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Trump in Green Bay, Wisconsin on April 2, 2024Scott Olson/Getty Images

(LifeSiteNews) — The Republican National Committee’s (RNC’s) Rule Committee changed its rules to make it harder to file formal objections to party decisions after the unprecedented liberalization of the national Republican Party Platform to align with the current priorities of former president and this year’s White House nominee Donald Trump.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, at its 2024 nominating convention this month the GOP adopted a dramatically shortened platform drafted and promoted by Trump surrogates. It cut the party’s longstanding support for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion and a federal law extending equal protection to preborn babies in favor of leaving abortion policy to individual states. The platform also endorsed birth control (many common methods of which function as abortifacients) and embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization, and cut the old version’s opposition to same-sex “marriage” and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that forced all 50 states to recognize it.

“If you look at it, it has Donald Trump written all over it,” RNC co-chair and presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump boasted when the full text was first released. “This is his platform.” Presidential son Eric Trump, Lara’s husband, has said that the changes are “reflective of my father and what he believes in,” and “my wife Lara who runs the RNC and what she believes in.”

The platform passed the Platform Committee 84-14 last week in a process insiders said was rushed to quash resistance, with no debate, deliberation, or consideration of amendments. Now comes word that the party’s new management is working to marginalize conservative dissent further still. 

The Washington Stand reported that, according to “numerous eyewitnesses,” the RNC Rule Committee has voted to raise the threshold for submitting a minority report, a document putting delegate objections on the record, from 25 percent to 35 percent. It also rejected a proposal to put votes for RNC chair on the record, and denied Platform Committee members one another’s contact information, which Rules Committee member Brant Frost V suggested was to prevent committee members from discussing or strategizing among themselves ahead of votes. Members were also required to submit only handwritten amendments rather than typing and emailing them, further slowing down the process.

At one point, raising the bar to 47 percent was reportedly threatened as well, but 35 percent prevailed, reportedly as a motion proposed by Harmeet Dhillon, a pro-Trump Republican attorney once floated as a potentially more conservative alternative to former RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel.

“Our job is basically to rubber stamp whatever is handed to us. 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 the Stand. “The people who are getting what they want are invariably the bad guys.” 

For the past year, Trump has worked to stake out a middle ground on abortion, closing the door on further federal action while expressing indifference to what policies states ultimately adopt (yet occasionally chiding states for pro-life actions he deems too “harsh”). Pro-life anguish over the platform changes was largely sidelined by the shooting earlier this month at a Pennsylvania Trump rally that grazed the candidate’s ear, killed one attendee, and critically wounded two others, intensifying pro-Trump sentiment among Republicans.

National polling aggregations by RealClearPolitics and RaceToTheWH currently indicate that Trump continues to lead Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presumptive replacement for President Joe Biden as their party’s nominee, in both the national popular vote and the Electoral College.

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