Long a thorny issue the question of what degree of responsibility political parties have to maintain a level playing surface for their candidates and voters refuses to go away.

In the well noted class action lawsuit Wilding v. DNC Services Corp. brought by supporters of then presidential candidate Bernie Sanders against the DNC and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Wasserman Schultz the DNC won the case, but the Sanders supporters may have won the argument. The suit alleged in essence that the DNC and chairwoman Wasserman Schultz had their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton and against her opponent Sanders.

Ultimately Judge William Zloch and later the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit dismissed the case on fairly arcane legal grounds. But the really startling revel from the case came from the attorney for the DNC, Bruce Spiva. Spiva argued that DNC Services Corp. was/is a private corporation with no obligation to follow any rules, even their own. A few quotes from that argument:

“The court would have to basically tell the party that it couldn't change [the neutrality rule], even though it's a discretionary rule that it didn't need to adopt to begin with."

“The party could have favored a candidate. I'll put it that way. Maybe that's a better way of answering your Honor's original question. Even if it were true, that's the business of the party, and it's not justiciable.”

Wilding v. DNC Services Corp. was probably the most successful unsuccessful lawsuit in history. Even though it failed on legal grounds it demonstrated that DNC and the Democratic Party that it represents are more than willing to abandon democratic process in pursuit of political control and are happy to say it if need be on the record.

That was on full display in 2016 and again this year as the independent minded and Sanders endorsed Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was forced out of the race that he was leading. Whatever your opinion regarding the allegations of Platner’s conduct it was plainly evident that Platner had a target, arguably even a bounty on his back and that the Democratic establishment put it there. They needed an instrument to force Platner out of the race and unsurprisingly they got it.

I reached out to Stanford Law professor Pamela S. Karlan about the legal viability of the DNC’s argument in Wilding. She agreed with Spiva and the court on the law saying that the DNC appeared to be within it’s rights legally. However the tension between the business of Democratic politics and traditional political organizing is not only is not going away, it’s arguably moving to center stage. The democrats have taken refuge in the law while the Republicans have driven them nearly completely out of power with what appears to be better political organizing.

The political core of democratic rule is representative democracy. The consent of the governed may have no standing in U.S. federal law but no government can function as a legitimate democracy without it. When we talk about so called insurgent Democratic candidates we are really talking about backlash candidates. These are candidates that feel and harness palpable rage against what is often perceived as an anti-democratic Democratic party.

The DNC strategy appears to be, ignore the rage, defeat the insurgents and hold on to power at all costs. In 2016 the worst thing the DNC could imagine was Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate and standard bearer. It’s a decade later and the Democratic party is completely out of power and everything the Democratic coalition writ large achieved since World War II has been reduced to rubble.

I’ll conclude with quote from Nobel laureate Bob Dylan:

Come senators, congressmen, Please heed the call, Don’t stand in the doorway, Don’t block up the hall, For he that gets hurt, Will be he who has stalled, There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’, It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin’