“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting,” reports the Washington Post. The executive order would decree various changes to election law that Trump has been conspicuously unable to convince Congress to enact. These could include a ban on no-excuse mail voting, “requiring voters to register anew for the 2026 midterms with proof of citizenship,” and giving various federal agencies answerable to the president “a role in identifying ineligible voters.”
It won’t work. Measures of this sort, assuming there is no other problem with them, have to be enacted by Congress using its Article I, Section 4, powers. Under our constitutional order, changes to election law cannot be imposed on states by executive whim, whether or not some supposed national-security rationale is proffered.
Per the Post’s reporting, the draft executive order is being pushed by some eccentric characters who have previously promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that have been uniformly rejected by courts and disproved by impartial investigation. In most administrations, such conspiracry theories wouldn’t get an audience at all; however, Trump is an obvious exception, as one of the nation’s leading promoters of election falsehoods and as one who has hired bitter-end “Stop the Steal” officials to fill key jobs relating to election policy. He has also repeatedly floated the idea of attempting at least a partial election takeover without going through Congress.
To paraphrase a high official of this administration: We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Read the rest here.
What Trump & the Republicans are after is not just voter ID (which I am already subjected to & support). What they want now is proof of citizenship: birth certificate or pass port. Both require extra efforts to obtain. My own father had no birth certificate due to an untimely courthouse fire. He had to obtain witness affidavits to serve in the Navy. His service record enabled him to get a passport.
ReplyDeleteThe real purpose behind the SAVE act is to remove unwanted voters from the rolls.
Good luck. As many of us already know, once a wannabe dictator gets in it can be very hard to shift them, whether they're dead or alive. (There's always a sycophant waiting to move up, eh?)
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