[Unidentified Male:] Without objection, the previous question is ordered. The question is on adoption of the resolution. All those in favor say aye. All those opposed, no. In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it. And the resolution is agreed to. Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table. The chair would remind the hall that it's absolutely critical that we are able to discern the ayes from the nays. Those in favor of the rules package will say aye.
[Audience:] Aye!
[Unidentified Male:] Those opposed shall say no.
[Audience:] No!
[Unidentified Male:] In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it.
[Wolf Blitzer, Cnn Anchor:] CNN's Dana Bash was on the convention floor when all of this erupted. It was very exciting for about an hour, Dana. It's all over with now. But tell our viewers how it went down.
[Dana Bash, Cnn Chief Congressional Correspondent:] Well, first of all, this was very much a surprise. It was kind of brewing a little bit in the hours before, but it was very much a surprise by the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, who have been working hand in glove to try to kind of make things go smoothly during this convention process. They thought that they had kind of quelled two very strong forces during all of the debate throughout the week last week over the rules governing this convention and, of course, the rules governing the next primary process for the next nominating process in 2020. Those two forces were never Trump, people who wanted to have an ability to have a so-called conscience clause, so ability to get out of their being bound to vote for Donald Trump, but then others who are kind of core conservative conservatives, many supporters of Ted Cruz who wanted the rules to be change so that, the next time, the primary and caucus process would only allow Republicans to vote. Basically, it would effectively mean that the nominee, they hope, would be more conservative. Those two forces aligned kind of quietly before what was supposed to be rudimentary vote here, a voice vote to kind of just approve this large rules package. And so they went around quietly before this moment here, Wolf, and they got nine states, I believe, nine states to say that they were OK with a roll call vote. The rules here said that, if they had seven, they would be able to have a role call vote. Why would that matter? If they had a roll call vote, then it would open everything up. It would open up the ability for anti-Trump forces to try to push their kind of votes and also the conservatives to have their kind of amendments. What we saw here was a very concerted effort. Again, the Republican National Committee working hand in hand with the Trump campaign to try to quell that. They got three of those states to rescind their efforts. They were able to stop it. What you just played was a messy process. First, they tried to approve it by voice vote. It was unclear how that went down, even though the chair said the ayes had it. And I'm told the Republican chair, the party chair, said that he was worried that that didn't look good, so they came out and did it again. But you very much had a lot of delegates here who are very unhappy that they thought they were going to be able to get an open process and have their voices heard, and they weren't. The two takeaways here are, number one, it was kind of the last gasp of I think the never Trump movement, but also a very real conservative-Cruz aligned group of delegates who were trying to steer the party for the future into a more conservative lane Wolf.
[Blitzer:] Dana, stand by. Dana is on the convention floor. It was pretty exciting. Thank you very much. That was just part of an eventful day here. Day one is certainly far from over. CNN's Jim Acosta is joining us now more with on the latest information that we're getting. Jim, this first day of the Republican Convention now officially under way. There were some notable party absences though, including the governor of this very state we're in right now.
[Jim Acosta, Cnn Senior White House Correspondent:] That's right, Wolf. Some of the biggest names in the Republican Party simply will not be on hand for Donald Trump's moment, becoming the nominee of this party. Former President George W. Bush will not be here. Mitt Romney, the last nominee of this party, will not be here. John McCain will not be here. In fact, the last nominee of this party who will be here will be Bob Dole. There will be a tribute for him later on tonight. I'm told he will be sitting in Donald Trump's VIP box for that. But you're right, Wolf. I don't think there's a bigger snub for this event, for this convention than that of Ohio Governor John Kasich. He's hosting this convention after all, you might say, because he's the governor of this state. I have been talking to a senior Kasich adviser today, Wolf, and the Ohio governor has been in Cleveland. He's been at different delegations talking to people, milling around Cleveland. But, according to this adviser, he's not going to set foot inside this convention hall for the duration of this convention. He feels that strongly that Donald Trump should not be the nominee of this party.
[Blitzer:] It's interesting that the Republican governor, Jim, of Ohio, John Kasich, he will not walk into this convention center. But the Democratic mayor of Cleveland, he was here earlier today. He formally went up on the podium and welcomed all the Republican delegates here. Very interesting. There will be notable speakers tonight, but I guess some of the more anticipated speakers, one of the most anticipated speakers will be the wife of Donald Trump, Melania. What do we expect to hear from her?
[Acosta:] That's right, Wolf. When you talk to people inside the Trump campaign and remind them about John McCain and Mitt Romney and George W. Bush being missing, they say there's one star of this convention and that is Donald Trump. To add to that star power, they are bringing in his family members. And Melania Trump will be going first tonight. She will be speaking to the convention hall here. In a very unusual, unprecedented move, Donald Trump is coming here as well. He's going to introduce Melania Trump to these delegates here. One thing that we have to look out for with introductions, Wolf, is just what Donald Trump is going to say. You will recall on Saturday when he introduced his vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, that introduction went on for 28 minutes and veered into parts of Donald Trump's stump speech that had nothing to do with introducing Mike Pence. And so we're going to be looking for that as well. But Melania Trump is going to be talking about who Donald Trump is as a husband. As you know, Wolf, a key weakness for Donald Trump, if you look at the polls and if you look at the numbers, is how he's doing with women right now. These are almost radioactive numbers for Donald Trump right now when it comes to female voters. And so they're hoping that Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump will start to chip away at that at this convention this week, Wolf.
[Blitzer:] That certainly is the goal. Jim Acosta, thanks very much Anderson, over to you.
[Anderson Cooper, Cnn Anchor:] Yes, Wolf, I'm here with the panel. Joined now by the senior Democratic Party official Donna Brazile, who has no doubt been watching this all with great interest. Donna, let's start off with you, since we're just hearing from you. In terms of what we witnessed a little bit more than an hour ago, there are some who say, look, it's a sign of disunity, others who say it's the sign of the death of the never Trump movement and a sign that this is Donald Trump's convention.
[Donna Brazile, Cnn Political Analyst:] When you look at the substance of the fight regarding open primaries or closed primaries, there's clearly a need for the Republican Party to have this conversation. Unlike the Democrats, and we know this, we look at our rules throughout the four years preceding the convention. So, at convention time, we have an opportunity to have input from all of the states and all of the delegates. On the Republican side, they have this one opportunity, and you change that. But I do believe this fight was about 2020 and not just right here in 2016.
[Jeffrey Lord, Cnn Contributor:] One of the things you got to be careful with, Anderson, if you remember, the Republicans changed the rule in 2012. I think it was 40B to zap Ron Paul and make sure his name wasn't placed in nomination. They get to 2016 and this backfired on them, as Rand Paul pointed out. You want to be really careful when you start doing this.
[Mike Shields, Former Rnc Chief Of Staff:] That rule is actually one that the RNC negotiated with the Cuccinelli folks and changed for them because the grassroots the grassroots first of all, by the way, everyone claims to be a leader of the grassroots. Everyone who is on the RNC, every delegate is member of the grassroots, but they all try to own that. So, I shouldn't even use that term. But the Cuccinelli folks, they did win a concession. They got rule 40B changed back to five states. That was something that actually happened earlier and helped them.
[Cooper:] And yet this isn't something that we have seen at a lot of conventions in recent memory, anyway.
[Gloria Borger, Cnn Senior Political Analyst:] No. We had the Paul walkout, remember? And that was small. We took note of it. I think what's happening here is much more organic, actually. What we saw was the Republican National Committee really quash it. They kind of said this isn't going to happen at our convention and...
[Cooper:] But you had the speaker walking off the stage at a certain point.
[Borger:] Right.
[John King, Cnn Chief National Correspondent:] They sent that poor guy out there. This was a surprise, as Dana reported, the fact that they got all these signatures at the last minute, they want to pull this off. Should the organizers of the event, the leadership of the RNC they knew for at least a couple of hours this was coming. Should they have had a better plan at the moment? Clearly, there was a little chaos and how are we going to sort this out?
[King:] Please.
[Shields:] Well, first of all, they were going off the stage to figure out this happens in the House all the time. These are House rules, by the way. Steve Womack is a congressman from Arkansas, did a great job. That's why he is here. And it happens all the time. The parliamentarian wasn't standing next to him. You saw he came out and stood next to him. This stage is different than the House floor. For him to ask a question to the parliamentarian, he has to walk off the stage and ask the question. The optics of that didn't work out as well.
[Scottie Nell Hughes, Donald Trump Supporter:] But here's my question. Why did they not already know they were going to win it? Once again, they have a loss. This is the third time they have lost. That's my thing. So, if you want to say, this was purely about embarrassment to the candidate, embarrassment almost to the party. That was their motivation. If they knew that they didn't have the solid win, why even bother?
[King:] That's dead right. A lot of these conservative forces, they don't like Washington. Some of them still have grievances with Donald Trump without a doubt, but they have grievances with the party. This is the people to Mike's point, they consider themselves the true conservative grassroots and they have their agendas too, as does everybody in this room. We're at a political convention. Guess what? Some people have their own individual agendas and they're looking to make but, look, this is part of the challenge. The volume is a little higher here. There's tensions. Did all conservatives love John McCain? Did all conservatives love John McCain Mitt Romney? Jeff goes back to the Reagan days, when he had to reach out to the old moderate wing of the party with George H.W. Bush. It happens at every convention. The buy-in is a little higher here because Donald Trump was an independent not that long ago. He said nice things about the Clintons. It was a bit of a hostile takeover for the party. But he won. And he won today on the floor. But I want to say, to the point of what we're about to get to, there's always these two missions at the convention. One is to talk to the room. Yes, Donald Trump, there's a lot of skeptics in this room. Are you really a movement conservative? Will you really cut taxes and shrink government? Will you really stand up for the pro-life movement? Will you really be that person given his positions in the past, which he says he has changed? He does have a mission here. The bigger mission is to the country. I'm fascinated by Melania Trump tonight, in the sense the biggest challenge for Donald Trump in a sense is to convince people out there, like me more. Give me a second look. She's key to that.
[Cooper:] It's not just Melania Trump tonight. First of all, you have Governor Perry, who, if you remember during the primary season, came out and blasted Donald Trump, was really the first candidate to come out and went after him on questions of faith.
[Borger:] He called him a cancer on conservatism, if you recall.
[Cooper:] And then you have national security people. You have Marcus Luttrell, who wrote the book "Lone Survivor," the movie "Lone Survivor." Rudy Giuliani. You have a number of people who survived the Benghazi attacks who were involved in Benghazi, and also a number of people whose kids have been killed in some way or other by illegal immigrants.
[Borger:] That's right. It's national security, strength. And just like Melania is going to attract women, they believe in talking to people in the Trump campaign, they believe the strength argument will also attract women voters, because they believe women see a dangerous world and they're national security voters very often to protect their family. They believe this is also a way to get, to bring down those negatives. In March, he was 70 percent negative with women. It's important.
[Nia-malika Henderson, Cnn Senior Political Correspondent:] That's the big challenge. Rebranding Donald Trump. They want a bump out of this convention. We haven't seen a lot of bumps come out of these conventions over the last couple of days. I think the biggest speeches we will see tonight, Donald Trump and Melania Trump. If you look back at what former first ladies have done, it's about humanizing the candidates and it's also, if you look at Michelle Obama's speech, for instance, she sort of acknowledged that she had this line in her speech that when I met him, he was a guy with a funny name and he was in Hawaii, but he had the same kinds of values that my family had as well. She was in some ways the translator of Barack Obama to the general public.
[Cooper:] Michael Smerconish, that's one of the things. I talked to Paul Manafort last night, who was saying essentially that and that every night that's what they want to get out of this. And by the end, they want to show what Paul Manafort was saying the sort of side of Donald Trump the public hasn't seen in these primary battles, which is the person in the boardroom, the person in private meetings, the person with his family. We're going to be hearing from pretty much every member of his family, every one of his kids.
[Michael Smerconish, Cnn Contributor:] I thought Governor Romney had a beautiful family. They all spoke well. I remember those handsome sons. I also remember the testimonials from folks who were Latter Day Saints. They didn't play those cards. In fact, I even make it sound cheap when I say it that way. But they were very careful in how much of that they showed. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake. I thought the best moment Donald Trump had in the entire primary process was the CNN town hall where he brought his whole family and he said very little. It will be interesting to see if he can say very little tonight, and I think he's right to play that card.
[Cooper:] We're going to take a quick break. We got a lot more to talk about as we await Donald Trump's arrival and Melania Trump's moment on the stage tonight. We will be right back.