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RNC Platform Committee meets to draft party priorities, principles and policies for next four years

Posted at 7:31 PM, Jul 11, 2016
and last updated 2016-07-11 19:31:58-04

Members of Republican National Committee's Platform Committee met Monday to draft the party's platform for the next four years.

The 112 member committee is made up of one man and one woman from each of the 56 delegations.

The platform is a playbook for the party outlining their principles, priorities and policy stances for the next four years.

The document rarely produces radical changes just tweaks and amendments. The problem Utah Delegate Boyd Matheson said is its over 200 pages long.

"A platform to have power must be read," Matheson said. "If we are going to be the party of the hard working Americans we should deliver to them a message and a platform that they can read in a single sitting."

Matheson proposed the Republican Party go back to it's roots, the platform in 1860 was made up of 17 points, about 1,200 words. "Conservative principles work," Boyd said. "We should never bury them so deep in a binder, a paragraph or a set of pages that the American people cannot readily recognize what those principles are."

Matheson proposed what he admittedly knew would never pass. A throwback to Abe Lincoln's 1860 platform with one that is just under 1,200 words.

"If the millennials can do it in 140 characters certainly than we can do better than 33,000 words," he said.