So You Want to Govern?
One of the most revealing – and perhaps disconcerting - traits of yesterday’s Democratic National Committee Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) meeting was its likeness to a street carnival. The thirty member body was charged with hearing the cases of Florida and Michigan – the Democratic Party’s prodigal sons. Each State had, in contravention of the DNC’s will, advanced their primary ahead of February 5th so that they could gain a more privileged place in the process.
As punishment, the RBC had handed down (sans the pale limelight of the television cameras) the death penalty – the voting rights of 100% of their delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August. The stern punishment was ironic because it was intended to have a deterrent effect; this same prinicple, apparently, does not transmute into support for stronger punishment of actual criminals.
But with a Presidential nomination on the line and two swing states in the balance, the RBC agreed to retry the Florida and Michigan cases. It is odd that there was so little complaint from Florida for their being lumped in with the likes of Michigan, but alas. The cases for the two states were really quite different.
In Florida, a Republican-dominated legislature and a Republican Governor signed an elections reform bill that mandated a paper trail for electronic voting machines and moved the Florida primary to January 29. Crying “2000!” and apparently moved by a greater fear of the Diebold Election Stealing Machine rather than the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, Florida Democrats went along with the 1/29/2008 primary. However, as they are outnumbered by a 2-1 ratio in the Legislature, there was little else they could do. Given these facts, it would seem logical for the RBC to recognize that 1.75 million Democrats voted in the primary, thank them for their participation, and give them back their full voting rights. Instead, each delegate will get 1/2 a vote at the Convention.
Michigan, though, was quite different. A Democratic Legislature in conjunction with a Democratic Governor, all spurred by a Democratic U.S. Senator, moved up the Michigan primary to January 15th. The move was a purely political maneuver by Senator Carl Levin. Sen. Levin is openly dismissive of the fact that New Hampshire and Iowa get to go first in the process every four years – and by dismissive, I mean to say that he whines about it all the time. He wants his state to go first so that potential Presidents in Congress will go along with whatever pork Levin wants for his state. The RBC properly punished Michigan by taking away all of their voting rights, and they should have kept it so. Instead, by being lumped in with Florida, they luckily came away with half-votes, too.
But through all of this, the defining characteristic of the meeting was not specious arguments or treating the great history of the civil rights movement like an old horse to be beaten (and beaten and beaten), but the near chaos of the proceedings. The “spectators” shouted and jeered at one another and at the committee members, pumped their fists while chanting “count the votes!”, and pounded wildly upon nearby objects. The co-chairs, Alexis Herman and James Roosevelt, just barely had any control at all over even the RBC Members. One half-expected John Stuart Mill to walk into the ballroom of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, look into the TV cameras, and say “told ya so”.
It rightly prompted a legitimate question. This group of people could barely govern themeselves. How would they go about governing the Free World?
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That was when the committee was meeting, alas. It’s like when testimony for Plan B and the cost-of-living adjustment for non-profits gets mixed up in the lege — you simply hear the testimony when the committee meets, which may not be that often.
The Democrats in FL wanted to go along with it — every other cycle, the media coverage of early primaries and caucuses does far more to decide the winner than delegates do, so they made the bet that they’d be more influential without their delegates. They bet wrong. Oops.
Nonetheless, they had the option (which most other states already do) of either switching to a party-run primary or a party-run caucus, and allocating the delegates based on those results. They didn’t do so, because a) it would cost the state party money, and b) Clinton supporters wanted the lopsided results to stand.
I think it sucks that either of them got any delegates back — we’ll never be able to kick Iowa and NH back in the calendar unless our committees make the sanctions stick.
(And the GOP, I’d note, doesn’t base the delegates determined by caucuses on presidential preference at all in many places — Maine, Hawaii, Louisiana, Colorado… and in Montana, ordinary Republican voters don’t get a chance to vote for the GOP nominee at all, since the caucuses are invitation-only.)
We can all sleep easier at night knowing that neither the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee or Chris Healy “govern the Free World.”
As for the shouters, well, Clinton lost, so those people are out in the street now. So sad. I understand that Ron Paul supporters have brought some similar hilarity to state GOP conventions, right?
There were no Ron Paul supporter disruptions at any of the 5 conventions I’ve been to this year, though there were certainly some who think like Ron Paul.
1/2 a vote – LOL – and as I said in my own blog (http://yedies.blogspot.com/2008/06/dnc-determines-that-florida-and.html)
that must mean that the DNC rules committee really meant to say that with 1/2 a vote those Florida and Michigan Democrat delegates are now really half-assed.
Quite frankly they shouldn’t have changed the rules and should have just not seated the delegates at all. It really won’t make much of a difference in the end. The media has already chosen the DNC nominee….