DNC To Decide On Unseated Michigan, Florida Delegates

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Members of a Democratic rules committee voted on Saturday to seat all of Florida’s and Michigan’s delegation to the party’s national convention and give their delegates a half vote each.

A first vote, which would have seated all of Florida’s delegation with full voting privileges, failed.

After the results were announced, spectators started to boo and his and some started chanting, “Denver! Denver!” the site of the party’s convention in August.

Democrats fear that a protracted battle over the issue all the way to the convention could split the party and weaken it’s chances of winning the White House in November.

The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee is hearing the two states’ appeals on its decision to strip all of their delegates because they moved their primary contests earlier on the calendar.

Lawyers for the committee advised in a memo CNN obtained this week that the committee’s rules call for 50 percent of the delegations to be seated.

Seating all of the states’ delegates is not on the table, the committee Co-chairwoman Alexis Herman said in her opening remarks.

“We had many states that wanted to violate the timing. We needed to send a very strong signal in order to prevent additional states from moving forward,” Herman said.

After meeting for about five hours, the hearing broke for lunch. The audience of 500 people and those out in hallways appeared to grow more boisterous as the hearing went on, cheering and booing speakers.

Supporters of Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had disagreed over how best to handle the situation.

Both Democratic presidential hopefuls have said they want the Florida and Michigan delegates to attend the convention.

Clinton’s campaign is calling for the results of the states’ primaries to be honored and the delegates awarded based on the results. That approach would help her chip away at Obama’s lead in pledged delegates because she handily won both states and would be awarded a greater share of the delegates.

Obama’s campaign disagrees, saying he followed the rules, took his name off of the Michigan ballot and did not campaign in either state.

The chairman of Michigan’s Democratic Party called on the committee to seat Michigan’s delegation in full, with full voting rights, and divide the pledged delegates between Clinton and Obama, 69-59.

In Michigan, Clinton got 55 percent of the vote, and 40 percent of Democrats voted for an uncommitted slate.

Mark Brewer admitted under questioning from the panel that the party had not followed any set guidelines in determining the split but had reached this compromise because “we have to do something in this situation; we can’t do nothing. I wish there were more, I wish it were better, but it’s all we have.”

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, meanwhile, used his time before the committee to attack New Hampshire’s “privileged position” as the traditional first-in-the-nation presidential primary — and the Rules and Bylaws Committee itself for ultimately granting that state a waiver that allowed it to maintain that status, despite a party plan designed to address complaints from other areas of the country.

Levin argued that Michigan had accepted the ruling that it would not be one of the four states allowed to hold its primary in January — objecting only when New Hampshire, which was not included in that group, was granted a waiver.

The dispute over the seating of Michigan’s delegates is a thornier dispute than the dilemma over Florida’s delegation. Clinton was the only major candidate who did not remove her name from Michigan’s primary ballot after the committee’s decision last summer.

Florida Democrats conceded in their opening remarks that a party penalty for holding their primary was unavoidable but pleaded with Democratic leaders to seat half their state’s delegates at the summer convention.

“We recognize, in fact, that Florida has violated that timing rule,” said Florida Democratic National Committee member Jon Ausman, who had challenged the original penalty, and he said a punishment of some kind was “appropriate.”

But he said Florida’s superdelegates did not need to face a similar reduction under party rules.

Dozens of sign-toting, chanting protesters gathered outside the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, the site of Saturday’s events, to have their say on what the decision should be.

Some of the signs read “Count our Florida votes” and “Rules, what rules?”

With no Michigan or Florida delegates included, Obama leads Clinton by 202 delegates. He needs 42 more to clinch the nomination.

“Right now, what we have to do is to figure our way through all of this, and I believe we will,” said Allan Katz, a rules member from Florida who supports Obama. “And I believe we will come up with something [Saturday]. There will probably be a little sort of tussling, but we are Democrats.” Follow a timeline of the dispute »

The rules committee will address two main issues at the hearing: how many delegates each state is allowed and how those delegates will be allocated between the two candidates. Watch who will really decide the nomination »

“How do you recognize the people who didn’t vote, and how do you recognize the people that did vote, and how do we at the same time maintain the integrity of the process?” asked Martha Fuller Clark, a Rules Committee member from New Hampshire and an Obama supporter. “And there are no easy answers.”

In a letter to the co-chairs of the rules committee, Clinton lawyer Lyn Utrecht said Friday that the panel is compelled to seat both delegations from Florida and Michigan fully and not award Obama any delegates from Michigan.

“It is a bedrock principle of our party that every vote must be counted, and thereby every elected delegate should be seated,” Utrecht wrote.

The letter said party rules do not allow “arbitrary reallocation of uncommitted delegates to a candidate or arbitrary reallocation of delegates from one candidate to another.” Read the full letter (pdf)

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told The Associated Press that receiving no pledged delegates from Michigan is not acceptable and said, “I don’t think is a position that people find terribly reasonable.”