Sanders ally pushes Dems on cutting superdelegates

[Swordsmyth]

A top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (http://thehill.com/people/bernie-sanders)'s (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign is circulating a letter to top Democrats, asking them to back an effort to remove superdelegates from the Democratic primary nomination system, BuzzFeed News (https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/bernie-jeff-weaver-clinton-superdelegates-unity-commission?utm_term=.cikaxRzdm#.yyD8XrbWq) reports.
Jeff Weaver, who managed Sanders's campaign and went on to briefly run his spinoff group Our Revolution, is in talks with members of Hillary Clinton (http://thehill.com/people/hillary-clinton)'s 2016 campaign to build support for the petition. It urges the DNC to rely solely on delegates that follow the will of Democratic primary voters in determining the nomination.

More at: http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/384296-sanders-ally-pushes-dems-to-support-cutting-superdelegates

[A Son of Liberty]

Agreed. Let's see just how many of 50% of the country actually are socialists. Enough pussy-footing around. I need to know who my enemies are.

[Swordsmyth]

The controversial issue of “superdelegates” and their future in the Democratic Party led to an angry confrontation on Tuesday night between Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and House Democrats, according to several lawmakers.
But the members’ angst may not help them since it appears that the DNC is ready to rein in the status of superdelegates, also known as “unpledged” delegates, no matter what lawmakers say or do.

Democratic activists’ desire to eliminate or scale down superdelegates grew in the wake of the sometimes ugly intraparty contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. It now appears that those grass-roots activists have the support they need to win any contest over the issue, even if the party establishment is upset by the move.
During a two-hour-plus meeting with a group of House Democrats at DNC headquarters, Perez laid out two options under consideration for superdelegates by the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee. The rules committee will meet on the issue Friday, and there’s a June 30 deadline for any proposed amendments to the DNC charter, which will be voted on during a key August party meeting, right in the middle of election season.


The first proposal — a product of the “Unity Reform Commission” established at the 2016 convention to “revise and reduce” the role of superdelegates — would create three categories of superdelegates. Some superdelegates would be allowed to vote in the first roll-call vote for the presidential nominee, while others would not.
However, Perez warned members that this proposal wouldn’t win enough backing to be adopted at the August DNC session.
The second option, which Perez supports and which appears far more likely to be enacted, would allow superdelegates to continue to exist, but they couldn’t vote during the first round of the presidential roll-call vote. They could, however, vote during the second round or any subsequent roll call, and they would still be permitted to support any candidate they wanted.
Perez believes this approach ensures that “we have an inclusive party, transparent process, democratic principles, and empowers the grassroots,” a DNC official said.
And that’s what set the House members off, because none of them believe there will be any more than one roll-call vote for the nominee.
In their view, that means elected Democratic officials — who have been put into office by hundreds of thousands or even millions of constituents — won’t play a role in nominating their party’s presidential candidate.
“I believe this decision, if they go forward, is going to do terrible damage to party harmony,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who raised his objections with Perez during Tuesday’s dinner. “It disenfranchises the elected leadership of the party. The last time we allowed that to happen was 1972, and we had the worst landslide in our history.”
“I believe that elected officials across the country — Congress and governors — I believe they provide a ballast for the party that we very much need,” Connolly added. “With all due respect to somebody who thinks we don’t need it, when we haven’t had it, Democrats have had disastrous results.”
“I think this is absolutely an insult to us,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.). “We’re no better than anybody else, but we stand for election. That has to mean something, that has to stand for something. That’s a lot of baloney.”
In an interview, Pascrell said that he told the same thing to Perez during Tuesday night’s closed-door dinner but didn’t like Perez’s retort.
“I didn’t really get a response, just more of an explanation,” Pascrell said. “I got the impression that this is pretty much a done deal with the options they had come up with, which I find difficult to handle.”


DNC officials said they plan to hold further discussions with members over this issue, although there may not be room for a deal that will satisfy lawmakers.
“Tom and the Rules and Bylaws Committee welcome feedback from members of Congress on ways to make our party more inclusive, increase transparency and empower the grassroots,” said Michael Tyler, the DNC’s press secretary. “We look forward to convening a group of members who have expressed interest in providing further input for the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to consider as they continue their work to reduce the role that unpledged delegates play in our presidential nominating process, a principle on which the full DNC voted to adopt at the March DNC meeting.”
Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), executive director of the early-1980s Hunt Commission, which created superdelegates, said lawmakers were “infuriated” by Perez’s stance, although he’s not sure there’s anything that can be done.
“I think there was a good deal of incredulity and some pretty severe criticism,” Price said. “For a lot of people, this was the first they’d seen of these things.”
Price’s view is that the term “superdelegates” is a key source of friction over the issue.
“We’re delegates. Party leaders are delegates,” he said. “They may or may not be unpledged, but there’s nothing wrong with that. That doesn’t help at all.”
Price said the initial term was the unwieldy “PLEL delegates,” which stands for “Party Leader, Elected Leader delegates.”
“I think there are ways to deal with this that could limit the number of unpledged delegates and could also limit their independent voting strength,” he noted. “I told [Perez] that I was willing to talk with him and work on this in whatever way he desired.”
Price said he hoped to have further interactions with DNC officials on the issue.

More at: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/06/superdelegates-house-democrats-630357

[Jamesiv1]

haha

The Democrat party is lying on it's death bed gasping for air.

I hope Hillary runs again. That will be the crushing blow.

[Swordsmyth]

After six months of work, a key Democratic panel Wednesday approved recommendations for the party to reduce the influence of so-called superdelegates in the 2020 presidential primary.
But the party’s solution does not reduce the number of superdelegates or eliminate them, as some had wanted. It seeks to prevent these independent actors in the primary from influencing the early stages of a contest through their endorsements, which was a complaint lodged by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election.
The language set to be voted on for final approval in August by the Democratic National Committee leaves room for superdelegates to play a decisive role if the presidential primary is unresolved by the time of the convention. And with a historically large number of Democratic candidates considering a run in 2020, the possibility that no one candidate will win a majority of delegates is far from a long shot.
But the recommendation of the Rules and Bylaws Committee is that superdelegates — who since 1984 have been delegates to the convention free to vote for the candidate they want rather than one based on party primary results — be prevented from voting on the first ballot of the convention. The intent is to create a process where delegates allocated purely by the popular vote in state primaries are the only factor that contributes to who wins the nomination.
The Rules and Bylaws committee held meetings every month since January to hash out how to implement the findings of the 2016 Unity Commission, which met in 2017 to bring together the Sanders and Hillary Clinton wings of the party. The Unity Commission recommended in December that the DNC reduce the number of superdelegates from more than 700 to just over 300. That would cut the total percentage of superdelegates by more than half, from 15 percent of the total number of delegates to 7 percent.
Over the past month or two, however, the Rules and Bylaws Committee settled on a different strategy: barring superdelegates from the first ballot. Sanders praised the move last month when it was first discussed, calling it “a major step forward in making the Democratic Party more open and transparent.”


A top Sanders adviser at the meeting Wednesday echoed that sentiment. “I think the folks here are trying to reflect the will of the people out in the country. So I think that’s laudable,” Jeff Weaver, who ran Sanders’s 2016 campaign and who attended most of the Rules and Bylaws meetings, told Yahoo News.
Weaver said he sat through hours of haggling over arcane details of procedural documents “to see the reforms that we unanimously passed [on the Unity Commission] make it through the entirety of the process.”
But one of the more expert observers of the primary process, Josh Putnam, said that the DNC changes may have unintended consequences, which is often the case when political parties change their rules in reaction to the last election.
Putnam, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington who specializes in campaigns and elections, and runs the Frontloading HQ (http://frontloading.blogspot.com/) blog, said the DNC’s proposal “is flawed because it is potentially built on wishful thinking … that the process will work the way it normally does.”
Democrats have not had a convention go past the first ballot since 1952. But in 2020, “the scenario that has often been spoken about is one where a large field of 2020 Democratic candidates winnows slowly enough under proportional allocation rules to keep some candidate from a majority of delegates before the convention.”
If that outcome looked likely at any point in the primary, the first-ballot vote at the convention would become “devalued,” Putnam wrote (https://frontloading.blogspot.com/2018/06/third-way-third-way-plus-democrats.html). “The second vote — the one with superdelegates — then becomes the ‘real’ vote.”
“This is a quirk, a roadblock, a problem, or a scenario for which the RBC is not exactly planning,” Putnam wrote. “That is a scenario in which superdelegates may be needed to break the stalemate.”
Because that will remain a possibility, Putnam said, the idea that superdelegate support will not be reported by the press or weighed by voters in a way that influences their vote is “hard to imagine.”

More at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/democrats-superdelegate-fix-backfire-000043850.html

[Swordsmyth]

Naturally, the superdelegates are not happy, Politico reported (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/11/bernie-sanders-dnc-superdelegates-710818) on Wednesday. “[S]uperdelegates outside of Washington” are organizing “opposition ahead of the August vote by the full DNC in Chicago.”
“If we don’t have a vote, then what good are we?” said William Owen, a superdelegate and DNC member from Tennessee who has been contacting fellow DNC members ahead of the Chicago gathering, especially in the South. “In Chicago, this will not be rubber stamped.”
Bob Mulholland, a superdelegate and DNC member from California who has been in talks with superdelegates in the West, said, “The more DNC members realize that this so-called reform is to throw them off the floor ... I think there will be a lot of complaints in Chicago.”
Democrats in the House of Representatives, Politico noted (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/06/superdelegates-house-democrats-630357) a few weeks ago, are upset as well. They don’t think the nomination will get to a second ballot, which would mean they play no role in selecting the candidate.
“I believe this decision, if they go forward, is going to do terrible damage to party harmony,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who raised his objections with Perez during Tuesday’s dinner. “It disenfranchises the elected leadership of the party. The last time we allowed that to happen was 1972, and we had the worst landslide in our history.”
“I believe that elected officials across the country — Congress and governors — I believe they provide a ballast for the party that we very much need,” Connolly added. “With all due respect to somebody who thinks we don’t need it, when we haven’t had it, Democrats have had disastrous results.”
“I think this is absolutely an insult to us,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.). “We’re no better than anybody else, but we stand for election. That has to mean something, that has to stand for something. That’s a lot of baloney.”



More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/29517-democrat-superdelegates-miffed-about-coming-rules-change

[oyarde]

How about some cage matches to settle this ?

[Aratus]

Let's see how far this goes...

[eleganz]

Lol DNC will never do it, they love party control more than the GOP and that is saying a lot.

But I'd love to give socialism the spotlight, leave it to an up or down vote, America needs to decide once and for all.

[Aratus]

Lets cut to the chase. This benefits Hillary in 2o20 in that
it makes everything more difficult for Bernie's people to
control the next DNC b4 2020. Hillary = CANDIDATE!!!!!

[timosman]

Lets cut to the chase. This benefits Hillary in 2o20 in that
it makes everything more difficult for Bernie's people to
control the next DNC b4 2020. Hillary = CANDIDATE!!!!!

We love Hillary! :heart:

[Aratus]

If Bernie runs...

[Aratus]

If Bernie wins in the primaries & caucuses...

[Aratus]

Can D.Trump or M.Pence best him in NOV of 2o20
And ought we to give a rats a$$ if this happens???

[timosman]

DNC changes superdelegate rules in presidential nomination process - https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/25/politics/democrats-superdelegates-voting-changes/index.html

[Swordsmyth]

DNC changes superdelegate rules in presidential nomination process - https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/25/politics/democrats-superdelegates-voting-changes/index.html

What stays the same for superdelegates
Superdelegates, like all other delegates, have other responsibilities at the convention, which are staying the same.
They are free to campaign and endorse the candidate of their choice at any time during the primary process. This has been a source of contention for some Democrats, who created rules to limit their ability to publicly endorse or campaign for presidential candidates. Those proposals failed in committee.
At the convention, they will still have complete floor access and be part of the hotel process to get their room assignments for the week. They remain eligible to serve on the rules, platform and credential committees. These are critical to the convention and the party.
On the floor, they can vote for a vice presidential nominee on all ballots however they choose.

[Swordsmyth]

The Congressional Black Caucus on Wednesday dealt a blow to Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, passing a no-confidence vote against the embattled Party boss. Caucus members told (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/14/congressional-black-caucus-tom-perez-991270) Politico that Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) introduced the debate over the DNC’s controversial superdelegate system and eventually led to the motion passing against Perez. The mood inside the room is said to have been “heated” as the vote was argued. Members “felt that the DNC pitted them against their constituents,” according to Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond (D-LA)
“So now if they want to be a delegate, they have to run against their constituents who want to be delegates, and it’s an unfair proposition,” the Louisana Democrat told (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/14/congressional-black-caucus-tom-perez-991270) Politico. “We don’t want to run against our constituents, so the caucus had made its position known. … It speaks for itself.”

More at: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/14/congressional-black-caucus-pass-no-confidence-vote-in-dnc-chair-tom-perez/