Moulitsas: Sanders's socialist coup | The Hill - Op Ed [View all]

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By Markos Moulitsas - 05/24/16 05:33 PM EDT

Knowing it’s lost electorally, the Bernie Sanders campaign is now pushing for a superdelegate coup, one that would discard the will of the Democratic primary electorate in favor of an unearned coronation. Whether willfully or not, such a strategy is not just an affront to basic democratic principles, it would also serve to disenfranchise the growth demographics powering the modern Democratic Party.

“We can argue about the merits of having superdelegates, but we do have them,” said Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver. “And if their role is just to rubber-stamp the pledged delegate count, then they really aren’t needed, right? So they’re supposed to exercise independent judgment about who they think can lead the party forward to victory.”

That is quite the turnaround from a few months ago, when Sanders and his surrogates were railing against the superdelegate system as an undemocratic affront to the will of the voters. And they’d be right — if, that is, those superdelegates had shown any willingness to subvert the will of the voters, something they didn’t do in 2008 when the insurgent Barack Obama won the nomination and certainly won’t do this year. The nominating process is undeniably in need of reform, but that doesn’t justify Sanders’s hypocrisy in siding with superdelegates over his newly adopted party’s voters.

But aside from the merits, let’s examine what such a superdelegate coup would mean.

Full Article at the Hill