Rules are rules ... or are they?

The great big tell lurking in the brawl of a presidential debate Wednesday night was rules: when they should be enforced and when tossed aside. This question arose in very different ways for two very different men: Mike Bloomberg’s insistence on hewing to nondisclosure agreements with female employees who sued his company, and Bernie Sanders’s rejection of the Democratic Party’s requirement that the nominee win a majority of delegates.

Each candidate — surprise! — adopted the position most beneficial to himself. Bloomberg argued that his hands were tied because the parties to sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits against his company had agreed to keep the settlements secret: case closed, literally. Sanders asserted the Democratic Party’s rules should be ignored, and the nomination awarded to the candidate with the most delegates, period.

Both candidates — the one who wants to live by the rules and the one who wants to junk them — are wrong.

Bloomberg argued, unconvincingly, that that there was no way to lift the secrecy pledges. “There’s agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet and that’s up to them,” he said. “They signed those agreements, and we’ll live with it.”

Actually, we shouldn’t, and we don’t need to.

Certainly, no woman should be forced into the spotlight involuntarily. But others might well want to speak out about what they experienced while working for Bloomberg but fear the legal and financial consequences of violating confidentiality pledges. Why should they be silenced?

Bloomberg is running for president; his conduct toward women in the workplace over which he presided matters. If he has nothing to hide — there are “a very few nondisclosure agreements” and “none of them accuse me of doing anything, other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told,” he asserted — then why not release the information?

No doubt there are privacy issues involving the conduct of Bloomberg’s employees beyond the boss himself. But there are ways of addressing those concerns without allowing Bloomberg to hide behind the phony shield of nondisclosure agreements. “The company and somebody else ... decided when they made an agreement they wanted to keep it quiet for everybody’s interests,” Bloomberg said.

Yes, but voters now have a competing interest. “A deal’s a deal” isn’t an acceptable response.

Which brings us to Sanders’ opposite, yet similarly selfinterested, assertion: The rules shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with my winning.

If anyone is now positioned to assemble the necessary majority of 1,991 delegates, it is Sanders. Indeed, the party’s rules operate in his favor. Candidates who win less than 15 percent of the vote (statewide or in a given district) receive no delegates. That means Sanders, leading in the polls, is poised to win even more delegates than his share of the overall vote, because he is dividing a pie that excludes those who fail to achieve 15 percent. Sanders further benefits from the fact that those who fall below that threshold are likely siphoning votes from his more moderate competitors. If the rules are rigged, they are rigged in Sanders’s favor.

Four years ago, when Hillary Clinton enjoyed a healthy delegate lead, Sanders thought she should have to play by the rules — which required her to win a majority. And Sanders lobbied for and celebrated the current rules, which maintained the majority requirement but prevented superdelegates — party insiders and elected officials — from being able to vote on the first ballot. “An important step forward in making the Democratic Party more open, democratic and responsive to the input of ordinary Americans,” Sanders said when the rules were changed in 2018.

Now, conveniently, Sanders see things differently. “Well, the process includes 500 superdelegates on the second ballot,” Sanders said Wednesday night, undercounting their number. “So I think that the will of the people should prevail, yes. The person who has the most votes should become the nominee.” At other points, Sanders has been even more ominous, warning of “a very divisive moment for the Democratic Party” if the candidate with the most delegates is denied the nomination.

It’s one thing if a nominee is just shy of a majority and their competitors are far behind. It’s different if the other candidates are bunched together — and it appears that a significant majority of delegates would prefer a more moderate nominee.

Bloomberg maintains that “rules are rules” because relaxing them would be inconvenient — and perhaps damaging to his candidacy. Sanders’ argument amounts to saying that rules aren’t rules when they get in his way. Both candidates are as wrong as they are self-serving.