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.
