The very lovely (tic) Sally Kohn has a bone to pick with the democratic party and their love, strike that, their NEED of POWER..... Well.... most of us know that power corrupts and that's why Sally wrote this article about the corrupt democratic party of which she belongs.....
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/opinions/superdelegates-democratic-party-kohn/index.html
(CNN) You might think, from their title, that superdelegates are better than regular delegates.
Actually, they're worse.
The process for presidential elections in the United States is governed by the Constitution. Primary elections, however, are not. They are controlled by the political parties themselves. In fact, until the 1820s, members of Congress chose the presidential nominee for each party. That elitist system started to buckle with the advent of national conventions, though delegates were still selected through state and local convention processes controlled by the parties.
It wasn't until the mid-1900s that parties embraced primary elections as part of the process for deciding on presidential candidates. But to ensure that the voters themselves didn't have all the power, in 1982 the Democratic Party adopted what are called superdelegates, who today control 15% of the final nomination process.
The Republican Party has superdelegates, too, but they have a lot less power. GOP superdelegates are only about 7% of the nominating vote, and according to Republican convention rules, superdelegates must vote in accordance with their state primary outcomes.
It's in the Democratic Party that the outsized power and lack of accountability of superdelegates is supremely, well, undemocratic.
Specifically, after the Democratic caucuses in Nevada, CNN estimated that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were almost tied for pledged delegates, with 52 and 51 of them, respectively. And yet Clinton was leading by a much wider margin in the total delegate count because a whopping 445 superdelegates -- out of a total of 712 -- pledged to support her. By comparison, just 18 superdelegates pledged to support Sanders.
In other words, while Clinton and Sanders were almost perfectly split in the tally of voter-determined delegates, superdelegates threw their weight behind Clinton by an almost 25-to-1 ratio.
Any liberal who has ever been at a protest march for social justice has heard the popular chant: "This is what democracy looks like!" Well, superdelegates are definitely not what democracy looks like. Anything but..
.... And now for the GREAT LIE of the Democratic Party in the words of a flaming liberal. The gig is up.
...In other words, the Democratic Party's superdelegates exist to preserve the power and influence of the Democratic Party's elite. Well that makes perfect sense -- if you're, say, the inherently elitist, pro-big business, rich Republican Party. But not if you're supposed to be the party that protects the interests of regular Americans.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/opinions/superdelegates-democratic-party-kohn/index.html
(CNN) You might think, from their title, that superdelegates are better than regular delegates.
Actually, they're worse.
The process for presidential elections in the United States is governed by the Constitution. Primary elections, however, are not. They are controlled by the political parties themselves. In fact, until the 1820s, members of Congress chose the presidential nominee for each party. That elitist system started to buckle with the advent of national conventions, though delegates were still selected through state and local convention processes controlled by the parties.
It wasn't until the mid-1900s that parties embraced primary elections as part of the process for deciding on presidential candidates. But to ensure that the voters themselves didn't have all the power, in 1982 the Democratic Party adopted what are called superdelegates, who today control 15% of the final nomination process.
The Republican Party has superdelegates, too, but they have a lot less power. GOP superdelegates are only about 7% of the nominating vote, and according to Republican convention rules, superdelegates must vote in accordance with their state primary outcomes.
It's in the Democratic Party that the outsized power and lack of accountability of superdelegates is supremely, well, undemocratic.
Specifically, after the Democratic caucuses in Nevada, CNN estimated that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were almost tied for pledged delegates, with 52 and 51 of them, respectively. And yet Clinton was leading by a much wider margin in the total delegate count because a whopping 445 superdelegates -- out of a total of 712 -- pledged to support her. By comparison, just 18 superdelegates pledged to support Sanders.
In other words, while Clinton and Sanders were almost perfectly split in the tally of voter-determined delegates, superdelegates threw their weight behind Clinton by an almost 25-to-1 ratio.
Any liberal who has ever been at a protest march for social justice has heard the popular chant: "This is what democracy looks like!" Well, superdelegates are definitely not what democracy looks like. Anything but..
.... And now for the GREAT LIE of the Democratic Party in the words of a flaming liberal. The gig is up.
...In other words, the Democratic Party's superdelegates exist to preserve the power and influence of the Democratic Party's elite. Well that makes perfect sense -- if you're, say, the inherently elitist, pro-big business, rich Republican Party. But not if you're supposed to be the party that protects the interests of regular Americans.
