No laws were broken. But it's very much in line with what the article is talking about:

> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

What information was withheld? I hadn't heard national security invoked in this context before.

Maybe they weren't at the end of that sentence yet, but they were definitely at the start of it. "governed by surprise" yes. "receiving decisions deliberated in secret" very much yes.

Is it really fair to call it a surprise when prediction markets had 80% odds on her since the day Biden dropped out? (https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-t...)

Or did you mean Biden dropping out itself? I don't see how anyone could have reasonably offered more notice that he was dropping out - presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.

> presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.

That's a generous assumption that doesn't really fit with how he seemed in public appearances before and after. The alternative possibility is that the narrative where he drops out of the primary and so the D candidate "has to" be appointed at a time when it's "too late" for the public to be involved was a deliberate one.

At this point we're at "the democrats might have planned for a single surprise, under circumstances that would be both difficult and suspicious to repeat".

It feels... exceedingly charitable to say that is "habituating people to surprise" in any real sense. If anything, I'd argue it has had the opposite effect: if the Democrats pull a second surprise like this time any time in the next couple of decades, quite a lot of people are going to be outraged.

I'm not really sure why they'd want to skip the Primary anyway? If she failed to pass as a candidate there, it would be pretty clear evidence that she wasn't going to beat Trump. If she passed the Primary, she's got more support behind her. It's a lose/lose to do what you suggested

Don't confuse legality with morality.

Okay, but that still begs the obvious question: what was immoral about it?