Tag: jane sanders
Here’s Why Bernie Is Courting Superdelegates

Here’s Why Bernie Is Courting Superdelegates

The delegate math does not look good for Bernie Sanders — but it may not matter.

Nearly a dozen states have yet to hold their presidential primaries and caucuses, but even between them, Sanders would have to perform exceptionally well to go into the Democratic National Convention this summer with enough pledged delegates to claim the nomination.

In a news conference Sunday, Sanders said that he expected Hillary Clinton would be in the same boat; that Democrats would end up with a “contested contest,” and that it would be up to superdelegates to decide the party’s nominee. Superdelegates supportive of Clinton, Sanders said, should consider switching to supporting him in those states where he won by a landslide.

Which is, frankly, a confusing strategy: the vast majority of superdelegates who have announced their support for either candidate are in the Clinton camp, and still more uncommitted superdelegates are Clinton supporters. While Clinton may not reach the nomination threshold with pledged delegates alone, her existing advantage among superdelegates will likely carry her to the nomination easily.

Sanders’s superdelegate campaign, meanwhile, is an awkward fit for the reform-minded former independent, and for the various progressive organizations that support his campaign. Superdelegates usually have experience in elected office, or as leaders within the Democratic Party, and this cycle has seen quite a bit of drama unfold between energetic (mostly younger) Sanders supporters and superdelegates committed to supporting Clinton. Now Sanders wants their votes?

“MoveOn members believe that superdelegates are fundamentally undemocratic and should be abolished,” MoveOn.com Washington Director Ben Wikler said in an email, when asked about that tension. “That’s why hundreds of thousands of us have signed petitions urging them to not override the will of the voters. For now, though, superdelegates are part of the system, so of course both candidates are going to court them for endorsements.”

Another prominent progressive coalition to endorse Sanders, Democracy for America, has multiple online petitions urging voters to pressure superdelegates into supporting him.

Join Robert Reich and Democracy for America in calling on all Democratic Party superdelegates to pledge to support the popularly-elected winner of the nomination,” one reads, with boxes for an email address and zipcode below.

Hypocrisies aside, it’s hard to fault Sanders for trying to maintain his campaign’s momentum in these final three months: seemingly every week he stays in the race, the Democratic establishment is nudged further to the left, lest they risk acenlienating his supporters.

“One of the incredible things in Sanders’s candidacy has been watching the Democratic Party become more progressive before our eyes,” said Ari Kamen, New York state political director of the Working Families Party (and the author’s second cousin). “We’re seeing things that were once totally anathema or not part of mainstream conversation now becoming the centerpiece, whether it’s expanding voting rights laws, a $15 minimum wage… these things are suddenly now mainstream Democratic tenets.”

“Our hope is that you see the culmination of that in a Democratic platform that embraces single-payer healthcare, that embraces tuition-free college, that embraces a $15 minimum wage.”

Hillary Clinton has responded unenthusiastically to such demands — “I didn’t say, ‘You know what, if Senator Obama does x, y and z, maybe I’ll support him'” in 2008, she reminded Rachel Maddow last week — but her campaign would be ill-advised to ignore the growing number of Democrats who see the convention as an opportunity to air party grievances: most Democrats polled say they want Sanders to continue his campaign until the convention.

“One of the things that we will be fighting for on the platform, whether he’s the candidate or not, is electoral reform,” Jane Sanders said in an interview recently with CNN. “The process needs to change. We need an open electoral system, same-day registration and open primaries.”

Her husband had a similar message at a rally last week in Indiana: “We are in this campaign to win, but if we do not win, we intend to win every delegate that we can so that when we go to Philadelphia in July, we are going to have the votes to put together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen.”

In other words: we’re playing by the party’s rules, so that we get a chance to change them.

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders holds a campaign rally in San Diego, California, in this file photo taken March 22, 2016.     REUTERS/Mike Blake/Files

Tax Transparency: Jane Sanders Goes Back On Disclosure Promise

Tax Transparency: Jane Sanders Goes Back On Disclosure Promise

Jane Sanders, wife of Bernie, backtracked Tuesday on promises both she and the senator made to release the couple’s complete tax returns for the years 2006 through 2013, making a red-herring excuse.

The returns will be released, Jane suggested, when Hillary Clinton provides transcripts of her lucrative speeches to Wall Street firms. Clinton should absolutely release the transcripts and she should have done so long ago, but the issues are not even close to parallel.

Two wrongs do not a right make. And being a good-guy politician does not exempt one from criticism from those who favor many of his policies, including me.

In comments to Wolf Blitzer on CNN midday Tuesday, Jane Sanders revealed that she and her husband either lack an understanding of the historic reasons it is crucial that presidential candidates release many years of complete tax returns, that they lack a broad regard for integrity in government, or that they have something to hide.

The latter concern grows from Jane Sanders’ own conduct. First, she falsely asserted that the couple had repeatedly released tax returns, an assertion with no basis in fact as my April 13 National Memo column showed. Then there was her role as the president of a small, financially struggling nonprofit college, where she reportedly funneled $500,000 to her daughter and may have made false statements on bank loan papers.

But even if the Sanders tax returns are clean as a whistle, we should care about the Sanders tax returns. That the one nearly complete return they have made available, for 2014, is pretty standard for a couple in their age and income brackets is entirely beside the point.

We should care because we want every single person running for president to make public their complete tax returns – including schedules, statements and worksheets – for many years so that we do not ever again have an unindicted felon in the White House or an admitted tax cheat just a heartbeat away.

If a white hat politician like Sanders will not follow a tradition dating to the corrupt, tax-cheating presidency of Richard Nixon and his first vice president, Spiro Agnew, it gives aid and comfort to those who want to hide their black hat conduct.

Sanders runs as Mr. Transparency, railing against what goes on beyond closed doors when Wall Streeters and CEOs meet with politicians. Yet the junior Senator from Vermont seems willfully blind to how his own conduct undermines his important arguments, which have received far too little attention in the mainstream news.

If Sanders will not walk his talk he cannot credibly challenge those whom he says, with good reason, are rigging the economy for their benefit. That loss of credibility is terrible because Sanders is raising issues that need our attention, about policies that must change or the wealthiest Americans will grow ever richer by diminishing the income and assets of the vast majority, as I have been documenting for more than 20 years.

But much worse than damage to Sanders’ credibility is the aid and comfort he gives to politicians, including Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich who have released nothing (Trump) or only summaries (Cruz and Kasich). Cruz and Kasich are both rich thanks to Wall Street. Heidi Cruz is a Goldman Sachs-er and Kasich made a fortune fast at Lehman Brothers, the overleveraged firm whose collapse set in motion the Great Recession.

The only one of the Final Five who has fully disclosed is Hillary Clinton. Her and Bill’s complete tax returns dating back to 1992 are posted at taxhistory.org, as are many other partial and complete presidential and candidate tax returns dating back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations.

We really need to see the full tax returns of those three before any one of them is nominated by their party, but Sanders is making it easy for the Republicans to say no to disclosure.

Think ahead to the elections of 2020, 2024, and beyond, especially if the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision stands, enabling the wealthiest Americans to pour unlimited sums into elections. Some of that money will be used to persuade. But as presidents including John Adams and James Madison warned, the business aristocrats will also trick people when it is in their interests to do so – and with Citizens United they can do so with abandon.

Plenty of people who want to exercise power over us from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will want to keep their tax returns out of public record now and for as long as the United States of America endures. Many of them who have something to hide will cite Sanders as their model. Some because their tax returns will show they paid little or no income tax for many years (Romney in 2012, Trump in 2016). Others may have taken aggressive positions that raise questions about their character and conduct. Still others may have unreported income, which we might learn if they disclose fully for many years and disgruntled business associates, mistresses or others come forth with cancelled checks, financial statements and other proofs.

What does it tell us that Sanders and his wife, who knew full well a year ago that they would be asked for their complete tax returns at least since 2007, have played a game of “hide the documents”? What does it tell us that Jane Sanders made an unconditional promise on Mark Halperin’s Bloomberg television program and now dishonors her word? What does it tell us that a man who rightfully demands transparency from others will not hold himself to the same standards?

And if there is something the Sanders need to hide – and I sure hope not — we need to know that, too. Why? Because even if Sanders fails to get the Democratic Party nomination for president, we want integrity in the Senate just as much as in the Oval Office.

Tax Transparency: After Expansive Vow, Sanders Releases Only 2014 Return

Tax Transparency: After Expansive Vow, Sanders Releases Only 2014 Return

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released nearly all of his and wife Jane Sanders’ 2014 tax return Friday night, but that disclosure still remains far from his wife’s promise to release complete returns for the last eight years while raising more questions about the candidate’s judgment.

As expected there was nothing startling in the schedules, raising the question of why Sanders has held back his returns, issued false statements about disclosure, and, in the case of Mrs. Sanders, made a flatly untrue claim on national television, as my reporting quickly showed.

Sanders runs as a reformer, as Mr. Transparency, and with good cause rails about the damage done by Wall Street. Yet he does not walk his own talk. His failure to be forthright and release full returns back to 2007 — when he was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Vermont — erodes the likelihood that other Presidential candidates this cycle and in the future will release their own full returns.

He is giving aid and comfort to politicians who want to hide their tax returns because what is in them really does matter. He is undermining the future of our country, but seems oblivious. Why does he not recognize that our republic is undermined when politicians — be they reformers, exploiters of weak financial integrity laws or crooks — reveal little or no tax information?

You can be sure that when pressed future politicians with conduct they need to hide will cite Sanders as the standard for making less than complete disclosure. As a would-be reformer, he ought to understand the principle and honor it.

Since Sanders likely has nothing to hide, why not make full disclosure? His mishandling of what should be the non-issue of his tax returns opens a window into the reasons why even politicians broadly aligned with his views, such as the members of the House Progressive Caucus, have been reluctant to endorse him in the primary.

 

Bizarrely, Sanders has placed himself under a tent that includes three of the remaining five Presidential candidates:

  • Donald Trump, who likely pays no income taxes and gives nothing to charity, will not release any tax information.
  • Ted Cruz, whose wife is a Goldman Sachs investment banker, has put out only four years of summary Form 1040s.
  • John Kasich, who between his years in Congress and becoming governor of Ohio, got rich at Lehman Brothers before it collapsed, has issued seven years of Form 1040s.

The fifth candidate still standing, Hillary Clinton, has released complete tax returns to 1992. You can see many tax returns, and for some only the 1040s, at taxhistory.org, a website run by nonprofit Tax Analysts, for which I am also a columnist.

Sanders’ behavior over the past nine months is even more perplexing because he must have known he would be expected to release his tax returns — a political norm dating to the dark days of the Nixon administration. President Richard Nixon, an unindicted tax criminal (his tax guy went to prison) resigned 42 years ago. Vice President Agnew confessed to evasion immediately after resigning.

We need far more disclosure about politicians, their connections, and their money, not less.

Thousands of comments on the internet assert that Sanders should not be held to account because he is alone in going after the establishment and especially Wall Street. But candidates must be held to uniform standards. Running as a reformer does not win anybody a pass. (Anyone who suspects that I dislike Sanders’ policies should read my New York Daily News essay, which explained that popular support for his views is so broad that large majorities of Republicans support his policies, even if they do not realize it.)

Unfortunately, Sanders’ responses to questions asked by other journalists after I explained the issues in my April 1 column have been less than forthright. Most troubling was what Jane Sanders told Mark Halperin on Bloomberg TV, when she claimed “every election we have released them…we did when he ran for election, yeah.” My reporting showed that was not true, but the Sanders campaign has not corrected her false statement.

As for the return that Sanders finally released on Friday evening, there’s nothing there.

The 2014 Sanders return shows that the senator and his wife gave $8,350 to charity, or 4 percent of their $205,271 income. That percentage is double the average in their income class. They did not disclose any further information about the charitable groups to which they donated.

Their Schedule C shows $4,900 in “business income” to Jane Sanders as an appointed commissioner of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission, a bi-state regulatory body created more than a decade ago that oversees shipments of radioactive waste from Vermont to the Lone Star state. It also shows that Sanders deducted $4,473 for employee meal expenses as a senator, half the cost of those meals.

The only curious item a $204 deduction for tax preparation, after Jane Sanders said that she uses the Turbo Tax program to prepare their returns. The most expensive version of TurboTax sold currently — a higher grade product than needed to prepare the couple’s returns — costs $109.99 That price includes both an online download and a compact disc. And that is the price charged by Intuit, the manufacturer, with retailers offering discounts pricing the top product at under $100.

Of course this is insignificant. Clearly, Bernie and Jane Sanders have nothing at all to hide. So why not release their complete 2007 to 2013 tax documents?

Tax returns for 2015 are not due until Monday night, April 18.