Voters in New York City cast ballots for the U.S. Presidential Election at PS 33 in Manhattan on November 08, 2016. (Photo by Monica Jorge)
Forget Russia, impeachment, and Ukraine. Democrats are giddy that they have a real crisis. As the Democratic House Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) explained last Thursday, the pandemic has created “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” Whose vision would that be? Not all Americans share the same vision, which is why we have elections.
But elections have not proven to be 100 percent effective in delivering the vision that the Democratic Party has been promoting for the last decade. Even when Obama was president, they were not able to move the country off-center toward socialism as much as they had hoped. While they were almost able to check off one of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” with the passage of Obamacare (“Control healthcare and you control the people”), the election of President Trump threw them into a frenzy.
Not believing that their vision could possibly be rejected by the masses, they embarked on a crusade to say the election was rigged, and the elected president illegitimate. The 2016 election ushered in a new era of politics in which Democrats decided that they could no longer rely on politicians to build support for their causes. So rather than changing the politician (case in point: Joe Biden), they are changing the rules. The election rules.
By changing the election rules, the Left is setting the stage for them to never lose a presidential election again. Ever. The election changes proposed in what is supposed to be an emergency virus bill are designed to destroy federalism as we know it and nationalize federal elections.
The “emergency” changes to election laws violate the Constitution’s division of powers between the states and the federal government. The proposed changes to state laws effectively eliminate voter identification and force states to give regular ballots to those whose identities it cannot confirm. They would force all states to not only offer same-day registration, but give those voters regular ballots to vote, which means that the state would have no time to verify that person’s eligibility to vote. The bill would also require states to register people without proof of identification via online registration, send e-ballots to anyone who requests one online without providing identification, and automatically mail ballots to every single name on the county’s registration list starting in July 2020, as well as automatically mail ballots to everyone who is no longer on the county’s registration list.
First of all, these “emergency” proposals are not needed. What is needed is simply an allocation of more money to the states so that they can properly initiate changes they deem necessary. That is what they requested in a March 22 letter sent to the House — not an onslaught of brand-new laws to try to enforce within 30 days, but more money. Period.
Second, these proposals are just a wish list gleaned from the ACLU and Brennan Center’s websites in which they describe how best to fight “voter suppression” to check off another of Alinsky’s best practices: “In the beginning, the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems.” The proposals now inked by House Democrats were first suggested by numerous Soros-funded groups earlier this month when the ACLU’s Dale Ho opined that the best way to handle the 2020 election was to have everyone vote by mail. The Brennan Center agreed.
Without dissecting the problems created by the suggestions of these radical groups, such as mail-in ballots being sent to old addresses and even being returned by those who are deceased, the bigger issue is that the bill treads on the one very special area of law expressly and intentionally given to the state governments: elections.
The very core of our democracy lies in the balance between federal and state power. This was an intentional design so that the federal government did not have more power than the people.
This proposed bill eliminates the decision-making of individual states and forces them to adhere to the vision of the House Majority by restructuring elections to become federally-run. It even includes a new private right of action which gives the Left’s well-funded lawyers even more opportunities to sue state governments and change state laws through litigation instead of through elections. It is nothing more than an end-run at passing H.R. 1, which was this Congress’s first attempt to federalize national elections.
Sue Becker is a litigator for the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
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