The bylaws of the Vermont Republican Party prohibit it from backing candidates who have been convicted of a felony. That could pose a problem for the party, given that its likely standard bearer, former President Donald Trump, was convicted last month of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment in hopes of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
But according to Vermont Republican Party chair Paul Dame, it’s not a problem — yet.
Only after next month’s Republican National Convention — when, presumably, Trump will again secure the party’s presidential nomination — would the Vermont GOP’s rule apply, Dame told VTDigger on Tuesday. And he’s still not sure how it would then play out.
As reported last week by the Vermont Political Observer and NBC News, the state party’s rules say that it “will not support or promote any candidate for elective office who … is a convicted felon.”
The party can make exceptions. A subsection of the rules allows its executive committee, by a majority vote, to exempt a particular candidate from the prohibition “under extenuating circumstances.” Such circumstances are not defined.
“In the past, exemptions like this have been made when a candidate may have completed their sentence, when they have evidence of kind of turning their life around and have shown a capacity to be of service to their local community,” Dame said in a video statement on Tuesday. “In the past, this has been done because we believe in second chances.”
So far, the party’s executive committee has not met “to even discuss what, if any, action we would take and whether or not such an action would be necessary in the case of President Trump,” Dame said in the recording.
Trump has not yet been sentenced and could still appeal the verdict.
Dame told VTDigger that he hadn’t “talked about it with enough people to say” whether the 14-member executive committee would hold a vote to exempt Trump from the rule. Such a vote would only happen after Trump is nominated in July, Dame said, and would be held in a closed-door, executive session.
Asked if he thought the committee should take up the question, Dame said, “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the rest of the executive committee thinks.”
“Whether you vote yes, whether you vote no, or whether you don’t hold the vote, all three of those send some kind of message,” Dame said. “We just haven’t had a chance to get everybody together to talk about what message we want to send.”
Dame said that, if such a vote were held today, he wasn’t sure where he would land. “I haven’t had time to think about it, and I’d want to hear the arguments for both sides,” he said.
“Overall, Vermont Republicans didn’t support Trump. We’re the only state that Trump didn’t win,” Dame said. “So I certainly think there’s a case to be made for the fact that that’s what our electorate — that’s the message they sent in March.”
“But that was March,” Dame continued. “That’s a long time ago in politics, and I’m sure that at least some of those people wanted to register their preference against Trump, but many of them still don’t want Joe Biden to win.”
Vermont Democratic Party executive director Jim Dandeneau said Tuesday that he had a different read from Dame’s recorded statement earlier that day.
“Based on the video, I think that their minds are made up and that the Vermont Republican Party is going to go to the wall for Donald Trump, and that is shameful.”
Dandeneau added, “They should be humiliated and embarrassed by the fact that they’re going to waive their own rules to support a man who was convicted of 34 felonies for covering up an affair with massive campaign finance violations to win the presidential election in 2016.”
According to Dame, the party bylaw is unlikely to affect Vermont’s delegates to next month’s convention. Nearly half of them are slated to cast their ballots for Trump.
Dame noted that two additional party rules — one from the state bylaws and another from Republican National Committee bylaws — require that delegates abide by the results of their state primary elections when casting their ballots at the convention.
“So to me, I’ve got two rules that tell me those Trump delegates have to vote for Trump, because we are there representing the vote that took place in March,” Dame said.
“That’s the instructions I’ve given to delegates who have asked me,” he said.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley won Vermont’s Republican presidential primary with just over half of the vote on March 5 — the only state primary she won before dropping out of the race the following day. But Vermont has a proportional delegate system, which means that nine of the state’s 17 delegates are set to cast their ballots for Haley at the convention, while eight are expected to vote for Trump, who won nearly 46% of the vote in March.
If the Vermont GOP’s executive committee were to keep the rule in place for Trump, Dame said that the most tangible outcome for Trump in the state would be that “we’re not going to send money to that campaign, I think.”
“Outside of that, it’s nothing we’ve really discussed, because we haven’t run into this before,” he said. “We are primarily focused (on) electing Republicans to the legislature, and so the money that we’re raising … that money has always been designed to be primarily spent here in Vermont, on Vermont races. And so whether Trump was convicted or not, that was going to be the case.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: A Vermont GOP rule bars it from backing felons. The state party chair says that’s not a problem for Trump — yet..