Fox News judicial correspondent Andrew Napolitano corrected host Andrea Tantaros on Monday after she claimed that the Founding Fathers would not have approved of a contested convention where Donald Trump was not given the nomination.
Over the weekend, Trump argued that Republicans would be "stupid" not to award him the nomination at the convention if he was substantially in the lead because they "wouldn't even have 1 percent chance" of beating Hillary Clinton without him.
"Who is correct on this?" Tantaros asked Napolitano on Monday. "I'm not sure the Founding Fathers would love what's happening on the Republican side. I'm not sure that's how they set up the framework for the United States of America."
"But constitutionally, can you weigh in on what the party is doing?" she asked. "Do they have a right to do it?"
"I disagree with you on the Founding Fathers," Napolitano explained. "Because I think politics was a rough and tumble in that era even as it is today. There just wasn't cable television around to record all of it."
"The Republican Party has a history of these things," he said. "It's not unprecedented."
In fact, most nominations throughout U.S. history were brokered prior to the widespread use of primaries. However, Tantaros worried that "suppressing the will of the people" seemed "extra-constitutional."
"The Republican Party is a private organization," Napolitano reminded the hosts of Fox News' Outnumbered. "It rents the government's space and equipment in order to conduct elections. It writes its own rules."
"If they want to change their rules in the week before the convention, they are free to do so," he pointed out, adding that some of the primary tactics were "unseemly, inappropriate, but historic, traditional and probably will go on."
Watch the video below from Fox News, broadcast March 21, 2016.
