DNC rejects Sanders’s request to remove committee chairs

Senior Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials have rejected a request from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s campaign to change the leadership of two crucial committees at the national convention this summer.

{mosads}Jim Roosevelt and Lorraine Miller, co-chairs of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, dismissed a request to remove Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank as co-chairmen of the convention’s platform and rules committees, respectively.

The campaign’s complaint, they wrote in a letter to Sanders lawyer Brad Deutsch, failed to allege a violation of the convention’s rules governing the conduct of elections or delegate selection. 

“Having carefully reviewed your challenge, we find that it fails to meet the criteria for the foregoing reasons and pursuant to the Regulations and Bylaws Committee for the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Reg. 3.4(G)(i) we are compelled to dismiss it,” they wrote to Deutsch.

Deutsch sought to have Malloy and Frank removed from the panels, which will have power over the party’s policy positions and the procedures for the next presidential election, citing “personal hostility” toward Sanders. 

“Gov. Malloy and Mr. Frank have both been aggressive attack surrogates for the Clinton campaign,” Deutsch wrote in a letter to Miller and Roosevelt. “Their criticisms of Senator Sanders have gone beyond the dispassionate ideological disagreement and have exposed a deeper professional, political and personal hostility toward the Senator and his Campaign.”  

Sanders believes Malloy is too biased because he has repeatedly bashed him for his views on gun control, accusing the Vermont senator of catering to the gun industry.

Malloy said Sanders should be “held accountable” for the “death and destruction” caused by his votes in Congress, such as voting while in the House against a bill that would have extended the period for background checks to five days.

Frank has criticized Sanders for “outrageously McCarthyite” tactics, such as suggesting that banks did not face criminal prosecutions after the 2008 financial collapse because of hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions their employees gave to political leaders.