When Bernie Sanders‘ donors sued the Democratic National Committee, saying: 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
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Moreover, the party’s own charter calls for elections to be run in a fair and impartial manner.
Yet the Party argued that it is not even minimally required to run a “fair and impartial” election, neither by democratic norms, nor by the bylaws that it voluntarily adopted, nor by the statements the party leaders gave during the primary that they would run a fair and impartial primary:
Smoke Cigars and Pick Candidates:
Bruce V. Spiva, the lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee argued that the party had the right to decide: 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
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Spiva argued that it was not enough that
- democratic norms call for fairness and impartiality,
- the party’s bylaws call for impartiality
- party officials promised impartiality in the media
The only way the Democratic Party had any culpability to be fair and impartial, is if Bernie Sander’s donors:
- specifically read the Bylaws before donating, and
- their donation was demonstrably contingent on reading the bylaws.
Sander’s donors were not even asking for the election results to be changed. They were merely asking to get their donations back and the DNC wouldn’t even do that.
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