Warring Democrats may finally be making up.
After a brutal 2016 presidential primary, made more devastating by a general election loss to President Trump, Democrats created a committee tasked with reforming the party and bridging the wide gap between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton wings. That panel — dubbed the Unity Reform Commission — met for the final time Saturday and they advanced a suite of sweeping recommendations that if fully adopted by the entire Democratic National Committee would drastically change the party’s presidential nominating process and how the DNC is managed.
For the first time since Trump won the White House, members of both the Sanders and Clinton factions within the DNC appear to be mending, shaking off the distrust and anger that dominated the 2016 cycle and moving toward some middle ground.
That’s not to say there isn’t skepticism among the two camps. Over the course of the two-day meeting in Washington there were a number of heated exchanges between members of the commission.
“There is a crisis in the city,” Nina Turner, a Sanders-appointed member, said on the party’s lack of budget transparency.
“This is fucking corruption,” Nomiki Konst, another Sanders-appointed member, said of what she considers the outsized influence of consultants and vendors within the party.
There was also self-reflection. “As much as I love him for many other things, [President Barack Obama] did not lead this party well,” said Elaine Kamarck, a member of the commission.
“What is unforgivable is that you get to 2015 with a party this broke — that should never have happened, Kamarck added later in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
But when all was said and done the majority of those on the commission — Turner, Konst, and Kamarck included — were excited about the future and the agreed-upon recommendations in the final report crafted by the panel. Those include reducing the number of superdelegates by about 400 (there are currently more than 700), expanding the use of primaries whenever possible, requiring an absentee option for presidential caucuses and same-day voter registration, and implementing strong mechanisms for oversight of the DNC’s budget.
“Today was a real victory for people who want reform in the party,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ 2016 campaign manager. “The Democratic presidential nominating process, assuming that all of these provisions get adopted by the DNC, will [be] a process that is much more democratic, and much more under the control of the rank-and-file of the party as opposed to party insiders.”
Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the commission, said working on the report itself helped shrink the gap between competing viewpoints in the party. Those on the commission were appointed by either Sanders, Clinton, or DNC Chairman Tom Perez.
“Nobody is 100 percent happy but everyone worked hard to come up with compromise and it pushed some farther than they wanted, maybe some not as far as they had hoped, but I think ultimately it had a real role in bringing us all together,” O’Malley Dillon told the Washington Examiner.
Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, agreed.
“When you have hardcore political operatives, which we all are on this commission, spending as much time as we did together it’s really kind of a lesson for everybody that when you’re in an institution and have two wings arguing and feeling each sides not hearing each other the best way to move forward is to actually work on a project together,” Kleeb, a Sanders appointee told the Washington Examiner.
“People were looking at us to see if we could create unity through reform; we did it,” said Jim Zogby, who has been a DNC member for 26 years.
Though happy with the reforms that made it into the final proposal, Larry Cohen, co-chair and Sanders-appointee on the commission, said the work isn’t over. From here, the proposal will move to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee before it goes before the full DNC for a final vote. That’s expected at the party’s fall meeting in 2018 but could occur earlier.
“[This] can’t be an ending in any sense,” said Cohen, who received a celebratory call from Sanders in the middle of his interview with the Washington Examiner. In the weeks leading up to commission’s final meeting, Sanders made the media rounds, promoting the panel’s work and pressing for many of the changes that ultimately made it in the proposal.
Closing remarks by commission members were filled with praise of each other, declarations of unity, and vows to fight their common enemy: Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress. But Gus Newport, former mayor of Berkeley, California and a Sanders-appointee brought everyone down a peg, reminding them that Democratic voters are the ultimate judge.
“Don’t go outta’ here feeling too goddamn proud,” Newport said. “My constituents say, Gus, ‘if you don’t come back with answers we want, no matter how difficult it is we’re going to start a third party;’ millennials have said they’ve had enough.”
