BRATTLEBORO — In the presidential primary last month, Vermonters made a resounding statement in favor of Bernie Sanders, delivering him a decisive 86-percent win that rendered Hillary Clinton disqualified from gaining any of the state's delegates.
Well - except for those pesky superdelegates, who can do whatever they so choose, regardless of what their constituents definitively prove they want.
One of those superdelegates: Vermont's less-fiery senator, Patrick Leahy, who has told the press he will cast his heavily weighted vote for Clinton regardless of what the Vermonters he works for want - a move that has sent the state into a justifiable uproar.
But before we dive into the story of how the Senate's longest-tenured member stabbed in the back the very voters who have been electing him for the past 40 years, let's do a little digging on this whole concept of superdelegates.
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According to The Nation, the superdelegate role in the Democratic Party can be traced to 1968, to the Democratic National Convention riots.
That violence forced the party to turn the job of choosing a candidate over to ordinary people, giving rise to the state-based system of primaries and caucuses that we have now.
But by the 1980s, Democratic bigwigs feeling a distinct lack of power decided to reclaim their authority, citing voters' poor choices with candidates like George McGovern as the reason the general public could no longer be trusted to do the voting themselves.
Enter then–North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt, who was tasked with righting the Reagan-pummeled DNC ship, and the superdelegate system was born in 1984.
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Hunt proposed that each state's Democratic Party U.S. reps and senators, democratic state governors, and various other DNC-appointed “distinguished party members” would be given as much voting power as a state delegate.
To put that in perspective, in this 2016 primary election, 432 of the 4,765 delegates will be superdelegates - meaning that each superdelegate's vote carries the weight of roughly 10,000 regular votes.
Yikes! If you are an everyday U.S. voter looking to make your vote count, are you outraged yet?
For those of us watching political pundits tally Clinton's superdelegate count as some sort of insurmountable total standing in Sanders' way, it's easy to get discouraged.
But since the superdelegate system was put into place, not a single democratic primary has been decided by superdelegate vote. And since superdelegates aren't actually committed to voting for the candidates whom they originally endorsed, they can side with the majority after all 50 states have had a chance to weigh in.
In fact, this has been the stringent practice of superdelegates since their inception. Why? Because to blatantly overturn the wishes of your voter base is suicide for the party.
And while the DNC and its corporate-owned liberal media allies will pull every other shady trick in the book to get Clinton the nomination, including using early superdelegate tallies to try and discourage Sanders supporters, rest assured that if Bernie Sanders wins the majority of regular delegates, the superdelegates will fall in line.
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So now, let's take a closer look at Senator Patrick Leahy's statement that he will support Clinton no matter what.
In a pre–Super Tuesday interview with Vermont Public Radio, Leahy said he would cast his ballot for Clinton regardless of the outcome of the vote.
His reasoning? He committed to Clinton years before the primary process even began, and he now feels it a matter of personal pride not to go back on his word.
He even said, “Long before Sen. Sanders ever said he was going to run, I urged then-Secretary Clinton to run and told her I'd support her.”
Now, this statement might come as a surprise to Vermonters remembering back to the 2008 election when Leahy was an early Obama adopter.
He told CNN at the time, “My endorsement is not in opposition to Sen. Clinton. [...] Barack Obama represents the America we once were and want to be again.”
When exactly did Leahy make this backroom deal with Clinton to support her?
And why did Leahy decide to make a decision for all Vermonters on his own before the race in question had ever begun and any information about the candidates and their platforms was available?
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The easy answer is: because that's what all superdelegates do. They make an initial endorsement and later switch their vote to align with the voter base they represent.
This is a right, and many would even say an obligation, given to all superdelegates based on the 1980s system.
But Leahy's masking his utter betrayal of his own constituents by making it seem like a matter of personal integrity, while simultaneously hoping his voter base doesn't understand the superdelegate system well enough to call him out on it, is particularly offensive.
It's an attitude that suggests that Leahy considers himself to be 10,000 times more “distinguished” than all other Vermonters. And to top it off, he's thrown in a clumsy attempt to make it seem like it's Sanders' fault for not announcing his candidacy early enough - meaning that somehow Leahy's 10,000-vote decision can be easily sewn up with a “whoever-gets-there-first” approach that has nothing to with the issues, the candidates, or the wants of the people in the state he represents.
It's also worth noting that in addition to his superdelegate vote at the convention, Leahy gets one regular vote as a resident of Vermont - just like all the rest of us.
By this token, if Leahy had wanted to fulfill his personal promise to Clinton, then he should have joined the 13 percent of Vermonters who cast their ballot for her on Super Tuesday.
That would have been the place to vote based on decade-old promises and strange ideals of personal integrity, not when he's commanding 10,000 extra votes, a privilege given to him not by the DNC but by the Vermonters who elected him. For without that Senate seat, Leahy would also have no superdelegate vote.
And those Vermonters who elected him? They made it abundantly clear who they want to be president in 2016.
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So why is Leahy really doing this? After all, he's been casting superdelegate votes since the very beginning; he can't possibly have done it all this time and not understand how it's supposed to work.
Which means that there's no way any of this is actually about some eight-year-old promise, or about his family's long history of personal integrity.
Only he can know that for sure, but I doubt Leahy will be receiving a low-level cabinet position from Clinton in trade for his endorsement, and while he definitely has more to lose financially than most of us Vermonters should Sanders get his way when it comes to distribution of wealth, somehow I just can't imagine that it's about money, either.
So what could be so compelling that it would lead Vermont's once-beloved senator to risk forever losing the loyalty of his constituents?
Only one answer comes to mind: jealousy. It's my personal belief that Leahy's apparent betrayal of Sanders and the Vermonters who support him comes down to little more than spite - knowing that after all the years Leahy has served and all the things he's done for Vermont, it's Sanders with a chance at the Oval Office.
Perhaps, deep down, Leahy knows he lacks the fervor and personal conviction that have turned Bernie Sanders into a folk hero over the past year.
And while I'm ever more hopeful that come this time next year Vermonters will be referring to Bernie as “President Sanders,” I suspect that one way or another we won't be referring to “Senator Leahy” as our Senator much longer.