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From Jared Beck's "What Happened to Bernie Sanders", published by Hot Books

"Eight months later, I was back in Judge Zloch's courtroom. The service of process issue having been resolved,

I was again seated at the plaintiffs' counsel table, watching the DNC's counsel make new arguments for dismissing the case. The court had scheduled the hearing in response to the defendants' second motion to dismiss complaint,

which proffered a whole new slew of grounds for why Judge Zloch should throw out the case without even getting to the discovery phase, i.e., the process by which litigants accumulate potential evidence through such discovery tools as document requests + depositions.

Among them was the contention that courts should not intrude in cases involving mere "political promises" ; the defendants compared the promise of neutrality in the Democratic Party's charter to George Bush's notorious broken campaign promise of "Read my lips, no new taxes",

arguing that if Sanders' donors have standing to bring suit, so too would Bush's donors. (DNC counsel Bruce Spiva) has been going over this line of reasoning with th Judge Zloch, warning that the Court that it should not "wade into the political thicket."

Now the judge alluded to the example of Bush, previously argued by the defendants in their moving papers:

THE COURT: Is there a difference between a campaign promise made by a political candidate and a promise that pertains to the integrity of the primary process itself?

In other words, President's George H. W. Bush's --

MR. SPIVA: "Read my lips"

THE COURT: -- promise -- "read my lips, no new taxes," and then he raised taxes. Well he could not be sued for raising taxes.

But with respect to the DNC charter, Article V, Section 4, is there a difference between the two?

MR. SPIVA: Not one -- there's obviously a difference in degree. I think your Honor--I'm not gonna--I don't want to overreach and say there's no difference.

But I don't think there's a difference that's material in terms of how the Court should decide the question before it in terms of standing,

in that this, again, goes to how the party runs itself, how it decides who it's going to associate with, how it decides how it's going to choose its standard bearer ultimately.

In case after case, from "O'Brien", to "Wymbs", to "Wisconsin vs. Lafollette ", the Supreme Court and other courts have affirmed the party's right to make that determination. Those are internal issues that the party gets to decide without interference from the courts.

And the fact that money has -- I know that my distinguished colleague on the other side has said several times that, Well, money makes this different, and it really doesn't in this context.

You know, again, if you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I'm gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that's different.

But here, where you have a party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding,

we could have -- and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way ot was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right,

and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal politics to answer those questions."

In his response to Judge Zloch's question, loaded with the image of Tammany Hall-esque figures smoking cigars,

Spiva only confirmed what we, our clients, and so many of Sanders' supporters had felt in our guts for months--that the DNC's obligation to be neutral was a sham, making the primaries a sham as well.

To hear the DNC's lawyer admit this fact in open court was still shocking through.

When is was my turn to speak, I rose and told Judge Zloch that if what Spiva has said "is true, then I think it's a really sad day for democracy in this country.

Because what essentially the DNC has now stated in a court of law is that it believes that there is no enforceable obligation to run the primary elections of this country's democracy in a fair and impartial manner."

One does not typically see lawyers defending multi million-dollar corporations from fraud claims get up in court to proclaim that their clients have no obligation to follow the commitments set forth in their governing documents.

Yet it was precisely the tactic adopted by Spiva at the hearing. And it was not the only jarring or unexpected statement of the day.

At one point, he suggested that our case could never be certified as a class action because donors to the Sanders campaign would have still given money to him--indeed, been more likely to donate--had they known the process was rigged.

At another, Spiva told Judge Zloch there was no way for the Court to even define what the Charter means by "evenhanded and impartial."

Such terms weren't the only key components of our case incapable of definition, according to Spiva. Earlier in the hearing, he had suggested that it would be impossible for the Court to "define who is a member of the Democratic Party nationwide. "

At the start of his presentation, Spiva even accused our lawsuit of being "a political weapon against the DNC and its former chairperson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz " and that we were the ones "threaten(ing) some serious First Amendment injury to the defendants. "

Spiva's brazen comments felt like a form of gaslighting, a psychological tactic to distract from the core legal arguments at issue that long afternoon.

But the comment about smoking cigars in the backrooms was like a punch in the gut--an in-your-face statement by Spiva that his clients would say + do as they pleased + there was nothing we, our clients, or anyone else could do about it.

(End of book excerpt)