Keeping the Pressure on the DNC to Become More Open and Participatory

The DNC’s Unity Reform Commission (URC) has now issued its Report of Recommendations which take the Democratic Party in a democratic direction. The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee will review and determine whether to adopt all Recommendations at its meetings on January 19 and 20, 2018.
The Rules and Bylaws Committee is a powerful committee that DNC Chair Tom Perez purged so badly last October that it now includes virtually no Bernie Sanders supporters. Progressive Democrats have initiated a campaign to tell Perez, whose interests are questionable, to take a leadership role in encouraging the Rules and Bylaws Committee to adopt all Recommendations. The full DNC will vote on the final Rules at its March 2018 meeting and/or in the autumn.

The DNC mandate to the URC was “to review the entire nominating process and to make recommendations to the DNC regarding the nominating process with a focus on ensuring the process is accessible, transparent and inclusive.” The DNC specified several areas of concern within the nominating process, including the role of unpledged delegates.

Unpledged delegates, or superdelegates, are the 712 out of 4,763 voting delegates in 2016 who automatically get a vote for the Democratic presidential nominee without regard to the voter outcome of their state. Unpledged delegates are thus undemocratic by nature. They are comprised of DNC members and Democratic Party elected U.S. and state legislative officials, Governors and Presidents so they tend to favor entrenched interests. In addition, many are registered lobbyists.

In the 2016 presidential election, candidate Hillary Clinton was able to get a sizable running start toward the presidential nomination eleven weeks before any vote was cast in any state primary or caucus due to the manipulation of the superdelegate system. By mid-November, 2015, 50% of the superdelegates had pledged their support for Clinton, partly because a Joint Fundraising Agreement that her campaign entered into with the DNC held out the enticement to state elected officials that her fundraising would benefit the state parties.

The DNC Joint Fundraising “Hillary Victory Fund” raised $500 million, and a Clinton Campaign treasurer was the sole decision maker over how Fund monies would be distributed. Since candidate Bernie Sanders was not afforded a similar fundraising agreement with the DNC, the agreement was in violation of the DNC Charter which requires officers of the DNC to be neutral and evenhanded during the presidential primaries.

In its Report, the URC recommends removing DNC members from the ranks of the unpledged delegates, reducing the number of unpledged delegates to less than 312, a decrease of nearly 60%. The URC could have reduced the number of unpledged delegates to zero, as this is the only truly democratic outcome, but it did not.

The URC also recommends that any future joint fundraising agreements be transparent and accessible to the public.

Other URC Recommendations include that “the DNC and the Party at all levels shall use all means, including encouraging legislation or opposing legislation, and changing Party rules, to”:

  • Expand the use of primaries, wherever possible.

  • Require states to use same-day or automatic registration for the Democratic presidential

    nominating process.

  • Require states to use same-day party switching for the Democratic presidential

    nominating process.

  • Resist any attempts at voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

    In addition, the URC recommends that the DNC:
  • Develop a strategic plan to maximize engagement with activists and partners to build coalitions to help our candidates win.

  • Invest in technology and data infrastructure to build organizing tools and ensure the voter file is modernized.

  • Engage DNC members, grassroots activists and other allies in redistricting efforts in their states.

  • Diversify the donor base and proactively engage small dollar donors.

These recommendations of the Unity Reform Commission toward participatory democracy are the result of the concerted effort of grass roots agitation and the work of Bernie Sanders delegates. During the DNC National Convention of July, 2016, the Bernie Sanders forces proposed to the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee the end of superdelegates so that all Democratic presidential delegates would be allocated according to the popular vote totals of each candidate. The Sanders complaint that the presidential election system was unfair gathered force with the release by WikiLeaks of 20,000 emails sent among Democratic Party officials, some suggesting that party leaders, including DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., favored Clinton.

On July 23, 2016, during a packed hearing of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, Occupy protestors could be heard outside chanting, “No superdelegates. No superdelegates.The Rules Committee defeated the proposal to end the role of superdelegates, with a vote of 108 to 58. But proponents of the reform measure promised a floor fight at the partys national convention later in the week. After a 7-hour debate, the Sanders and Clinton delegates, as a compromise, agreed to create the “Unity Reform Commission.The compromise gave Sanders the right to select 8 members of the Commission, Clinton had the right to select 10, and the Democratic National Committee Chair, who later turned out to be Tom Perez, got the right to select 3, for a total of 21 members.

The division between the Commission members selected by Sanders, on the one hand, and those selected by Clinton and Perez, on the other hand, was clear at the final meetings of the Commission in December, 2017. The Sanders appointees proposed and pushed through major reforms on budget oversight and conflict of interest issues with high-paid consultants.

James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute and a top Sanders backer (removed by Tom Perez from the Executive Committee) proposed a financial oversight board to monitor the expenditures of the DNC. During this discussion, Zogby stated that as a long-term member of the Executive Committee, he had never seen a budget. Other members of the Commission who were on the Executive Committee or had been to Budget Committee meetings also said they had never seen a budget. DNC Vice Chair Ray Buckley has also reported that he has never seen a budget.

Commission member Nomiki Konst righteously challenged the DNC for spending a billion dollars and losing the “easiest presidential race you can possibly imagine,” and further asserted that [over a two year period], “between $700 and $800 million was spent on five consultants.” During the 2016 presidential race, the Clinton Campaign controlled the DNC, and the DNC essentially served to pay consultants to get Clinton elected.

The budget oversight proposal was initially resisted by the Clinton/Perez appointees and tabled. After hours, however, Commission members crafted a compromise that tasked the Budget and Finance Committee to do what the DNC Charter and Bylaws already charge it with doing without effect up to now – “reviewing the budget, assisting in developing priorities, reviewing major contracts, and evaluating the performance of consultants and senior staff.” The recommendation further requires that contracts exceeding $100,000 annually must receive prior approval from the DNC Chair and officers.

In addition, the URC recommends that “the composition of the Budget and Finance Committee should be by election of qualified members,” since previously, its members have been selected by the DNC Chair and voted upon in “slates.”

One of the proposals offered by Nomiki Konst was a conflict of interest policy which would require any DNC member who had a financial interest in the DNC to recuse themselves from voting on any matter affecting their financial interest. Interestingly, this industry-standard protocol would have directly impacted Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the Chair of the URC. Dillon is the co-founder of Precision Strategies, one of the highest paid consulting firms during the election. The DNC paid Precision $230,000 for political consulting between February 2016 and the end of the primary. The proposal was voted down 6 to 9, with the Sanders appointees voting in favor and Clinton/Perez appointees voting against the proposal. However, Commission members worked after hours and ultimately achieved compromise on a recommendation calling for a “detailed financial conflicts of interest policy” modeled from best practices.

On the first day of the December meeting, moderate members of the commission signaled that they would vote down a proposal to create an Ombudsmen Council to serve as a kind of inspector general and complaints board for DNC members, but by the next day, the Commission voted to recommend a 7-member Ombudsmen Council that included the elected chairs of the DNC’s 4 regional caucuses.

The Rules and Bylaws Committee and the DNC will hopefully adopt the recommendations of the Commission in the next months. To ensure they do, the Democratic base must keep the pressure on Tom Perez. The future of the Democratic Party must be wrested from the many DNC members who are lobbyists, consultants or big money representatives who expect to always win financially even if the Party loses.
 
 
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