“[A] political party which wishes to lead,” reads the preamble to the Democratic Party’s charter, “must listen to those it would lead, a party which asks for the people’s trust must prove that it trusts the people …”

On August 25, the Democratic National Committee took that passage to heart by limiting the power of “superdelegates” in choosing the party’s presidential nominee. Good move, and long overdue.

Proximate inspiration: The disastrous 2016 presidential cycle, in which superdelegates played a key role in assuring the nomination of Hillary Clinton (and the election of Donald Trump) by giving Clinton a seemingly insurmountable early advantage over insurgent Bernie Sanders. Backroom work by the DNC itself to engineer that outcome — exposed in a WikiLeaks email dump — made cries for reform  inevitable.

In fact, the “superdelegate” system worked precisely as intended in 2016, and  it has belied the Democratic Party’s claim to represent “the people” since its adoption in 1984.

In 1981-82, the Hunt Commission met to develop a party response to two major defeats: George McGovern’s 49-state loss in 1972, and Jimmy Carter’s 1980 failure of re-election.

As Branko Marcetic explains in “The Secret History of Super Delegates,” the party had previously reformed its process after 1968, moving the party’s center of nomination power out of smoke-filled rooms and into the hands of primary voters. As a result, McGovern and Carter won their nominations by going around the party establishment and directly to “the people.” The Commission’s solution to “restore balance” was a special class of delegate, the superdelegate, of perceived superior political judgment.

Superdelegates make up nearly 1/6th of national convention delegates, and they are by definition party insiders: DNC members, governors, members of Congress, and former presidents, vice-presidents, congressional leaders, DNC chairs.

Unlike regular delegates, who are bound by primary and caucus results, superdelegates theoretically answer to no one. They’re free to support any candidates they like, for whatever reasons they think important.

But that freedom from constraint, in addition to alloying the party’s supposed internal democracy with an elite semi-veto, is illusory. Superdelegates — officeholders hoping to be re-elected, or up-and-comers planning future campaigns — rely on the DNC itself for support. Superdelegates have every incentive to vote for whomever the DNC favors, so that the DNC will favor THEM.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and then-DNC-chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz weaponized the superdelegate system to make Clinton seem “inevitable” even where the popular vote said otherwise.

When Sanders whipped Clinton by more than 22 points in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, the two came out of the state with the same number of delegates in hand due to superdelegate pledges of fealty to Clinton. When Clinton lost she tied. When she tied she won. Inevitable! And that depressed turnout for Sanders in later states.

In 2020, superdelegates won’t be allowed to vote on the first presidential nomination ballot unless that vote is purely ceremonial because there’s an obvious winner from the popular voting. The superdelegates only vote effectually if “the people” can’t decide the first time around. A little more democratic that way, don’t you agree?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On August 23, the Internal Revenue Service announced new rules on the  federal income tax’s State and Local Tax deduction. The rules are intended to thwart an interesting scam several state governments worked up to “save” that deduction. It’s an interesting reversal of the two major parties’ usual talking points.

Republicans love to be seen as taking axes to taxes. “Tax cuts” are their two favorite words. But as part of “paying for” last year’s tax cuts, they capped the SALT deduction. Taxpayers who itemize their deductions can now only strike $10,000 in state and local taxes off their federally taxable income. Republicans are “paying for” their middle class tax cuts by soaking the rich.

Democrats, especially Democrats who govern high-tax states, love to soak the rich. In fact, they have some favorite tax words, too — three of them on the subject of tax cuts that benefit wealthier Americans. Those Americans, Democrats say, need to pay “their fair share.” But they’re against soaking the rich (for “their fair share”) in this particular case.

Why? Well, the SALT deduction allowed those states to soak the rich more, without much of a fight. Think your taxes are too high here? Just grab that federal tax deduction to take the edge off! Pay “your fair share” here — the feds can take it in the shorts or force people in lower-tax states to subsidize you at the federal level. The SALT cap invites state and local tax rebellion.

So the tax-and-spend states came up with and audacious scheme:

They set up “charitable foundations” to do the stuff they do with taxes. Then they offered dollar-for-dollar state tax credits for donations to those foundations … which the wealthy could deduct from federally taxable income as “charitable donations” instead of as “state and local tax payments,” thus avoiding the cap.

A transparent shell game, and one the IRS can hardly be blamed for seeing through and putting the kibosh on.

I’m all in favor of state governments operating as charities, but real charities take actual donations, not donations in lieu of taxes. Why not keep those charitable foundations and use them to replace, rather than offset, state and local taxes?

And while we’re at it, how about we push the feds to do the same thing? Want a new aircraft carrier? Hold a bake sale.

Squabbling over which gang gets the tax take doesn’t change the fact that taxation is theft.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On August 21, US president Donald Trump’s former lawyer entered a guilty plea on several charges. The centerpiece charge: Making an illegal campaign contribution “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” Michael Cohen’s own lawyer, Lanny Davis, identifies that candidate, revealing that Cohen “testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime.”

The issue, of course, involves a hush money payment of $130,000 from Cohen to adult film actor Stephanie Clifford, aka “Stormy Daniels.” The legal theory is that Cohen’s payment constituted an illegal and unreported in-kind campaign contribution to Trump. Or, as it is put in the charging documents, Cohen “made a $130,000 payment to [Clifford/Daniels] to ensure that she not publicize damaging allegation before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election.”

I’m going to argue that that last bit — on which the criminal charge hinges — isn’t necessarily true, but first let me clear the deck.

Yes, it was stupid for Trump to pay hush money for silence from Clifford/Daniels. Yes, it was even dumber for him to have a third party make that payment on his behalf. And beyond being stupid, it was politically unnecessary.

Everyone who cared about Donald Trump’s marital infidelities and sexual peccadilloes already had enough — more than enough — information on the subject to reach the same conclusion that they would have reached from this particular incident. And it was therefore clear that nobody who still intended to vote for him as of late October 2016 DID care. Which leads me to question the claim that the purpose of the payment was political (that is, intended “to influence the election”) as such.

Trump paid out hush money — money secured by a confidentiality agreement —  to his first wife in 1992, when he was not a candidate for public office. And again to his second wife in 1999, when he was not a candidate for public office (he did withhold a payment when she threatened to go public as he prepared his failed campaign for the Reform Party’s 2000 presidential nomination, which I guess could be taken as evidence that he “intended to influence the election”).

Who else has Trump paid for silence when he wasn’t a candidate for public office, and why? Who knows?

While it’s obvious that the upcoming presidential election was much on Donald Trump’s mind in October of 2016, it’s not obvious to me that someone paying sex-related hush money on his behalf is a “campaign contribution,” especially if he had other reasons (for example, the potential wrath of his third wife) to not want his sex life on the front page. And his history says he did in fact have other motivations.

If a friend gave Trump a pair of shoes for his birthday on June 14, 2016, and he wore them while accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination on July 19, 2016, were those shoes a “campaign contribution?”

Trump has committed any number of impeachment-worthy offenses. Perhaps his tormentors should concentrate on those offenses instead of just looking for the easiest way to “get Trump.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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