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DNC Shatters The Illusion Of American Democracy In Order To Keep People’s 27 Bucks
Well that didn’t take much. After all the time and effort that those of us in the alternative media have been pouring into our attempts to show people that democracy does not exist in America, the political establishment has stepped forward and admitted it candidly with its own face hole. A recently-released transcript of Florida court documents has revealed that the Democratic National Committee’s first line of defense in their motion to dismiss a lawsuit against them by defrauded Bernie Sanders supporters is to state that they are under no contractual obligation to provide the American people with real party primaries.
Yes, really. That’s their Plan A. In order to avoid a situation where they could be forced to return some of the small-dollar campaign donations of Sanders’ base, representatives of the regulatory committee for the Democratic party have tacitly admitted in a court of law that they are running a fake political party using the lie of legitimate primary elections to manufacture political engagement, and that democracy is officially dead in America.
“[T]here is no right to — just by virtue of making a donation, to enforce the parties’ internal rules,” said DNC attorney Bruce Spiva. “And there’s no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There’s no contractual obligation here.”
Mr. Spiva is of course referring to the charge that Sanders supporters were defrauded of millions of dollars when they poured donations many of them could barely afford into the campaign of a candidate that the DNC was actively conspiring to sabotage, in gross violation of the Impartiality Clause of their own charter. Rather than trying to deny that this act of sabotage took place, the DNC is instead arguing that it is perfectly within its rights to obstruct and favor any campaign it wants in order to ensure the nomination of the candidate that it prefers.
Since I am writing this essay for the perpetual Clintonian circle jerk that is Medium, I should probably preempt any vapid scoffing and dismissal here by assuring the reader that if you have been suffering from the delusion that Hillary Clinton was legitimately elected as the Democratic presidential nominee, you are wrong, and even the DNC lawyers admit it. If that’s not enough proof for you, the Impartiality Clause (Article 5, Section 4 of the DNC Charter) reads as follows:
“the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.”
There is simply no way that anyone who has read through the conversations in the more egregious DNC leaks, the Podesta emails showing that the DNC and the Clinton camp were colluding as early as 2014 to schedule debates and primaries in a way that favored her, or then-DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile acting as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing Clinton questions in advance to prep her for debates with Sanders can truthfully say that this Impartiality Clause was adhered to. It wasn’t. And, according to Mr. Spiva, that’s because it didn’t need to be.
This 2008 NPR special details the way the Democratic nomination process was radically revised after the 1968 fiasco at the Chicago Convention in order to win back the droves of disgusted voters who’d abandoned the party, and a major component of that revision was giving the people a voice in the nominating process by instituting primaries and caucuses. Had they not done this, had they not promised the American people a fair and balanced democratic primary process, the Democrats risked losing party viability and being replaced by another party that was more appealing for voters to engage with. By admitting that they have been lying about taking this promise seriously, the DNC is admitting that its party probably should have perished sometime in the 1970s. They deceived the American people into letting them remain.
Prior to giving the people a voice in the nomination process, the DNC selected the Democratic nominee internally, the result of which was what provoked the 1968 riots in the first place. This old, outdated process is what Mr. Spiva is referring to in this next excerpt from the court transcript:
“But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right.”
It doesn’t work that way, Bruce. The reason internally-selected nominees stopped existing decades ago is that people realized that they are bullshit. If the Democrats espouse the position that they’re going to secretly manipulate their nominating process and lie to the American people about it, their party will die, like it would have after the 1968 disaster had they not made their broken promises to the people. You don’t get to cut yourself legal slack by saying that your Committee could have just selected its nominee without pretending to have a primary; it could not have. The American people would never have stood for it. If they’d realized that the extent of American democracy is choosing between an internally-selected corporatist and the GOP candidate, they never would have tolerated it. And the DNC knew this. That’s why they lied about it. That’s why they deliberately deceived the American people into thinking that a legitimate presidential primary was happening in the Democratic party, so that they would become engaged in the party and vote for it in the general election.
Harvard attorney Jared Beck, one of the plaintiffs in the case, told TYT’s Jordan Chariton that his jaw dropped when he heard this defense. He argues that without free and fair elections, democracy cannot be said to be happening in America, which is innately unconstitutional.
“I think it even goes beyond the charter, quite frankly, because this is fundamental to democracy,” Beck said in an interview with TYT Politics. “I mean, the Constitution speaks of a democratic political system, and I kept bringing this point up over and over again, is that in order to have a democracy the DNC has to be even-handed and impartial in the process, or else we don’t have a democracy in this country.”
The transcript shows that Mr. Beck did indeed present this argument to the court multiple times. The following are excerpts from the court transcript of Beck’s arguments toward that end:
“What we’re talking about here is the very core of what our democracy runs on, the very basis for our democracy, which is the conduct of free and fair elections. That’s the basis, that’s the bedrock on which the claims of this case take off, because the election — the elections — as American history has developed, the conduct of those elections, for better or worse, has come under the domain of the two major political parties in this country.
And in our case, in getting into the allegations of our case, what we are alleging and what we are very, I think, clearly alleging and specifically alleging in this complaint is that people paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee — nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial. And that’s not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that’s what the Democratic National Committee’s own charter says. It says it in black and white. And they can’t deny that.”
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I think that there’s a fundamental understanding in this country that’s taught from a very early age, certainly I remember it, that we live in a democracy. And I think a fundamental part of what a democracy means is that elections are not conducted in this biased and predetermined way. And I think that everybody who seeks to participate in the political process, especially when they’re going to the trouble of cutting a check to a candidate that they support or a party that they support, they believe that those candidates and entities are taking place in a process that is fair and impartial, because they believe in a process that’s democratic.
And in response to Spiva’s assertion that there was no obligation to even have a primary at all:
And, quite frankly, if what defendant — or what the DNC has just said is true — and I really hope it’s not true, but if what he said is true, then I think it’s a really sad day for democracy in this country. Because what essentially the DNC has now stated in a court of law is that it believes that there is no enforceable obligation to run the primary elections of this country’s democracy in a fair and impartial manner. And if that’s the case — and I think counsel just said it himself — then really, you know, the sky’s the limit in terms of what the DNC and any party, for that matter, can do. |
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