GOP Makes It Harder to Add Stronger Pro-Life Language Back to Platform
After the Republican Party weakened its platform’s stance on abortion and other social issues, party leaders created new barriers making it more difficult for conservatives to oppose the party’s liberalization formally, numerous eyewitnesses have told The Washington Stand.
The Republican National Committee’s (RNC) Rule Committee has adopted a new measure raising the threshold necessary for opponents to file a motion dissenting from the party’s decisions. If the Platform Committee takes a stance opposed by a significant share of delegates — such as stepping back from their historic commitment to protect unborn children — rank-and-file delegates may submit a “minority report” documenting their objections. But after ramming a new Republican Party platform through the RNC with virtually no time for debate, the party’s new leadership then stifled delegates’ ability to protest by raising the minimum number of signatures needed to file a minority report by more than two-thirds, from 25% to 35% of delegates.
That came only after threatening to raise the threshold to a whopping 47% of delegates — a level closer to a plurality report than a minority report.
“Is this a signal that they are taking the party to a place” more than one-third of their “constituency does not want to go?” asked FRC Action Chairman Tony Perkins on social media. “Look no further than the current platform that fails to recognize our rights from God, waters down the stand for the unborn, fails to define marriage and totally leaves out the Second Amendment.”
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On July 8, the Republican Party offered a radically truncated platform that, for the first time in decades, promised no concrete national legislation protecting unborn life, nor even opposing taxpayer-funded abortion. Although delegates adopted the platform’s weaker language by a vote of 84-18, the new GOP leadership thrust the platform — which is usually crafted during two days of hearings — on delegates with less than 15 minutes of debate and virtually no opportunity to review the changes. “They didn’t have a chance to read it beforehand,” revealed Brent Keilen, FRC Action’s vice president for Strategic Initiatives, who saw the proceedings personally. Utah delegate Gayle Ruzicka confirmed, “They didn’t even give us a chance to read it before we voted on it,” before pronouncing herself “frustrated” at the stifling process.
Immediately after the platform vote, “Tony Perkins, representing Louisiana, asked for the rules on filing a minority report. Chairman [and Tennessee Senator Marsha] Blackburn refused to provide that information,” stated Mary Summa, general counsel for North Carolina Values Coalition. Summa, who boasts she has “participated in every National Platform Committee since 1988,” called the platform adoption process “a travesty.” Others described the RNC leadership’s actions as “insulting,” “demeaning,” “demoralizing,” and “despicable.”
Nonetheless, Perkins submitted the minority report — which upheld the protection of life and family as “issues for the ages and not for any single [election] cycle — in less than an hour to the RNC chairman and co-chair of the Platform Committee, in accordance with the rules.
As the new platform backed away from the party’s pro-life position, the new Republican Party leadership moved to stifle dissent. Initially, delegates considered raising the number of delegates needed to file a minority report to 47% — a number intended to reflect that Donald Trump would become the 47th president of the United States, a delegate present told The Washington Stand.
“The motion to [change] the threshold to adopt a minority report to 35% was made by Harmeet Dhillon. The motion passed, other amendments were defeated,” Brant Frost V, a 34-year-old member of the Rules Committee from Georgia and first vice president of the Georgia Republican Assembly, told The Washington Stand. “Then the question was called” — a parliamentary maneuver that ends the meeting — “before more conservative amendments could be introduced. The vote to call the question passed with only about 21 no votes” out of approximately 112 members. “There were only about two-dozen people with actually intact spines on that whole committee,” Frost told TWS.
Some delegates speculated to TWS that Dhillon — a California-based attorney who has represented significant conservative interests in court — did not know the previous threshold or offered her motion as a compromise. All pronounced their frustration at a process that locked out longtime Republican volunteers and leaders while backtracking on the party’s historic commitments.
“The majority of the approximately 21 people who voted against the rules change had been active in the conservative movement well before 2016,” including Leadership Institute founder Morton Blackwell, a source with knowledge of the vote told TWS.
A number of Rules Committee members told TWS that the RNC’s behavior fails to uphold an adage known as “The Reagan Rule,” from a statement attributed to our 40th president: “My 80% friend is not my 20% enemy.”
While the 2024 Republican Party platform still registers opposition to late-term abortion, it promises no concrete action of any sort — even to end taxpayer funding of abortion at home (the Hyde Amendment) or abroad (the Mexico City Policy). The revised pro-life plank mentions the 14th Amendment but does not specifically say that it applies from the moment of conception, as previous platforms did.
“We lost the battle, because they rigged the game. Some of these consultants say they’re against election interference, but they participated in it,” said Chad Connelly, CEO of Faith Wins on “Washington Watch” Monday. “We got steamrolled.”
Republican leaders reportedly forced delegates to turn over iPhones and photographed those who voted against the platform, even following some to the restroom. One campaign staffer’s “job was to follow anyone who left to ensure their silence to the outside world. In one case, this meant following a woman to the ladies’ room,” noted delegate Bill Gribbin in National Review. President Donald Trump addressed the platform committee via video, telling delegates of the new platform, “You will pass it quickly.”
The RNC also made numerous other rules changes making it more difficult to demur from the burgeoning top-down party consensus, Frost objected. The Rules Committee “overwhelmingly voted down a proposal to have on the record votes for RNC Chair, so the folks back home know how their representatives voted. Whose priorities are being served here?”
Frost noted in an online video that members of the Rules Committee were denied any contact information of their fellow committee members, and there was no way to waive confidentiality if delegates wished to be contacted. Although the rule was intended for only the Rules Committee, he said, it was applied to every committee “to maintain control.”
“If the members can’t talk to each other until they get to this meeting, they can’t strategize; they can’t run ideas past each other, and it’s also a great way to prevent them from offering amendments in committee,” he said. “This committee process has been very clearly orchestrated to prevent the convention committees from doing any[thing of] real substance.”
Frost said members were also told they had to submit amendments, which had previously been submitted by email, only handwritten on paper, which others will type. “There’s no reason to do that except to slow down the process and to discourage amendment writing,” he said.
“Our job is basically to rubberstamp whatever is handed to us,” said Frost. “On paper, this should be a golden age for the Trump 2016, Ron Paul, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Huckabee person. … In practice, we’re even worse off than we were before, because the grassroots back home instead of being suspicious, think all is well,” Frost told TWS. “The people who are getting what they want are invariably the bad guys.”
On the other hand, the Trump campaign made efforts to block two pro-life delegates from South Carolina from the Platform Committee, according to Politico.
The GOP’s liberalization on social issues represents a reversal of decades of momentum spurred on by figures such as President Ronald Reagan to strengthen the party’s pro-life plank and endorse a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Until this month, the Republican platform had affirmed for 40 years that, since the 14th Amendment guarantee of personhood applies to human beings from the moment of conception, “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.”
However, the vague 2024 Republican Party platform represents a triumph for socially liberal Republicans, especially Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a former Democrat. Kushner “wanted to cut the Republican platform down to one page of principles” in 2020 as “a simple way of entirely removing controversial topics” from the platform, according to The New York Times.
Trump officials publicly denied drawing up the platform language in advance. “Trump officials have privately maintained, meanwhile, that no specific language on abortion has been determined ahead of the scheduled platform meetings next week in Milwaukee,” reported Politico. Yet Trump reportedly gave an overview of platform principles, which aides drafted, well in advance of the Platform Committee meeting. The New York Times reports that leaders responsible for watering down the Republican Party platform, which they rewrote inside Mar-a-Lago, are Trump campaign/RNC political director James Blair, speechwriter Vince Haley, Trump campaign aide Chris LaCivita, pollster Tony Fabrizio, speechwriter Ross Worthington, and political advisor Susie Wiles.
Some delegates contrasted Trump’s treatment of pro-life voters on social issues with the concrete promises he made while trying to woo the Libertarian Party. Trump promised the Libertarian Party convention that he would appoint a libertarian to his Cabinet; free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; and pardon Ross Ulbricht, who operated a website called Silk Road that combined cryptocurrency and trafficking of hard drugs.
Evangelical Christians made up 28% of the electorate in 2020 — a surge of 9.2 million voters over 2016. Overall, devout Christians (both evangelical and non-evangelical) made up 37% of all voters. Approximately 38% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters identified as evangelical Christians in the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Study, and 72% of Republicans called themselves pro-life, according to Gallup. Evangelicals voted 83% for Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms, and 81% voted for President Donald Trump in 2020.
Experts question the efficacy of upsetting a major part of your voting coalition, especially if the Democratic candidate narrows Trump’s lead as the race nears the end. “They’re going to need us around in September,” Connelly told “Washington Watch.” Even evangelicals’ opponents realize the damage the RNC’s latest machinations on abortion could cause. “If this winds up being a close election, there really could be a price to pay for some of these maneuvers that have been made here,” wrote Tim Alberta of The Atlantic.
Too many leaders are willing to sell out their pro-life principles for access, Frost told TWS. “I don’t care how nice you are” to me personally, he said; “I care about what are you giving the cause.”
“This is about a cause, not about the club. Although I like the Republican Party, I love saving babies,” Frost told TWS.
Frost is far from alone. The decision to back away from the party’s decades-long commitment to protecting unborn life at every stage of development, and every level of government, sparked the fierce opposition of nationally prominent conservative and Christian leaders. Dr. Ben Carson, who had reportedly been discussed as a vice presidential candidate, called for an “urgent gathering of those who are responsible for the plank,” especially Republican pro-life voters. “They shouldn’t just unilaterally do something of this magnitude,” said Carson.
Dozens of political and moral leaders joined forces in putting the RNC on notice that it must return to the party’s pro-life vision to succeed. “For the first time in decades, the Republican [p]latform retreats on life. Pro-life Americans are rightly outraged and gravely concerned. As drafted, the platform removes long-standing Republican promises on life, from prohibiting taxpayer funding for abortion to a Constitutional amendment to specific protections for unborn babies,” they wrote in a joint letter.
“[E]nsuring a strong platform is your responsibility. … We encourage you to support the Platform Committee’s Minority Report, amendments that strengthen the pro-life resolve of the platform, and to vote down any platform that weakens the party’s pro-life stance,” stated the document, signed by Albert Mohler of The Southern Baptist Seminary, Lila Rose of Live Action, Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Jeanne Mancini of March for Life, Robert P. George of Princeton University, Jonathan Saenz of Texas Values Action, talk show host Erick Erickson, Dr. John Seago of Texas Right to Life, Kristen Ullman of Eagle Forum, Bob Carlstrom of AMAC Action, Peter J. Thomas of The Conservative Caucus, and other prominent, conservative, pro-life advocates.
The following day, 44 more conservative leaders signed the letter — drawn up by Paul Teller, the executive director of Advancing American Freedom, founded by former Vice President Mike Pence — including Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, popular Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Cathi Harrod of Arizona Policy, Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation, and former U.S. Congressman Paul Broun.
“I will be actively involved from now to November, but I also believe we must always look beyond the next election and work to preserve and promote the enduring ideals that ensure life and prosperity for future generations,” vowed David Barton, an RNC Platform Committee delegate from Texas best known for founding WallBuilders, which distributes materials documenting the influence Christians exerted on America’s founding.
Frost said frustrated pro-life Republicans have an opportunity to change the party’s trajectory in just months. “In January the RNC is going to elect a new Rules Committee,” which he called “the most important committee” in the entire party structure. Social conservatives should lobby their most favorable RNC members “to serve on the Rules Committee, and then begin lobbying the other committeemen and the chairman to” approve their nominations.
If conservatives can become a meaningful presence on that committee next January, said Frost, “we can start to roll some of this back.” Christian conservatives are strongest when they band together. “Remember,” said Frost, “courage and cowardice are both contagious.”
Yet some conservatives defended the platform’s language. For instance, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) faulted critics for desiring a “granular and historic type approach” to issues and inaccurately stated that the Dobbs decision “sends [abortion] back to the states.” In fact, hyper-detailed pro-life policies powered Donald Trump to success in the 2016 election, including the platform’s strong pro-life language and especially his promise to appoint specific justices to the Supreme Court. The Dobbs decision reversed the Supreme Court’s elevation of abortion to an allegedly unalienable and constitutional right, allowing politicians at every level of government to defend innocent life — including the federal government.
Additionally, Democrats have promised to weaponize the federal government in favor of the abortion industry. Biden and Harris have announced they plan to use the federal government to pass a sweeping, top-down, national abortion expansion which strikes down nearly all the pro-life protections enacted in all 50 states over the last 50 years, as well as numerous local ordinances.
Neither the Republican National Committee’s press office nor Senator Marsha Blackburn’s office has responded to numerous media queries from this reporter, which began on Friday, July 12, and continued the following day. After this reporter announced a deadline of 5 p.m. Saturday, two articles on the topic appeared in the legacy media within days. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump faced an assassination attempt on July 13, which he said he survived “by the grace of Almighty God.” The Secret Service’s failure to protect him remains under investigation. He then presided over last week’s Republican National Convention, whose somber messages uncharacteristically excluded the issues of life and family.
FRC Action encourages all pro-life voters to “send a message to Republican National Convention Chair Michael Whatley and Platform Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn letting them know that you support this Minority Report.”
The RNC “may be able to gag the objecting voices within the party,” said Perkins, “but they need to realize they will not be able to gag voters.”
The minority report can be read in full here.
LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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