Rules and Bylaws Committee

So what have we learned from the recent Democratic battle royal in Capital City?

For starters, if you break the rules, you have to pay a price. This could not be truer for the states of Florida and Michigan who had moved up their primaries, despite the fact that the rules for both the Democratic and Republican national committees forbid anyone to move their primaries before February 5. New Hampshire was the only exception for the Democrats.

Despite these rules, those two states moved their primaries up. The GOP penalized Michigan and Florida, along with Wyoming, New Hampshire and South Carolina by taking away one half of the delegates in that state. Obviously, there wasn’t a whole fallout about what the GOP handed down and no one seems to be surprised by the action. The Democrats, on the other hand, simply stripped Florida and Michigan of their delegates…all of them, and the candidates agreed not to campaign in those states. The democratic leadership did this to send a message to other states thinking about moving their primaries up, in an attempt to gain control of the schedule again.