Not a Single Republican Delegate Is ‘Bound’ to Donald Trump (Bit of a peek into the dark side) [View all]

[MosheFeingold]

(Forgive the National Review source; interestingly, it is the best source for OPO research on Don The Con.)

National Review, Online
By: David French
June 10, 2016

Let’s begin with a simple proposition: As a matter of law and history, there is not a single “bound” delegate to the Republican National Convention.

Not one delegate is required to vote for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or any other individual who “won” votes in the primary process. Each delegate will have to make his or her own choice. They — and they alone — will choose the Republican nominee. The paragraph above contradicts much of what you’ve been told about the presidential nominating process, and it even contradicts state law in multiple jurisdictions, but state law does not govern the Republican party. The party governs itself, and according to the rules it has implemented, there is only one convention where the delegates were truly bound: 1976’s, when Gerald Ford fended off a challenge from Ronald Reagan. In every other Republican convention ever held, every delegate has been free to vote their conscience.

Let’s break this down, legal step by legal step:

1. State legislatures cannot violate the First Amendment rights of Republican delegates. Throughout the primary, pundits have reminded voters again and again that there exists a patchwork quilt of state laws that “require” delegates to follow the will of the primary voters — sometimes only through one ballot, sometimes through more. These laws are unconstitutional. A state entity cannot mandate the manner in which private citizens govern private organizations. Indeed, the notion that states can compel members of private associations to vote according to primary results is a fundamentally progressive notion, an expansion of the government into the private sphere. Yet First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of association stand as a bulwark against exactly this kind of government interference.

Indeed, the Supreme Court has already ruled that in a conflict between state law and national-party rules, the national-party rules take precedence. In Cousins v. Wigoda, the High Court decided a dispute between two delegate slates to the 1972 Democratic Convention — one slate (the Cousins slate) was selected according to Illinois state law; the other (the Wigoda slate) was actually seated at the convention. The Court granted review to determine whether Illinois courts were “correct in according primacy to state law over the National Political Party’s rules in the determination of the qualifications and eligibility of delegates to the Party’s National Convention.”

The Court ruled for Wigoda, holding that: The States themselves have no constitutionally mandated role in the great task of the selection of Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates. If the qualifications and eligibility of delegates to National Political Party Conventions were left to state law “each of the fifty states could establish the qualifications of its delegates to the various party conventions without regard to party policy, an obviously intolerable result.” Such a regime could seriously undercut or indeed destroy the effectiveness of the National Party Convention as a concerted enterprise engaged in the vital process of choosing Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates— a process which usually involves coalitions cutting across state lines. [Internal citations omitted.]

Or, to put it in plain English, the Court essentially told the states to mind their own business and let the parties govern themselves.

Excerpted due to copy right. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436428/republican-convention-delegates-not-bound-donald-trump