Republican Party is a private organization and it can make whatever rules it wants.

Fine. But if that's the case, the party should at least have the decency to tell the voters, we have a couple thousand insiders who are going to decide who our nominee is. Don't make 20 million people trudge to the polls under the false belief that their vote matters if it doesn't.

Amazingly, this is the same party that says it must drive up voter turnout to win, but when voters DO turn out in record numbers, they thumb their noses at them as stupid, low-information, "not real Republicans," and so on. My delegate friend sneered, I've never even seen these people at a Republican meeting before. Um, isn't that a good thing?

As an aside, Democrats routinely slander these voters as racists, xenophobes, know-nothings, fascists and other niceties. ‎Wouldn't it be nice if the conservative intellectual class came to these voters' rescue rather than piling on and giving credence to these vile leftist rants? Whose side is the "never-Trump" crowd on?

So how to fix the GOP nominating system to empower voters and make the delegate class mostly impotent? I'm no expert (who is?) and I do believe in federalism in which the 50 states decide their own rules. But at the very least get rid of the rules that allow "unbound delegates." Trump won almost 60 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania; yet as many as two-thirds of the delegates said that at the convention, they would choose someone other than Trump. Delegates should be bound based on a well-defined rule of either winner take all or some kind of proportional system. By the way, the delegates should be tooth picks or straws to be counted, not people.

Whoever has the most straws wins. What a concept!

As I write these words, I just received a text that some influential never-Trumpers are STILL conspiring to find a way to take the nomination from Trump even after he gets way past the 1,247 delegate finish line. ‎They are advising delegates to break the rules and not vote for Trump even though they are honor-bound to do so.

Will the madness ever end? If only these smartest minds of the party, by their own admission,  would help figure out how to beat Hillary.

*Stephen Moore is ‎an economic consultant at Freedom Works.

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About The Author

Stephen
Moore

Stephen Moore is a contributing author for CBN News. He is chief economist at The Heritage Foundation, a position he has held since January, 2014. Previously, Moore wrote for The Wall Street Journal and was also a member of The Journal’s editorial board As chief economist at Heritage, Moore focuses on advancing public policies that increase the rate of economic growth to help the United States retain its position as the global economic superpower. He also works on budget, fiscal and monetary policy and showcases states that get fiscal houses in order. Moore’s early career was shaped by three