2016 GOP Platform Is Not a Trump Manifesto

By Jim Barnes

July 13, 2016

originally posted in Ballotpedia.org

Cleveland, Ohio— After two days of debate, at times heated, the 112 Republican national convention delegates charged with crafting the party’s 2016 platform produced a document that acknowledged their presumptive presidential nominee’s stands, but hardly embraced them. Indeed, the overriding concern of many of the delegates seemed to be to make sure that the GOP platform hewed to its traditionally conservative position on social issues, views that Donald Trump tends to eschew.

The platform did take a more skeptical view on trade than it did four years ago when it declared: “A Republican President will complete negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership to open rapidly developing Asian markets to U.S. products.” The 2012 platform language extolling the virtues of free trade was replaced by a more skeptical tone: “We need better negotiated trade agreements that put America first,” the 2016 platform declares, rhetoric Trump has embraced on the campaign trail.

But when the specific draft language for the platform’s economic plank was debated in a subcommittee session on Monday, the delegates removed a direct reference to “TPP” in a section calling on Congress not to rush the agreement or pass it in a lame duck session of Congress. Instead, the delegates simply said that “significant” trade deals shouldn’t be rammed through Congress, a reflection of the sentiment held by several who were as anxious over the lack of transparency in how trade agreements have been negotiated as the various pros and cons of the TPP itself.

Moreover, Trump’s signature position on imposing a 35 percent tariff on imports from companies that move their plants to foreign countries is absent from the GOP platform.

Andy Puzder, the CEO of the fast food company CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc., which owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s chains, who co-chaired the economic platform plank subcommittee, said that he had expected his panel to be “more contentious this time and it wasn’t.” Four years ago, Puzder, an engaging businessman and Trump supporter who often comments on the economic policy on financial television shows, performed the same role for the 2012 Republican nominee and Trump nemesis, Mitt Romney. Puzder, who was a Romney fundraiser and policy adviser, noted that four years ago nearly everyone on the economic subcommittee was a Mitt Romney delegate, while in Cleveland he suspected there was more variety in terms of the candidate preferences of the platform delegates.

There was such little dissent on the economic subcommittee that it was the first to finish its drafting work on Monday. “This isn’t a values committee, it’s a business committee,” Puzder noted.

Indeed, it was values issues that generated the most heat during the GOP platform deliberations, particularly those concerning gay and transgender rights. Although Trump has spoken favorably of the support he receives from gay voters and criticized state laws that dictate the public restrooms transgendered people can use, the delegates beat back any attempt to weaken the platform’s support for states that want to restrict such access. The GOP delegates also rejected proposals to endorse gay marriage or even acknowledge two-parent families that are not composed of “one man and one woman.”

On Tuesday, tensions between social conservatives and moderates on the platform committee flared over the party’s willingness to reach out to gay Americans. Giovanni Cicione, a delegate from Rhode Island, offered an amendment that noted that LGBT individuals “in particular have been a target of violence and oppression” by radical Islamic terrorism. “We need to do something here” to show the party wants to attract gay voters, said Cicione. Even after Cicione’s proposal was amended to include “women, Christians, and Jews” as the targets of violence, his amendment was replaced by another that simply denounced terrorist assaults on all “human beings.”

At another point, Rachel Hoff, an openly gay delegate on the platform committee from the District of Columbia, proposed a secondary amendment to insert the words “on the LGBT community” in a proposed amendment that made reference to the recent terrorist attack in Orlando. Hoff said she was making her proposal, “to test how far this committee is willing to go to avoid a single positive reference” to LGBT Americans in the platform. Hoff’s amendment was rejected.

The occasionally contentious platform debate over values exposed other differences—at least in tone—between the party’s presumptive nominee and its conservative base. “Just like we need to name radical Islamic terrorism we need to name Planned Parenthood,” thundered Louisiana delegate Sandy McDade while advocating for an amendment to place restrictions on the organization. During the primaries, Trump has defended Planned Parenthood, saying it had done “very good work for millions of women.”

Asked how he felt about the platform’s content and whether it was missing any important elements, Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative social issues advocacy group and a platform delegate from Louisiana, said, “I am very happy with what we have here.”

On foreign policy, the platform drafters largely upheld the party’s traditional peace-through-strength and internationalist views. In the wake of the Iraq war and the ongoing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, some Republicans have opted for a less assertive foreign policy. The leading proponent of that sentiment during the 2016 GOP presidential nominating contest was Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. But just as Paul was unable to rally Republican primary voters behind a neo-isolationist foreign policy, it had similarly limited appeal among the Republican platform delegates.

The full committee rejected a number of amendments offered by Maine State Sen. Eric Brakey to temper the platform’s advocacy for a more muscular stance in world affairs. Brakey, who chaired Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign in Maine and was the state director for Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential bid, proposed amendments to remove platform language supporting regime change in Syria, sanctions against Russia, and a hard line against Cuba. Each time, Brakey’s platform committee colleagues rejected his proposals.

One striking element of the 2016 Republican platform debate was the lack of intervention by the Trump campaign. While some Trump staffers monitored the deliberations, they didn’t try to dictate outcomes. “They have not strong-armed the delegates,” noted Perkins, comparing the Trump platform effort in Cleveland to previous nominees’ tactics. Rhode Island’s Cicione, who was a platform delegate in 2008, echoed Perkins on the Trump campaign’s role in the platform process, “It certainly wasn’t heavy-handed, I can tell you that.”

At several junctures during the full platform committee debate, several delegates complained that the party manifesto was getting too much “in the weeds” of public policy. That frustration, Cicione said, has led some 37 GOP platform delegates to sign onto a minority report that will replace the entire draft platform with a 1,200-word statement of principles. The outcome of that dissenting effort will be decided on Monday, July 18, when the full convention opens in Cleveland. At that time both the Trump campaign and the staff of the Republican National Committee could assume a more “hands-on” posture to put down any platform insurrection.

James A. Barnes is a senior writer at Ballotpedia who has covered every Democratic and Republican national convention since 1984. He is in Cleveland and Philadelphia for Ballotpedia in July.

This article was originally posted at Ballotpedia and is re-posted with permission.