Sanders Supporters Get Their Day In Court Against Wasserman Schultz

[Jim Lane]

158. I hope even nonlawyers can realize how absurd your posts are.

All it takes is a little reading comprehension.

You write:

The definition of consumer could not cover a political donor. You wanted to defend this claim and your attempt at legal analysis was amusing. Re read your own post. Again I would never make the silly claims you asserted about the DC consumer protection law without reading the law.

How about you reread my post? How about you identify the claims that I supposedly "defend{ed}" or "asserted"? I pointed this out to you in #156:

{W}hat "claims" did I make about the DC law? I made clear that I hadn't read it, or the regs, or the interpretive decisions. I said only that merely characterizing a statute as one for consumer protection didn't prove that it excluded political donors.

Thus, I never said the statute applied. Notice, incidentally, that when I disagree with you I often quote the statement of yours that I'm disputing. You find it easier to avoid quoting me so that you can attack purported errors I never actually made.

You write:

Contrary to your rather amusing claims, nothing has been proven at this stage. Again we are at the motion to dismiss stage and to date the plaintiff's allegations are unproven and are poorly drafted.

Another fine straw man. I have repeatedly said that nothing about the facts has been proven at this stage. In my #93 in this subthread, to which I specifically directed your attention, I wrote:

If DNC/DWS win this motion, the case will be over. . . . There will be no inquiry into whether the DNC actually did violate its own rule in this instance.

Obviously, I never said that, even without an inquiry, the plaintiffs' factual allegations had been proven. That's why, in #156, I asked:

So what exactly is it in my #149, which you now label "wrong", that you dispute?

Again you can't be bothered to answer.

I've twice qualified my comments in this post by saying that it's the factual allegations in the complaint that haven't been proven. What has been established, by the DNC's motion papers, is its attitude toward its own rules. This was the key point in my #149:

In the motion, the DNC argues that the party rule requiring DNC neutrality is a mere "political promise" that it can violate at will with complete impunity.

There are restrictions on a 12(b)(6) motion, in which plaintiffs don't have to prove their factual allegations and defendants don't have to (indeed, aren't allowed to) disprove them. Therefore, no conclusions can be drawn about the truth of the factual allegations, and I drew none. Nevertheless, we can draw conclusions about the parties' legal positions.

My conclusion is that the DNC does not consider itself bound by its own published rules. My personal opinion is that the Democratic Party should change that position and should either enforce its rules or, if it has decided to go the route of blatant favoritism, change the published rule. Enforcing the rule would be best but changing it, to reflect actual practice, would at least be honest.