Huzzah.
Good news if true, but I’ve never seen anything the Institutional Democrats couldn’t manage to screw up.
‘We’re going to fight it like hell’
By DAVID SIDERS, Politico
08/23/20
Democratic Party officials are on the verge of greenlighting a Bernie Sanders-endorsed plan to weaken the influence of superdelegates in the presidential nominating process. But it won’t be pretty.
As Democratic National Committee members arrived here Thursday for their annual summer meeting, outspoken opponents of the proposal acknowledged they were outnumbered. Still, they pledged an aggressive, last-ditch lobbying effort ahead of a Saturday vote, defying a call for unity from party leaders.
“We’re up against a wall,” said Bob Mulholland, a superdelegate and DNC member from California who helped organize opposition to the proposal. “We’re going to fight it like hell.”
The opposition campaign threatened to undercut a bid by party leaders to present a unified front before a critical midterm election, exasperating officials who have worked for months to design a compromise. Less than a day into the proceedings — and with the superdelegate controversy hanging heavily over the gathering — New York Assemblyman Michael Blake, vice chairman of the DNC, said “my patience is growing short.”
Leaving an executive committee meeting on Thursday morning, Blake said, “We’ve got real shit to get done, to go help people.”
The superdelegate issue has bedeviled the party for the past two years, ever since the bulk of superdelegates — the members of Congress, governors and DNC members and other top officials who made up about 15 percent of delegates during the 2016 convention — overwhelmingly sided with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary.
In some cases, their support for Clinton came in defiance of the popular vote outcome in their states, leading Sanders’ supporters to rage against a nominating process they contended was tilted in Clinton’s favor.
The current proposal, a priority of Sanders and his supporters since the Vermont senator’s defeat two years ago — a result of the Unity Reform Commission established at the 2016 national convention — would prohibit superdelegates from voting on the first presidential nominating ballot at a contested national convention, reducing their influence in a nominating process.
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Inside the Hyatt Regency convention halls, opponents of the proposal are raising objections on both substantive and procedural grounds. They argue, among other points, that such a significant rules change should require a two-thirds vote, not a simple majority — a position DNC officials reject.If the proposal is adopted, superdelegates could vote on the first convention ballot only if a candidate earned enough pledged delegates from state parties and caucuses to win the nomination.
After meeting with about 15 opponents of the proposal at the convention hotel Thursday afternoon, William Owen, a DNC member from Tennessee who is helping to organize the resistance, said, “I think we’ve got a shot at trying to slow this thing down.”
C’mon guys. This is our pre-compromised proposal and it’s little enough.