House Dems Boo Sanders, Tell Him to Get Behind Hillary

Bernie Sanders has already said he'll vote for Hillary Clinton if she's the Democrats' nominee—but he still hasn't ceded that title to her nor endorsed her, and members of his own party are getting sick of it. The Vermont senator was actually booed Wednesday during what Politico calls a "tense" Q&A in which House Democrats turned the screw on Sanders to drop out of the race and offer his unequivocal support for Hillary. Sanders' response (and the line that got booed), per multiple sources who were at the closed caucus meeting: "The goal isn't to win elections, the goal is to transform America." It was a reaction that only exacerbated the frustration of party members ready to pull together a united front to take on Donald Trump. CNN notes that, until now, many Democrats haven't wanted to publicly chastise Sanders for continuing his campaign because they don't want to alienate his supporters.

But on Wednesday, "he went in there with his canned talking points from the stump," an anonymous source who was in the meeting tells the Los Angeles Times. "People just weren't having it." Some of the attendees even started chanting, "Timeline! Timeline!" when they thought Sanders was evading questions and hyperfocusing on platform items he wanted to talk about, which included trade, climate change, minimum wage, and what Sanders believes is an unfair superdelegate process. Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty told the senator she felt "like a hostage" due to his platform demands, a source who was present tells the Washington Post. Sanders did have at least one supporter: a representative from his own state. "A lot of members are anxious about when is he going to explicitly support Hillary," Pete Welch tells Politico. "But if we want to win, we've got to take the long view that we need a platform that is going to genuinely create excitement for our nominee." (More Bernie Sanders stories.)