Mitt Romney may love his home state of Michigan, but not all the delegation loves him back. And they are not alone. The Minnesota and Nevada delegations actually cast a majority of their votes for Ron Paul. Is Romney worried? Not a chance. The Paul folks might as well have stayed home.

Michigan delegate Joe Jurecki, a committed Paul delegate, learned the hard way today that democracy and party politics often fail to intersect. Jurecki and his fellow Paul revolutionaries sat powerless today as John Boehner and the rest of the Republican Party upper management conducted a “sham vote” that would have made Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev proud.

The well-worn gambling adage “the fix was in” fails to do justice to the kangaroo proceeding that occurred on the floor of the Convention on Tuesday afternoon. Today Speaker John Boehner and former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu oversaw a steamrolling of the democratic process.

So what happened? A secret ballot? Might as well have been.

Boehner and company used voice votes to remake the rules on delegate selection.

Voice votes may be reliable in a boardroom of 20 people. But in a hall where nearly half the audience had no right to vote, they are about as reliable as a major bank’s balance sheet. Heck, I could have “voted” from press row if I’d chosen to this afternoon.

And even after the voice vote, Paul supporters appeared to have successfully turned back two of the proposed rules changes. But it didn’t matter – Boehner was going to pass the measure. The fix was in. All measures passed in the midst of a chorus of boos.

So why does this matter? The remaking of Republican delegate procedural rules 12, 15 and 16 has the effect of shutting the door on any future Ron Paul-style insurgency campaigns. Most onerous in the new rules: a passage that gives the Republican National Committee the power to force a delegate to resign if he or she “nominates or demonstrates support for Presidential Candidate other than the one he or she is bound to.”

Talk about a catchall — “demonstrates support…”

Does that mean wearing a Ron Paul button will get you banned? Who knows?

Before non-Tea Party Republicans start cheering the changes that will effectively neuter candidates like Ron Paul, consider this… In four years the Tea Party may finally figure a way to use the Koch brothers’ money to overtake the John Boehner wing of the GOP. Then how great will these rules look?

Jurecki, who appeared drained and defeated after the votes, summed up the proceedings with the appropriate sports metaphor… “We [Paul supporters] learned how the rules worked, played by those rules, and then they changed the game after it had been played.”

This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2012.