When the Romney camp and the Republican establishment rewrote Rule 15 at the RNC to centralize more power within the party hierarchy, they created a massive grassroots backlash from grassroots activists, Tea Partiers, and Ron Paul supporters.

To placate the grassroots, the establishment pushed a “compromise” on Rule 15, which conservative commentator Erick Erickson called a “red herring“, and simply shifted even more unsettling changes into Rule 12. The Romney camp then launched a misdirection campaign to placate and confuse grassroots activists.

The Romney camp even went as far as preemptively removing Rules Committee members and replacing them with Romney-appointed delegates, a move one can only imagine was done to secure passage of the rule changes.

A grassroots insurrection against the changes led by Morton Blackwell, FreedomWorks, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Ron Paul supporters and countless others, encouraged full Minority Reports on the Rules when the RNC convened to adopt the rules.

This is where the establishment got even more brazen. When Speaker John Boehner asked for the “ayes” and “noes” on the adoption of the rules, the “noes” were at the very least just as loud as the “ayes”, and yet in the opinion of Speaker Boehner the “ayes” had it. Gavel.

But as the video below reveals, the adoption of the rules and disenfranchisement of the grassroots was planned and already written on the Teleprompter. It’s shocking:

It’s one thing to disagree with us on rules and issues. It’s another thing to spit in our faces and expect us to smile, work for your candidate, or cast a ballot on his/her behalf.

In the words of The Dude from The Big Lebowski, “this aggression will not stand, man.”

To find out more on the rule changes at the RNC, please read an excellent blog post from Dean Clancy, our VP of Health Care Policy and Legislative Counsel.

AND MORE

Tim Altier : Ron Paul was not my favorite candidate during the GOP primary process, but what the Republican National Committee did to him, his delegates, and his supporters this week was shameful. Besides the Ron Paul delegate issue, the RNC

also changed some rules resulting in more RNC top-down control over the state Republican parties/committees thus severely diminishing the influence of grassroots activists nationwide. The GOP establishment does not like the Tea Party, the Ron Paul movement, and grassroots conservatives. They use these groups to further their own causes and candidates when expedient. I switched my voter registration this year from the Conservative Party to the Republican Party to help reform and affect the conservative movement from within, but now I wonder what’s the point? If Romney goes off the rails like Obama and doesn’t bring sense and sanity as our next President, we will need all the “Ron Paul people” in four years. I admire their abilities and how they’ve established a nationwide movement that includes thousands if not millions of young voters who would otherwise blindly follow the Democrats. I trust the Ron Paul fans to keep Romney accountable as I will.