Bernie Sanders: ‘We Have to Replace the Current Democratic National Committee Leadership’

Tuesday during remarks he gave in Washington, D.C., Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, seemingly called for Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) to be ousted.

Sanders has criticized Wasserman Schultz in the past, but in this instance he cited the need for a more progressive platform and improvements with the election processes.

Partial transcript as follows:

Number one, I do believe that we have to replace the current Democratic National Committee leadership. We need a person at the leadership of the DNC who is vigorously supporting and out working to bring people into the political progress. Yeah, I know political parties need money. But it is more important that we have energy, that we have young people, that we have working class people who are going to participate in the political process and fight for their kids and for their parents.

We need, at the Democratic National Convention, to approve a progressive platform, the most progressive platform ever passed by the Democratic Party, a platform which makes it crystal clear that the Democratic Party is, in fact, on the side of working people, is on the side of low-income people, is on the side of people who have no health insurance, and is prepared to stand up the powerful corporate interests whose greed is doing so much harm to this country.

We need real, electoral reform within the Democratic Party. And that means, among many, many other things, open primaries. The idea that in the state of New York, the great state of New York, three million people could not participate in helping to select who the Democratic or Republican candidate for president would be, because they had not registered — because they had registered as an independent, not as a Democrat or Republican, is incomprehensible.

We need open — we need same-day registration, and that means that anybody in this country can walk in and get registered to vote on the day of a primary or a caucus.

We need adequate staffing and training to run elections in a way that is appropriate for our democracy. We now take it for granted, but we should not.

In this process, we have gone through a situation in Arizona, where people waited on line five hours in order to cast their votes. How many tens of thousands of people simply gave up — gave up the right to vote, and walked away?

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