Legal Commentary

Stanley Fish has a characteristically provocative little column on the superdelegates at the NY Times.  He calls it "Memo to the Superdelegates: No Principles, Please."  As David Ponet and I have recently argued, however, the superdelegates are quite generally bound by a political morality, one that doesn't give them perfectly clear guidance on what they should do but one that certainly gives them more direction and principle than Fish can tolerate.  Fish just can't fathom any principles because he thinks political morality is a contradiction in terms:  "One could say that they should exercise political judgment but, given that they are political and not moral agents, that would be tautological."  Not so.  Even if the delegate system was designed to help subvert pure majoritarian democracy, it doesn't mean that superdelegates may do whatever they please for whatever reasons they prefer.  Ponet and I spell out what we think in our column at the Legal Times -- and in so doing explain the differences between the superdelegates who have their position by virtue of their representative capacities and the "super-duper" delegates, who have a much different constituency.