Conservative members of the Republican National Committee (RNC), led by Morton Blackwell of Virginia and Ross Little of Louisiana, blocked a move by establishment leaders at an RNC Rules Committee meeting in Indianapolis last week to give the RNC carte blanche to change the party's rules between national conventions.

Blackwell vowed that, if necessary, conservative delegates will fight on the floor of the national convention in Philadelphia this summer to prevent the RNC from being granted enhanced authority over party rules.

The proposals originated in a report submitted by an RNC advisory commission that recommended restructuring the GOP nomination process to combat what ir feared was a movement toward a single national primary.

Once the Republican National Convention set an absolute date before which no state could hold primaries - as it did in 1996 (against the advice of conservatives) - a movement by states to go early was inevitable. When a commisison was charged with focusing on solving the so-called front-loading problem, once proposal led to another. If states were to be assigned dates before which they could not hold primaries, was not an enforcement mechanism needed to guarantee that states complied?

One proposal was for nonconforming states to lose up to 90% of their delegates. But what if the Democrats would not follow? The commission recommended that the RNC should be given the "flexibility" to change all the party's rules between conventions. And, as long as they were fooling with the party rules, why not require that all state primaries allocate delegates proportionally? And why not make the members of the RNC itself automatic delegates to the naitonal convention?

The commission's power grab, however, did not work out as planned. A series of amendments in Indianapolis pared back the proposed new RNC powers to just the power to change the timing of state promaries. Blackwell, however, vowed to defeat even this provision at Philadelphia.

Blackwell reminded members that the RNC has asked for additional powers many times in the past, but has consistently ben overruled by the delegates at the national convention, who have not been willing to transfer their authority to a group with the limited representaiton of the much smaller RNC.

Following statesrights principles, the RNC Rules committee refused to mandate promotional selection of delegates, arguing that a kind of proportionality already exists in the practice of electing most delegates by Congressional District.

Still, the reform commission and even many conservatives, including Blackwell, argued that the threat of a national primary was serious enough to necessitate national uniformity. The commission had recommended a "Delaware Plan" in which states, placed in four monthly groups, would hold their primaries in order of their size, from smallest to largest. THe largest states vigorously opposed the proposal as shutting them out of the process. Although almost half of the delegates would be chosen during or after the fourth grouping of states, committee members from large states believed the nomination would still be settled before they had a chance to participate.

The large states were able to move the proposed start of the primaries up by one month, to February from March. But the Delaware Plan itself passed 36 to 13, largely pitting small against large states.

In the end, conservatives emerged from the meeting still critical of the proposed rule changes because they gave too much power to the RNC, and members from large states remained critical because they believed the scheduling of primaries would give too much power to small states.

New Hampshite, angry that its first-in-the-nation primary position was endangered (Iowa was protected because the date restrictions do not apply to caucuses), threatened to go first anyway, even if it means the loss of 90% of it's delegates.

No one ended up happy. There goes Philadelphia and that City of Brotherly Love stuff.

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Donald Devine, former director Of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is a columnist and a Washington-based policy consultant and a Vice Chairman for the American Conservative Union.