THE PLAN? – AT 10:21 A.M. ET:   There's high speculation that Mitt Romney's plan, along with others who are appalled by Donald Trump, is to "lock" the Republican National Convention, making it impossible for anyone to win the nomination on the first ballot.

The plan would then be to have a fully open convention, with a candidate, not Trump, emerging as the winner.  From the Washington Examiner: 

"If you were to devise a plan to stop a runaway nominee," Republican superlawyer Ben Ginsberg said on MSNBC Tuesday night, "you would have to do a lot of state-by-state organizing, win the delegates at the convention."

In the late hours of election night — a night in which Donald Trump won seven of 11 Super Tuesday contests — Ginsberg, who knows as much about such matters as anyone in the GOP, offered a clinic on how to stop the front-runner. The first step, he said, would be to slow Trump down at the ballot box in the March 15 winner-take-all elections in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere. "You've got to do a lot electorally in the next two weeks," Ginsberg said. "March 15 is kind of cutoff day."

If the non-Trump candidates, specifically Florida's Marco Rubio and Ohio's John Kasich, were able to win their home states, they might amass enough delegates to keep Trump short of the 1,237 delegates required to clinch the nomination.

But what happens if neither, or even just one, can beat Trump? "Then, if you care deeply about where the party goes," Ginsberg said, "you get into the rules a little bit."

Ginsberg explained that 73 percent of the delegates at the GOP convention "are chosen at state conventions or by state party executive committees with little or no input from the candidate who wins that state." Those delegates are bound, on the convention's first ballot, to vote for the presidential candidate chosen by their state's voters. But they're not bound to do so on subsequent ballots. And even on the first ballot, they're not bound to vote in the candidate's interest on rules issues, credentials challenges, or other questions that can loom large in the arcane proceedings of the convention.

"So if you were to devise a plan to stop a runaway nominee," Ginsberg said, "you would have to do a lot of state-by-state organizing, win the delegates at the convention."

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It's a manual on how to shake up a convention, and the nominating process.  One group that's praying for this are the TV executives.  It's exciting television – intrigue, backstabbing, double dealing, smoke-filled hotel rooms – all the things you need for a sound foreign policy.

March 4, 2016