As the Republican National Convention looms in Tampa next week,
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) continues to be the only Romney opponent
still making relevant news, largely because debates and
negotiations over how many of his delegates will be properly seated
in Tampa continue.

I blogged yesterday
about a deal on a couple of the contested states, Louisiana and
Massachusetts, in which Paul wins some but loses some he would have
had had the party establishment not been fighting him in the first
place. 

NPR had a
long account of that deal, hitting the heart of why Romney’s
people are even nickle-and-diming the Paul delegates if the
nomination is Romney’s:

Pro-Paul delegations from Iowa, Nevada and Minnesota have
already been credentialed, without challenge, for the
convention.

Romney and the RNC had been pursuing a legal strategy that
appeared designed to prevent Paul from coming into the convention
with “the support of a plurality of the delegates from each of five
or more states.”

Why? Reaching that threshold, according to the party rulebook,
would allow Paul delegates to place the longtime congressman’s name
into nomination during the convention, and the candidate to make a
speech. Paul has not sought to be nominated from the floor.

More Paul delegate issues are still in the air as I write. While

the Maine challenge–in which two local GOPers are trying to
get a Paul-controlled delegation unseated because of alleged
irregularities at the state nominating convention–is still being
debated, sources within the Maine delegation assure me they
are not amenable to any deal (especially a rumored one that would
make the delegation half-Romney, half-Paul) and are going to Tampa
and will fight to be seated no matter what.

In other Paul delegate news, Huffington
Post reports that the RNC’s Rules Committee considered,
and rejected, a rules change to raise the number of state
delegations one must control to be nominated for president from the
floor from five to 10, allegedly to make triple-super-sure that
Paul can’t be nominated for president officially at the RNC next
week. Excerpt:

the deliberations sigaled that the Republican Party and Mitt
Romney’s presidential campaign remain nervous to some degree about
the potential for Paul supporters to disrupt the carefully scripted
program for the four-day convention next week….

The
Paul campaign told CNN that its count indicates that 373 of the
2,286 delegates support Paul. Some of those delegates are bound by
state rules to vote for Romney. However, the state rules binding
delegates to the presidential nominee do not apply to vice
president, leaving open the possibility that Paul delegates could
nominate an alternative to Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan
(R-Wis.) from the floor.

But the Paul insider said that the Texas congressman does not
want to be nominated for vice president.

The Romney campaign
reached an agreement with the Paul campaign to seat contested
delegates in Massachusetts and Louisiana this week, but delegates
in Oregon remain contested. 

*Some of the (very complicated)
details of the Oregon delegate challenge.

*The Minnesota delegation is
still for Paul, and happy about it.

*Christian Science Monitor writes of Paul activists who
think all these
delegate deals are raw deals.

*The lawsuit–not supported by the campaign itself–trying to
get all RNC delegates declared “unbound” (with the dream they would
then put Paul over the top even now) is
struggling for life against a judge who might be prepared to
dismiss it with prejudice any minute now. I wrote about the suit in
June
for the
New York Times and an
earlier version of the suit being tossed earlier this month.
More of the filings from the suit’s twists and turns
available here.

*Jim Antle at Daily Caller, in an
article quoting me, writes that “Paul activists uneasily
embrace GOP.” Money quote about a very complicated situation, one
that will by no means be ending in Tampa next week:

Republican leaders have an incentive to resolve the impasse:
they want to keep the convention running smoothly without any
disruption from the Paul delegates. There is also much at stake for
the Paul forces. If young Paulites make the GOP gathering their
1968 Democratic National Convention, they will endanger all the
progress they have made within the party.

But if Paul backers come away from Tampa empty-handed, it will
bring doubts many of them still have about working within the GOP
into the open and potentially divide the movement.

*In other Paul news, even as Ron himself seems shut out of the
RNC itself except for a possible video tribute and a speaking berth
for his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a bunch of his grassroots fans
are holding a multi-day
festival of Paulian ideas, for which they have now turned
“Paul” into an acronym—P.A.U.L.-People Awakening and United for
Liberty.” (You try it!) 

Ron himself is not scheduled to appear at that one, though
Paul-inclined intellectuals and entertainers from late-period
Misfits vocalist Michael Graves to Meltdown author
Tom Woods to antiwar radio
host Scott Horton,
are. Even politicians are showing up–most prominently Libertarian
Party presidential and vice presidential candidates Gary Johnson
and Judge Jim Gray.

*Paul himself is holding a big
rally the day before the RNC begins at Tampa’s Sundome.
Speakers run the full Paul gamut from the purely political, like
Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, to the decidedly non-political such as
Mises Institute founder and anarcho-Rothbardian Lew Rockwell.

*Adam Kokesh of Veterans for Ron Paul now says a planned march
on the RNC in Tampa
might not happen after all, out of general distaste for the way
he sees the campaign treating the grassroots.

*And the Paul campaign’s own website reminds you: even after Ron
Paul is no longer on the political scene, it was always
all about the message.

My book,
Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He
Inspired.