Snip

Republicans have assumed this entire elections season that a candidate must have won at least 8 state primaries or caucuses to be eligible for the GOP nomination, but apparently that is not the case and apparently a rule change hasn’t technically occurred, but that’s not the way it seems.

Even Ted Cruz said just last night that John Kasich wasn’t eligible because he hadn’t won enough states, so even he was mislead.

Insiders now say rule 40(b) only applied to the republican convention in 2012 and was never intended to be used in future elections.

From Washington Examiner:

Party officials and knowledgeable sources have confirmed over the past few days that Rule 40(b) doesn’t exist for the purposes of the upcoming convention. That means at this point, the three candidates left in the race, front-runner Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are all eligible for the nomination, as, possibly, are the Republican contenders who have since suspended their campaigns.

Ben Ginsberg, a Republican elections lawyer who was involved in rule-making process for the 2012 convention, said that Rule 40(b) isn’t transferrable to the 2016 convention. Ginsberg explained to the Washington Examiner that what was passed in 2012 applied only to 2012, and that the 2016 convention must pass its own rule determining nomination eligibilty.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus confirmed Ginsberg’s assessment on Sunday during a television interview. “There will always be a perception problem if people continue to miss — to not explain the process properly. So, the 2012 rules committee writes the rules for the 2012 convention. The 2016 rules committee writes the rules for the 2016 convention,” he told CNN.

The party’s nominee is never officially crowned until he receives the vote of at least 1,237 elected convention delegates. But the exercise has been a formality for so long, with conventions functioning as made-for-television pep rallies, the public has essentially assumed that the winner is determined by their votes in the primaries and caucuses held in most states and U.S. territories.

You can be certain of one thing. If it were Trump that was trailing like Cruz and Kasich, the GOP would be insisting that rule 40(b) was in fact intended to apply to elections beyond 2012, but since Trump is winning by a huge margin, the convention is pulling out all the stops and doing everything they can to keep the establishment pick alive.