By Daniel Marans
The HuffPost (12/9/17)

WASHINGTON ― At its final meeting on Friday and Saturday, the Democratic National Committee’s Unity and Reform Commission agreed to a set of dramatic revisions aimed at restoring faith in the presidential nomination process and the management of the DNC.

The 21-member panel, which held its ultimate gathering in a conference room at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C., is recommending the effective abolition of some 60 percent of superdelegates to the presidential nominating convention. It has also presented a set of measures designed to increase accessibility to presidential primaries and caucuses, as well as reforms aimed at opening up DNC budgetary and administrative processes to greater scrutiny through, among other things, the creation of an Ombudsmen Council.

If the Unity and Reform Commission’s recommendations are adopted by the DNC, as they are widely expected to be, the party’s presidential nominating process will be significantly different in 2020. 

The reforms are not yet a done deal, however. The commission’s report now heads to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which will have a 6-month period to amend party rules to enact the reforms, and could theoretically try to dilute the commission’s recommendations (though they would have to run any changes by the commission). The roster of over 400 voting DNC members will also get to vote on the proposals at the next full DNC meeting in the fall of 2018. 

But the commission’s most adamant reformers, most of whom were appointed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), characterized the outcome as a major win for the Democratic Party’s disillusioned progressive wing. The acceptance of Sanders surrogates was essential to the commission’s success, since evidence that the DNC had favored Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential primary and the anger it inspired among Sanders supporters fueled the creation of the commission.

“I hope that the grassroots [activists] who have felt dismissed and who have lost faith in the party … understand that they have had warriors on this commission who are completely in line with their values and that we fought and we won a lot to make this party inclusive,” said Nomiki Konst, a Sanders appointee to the commission.

Asked what his message would be for the hardened cynics on the grassroots left, Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, and another Sanders pick on the commission, declared that he too “went into [the commission] a hardened cynic ― as late as yesterday.” …

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(Commoner Call cartoons by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free to use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

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From One Of The Best Ignored Books To Come Out Of The 2016 Election Debacle…

“Democrats practice a better brand of rhetoric, and they’re not as lunatic as the Republicans have become on social issues, but the fact is, they’re no less a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oligarchy than the Republicans, and the people have gotten wise to it.

“With the press in the pocket of the Oligarchy, it took a people’s movement to expose the reality behind the carefully constructed facade of the Democratic Party as the People’s Party. That’s what the Occupy Movement in the run up to the 2012 elections accomplished — it put inequality on the public’s radar. It took someone like Sanders to give this nascent movement a political voice. And it will take us, we the people, to complete the revolution in the next few years.”

• John Atcheson author of “WTF, America? How The US Went Off The Rails And How To Get It Back On Track”, 2017 (p.60)

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