consortiumnews | Conventional
wisdom said that powerful Congressman Joseph Crowley couldn’t be beat.
But his 20-year career in the House of Representatives will end in
January, with the socialist organizer who beat him in the Democratic
primary in the deep-blue district of the Bronx and Queens poised to
become Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In a
symbolic twist of fate, the stunning defeat of Crowley came a day before
the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party voted on what to
do about “superdelegates,” those unelected Democratic Party elite
who’ve had an undemocratic and automatic vote in presidential
nominations since 1984 to prevent leftwing candidates from being
nominated.
Crowley’s
defeat shows how grass-roots movements can prevail against corporate
power and its pile of cash. The Crowley campaign spent upward of $3
million in the Democratic Party primary. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign
spent one-tenth of that. He wielded the money. She inspired the people.
As the
28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was quick to say after her Tuesday night
victory, her triumph belongs to everyone who wants social, economic and
racial justice. She ran on a platform
in harmony with her activism as a member of Democratic Socialists of
America and an organizer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.
Conventional wisdom said superdelegates—who exerted undemocratic power
over the selection of the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—couldn’t
be stopped from once again putting the establishment’s thumbs on the
scale.
But on
Wednesday afternoon, the party committee approved a proposal to prevent
superdelegates from voting on the presidential nominee during the first
ballot at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (The last time the
party’s convention went to a second ballot was 1952.)
As NPR reported,
the committee “voted to drastically curtail the role ‘superdelegates’
play in the party’s presidential nominating process. The DNC’s Rules and
Bylaws Committee voted 27 to 1 to block officeholders, DNC members and
other party dignitaries from casting decisive votes on the first ballot
of presidential nominating conventions.”
Make no
mistake: Those in the top echelons of the Democratic Party aren’t moving
in this direction out of the goodness of their hearts. Grass-roots
pressure to democratize the party—mounting since 2016—is starting to pay
off.
