Ted Cruz may have lost his bid to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, but he is fighting to ensure his conservative principles are still represented at the the Republican convention in Cleveland, the New York Times reported Monday.
According to the Times report, Cruz is already trying to wield influence over the party’s platform, a mostly symbolic document in years past, that could become the clearest depiction of the party’s policy civil war at the convention in July. The Times reported Monday that Cruz surrogate Ken Cuccinelli emailed Cruz backers and delegates Sunday with a message that even if the GOP nominating contest was over, it was “still possible to advance a conservative agenda at the convention.”
Many conservatives within in the Republican Party including House Speaker Paul Ryan have voiced concerns about Trump’s conservative bonafides, but Cruz’s wading into the intricacies of the platform process is the most concrete example yet of how Trump’s party may try to police their nominee’s influence on the its core beliefs. As the Times points out, the Cruz campaign spent heavily on ensuring it won sympathetic delegates around the country, an investment that may not help him get the nomination, but could pay off when the platform committee meets.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council and a delegate said “Ted Cruz has been vigilant and methodical in selecting and identifying conservative delegates who are not aligned with the party, per se, but aligned with the conservative ideology. And those are the people who will be at the convention and will be on the important committees.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Cuccinelli specifically noted a few areas where Cruz delegates may want to fight to protect conservatism including abortion and perhaps even the addition of a plank that would block transgender Americans from using the restrooms they identified with.
“This is about protecting movement conservatism,” Cuccinelli told the Times.
