"In a major victory for underdog Democratic presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, two top officials with the Democratic National Committee publicly broke with the party Wednesday night, calling for changes to the debate process that the candidates have advocated.
In a joint statement posted to Facebook, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, both vice chairs for the DNC, called for increasing the number of debates and said a so-called exclusivity clause was a “mistake.”
“As vice chairs of the Democratic National Committee, we are calling for several more debates than the six currently scheduled, and withdrawing the proposed sanctions against candidates who choose to participate in non-DNC sanctioned debates,” they wrote.
So far, the DNC has not budged. At a breakfast with reporters Thursday in Washington sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz made it clear she had no interest in changing the rules. “We’re not changing the process. We’re having six debates,” she said. “The candidates will be uninvited from subsequent debates if they accept an invitation to anything outside of the six sanctioned debates.”
The committee this year scheduled only six debates and instituted a controversial rule that punishes candidates who participate in unsanctioned debates by barring them from future official events. O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, and Sanders, a senator from Vermont, have complained loudly about the clause, accusing the DNC of writing the rule to protect front-runner Hillary Clinton."
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/calls-mount-changes-democratic-debate-process
