We’re not even pretending to care about the rules anymore
“Exciting” news dropped in Georgia this morning. Georgia’s elected members to the Republican National Committee have reportedly waived the rule requiring national party neutrality in contested Republican primary elections, in order to allow the RNC to support and fund Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’ Trump-endorsed candidacy for governor.
The problem is that the Georgia GOP’s own bylaws don’t allow them to do so.
First, a brief primer: the RNC is comprised of three members from each state (as well as several US territories). These are the state party chair, and the national committeeman and national committeewoman from each state, who are elected to four-year terms by the voting delegates at the state party convention.
The RNC’s rules make it clear that its default position is to be neutral in contests among Republican candidates, but it does provide for an exception when all three RNC members from a given state waive that neutrality requirement. From RNC rule 11, entitled “Candidate Support”:
“(a) The Republican National Committee shall not, without the prior written and filed approval of all members of the Republican National Committee from the state involved, contribute money or in-kind aid to any candidate for any public or party office of that state, except the nominee of the Republican Party or a candidate who is unopposed in the Republican primary after the filing deadline for that office.”
Our RNC members – chairman Josh McKoon, national committeeman Jason Thompson, and national committeewoman Amy Kremer – have apparently provided said written and filed approval, allowing the RNC to directly support Jones at the behest of Trump. But doing so is in direct violation of the Georgia GOP’s bylaws. Section 7.6, titled “Restrictions on endorsements by GRP officials”, reads, in its entirety:
“Members of the State Executive Committee, the State Committee, GRP employees, appointed GRP Officials, County Chairmen, members of any County Committee and members of any District Committee shall not use their official title in any manner in connection with their support of, any candidate for any public office in the State of Georgia in either a special election or for the Republican nomination in a primary where there is at least one other announced Republican candidate.”
Note that there is no stated exception for “unless Trump wants them to”. Exercising the candidate support loophole in the national bylaws requires our elected party officials to use their titles to waive neutrality in a manner that Georgia GOP bylaws specifically prohibit those officials from doing. In other words, the exception in the RNC rules is not open to the Georgia GOP, because our state rules do not allow it.
The difference in what national and state bylaws permit shouldn’t be unusual to anyone familiar with our federal system of government. There are many cases where something is federally allowed but prohibited by one or more states, and if you violate a state law in such a category, it is not a defense that what you did is permitted federally. For example, if your state has a minimum wage of $15/hr, you cannot pay your employees $8/hr and avoid state prosecution because the federal minimum wage is less than that.
Let’s be clear regarding what is going to result from this rule violation, at least in the short term: absolutely nothing. It should be obvious that Chairman McKoon will not be calling a meeting of the GOP State Committee to ask them to remove himself and our committeeman and woman from office for cause. Even if he did, the rules require a ⅔ vote of the committee for removal. The state party’s official membership has essentially refashioned itself into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump campaign, and it’s entirely implausible for such a vote to succeed among current membership.
But just because there is currently no mechanism by which any party rule will be enforced if it’s perceived to be contrary to Trump’s interests doesn’t mean it’s a great idea for the party to ignore those rules to favor a particular candidate. The state party tried to intervene on Trump’s behalf in the last statewide cycle in 2022, and all of its preferred candidates got their clocks cleaned. (Anointing Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for president without a primary didn’t work out great for the Dems, either.)
So if you don’t care about the rule of law, that’s fine. If it doesn’t bother you that your state GOP thinks the voters exist to serve the party and not the other way around, that’s cool too. Certainly there’s always been some incentive in politics to abandon principles in order to win elections. But when you give up those principles and get nothing but electoral L’s in return, what’s the point of any of it?
