Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has quietly urged members of the rules committee to not make changes regarding the nominating process to avoid looking as if the party was trying to block Donald Trump from ending up as its nominee.
Priebus sent text messages last week to "multiple" members of the rules committee "strongly suggesting that they not alter the convention rules" at its spring meeting next week in Florida, The New York Times reports.
The newspaper cites two rules members who received Priebus' texts as sources for its report.
In addition, key rules committee members met on a conference call Thursday and decided that they would block any effort in Florida to change how the Republican National Convention would be conducted in Cleveland in July, one person on the call told the Times.
"We're not going to do anything with the rules next week," Rob Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party and a rules committee member, said. "There's no point because new rules will be written at the convention."
Trump has been hammering the GOP's delegate-selection process since losing all 34 of Colorado's last Saturday in a state Republican Party convention. The process effectively locked out 90 percent of the Centennial State's GOP voters, according to news reports.
His protests also included an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on Friday that concluded:
"The political insiders have had their way for a long time. Let 2016 be remembered as the year the American people finally got theirs."
Trump needs 1,237 delegates to win the nomination. He currently has 744, compared with 545 for Ted Cruz and 144 for John Kasich.
Cruz won Wyoming's 14 delegates on Saturday in a process similar to Colorado's.
According to the Times, the Republican Party's rules committee can set guidelines for nominating candidates — however, they are only suggestions.
The panel consists of 112 delegates who actually write the rules governing the convention, but those rules would become effective only if they are approved by all the delegates in Cleveland.
In addition, 17 states still have yet to hold Republican primaries or caucuses, making it unclear which rules should be rewritten to possibly thwart any Trump nomination, according to the report.
"What upside is there for us to muck around with the rules?" asked Steve Duprey, a member of the New Hampshire Republican Committee who also sits on the rules panel.
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