Harold Ickes, speaking on behalf of the Clinton campaign, came in for a lot of criticism for his remarks on the Michigan compromise, under which the pledged delegates were split 69-59 in favor of Clinton, but each getting only a half vote.
There was, perhaps, a little more hyperbole in his words than was entirely necessary, but as I outlined this morning, Ickes is basically right about the awarding by the RBC of any delegates at all to Obama.
Now, everybody knows that a substantial portion of the people who came out to vote for "uncommitted" in Michigan did so because they really wanted to vote for Obama, but he wasn't on the ballot (which was his own doing, whatever you may think of his motivations for doing it). But the bottom line is that the consequence of that withdrawal is that the only facts that can be definitively stated about those votes is that they were for "uncommitted." They could mean this. They could mean that. But they do mean "uncommitted."
Or at least they did, until they were sprinkled with magic pixie dust over lunch this afternoon. Because when the RBC came back, they were magically transformed into votes that said, "Yes, we said 'uncommitted,' but we really meant 'Barack Obama.'"
And maybe that was even true. The point, though, is that the RBC had no mechanism under the rules by which they are entitled to make that decision. No mechanism, that is, except one: the prerogative of the rules committee to say -- provided it can muster the votes for it -- that the rules can go jump in the lake.
And that's what they did today.
Now, at one point today, the rumor was that the other presidential candidates who had withdrawn from the ballot in Michigan were being prevailed upon to agree that they would somehow assign whatever interests they may have had in their claim to whatever portion of the "uncommitted" might have been cast as a proxy for their names to Obama instead. I don't know whether that happened, or by what mechanism that could even be accomplished (besides more pixie dust), but it didn't rate any formal mention before the RBC if it did.
So Harold Ickes is right. This was a violation of the bedrock principle that a vote has to be counted as what it was, not what we wish, guess, or hope it was.
Unless, of course, we adopt a motion in the rules committee that says we don't have to. Today.
A violation? Yes. But one that anyone who plays the "let's parse the bedrock understanding of what it means to have rules" game -- especially someone like Harold Ickes -- has to know looms as a real possibility? Absolutely.
UPDATE: Some of you will get this easier than others, because I'm having to use a legal term of art to express it, but here it goes:
This is, I think, at the heart of what Ickes was trying to express: What the RBC did today, it did sitting as a court of equity. But the RBC does not, ordinarily, have jurisdiction to sit as a court of equity. It sits, to complete the analogy, as a court of law. That is, there are a set of rules to follow, and you follow them regardless of "fairness" if being fair requires a departure from the law. A court of equity is empowered to make its decisions based on the more vague "interests of justice," even when the letter of the law would not ordinarily permit it.
Courts of equity are not invalid, where they are empowered to sit, just because they decide cases at equity rather than at law.
But the fact that their decisions are valid and binding does not mean the decisions they make were based in law.
