RNC tightens party rules, stymieing anti-abortion protests

Republicans in Milwaukee approved new party rules that will likely prevent protests of the party’s platform, after grumbling from anti-abortion activists.

At Thursday’s meeting of the RNC’s rules committee, the party raised the threshold to bring up a minority report — an official criticism of the platform — from 25% to 35% of members. To suspend rules and force a vote will require support from a majority of the 57 states and territories represented at the RNC, up from just seven.

Social conservatives had planned for worse. As the meeting began, party leaders hoped to raise the minority report threshold to 47%, a reference to how Trump, if elected, would become the 47th president. Harmeet Dhillon, a California RNC member who ran unsuccessfully for party chair in 2023, was among the members urging the 35% compromise.

But the change would likely be enough to doom a one-page minority report offered by social conservatives as a “declaration of principle,” endorsing a human life amendment to the Constitution.

The committee, which like the platform meeting was closed to press, also approved changes to the nominating process. In 2028, states with closed primaries will get a bonus delegate to the convention. This year, states that allowed non-Republicans to vote in their primaries were generally more favorable to Nikki Haley — including Vermont, where she won.

At the risk of understatement, Republicans had a lucky week. The Democratic panic over President Joe Biden’s debate performance drowned out most news about the final platform negotiations. The stories that did run were not bad at all for the Trump campaign, describing a “softened” GOP stance on abortion, undercutting Democratic messaging about how a second Trump term could limit abortion rights.

The truth of those stories was that anti-abortion activists felt insulted by this year’s platform and rules processes. It was the first since 2016, when Trump’s rough path to the nomination and Ted Cruz’s strength with conservative voters gave their faction more power. Delegates who wanted to affect the platform spent extra money to arrive early in Milwaukee, only for a Trump-approved document to be gaveled through in minutes, with no changes.

“It is obvious the RNC realizes they are leaving a sizable minority, if not majority, behind as they drop their historic commitments to the sanctity of life and the family,” said Tony Perkins, the chairman of Family Research Council Action, who helped draft the text of that minority report.

• For ABC News, Will Steakin and Soo Rin Kim report on how conservative policy scholars who the Trump campaign has distanced itself from were part of the platform-writing process. “The senior officials tasked with drafting the Republican platform… named Russ Vought as the platform committee’s policy director and Ed Martin as deputy policy director. Both have ties to Project 2025.”
• In National Review, Dan McLaughlin argues that the platform could have gone further without contradicting Trump. “What is conspicuously absent here is any discussion of what the federal government under Joe Biden is already doing to promote abortion with federal funds, on federal property, through federal executive order and federal agency action, and in lawsuits aimed at restricting states from enforcing their pro-life laws.”