Amazing but true – delegates to the GOP convention are not bound by either law or tradition to cast their votes for any particular candidates, or at all, on any ballot. No nefarious back-room “changes to the rules” are needed; they are free, already, now, to vote their consciences. David French has chapter and verse.

The GOP has a last chance to do the right thing. I have seen many invocations of “party loyalty” in the last month, but there are no grounds for party loyalty if we believe that a party is literally nothing but whatever a plurality of the voters (many of them not party members) happen to demand it be at any given moment. What does “party loyalty” even mean if the “party” has no objective existence, and is no more than whatever you want it to be?

It’s bad enough that we allow now people who are very sick, unhappy and out of control to “identify” as something other than what they are. But at least they are willing to identify as something. How ridiculous would it be if Bruce Jenner simultaneously demanded that we acknowledge him to be a woman and call him Caitlyn, and that he continue to be allowed to compete in men’s swimming, out of some kind of groundless “athletic loyalty”?

You cannot have loyalty to an institution unless that institution exists for something. Does the GOP exist for anything? The outcome of the convention will give us our answer – either way.