• 4 Posts
  • 201 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 20th, 2024

help-circle
  • To clarify, that case was thrown out becuase plaintiffs lacked standing. I guess that counts as the DNC winning?

    In Wilding v DNC:

    Plaintiffs filed a putative class action alleging that during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries the DNC and its chairwoman improperly tipped the scales in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was challenging Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    This website reports a similar quote about replacing candidates though with more context:

    [I]f you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I’m gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that’s different. But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, 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, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

    That isn’t the entire quote and it seems to be missing some important context. The link to the transcript is dead unfortunately.

    Even if that is the complete context:

    • I don’t know if what Spiva is saying is legally true. As the Trump trial has shown us just because a lawyer argues something in court does not mean it’s true or legal.
    • Assuming what Spiva is saying was true then and is still true now, he also says “And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions.” I’m not 100% sure what this means because of the missing context, but it seems to imply simply picking the candidate in a cigar filled room would have brought legal trouble to the DNC.

    It’s still not clear the DNC can unilaterally replace Biden as the candidate without his consent. If they did it would open a whole host of new problems, the least of which is how do the pick the new nominee now that nearly all states have already held their primaries.

    Saying “it’s a simple thing that has to happen, just do it DNC” is just blatant misinformation.

    Also, Spiva appears to no longer work for the DNC. It isn’t clear if their current counsel holds the same opinion.


  • But one DNC lawyer’s argument actually tries to justify the party’s right to be biased on behalf of one primary candidate over another, according to an article from The Young Turks. In other words, they could have chosen their nominee over cigars in a backroom. That’s what the attorney reportedly said in a Florida federal court:

    Do you have a more reliable source than “a laywer said”? Do you know which lawyer is alleged to have said it? Do you know if that lawyer is still working for the DNC? Have the DNC bylaws changed sine 2017 when this quote is alleged to be from?

    You’re making a lot of assumptions based on a poorly sourced anonymous quote from 7 years ago.







  • Honestly I think they’re just to pretend like that doesn’t exist. I would be interested to hear their stance on it though.

    There isn’t a lot of self consistency with the conservative logic around abortion. Abortion is murder to them, but they drive by abortion clinics every day and do nothing. You’d think a building dedicated to murdering children would demand a stronger response.

    Abortion is murder, but it’s okay to murder the child if it wasn’t conceived under the right conditions.

    Abortion is murder, but we can leave it up to the states to decide when it’s murder and when it’s okay.

    Just a lot of mental gymnastics.


  • They’ve backed themselves into an ideological corner.

    For years the right has campaigned against abortion on the premise that “life begins at conception”. Because of this stance IVF puts them into a tricky situation: continue to maintain their extreme view that life begins at conception and oppose IVF, or accept IVF and concede that life doesn’t begin at conception.

    If they accept IVF then that undermines their entire argument against abortion, which is obviously not a choice you make if your goal is to make all abortions illegal. So conservstives take the ridiculous stance that IVF embryos are babies, and since some embryos are lost during the IVF process, IVF must be murder.













  • Why didn’t the AIPAC spend $15 million to buy AOCs seat as well if that’s all there is to it?

    I think something you may not be taking into account is that Bowman’s district was redrawn since he first got elected, drastically changing his constituency:

    The congressional district’s boundaries have shifted since Bowman first won office in 2020, losing most of its sections in the Bronx and adding more of Westchester County’s suburbs. Today, 21% of its voting-age population is Black and 42% is non-Hispanic white, according to U.S. Census figures, compared to 30% Black and 34% white in the district as it existed through 2022. Bowman is Black. Latimer is white.

    This change made him particularly susceptible to a primary challenge, regardless of PAC spending.

    This article shows the AIPAC has contributed almost $900 thousand to Wesley Bell’s campaign as of April 30th. This isn’t total spending in the race, just direct campaign contributions. Still less than they contributed to the Latimer’s campaign for sure, but not insignificant. We’re still almost 6 weeks until the Missouri primary election which is when the spending usually ramps up. To do an apples to apples comparison at this point in time would take more time than I care to invest but I’d love to see the results if you want to do it. Regardless of the exact figures, it’s clear the AIPAC is targeting only specific progressive Democratic candidates, and it seems to me the reason they’re doing so is because the candidates are already politically vulnerable.

    Also Latimer beat Bowman by nearly 17% per NBC news.