Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) would support re-instating a ban on the Democratic National Committee accepting donations from lobbyists, he told the Huffington Post in an interview published Wednesday.
“I think it’s important that people feel that the party is their party,” Ellison said. “There is a pragmatic, perhaps too pragmatic step that you can say, ‘We’ll just take whatever money from whatever source in whatever amount.’ But once you do that, I think you cross a line where people do not feel that the party is really theirs.”
In a separate interview with the publication, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, seen as the other leading contender for DNC chair, said that “we have to have everything on the table” and did not rule out accepting donations from lobbyists.
The Washington Post had reported last year that the DNC, then under the leadership of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), had done away with the ban on such donations, which was initially proposed by Barack Obama when he was a presidential candidate 2008.
Note to Ellison: No one’s gonna notice.
Sounds good to the purity-left, but it would be a major handicap to the Dems at a time when money to fight the GOP is needed in vast amounts.
Such a ban also includes lobbyists for the Sierra Club, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, SPLC, SCLC, and other liberal interest groups.
It’s a dreadful idea—beloved only by those who are foolish enough to believe that all lobbyists are bad actors.
That group is composed almost exclusively of Bernie’s Bern-outs.
Off topic, but I had to note this nonsense:
Bingo. If the RNC did it, they’d roll it out with enough aplomb to get the message out (not that they’d ever do it), but this would be entirely message-failed by the DNC and ignored by the MSM as a result.
Stupid. You don’t get “purity points” from the general population. You do get tagged as “a bunch of losers” when you don’t have enough money to compete in all 50 states.