Republicans are pushing a new policy platform to better align with Donald Trump, but not all party members are happy about aspects of it.
The Republican Party approved a new platform Monday, ahead of next week’s national convention, where it will be officially voted in, and notably missing from the list is a federal ban on abortion.
The absence represents a policy shift for the party as it cowers behind its champion, Trump, who stopped advocating for a federal ban shortly after the midterms, when he realized it was an insanely unpopular policy with voters.
But not everyone is on board with the change, or how it happened.
WISN12 News’s political director Matt Smith spoke with Gayle Ruzicka, a disgruntled member of the Republican National Committee platform committee from Utah. Ruzicka is also the president of the Utah Eagle Forum, the conservative lobbying group founded by Phyllis Schafly, who opposed the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment.
“It’s never happened before. I mean, I guess I’ve done this several times. There was no committees. We always had subcommittees, where we can go in and rework … a section of the platform; we can propose amendments, debate them, add them. It always happens,” said Ruzicka. “They didn’t allow any amendments. They didn’t allow any discussion.
“They rolled us. That’s what they did.
“You know, we spent thousands of dollars to be here, and everything they told us they were going to do isn’t what happened. None of it happened. I’ve never seen this happen before. I don’t understand why they did it. And I’m extremely disappointed that we do not have any pro-life language,” she said.
Buried on page 15, the new policy platform gives a new spin for Republicans’ tireless efforts to ban abortion across the nation. It reads, “After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”
That wasn’t good enough for Ruzicka. “The platform simply says that we oppose late-term abortion. Well, what about before that?” she said. So why did she vote for it?
She also said she was bamboozled by the voting process.
“I’ve never been treated so badly, to have them force this vote on us, before we even have a chance to read the platform,” Ruzicka said, explaining that it was passed out shortly before a meeting that required the members’ attention.
“We glanced through it, but we didn’t have the time to study it and read it. And then all of a sudden somebody made a motion to vote on the platform. And that was it. And then they sent us home.”
It seems that the Republican Party was anxious to pass Trump’s slightly unorthodox platform through, even if the policies don’t represent the opinions of its committee members, let alone the position the GOP has had for the past 50 years. Uniformly adopting Trump’s policy platform goes to show how far the Trump takeover of the GOP has come: He’s in the party’s bloodstream now, changing its very DNA.
In 2020, the Republican Party didn’t even deign to write a platform, amid rumors that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner planned to shorten it significantly and streamline (upend) the drafting process, according to Vox. Perhaps some of Kushner’s plans are latent within the party, intent on making decisions that align with the candidate, rather than the people.
