Better in their words…

A very good, thought provoking article for me.
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WSJ 4/9/2016

As the odds rise of a contested Republican presidential convention, Donald Trump’s and Ted Cruz’s camps are insisting that one of them must be the nominee. The Trump argument is that even if he falls short of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination, denying it to him at the convention would amount to antidemocratic theft. Mr. Cruz appears to think that finishing second means finishing first if the guy who beat him can’t win on the initial convention ballot.

Eric O’Keefe is here to say: whoa. The veteran Republican grass-roots activist sees a contested convention as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the delegates of a private political party to assert their power. The results of the GOP primaries are hardly representative of the party’s will, Mr.

O’Keefe says, because state parties have been wrecked by domineering state legislatures. Why should Republicans bow down, for instance, to the results of statemandated open primaries that allow liberal and independent voters to bum-rush what is supposed to be a private poll?

“There’s nothing that special or even good about the governmentrun primary process,” Mr. O’Keefe says. Relishing the opportunity for Republican delegates to stand up for themselves, he is gearing up a campaign to educate and encourage them to exercise their prerogatives at the convention and to ignore specious insistence that they follow some imaginary obligations. “The delegates have been going to conventions for years and treating them like Super Bowl parties because there was nothing else to do,” he says. “But this year they have the opportunity to practice a great national tradition, to exercise their legal, historical right to defeat a man who opposes most of what they believe in, and instead nominate a candidate who represents them.”

As you might suspect, the “man” Mr. O’Keefe referred to is Donald Trump.

“I hate bullies, and of late I’ve come to hate them more,” Mr.

O’Keefe says. “Trump means institutionalized bullying. Tyranny grows from ambitious people grabbing whatever levers of power are available.”

The 60-year-old Mr. O’Keefe has plenty of experience with pushing back against bullying—in Wisconsin. The state that helped make his dream of an open Republican convention look like it could become a reality is also the state that not too long ago sought to throw him in jail for exercising his constitutional rights.

Mr. O’Keefe—who skipped college, had a brief stint in business and then got swept up in libertarian politics—by the mid-1980s had become disillusioned with how politicians of all types rig the system to maintain their hold on power. He turned to issue-oriented politics instead, and took up causes like promoting term limits, fighting against eminent-domain abuse and other ways of restoring the influence of citizens over how they are governed.

“I am not interested in driving policy or candidates,” he says.

“I’m interested in self-governance, in having people learn what it is that they own, and then exercising that power. Our citizens have been turned into spectators—it’s what the left wants.”

Mr. O’Keefe ran many of his issue-oriented campaigns from his adopted home of Wisconsin (he was born in Michigan), where he heads the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a self-described “statewide network of thousands of pro-growth Wisconsinites.” After Scott Walker was elected governor in 2011, Mr. O’Keefe was impressed when Mr. Walker pushed through Act 10 legislation to reform the state’s public unions.

This was exactly the sort of government-limiting reform that Mr. O’Keefe believed in, and when Republicans in the state Senate came under recall threat, he stepped in. He fired up his fundraising networks, and the Wisconsin Club for Growth ran issue ads extolling Act 10, ads that became the main counter to a unionfunded anti-Act 10 advertising juggernaut. The GOP kept the Senate in 2011, and Mr. Walker beat back a recall vote a year later.

The left-leaning permanent government in Wisconsin was furious about how things turned out. In particular, the Democrat-infused state prosecutor’s office wanted payback.

John Chisholm, the state district attorney in Milwaukee County, launched a secret grand jury-like probe known as a “John Doe” against Mr. O’Keefe, the Wisconsin Club for Growth, and 29 other conservative groups in an attempt to pin a crime on somebody, anybody, for violating campaignfinance laws. The investigation included predawn house raids, subpoenas and the imposition of a gag order on the targets.

District Attorney Chisholm picked the wrong guy to try to gag. Having spent years fighting against entrenched political power, Mr. O’Keefe found himself in government crosshairs and ordered not to talk about it. Risking legal sanctions, he spoke on the record to this newspaper’s editorial board in 2013 about the John Doe and what he believed was a story of political revenge.

Mr. O’Keefe still gets teary when he recalls the worst moments of the probe, but it left him with some lessons. “One is that no one should ever underestimate how easy it is for government to slip into terrifying abuse,” he says. “If they did this in Wisconsin, there are literally hundreds of government employees around the country ready and willing to attack their citizens too.”

It took two years, many Journal editorials, and the state Supreme Court to exonerate the targets of Mr. Chisholm’s vendetta. Some are seeking justice to discourage future such abuses. On Monday, Mr. O’Keefe’s lawyer, David Rivkin of the Washington, D.C., law firm Baker Hostetler, will step into federal court in Wisconsin to pursue a civil-rights suit on behalf of Cindy Archer, another victim of the probe. Despite the collapse of the Wisconsin John Doe investigation, similar campaign-finance assaults on conservatives have spread to Montana, Texas and Missouri.

Make no mistake: Mr. O’Keefe isn’t a fan of campaign-finance laws, which he regards as attempts to muzzle speech. Laws limiting political contributions “are created by the politicians, to cripple challengers, who are the equivalent of startup companies,” he says.

“Imagine if IBM was the only company in the country, and you had a limit of $1,000 of venture capital to any competitor. You’d never have another business.” Mr. O’Keefe helped found the Center for Competitive Politics to fight against laws impinging on speech rights.

Which brings him back to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr. O’Keefe has been researching the history of conventions and collecting material for meetings with GOP convention delegates to present his case. He will tell them that they have an obligation to nominate a better generalelection candidate than Mr.

Trump—not merely to spare the country from Mr. Trump’s policies, but to reassert the party’s constitutional right to operate as a wholly private, autonomous political actor.

Mr. O’Keefe was particularly offended by Mr. Trump’s recent threat to sue the Louisiana Republican Party to force more of its delegates to support him.

“These delegates are exercising a core aspect of political freedom.

They don’t need government permission to speak or government regulation of how they vote,” Mr.

O’Keefe says. “He’s behaving like a tyrant when he doesn’t even yet have power.”

What about the argument that letting the delegates decide the nomination at a contested convention would mean a return to the smoke-filled backroom bargaining of the past? “And what’s wrong with that process?”

Mr. O’Keefe replies. “It worked well. Those rooms were full of engaged citizens—people who had an interest in the success of their party and their country.

They vetted the nominations, they imposed accountability, they shook up the system.”

Voters are angry today, he adds, because they feel disenfranchised. A contested convention invites engagement.

The problem, he says, is that the GOP over the years has become “flaccid organizationally, and structurally.” It has forgotten its authority and its role in the constitutional system, forgotten that its own rules refer to what technically takes place in each state as nothing more than a “presidential preference vote.”

“This is about taking back the private party system,” says Mr.

O’Keefe. “The states took away the rights of private nominations long ago. But in the case of the national party—it is a voluntary organization and it sets its own rules.” Part of his campaign to educate the GOP delegates and the media will be this reminder: The only rules that count are those the convention itself adopts at the outset of the gathering—rules that can also be changed as the convention unfolds. For the record, he says he isn’t acting on behalf of any candidate, and he could live with any number of nominees other than Mr. Trump.

Mr. O’Keefe’s bet is that once the delegates embrace that freedom, Mr. Trump can’t win because about “75% of those delegates in Cleveland are anti-Trump.” And imagine how “wonderful” it could be, Mr.

O’Keefe says, if the delegates exercised their liberty on the national stage.

“There they are in Cleveland, grasping their legal and historical right to nominate the most powerful person in the world,” he says. “The delegates may not know it, but they will not only be saving the Republican Party and the country—they’ll be reviving a tradition of self-governance.”

Ms. Strassel writes the Journal’s Potomac Watch column.

The man who defeated Wisconsin prosecutors now says party delegates have the right to choose any nominee they want, and they should use it.

‘This is about taking back the private party system,’ says O’Keefe, who sees the primaries as tainted by government intervention.

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