Former radio talk show host Steve Gill, an elected Cruz delegate, and State Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mt. Juliet), an elected Trump delegate, tell Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon that along with former State Rep Joe Carr, a Cruz delegate, they are inviting their 49 fellow Trump and Cruz delegates in Tennessee to meet later this month to fend off the GOP establishment’s efforts to “broker” the party’s convention and hand the nomination to someone other than Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Beavers was elected as an at-large delegate committed to Trump and received more votes than any other Trump delegate in the state’s March 1 primary. Carr and Gill finished in first and second place, respectively, in votes cast for Cruz delegates elected at-large across the state in that primary.
“I think this is truly grassroots. That’s what’s so interesting about this. When I started talking to Joe Carr, who’s a Cruz delegate, and Senator Mae Beavers, who’s a Trump delegate, and other Trump and Cruz delegates, we all were kind of having the same thought at the same time,” Gill told Bannon.
“There’s a lot of this vitriol, a lot of bitterness and battle between the Trump folks and the Cruz folks right now. But as we look through the delegate list in Tennessee, we realize that back when we stopped the state income tax in Tennessee [in 1999 and 2000], when people circled our capital and honked their horns, we were “horn-honkers” before [we] were Tea Partiers and now we’re on opposite sides of this particular political battle,” Gill noted.
“But we’ve worked together fighting the establishment, fighting both the Democrats and the RINO Republicans for a long time, and it occurred to everybody simultaneously that it makes no sense for us to get to the finals, as we’re in March Madness [of the NCAA Basketball Tournament], to be the final two teams, and then have somebody that didn’t even make the Sweet Sixteen come in and try to grab the MVP trophy after the tournament game is over,” Gill said.
“I think Trump will get the number of delegates that he needs,” Beavers told Bannon. “But we want to make sure that when we go to the convenention there’s not a brokered convention.”
“We don’t want it taken away from whoever has earned the vote. I think it makes a lot of sense for the Cruz and the Trump people, the leaders, to get together and say we’re not going to let this happen. We’re not going to let them change the rules on us and put someone in that hasn’t worked for the position,” Beavers told Bannon on Breitbart Radio Saturday, heard on the Patriot Channel 125 of the Sirius/XM Radio Network.
As Breitbart News reported previously, Beavers, Gill, and former State Rep. Joe Carr, a Cruz delegate who narrowly lost to incumbent Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) in the 2014 Republican U.S. Senate primary, met on Friday to prepare the agenda for the larger meeting, which will be held before the end of March.
“This story has caught fire on Breitbart, and people are talking about it all over,” Bannon noted.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/19/trump-cruz-delegates-in-tn-join-forces-again-to-stop-gop-establishment/