Reince Priebus will face difficulty getting members to buy in to recommendations. | REUTERS RNC rejects most rule changes

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — An activist-led push to repeal all of the rule changes pushed through by Mitt Romney’s envoy at last summer’s Republican National Convention failed here Wednesday.

But a coalition of libertarians and conservatives on the Republican National Committee’s Rules Committee voted to remove one of the most controversial requirements: that the winner of a state caucus or primary automatically gets to control its delegates.


A nearly four-hour fight at the RNC Spring meeting, which unfolded in a windowless ballroom of a fancy hotel, showcased the mounting tension between the establishment and movement conservatives, for now in cahoots with Rand Paul supporters, over the direction of the party in the wake of last November’s electoral thumping.

The full RNC still needs to approve the proposal on delegate allocation at a general session Friday. Its fate is uncertain, and D.C.-based party leaders might try to block it. Any change to the rules requires support from three-quarters of the 168 members. It passed the smaller committee by only a 31-20 margin.

Division within the rules committee suggest that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus will face difficulty in winning buy-in for many of the recommendations made last month by a five-member task force he convened on how to win elections again.

“So, we take it rule-by-rule now,” said Nevada national committeeman James Smack, a Paul booster, suggesting that he plans to introduce 15 to 20 amendments at future gatherings. “We’re prepared to fight back.”

Representatives from caucus states came in upset over the requirement passed last summer in Tampa aimed at ending beauty contests in 2016. Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses, for example, but Ron Paul wound up controlling the delegation to the national convention because he organized volunteers to compete in county, district and state conventions.

The Romney campaign was frustrated because they would win the so-called “beauty contest” but then need to send operatives back to organize for local conventions to make sure they got the delegates.

“With no disrespect to the Santorum and the Romney campaign in Iowa, they didn’t do their job,” said Iowa national committeeman Steve Scheffler, a prominent social conservative. “People that are involved in the grassroots should be able to choose those delegates.”

“You may not like the results that you saw in Iowa, but states should be allowed to do what they want,” he added.

Other Republicans at the meeting argued that non-binding elections make voters less likely to participate and also empower the extremes of the party. They argued that candidates are less likely to campaign in places where they’re not sure a victory on Election Day will translate into delegates for the convention.

“That is not a smart way to grow the party,” said Henry Barbour, Republican national committeeman from Mississippi who opposed scrapping many of the Romney Rules. “The rules that we passed in Tampa honor what happens in primaries. We need to value what happens in primaries and caucuses, as well as state conventions. We want to have more participation, not less participation.”

Acolytes of the “liberty movement” were out in full force. A few dozen sat in the audience; some carpooled from as far away as Texas. At least two recorded members during the roll call votes, tracking how they voted on proposed changes.

“Conventions build the party; primaries don’t,” said Dimitri Kesari, a political consultant who served as deputy campaign manager on Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2012. “Why do we have to federalize everything? We want to let states pick what they want.”

Morton Blackwell, the Republican national committeeman from Virginia, was the driving force behind the effort to repeal wholesale the changes passed last year. He was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate in 1964. Now 73, he’s been at every national GOP convention since then.

“We need to send a signal that power grabs and concentrations of power are not what the Republican Party is about,” said Blackwell, singling out Romney legal adviser Ben Ginsberg.

Blackwell, who runs the Leadership Institute, garnered support from a long list of prominent conservatives, from Ed Meese to Grover Norquist, ahead of the meeting.

He negotiated with Priebus, as well as a handful of his emissaries, in the run-up to Wednesday’s showdown. He said they came very close to an agreement, which allowed Priebus to keep the power to name a Budget Committee chairman, but it got derailed at the last minute when establishment leaders pushed to restore two of the Romney rules.

His push to get rid of all the rules would have essentially meant a return to what was passed at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

“We are getting hundreds and hundreds of emails from delegates to our state convention. Every one of them wants us to go back to the prior rules,” said Texas Republican Chairman Steve Munisteri, who basked the Blackwell effort. “I’ve yet to have a single person in our state tell us we should maintain the rules.”

The proposal, though, failed on a 28-25 vote.

Historically, changes to the party rules could not be made in between the quadrennial national conventions. The Romney forces wanted to change this, in theory, so that if they controlled the White House they would be able to alter the rules to their advantage.

Ironically, the original proposal in Tampa was that two-thirds of the full committee could change the rules. But activists worried about a GOP White House trying to block challenges from conservatives pushed to require three-quarters approval of the full body, regardless of how many actually attend the meeting. This now complicates their effort to undo the other rules.

There is widespread support for another amendment to the rules, introduced by Barbour at the meeting Wednesday, which clarifies the rules to be clear that no presidential candidate has the power to remove a delegate that they do not approve of in a state they carry. But if someone is bound to support a winning candidate at the national convention and they do not, their vote would still count toward the winner’s total.

A big flashpoint at the meeting came as both sides invoked the party’s “grassroots.”

Maine national committeeman Mark Willis, a Paul booster who tried unsuccessfully to run for RNC chair in January, warned that the grassroots will not work for the GOP if the rules were not repealed.

“They are an army that worked for free,” he said.

When Willis asked “the grassroots” to stand up, a bunch of consummate insiders he didn’t expect jumped up as well, including Barbour — nephew to former RNC chair Haley Barbour.

Barbour said that it is unfair to characterize his opposition to throwing out all of last year’s rules as anti-grassroots.

“We also have many good rules that did pass in Tampa,” he said. “The large majority of them did not come from quote ‘the Romney campaign.’ Certainly a handful did.”

During his back-and-forth with Blackwell, Barbour quipped: “I appreciate Mr. Blackwell’s long service to the Republican National Committee. Some might argue it makes you part of the establishment, but we know better.”

Blackwell shot back: “Who better than you?”