My Platform

Our Conservative Values:

My reason for being involved in politics has always been to make a difference for my conservative principles – and then to help other conservatives make a difference too. My goal for the Republican Party is that it becomes an even stronger, more successful vehicle for our shared conservative values.

I firmly support our conservative SCGOP and RNC party platforms – and have helped lead efforts to KEEP them conservative for years.  Issue by issue, they represent not only what we stand for, but what draws other conservatives to our party.

But it’s one thing to know what you believe, and it’s another thing to be able to do something about it. And that’s where the political fundamentals come in.

Getting it Done:

The simple fact is there are lots of things that a political party “could” do, but there’s a much smaller list of things that “only” the party can do.  And those are the things we have to focus on.

No matter how much things change, the fundamentals remain the same. In political terms that means 1) organization, 2) fundraising and 3) communications. No one else is going to identify, train and organize our activists, or raise money or communicate our conservative message for us. Everything that we do should relate to the fundamentals. That’s my commitment.

Fighting for the Grassroots:

As a member of the 2012 Republican National Convention Rules Committee, I led the fight to protect the ability of grassroots Republicans in each state to elect their own national convention delegates, and not have them “appointed” by insiders.

Without any warning, Washington, DC insiders had introduced a proposal to allow presidential candidates to pick their own delegates, rather than having you continue to elect them in conventions. The result would have been a Republican party run from the top-down, rather than from the grassroots-up – and would have put consultants in charge of writing our platform.

I led the effort to fight this change and, when they initially didn’t have the votes to stop it, I sounded the national alarm to conservative media and grassroots organizations. As a result, we gained the votes to push for a minority report to the full convention – which forced the opposition to withdraw their plans rather than have them exposed and defeated on national television.

You can find links to some of the coverage of that fight below: