The D.N.C. Deliberates
6:50 p.m. | Florida Divided By Two: A proposal to seat all of Florida’s delegates but give each one only half a vote passed the committee by a vote of 27-to-0 with one abstention.
Clinton stalwart Harold Ickes, said he was “disappointed” that the delegates from the Sunshine States did not receive full voting rights, but supported the motion.
This will change the delegate allocation, because of the way delegates are apportioned from one congressional district to the next.
“We will leave here more united than we came,” committee member Alice Huffman said of the decision.
Mr. Ickes is now expressing his disappointment. He said that a motion to restore all of the state’s pledged delegates, but only give each half a vote would “hijack” the democratic process. The proposal would remove four delegates from Mrs. Clinton.
“This body of 30 individuals has decided that they’re going to substitute their judgment for 600,00 voters,” Mr. Ickes said. “Now that’s what I call democracy,” he added sarcastically.
And he throws down the challenge: “Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee,” he added.
Floor fight anyone?
(The credentials committee, a 186-member body, doesn’t meet until July, and any decision by it supposedly would have to be approved on the floor at the convention in August.)
6:45 p.m. | Fla. Motion Fails: Motion Failed: The motion to restore Florida’s delegates with full voting rights failed, after a vote by members of the rules committee just now. Twelve of them voted in favor, 15 were opposed.
The crowd erupted in boo’s and chants of “Denver! Denver!”
Committee member Hartina Flournoy predicted correctly that the motion on seating all of the Florida delegates “has no chance of passing this body,” but voted for it anyway.
Several members of the committee, including David T. McDonald and Yvonne Gates expressed their opposition to the proposal on the table during discussion. “In all fairness I think it needs to be stated that what we were trying to do was respect the rules,” Ms. Gates said. “Florida did not follow the rules that we had set up.”
6:30 p.m. | Michigan Mended?: Our colleague Katharine Q. Seelye reports: Following its probable deal on Florida, the rules committee has reached a deal on the Michigan delegation, officials said, giving Mrs. Clinton a net gain of five delegates.
The plan was offered Saturday by Mark Brewer, the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party. He asked the committee to award Mrs. Clinton 69 delegates and Mr. Obama 59 – a rough estimate of the results, assigning the “uncommitted” tally to Mr. Obama, whose name was not on the ballot.
Officials said that the delegates would be seated but with a half vote, not a full vote.
Both the Obama and Clinton campaigns had made other proposals. The Obama camp wanted to split the delegates. The Clinton campaign wanted 73 delegates for Mrs. Clinton and 55 for uncommitted.
6:20 p.m. | And They’re Back: After nearly three hours behind closed doors, James Roosevelt Jr., the committee co-chairman, called the meeting back into session at 6:15. Committee member Alice Huffman began by placing a motion on the floor to fully seat the Florida delegates – it was met by swift applause. As Ms. Huffman began speaking on her motion, Alexis Herman, the other committee co-chair, committed a minor error of parliamentary procedure. (”My error. I’m really ready to go home,” Ms. Herman said.)
Ms. Huffman picked things up from there, saying that Democrats should not be penalized for a decision to move up the state’s primary made by Republicans. She added that the voters of Florida were this victims in all of this
Ms. Huffman acknowledged that her motion “runs a little counter to what we’ll do in 2012 and how we’ll operate as a rules body in the future.” But she said the committee had to do something to unite the Democratic Party in November, especially when it comes to keeping the voters happy in the battleground state of Florida.
5:25 p.m. | Breakthrough?: Our colleague Jeff Zeleny reports that a tentative deal has been reached on Florida, according to two sources inside the room, with Mrs. Clinton getting an additional 19 delegates. Jeff’s take:
But an hour-lunch break, so members could go behind closed doors to discuss the cases before them, has turned into a contentious debate about how to settle the Michigan dispute.
For now, members are hashing this out – privately, out of the view of cameras and the dwindling crowd here – in hopes of reaching a compromise. Two people inside the room report that the situation resolving Florida was a snap, compared to the discussions involving Michigan, which had deadlocked the group. Call it the political equivalent of a hung jury.
4:45 p.m. | Coming Up Next: The 28 members of the rules committee are supposed to return to the hearing room any minute now. When they take their seats once again, they’ll be settling in for evening deliberations — of undetermined length, we hazard to add — to consider the arguments on delegate seating they heard earlier today.
During the “lunch” break, the mezzanine level of the Washington hotel where the session is taking place had the feel of a spin room with committee members, party leaders and, of course, representatives from the Clinton and Obama campaigns, meeting each other and the press.
As we head into round two, here’s what we know: When it comes to Florida, the Clinton campaign is looking for full seating of all the state’s delegates – no half votes. Speaking on behalf of the Obama team, Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida suggested a different proposal that would cut the number of pledged delegates in half but would still result in a net gain of 19 delegates for Mrs. Clinton.
On the issue of Michigan, the state Democratic Party favors a proposal to award 69 delegates to Mrs. Clinton and the remaining 59 to Mr. Obama based on a calculation that blends the results of the primary with exit poll results and other factors. The Clinton campaign appears to consider this just a lot of fuzzy math and instead is looking for a 73 to 55 division of delegates (in Mrs. Clinton’s favor). Meanwhile, the Obama campaign wants the D.N.C. to split Michigan’s delegates evenly between the two candidates.
So, we’ll be watching as the Rules and Bylaws committee members talk among themselves — some have already shown a tendency toward the loquacious — for probably the next few hours. They may come to some decisions tonight, but they also have the option of punting any unresolved issues to the party’s Credentials Committee, stretching the uncertainty out even further.
3:05 p.m. | Brazile Steps Up: During the Q&A with Mr. Blanchard, who noted that he was flying back to Michigan after the hearing to celebrate his mother’s 98th birthday, committee member Donna Brazile shared a pearl of wisdom from her own mom.
“My momma always taught me to play by the rules,” she said, adding that “when you decide to change the rules, especially middle of the game … that is referred to as cheating.” Ms. Brazile said fairness dictated that the committee should take into consideration Michigan voters who might have written in a candidate or stayed away from the polls on primary day thinking that their vote would not count. That scenario, of course, would help out Mr. Obama. The crowd applauded loudly.
“Hillary Clinton did play by the rules,” Mr. Blanchard responded. “I just want to pick the paper up in Michigan … and feel that the voters were treated fairly
And with that, the committee took a very late lunch break.
2:45 p.m. | The Clinton Camp’s Rebuttal: Former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard goes to bat for the Clinton campaign telling the committee members that they’ve “got to honor the 600,000 voters in Michigan” and the allocation of delegates should fairly reflect the voters’ preference.
“It doesn’t make sense to punish the voters of Michigan because you thought our party leaders were overly aggressive,” Mr. Blanchard told the rules committee.
He took issue with previous speakers who characterized the primary as “flawed,” and said that the Clinton campaign supports awarding delegates based on the results from Jan. 15.
2:15 p.m. |Obama’s Michigan Plan: David Bonior, representing Senator Barack Obama, comes to the committee with the campaign’s proposal – split the delegates of Michigan evenly between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Bonior, who ran Senator John Edwards’s presidential campaign and served for 26 years as a representative from Michigan in the House of Representatives, said that “the event that happened on January 15 was not anything close to a normal primary election.”
And, “given the serious flaws in the Michigan primary,” the state Democratic party’s delegate allocation plan would not be appropriate, Mr. Bonior said.
Meanwhile, outside a severe thunderstorm just darkened the sky, with thunder rolling around.
1:45 p.m. | Fair Reflection Returns Harold Ickes, chief delegate-counter for Senator Clinton and advocate of full seating, gets the last question (or comment) during Senator Levin’s lengthy testimony. He tells the Michigan senator that he’s behind him on seating the full delegation, but pleads with Mr. Levin for “fair reflection” – a phrase Mr. Ickes has been using throughout the day – when it comes to allocating the delegates. Mr. Ickes said sees the 69-59 allocation plan as arbitrary.
But Levin appears not to budge: “You’re calling for a fair reflection of a flawed primary.”
1:15 p.m. | Michigan’s Message Senator Carl Levin of Michigan appeared before the committee to express his support for the proposal floated by the state party, which would seat all of Michigan’s delegates with full voting rights. He acknowledged, however, that the allocation of delegates between the candidates is “imperfect,” adding that “there is no scientific way to reach the conclusion we reached.”
He challenged the committee to figure out a better way of dividing the delegates, saying that if they could come up with a better formula, “so be it.”
The bottom line, according to Senator Levin: “The Democratic party needs unity in the middle of this contentious battle between two strong candidates. The Michigan Democratic Party has achieved unity. We’re asking you to preserve it.”
Mr. Levin also took swipes at the “privileged position” that Iowa and New Hampshire occupy as the first states to hold nominating contests in every recent election cycle. “No state should have that perpetual privilege.”
Earlier, that state’s Democratic Party chairman Mark Brewer asked the committee to seat the full slate of 128 pledged delegates, divided 69 for Senator Clinton and 59 for Senator Obama even though his name wasn’t on the ballot. He said 594,000 Democrats voted in the primary in mid-January, and about 30,000 votes weren’t counted because they were write-ins.
The proposal, he said, would reflect the “true state of voter preference in Michigan.” (Mr. Brewer argued that some voters marked their ballot “uncommitted” as a proxy for Mr. Obama.)
Mr. Brewer said the delegate allocation the state party came up was based not just on the raw tally of the vote in Michigan, but also on exit poll results and a survey of uncounted Democratic write-in votes.
But in the question and answer period, rules committee member Elaine Kamarck took issue with Mr. Brewer’s method, calling it a “willy-nilly kind of arbitrary assignment of delegates.”
“It seems to me that this way lies chaos,” she added.
12:45 p.m. | First Up, Florida The Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee became judge and jury on Saturday as it heard arguments from party heavyweights and representatives from campaigns of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama about the disputed delegates from Florida and Michigan.
In the morning the rules committee heard from Howard Dean, the party chairman, who noted the historic nature of the election (“We are going to nominate either the first woman or the first African-American to our party”) and said the contest has brought Democrats in record numbers to the polls.
The committee then proceeded to consideration of the seating of Florida’s delegates under a petition submitted by Democratic National Committee member Jon Ausman, who said at the hearing that Florida’s “timing violation” should leave it with half of its delegates at the convention.
State Senator Arthenia L. Joyner spoke on behalf of the Clinton campaign and asked the committee to “give voices back to the 1.75 million voters in Florida” arguing for a full seating of all the state’s delegates.
Senator Barack Obama’s representative, Robert Wexler of Florida’s 19th congressional district, said the campaign was supporting the Ausman petition and that seating 50 percent of the state’s delegates would conform to party rules.
“Our Florida Democratic voters are frustrated by the decisions that have been made that diminish our primary,” Mr. Wexler said. “The Obama presidential campaign supports a resolution today that will allow the D.N.C. to preserve its nomination process and at the same time enable Democrats in Florida to participate in choosing our party’s nominee and allow elected delegates from Florida to be represented at the Democratic National Convention.”
So far, the meeting this morning has been interrupted many times by applause from those seated in the audience. While Mr. Wexler was up, Harold Ickes, a member of the committee and chief champion of Senator Clinton’s desire to seat both delegations fully, asked whether the Florida congressman was “familiar with the concept of fair reflection?” That drew a round of laughter when Mr. Wexler asked Mr. Ickes to enlighten him. And then, Mr. Ickes declined to go forward.
There are a lot of phrases being bandied about — “Alice in Wonderland,” “Shall is Shall, Shall is Not May.” Stay tuned, we’ll be back with more.
By Michael Falcone
Clinton stalwart Harold Ickes, said he was “disappointed” that the delegates from the Sunshine States did not receive full voting rights, but supported the motion.
This will change the delegate allocation, because of the way delegates are apportioned from one congressional district to the next.
“We will leave here more united than we came,” committee member Alice Huffman said of the decision.
Mr. Ickes is now expressing his disappointment. He said that a motion to restore all of the state’s pledged delegates, but only give each half a vote would “hijack” the democratic process. The proposal would remove four delegates from Mrs. Clinton.
“This body of 30 individuals has decided that they’re going to substitute their judgment for 600,00 voters,” Mr. Ickes said. “Now that’s what I call democracy,” he added sarcastically.
And he throws down the challenge: “Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee,” he added.
Floor fight anyone?
(The credentials committee, a 186-member body, doesn’t meet until July, and any decision by it supposedly would have to be approved on the floor at the convention in August.)
6:45 p.m. | Fla. Motion Fails: Motion Failed: The motion to restore Florida’s delegates with full voting rights failed, after a vote by members of the rules committee just now. Twelve of them voted in favor, 15 were opposed.
The crowd erupted in boo’s and chants of “Denver! Denver!”
Committee member Hartina Flournoy predicted correctly that the motion on seating all of the Florida delegates “has no chance of passing this body,” but voted for it anyway.
Several members of the committee, including David T. McDonald and Yvonne Gates expressed their opposition to the proposal on the table during discussion. “In all fairness I think it needs to be stated that what we were trying to do was respect the rules,” Ms. Gates said. “Florida did not follow the rules that we had set up.”
6:30 p.m. | Michigan Mended?: Our colleague Katharine Q. Seelye reports: Following its probable deal on Florida, the rules committee has reached a deal on the Michigan delegation, officials said, giving Mrs. Clinton a net gain of five delegates.
The plan was offered Saturday by Mark Brewer, the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party. He asked the committee to award Mrs. Clinton 69 delegates and Mr. Obama 59 – a rough estimate of the results, assigning the “uncommitted” tally to Mr. Obama, whose name was not on the ballot.
Officials said that the delegates would be seated but with a half vote, not a full vote.
Both the Obama and Clinton campaigns had made other proposals. The Obama camp wanted to split the delegates. The Clinton campaign wanted 73 delegates for Mrs. Clinton and 55 for uncommitted.
6:20 p.m. | And They’re Back: After nearly three hours behind closed doors, James Roosevelt Jr., the committee co-chairman, called the meeting back into session at 6:15. Committee member Alice Huffman began by placing a motion on the floor to fully seat the Florida delegates – it was met by swift applause. As Ms. Huffman began speaking on her motion, Alexis Herman, the other committee co-chair, committed a minor error of parliamentary procedure. (”My error. I’m really ready to go home,” Ms. Herman said.)
Ms. Huffman picked things up from there, saying that Democrats should not be penalized for a decision to move up the state’s primary made by Republicans. She added that the voters of Florida were this victims in all of this
Ms. Huffman acknowledged that her motion “runs a little counter to what we’ll do in 2012 and how we’ll operate as a rules body in the future.” But she said the committee had to do something to unite the Democratic Party in November, especially when it comes to keeping the voters happy in the battleground state of Florida.
5:25 p.m. | Breakthrough?: Our colleague Jeff Zeleny reports that a tentative deal has been reached on Florida, according to two sources inside the room, with Mrs. Clinton getting an additional 19 delegates. Jeff’s take:
But an hour-lunch break, so members could go behind closed doors to discuss the cases before them, has turned into a contentious debate about how to settle the Michigan dispute.
For now, members are hashing this out – privately, out of the view of cameras and the dwindling crowd here – in hopes of reaching a compromise. Two people inside the room report that the situation resolving Florida was a snap, compared to the discussions involving Michigan, which had deadlocked the group. Call it the political equivalent of a hung jury.
4:45 p.m. | Coming Up Next: The 28 members of the rules committee are supposed to return to the hearing room any minute now. When they take their seats once again, they’ll be settling in for evening deliberations — of undetermined length, we hazard to add — to consider the arguments on delegate seating they heard earlier today.
During the “lunch” break, the mezzanine level of the Washington hotel where the session is taking place had the feel of a spin room with committee members, party leaders and, of course, representatives from the Clinton and Obama campaigns, meeting each other and the press.
As we head into round two, here’s what we know: When it comes to Florida, the Clinton campaign is looking for full seating of all the state’s delegates – no half votes. Speaking on behalf of the Obama team, Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida suggested a different proposal that would cut the number of pledged delegates in half but would still result in a net gain of 19 delegates for Mrs. Clinton.
On the issue of Michigan, the state Democratic Party favors a proposal to award 69 delegates to Mrs. Clinton and the remaining 59 to Mr. Obama based on a calculation that blends the results of the primary with exit poll results and other factors. The Clinton campaign appears to consider this just a lot of fuzzy math and instead is looking for a 73 to 55 division of delegates (in Mrs. Clinton’s favor). Meanwhile, the Obama campaign wants the D.N.C. to split Michigan’s delegates evenly between the two candidates.
So, we’ll be watching as the Rules and Bylaws committee members talk among themselves — some have already shown a tendency toward the loquacious — for probably the next few hours. They may come to some decisions tonight, but they also have the option of punting any unresolved issues to the party’s Credentials Committee, stretching the uncertainty out even further.
3:05 p.m. | Brazile Steps Up: During the Q&A with Mr. Blanchard, who noted that he was flying back to Michigan after the hearing to celebrate his mother’s 98th birthday, committee member Donna Brazile shared a pearl of wisdom from her own mom.
“My momma always taught me to play by the rules,” she said, adding that “when you decide to change the rules, especially middle of the game … that is referred to as cheating.” Ms. Brazile said fairness dictated that the committee should take into consideration Michigan voters who might have written in a candidate or stayed away from the polls on primary day thinking that their vote would not count. That scenario, of course, would help out Mr. Obama. The crowd applauded loudly.
“Hillary Clinton did play by the rules,” Mr. Blanchard responded. “I just want to pick the paper up in Michigan … and feel that the voters were treated fairly
And with that, the committee took a very late lunch break.
2:45 p.m. | The Clinton Camp’s Rebuttal: Former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard goes to bat for the Clinton campaign telling the committee members that they’ve “got to honor the 600,000 voters in Michigan” and the allocation of delegates should fairly reflect the voters’ preference.
“It doesn’t make sense to punish the voters of Michigan because you thought our party leaders were overly aggressive,” Mr. Blanchard told the rules committee.
He took issue with previous speakers who characterized the primary as “flawed,” and said that the Clinton campaign supports awarding delegates based on the results from Jan. 15.
2:15 p.m. |Obama’s Michigan Plan: David Bonior, representing Senator Barack Obama, comes to the committee with the campaign’s proposal – split the delegates of Michigan evenly between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Bonior, who ran Senator John Edwards’s presidential campaign and served for 26 years as a representative from Michigan in the House of Representatives, said that “the event that happened on January 15 was not anything close to a normal primary election.”
And, “given the serious flaws in the Michigan primary,” the state Democratic party’s delegate allocation plan would not be appropriate, Mr. Bonior said.
Meanwhile, outside a severe thunderstorm just darkened the sky, with thunder rolling around.
1:45 p.m. | Fair Reflection Returns Harold Ickes, chief delegate-counter for Senator Clinton and advocate of full seating, gets the last question (or comment) during Senator Levin’s lengthy testimony. He tells the Michigan senator that he’s behind him on seating the full delegation, but pleads with Mr. Levin for “fair reflection” – a phrase Mr. Ickes has been using throughout the day – when it comes to allocating the delegates. Mr. Ickes said sees the 69-59 allocation plan as arbitrary.
But Levin appears not to budge: “You’re calling for a fair reflection of a flawed primary.”
1:15 p.m. | Michigan’s Message Senator Carl Levin of Michigan appeared before the committee to express his support for the proposal floated by the state party, which would seat all of Michigan’s delegates with full voting rights. He acknowledged, however, that the allocation of delegates between the candidates is “imperfect,” adding that “there is no scientific way to reach the conclusion we reached.”
He challenged the committee to figure out a better way of dividing the delegates, saying that if they could come up with a better formula, “so be it.”
The bottom line, according to Senator Levin: “The Democratic party needs unity in the middle of this contentious battle between two strong candidates. The Michigan Democratic Party has achieved unity. We’re asking you to preserve it.”
Mr. Levin also took swipes at the “privileged position” that Iowa and New Hampshire occupy as the first states to hold nominating contests in every recent election cycle. “No state should have that perpetual privilege.”
Earlier, that state’s Democratic Party chairman Mark Brewer asked the committee to seat the full slate of 128 pledged delegates, divided 69 for Senator Clinton and 59 for Senator Obama even though his name wasn’t on the ballot. He said 594,000 Democrats voted in the primary in mid-January, and about 30,000 votes weren’t counted because they were write-ins.
The proposal, he said, would reflect the “true state of voter preference in Michigan.” (Mr. Brewer argued that some voters marked their ballot “uncommitted” as a proxy for Mr. Obama.)
Mr. Brewer said the delegate allocation the state party came up was based not just on the raw tally of the vote in Michigan, but also on exit poll results and a survey of uncounted Democratic write-in votes.
But in the question and answer period, rules committee member Elaine Kamarck took issue with Mr. Brewer’s method, calling it a “willy-nilly kind of arbitrary assignment of delegates.”
“It seems to me that this way lies chaos,” she added.
12:45 p.m. | First Up, Florida The Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee became judge and jury on Saturday as it heard arguments from party heavyweights and representatives from campaigns of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama about the disputed delegates from Florida and Michigan.
In the morning the rules committee heard from Howard Dean, the party chairman, who noted the historic nature of the election (“We are going to nominate either the first woman or the first African-American to our party”) and said the contest has brought Democrats in record numbers to the polls.
The committee then proceeded to consideration of the seating of Florida’s delegates under a petition submitted by Democratic National Committee member Jon Ausman, who said at the hearing that Florida’s “timing violation” should leave it with half of its delegates at the convention.
State Senator Arthenia L. Joyner spoke on behalf of the Clinton campaign and asked the committee to “give voices back to the 1.75 million voters in Florida” arguing for a full seating of all the state’s delegates.
Senator Barack Obama’s representative, Robert Wexler of Florida’s 19th congressional district, said the campaign was supporting the Ausman petition and that seating 50 percent of the state’s delegates would conform to party rules.
“Our Florida Democratic voters are frustrated by the decisions that have been made that diminish our primary,” Mr. Wexler said. “The Obama presidential campaign supports a resolution today that will allow the D.N.C. to preserve its nomination process and at the same time enable Democrats in Florida to participate in choosing our party’s nominee and allow elected delegates from Florida to be represented at the Democratic National Convention.”
So far, the meeting this morning has been interrupted many times by applause from those seated in the audience. While Mr. Wexler was up, Harold Ickes, a member of the committee and chief champion of Senator Clinton’s desire to seat both delegations fully, asked whether the Florida congressman was “familiar with the concept of fair reflection?” That drew a round of laughter when Mr. Wexler asked Mr. Ickes to enlighten him. And then, Mr. Ickes declined to go forward.
There are a lot of phrases being bandied about — “Alice in Wonderland,” “Shall is Shall, Shall is Not May.” Stay tuned, we’ll be back with more.
By Michael Falcone
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