Does the Democratic Party Have the Right to Nominate Democrats for the Presidency?

National Nurses United president RoseAnn DeMoro, fresh off such insights as “Donald Trump is our best hope for single payer” and “Tom Perez is the greatest establishment neoliberal in human history,” comments in this profile of Kamala Harris.

“She’s not on our radar,” RoseAnn DeMoro, a Sanders ally and the executive director of National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association, said of Ms. Harris. “She’s one of the people the Democratic Party is putting up. In terms of where the progressives live, I don’t think there’s any ‘there’ there.”

So, someone from the Democratic Party shouldn’t be the Democratic nominee in 2020? I don’t know, this seems, just perhaps, slightly problematic to me. If you are on the left and think Harris hasn’t proven anything or is unacceptably centrist, that’s fine. The former is more defensible, the latter I’m not really sure. But it’s the framing that bugs me. The 2020 Democratic nominee for president is going to come from the Democratic Party, unless it is Bernie Sanders. And the problem here is that what DeMoro and her supporters are really saying is that if the nominee is not Bernie or someone Bernie-approved who is also not a Democrat, then they aren’t voting for a Democrat, even in the face of actual fascism. At that point, DeMoro is just Jill Stein.

Or maybe she just thinks Trump is better on health care than a standard liberal.