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FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A White House official told the Agriculture Department to include left-leaning groups, including the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the League of United Latin American Citizens, among “stakeholders” to help implement President Joe Biden’s executive order aimed at turning out the vote.
At the same time, records obtained by The Daily Signal show that USDA brass had extensive discussions with the Raben Group, a Democrat-aligned lobbying group managed by former officials of the Clinton and Obama administration.
The Raben Group represented the left-wing advocacy group Demos, which has pushed the so-called Green New Deal and labor unions’ policy goals. As The Daily Signal previously reported, Demos worked with the USDA on “best practices” to boost voting.
The United Food and Commercial Workers, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the Raben Group were not on a previously reported list of more than four dozen left-leaning organizations that participated in a “listening session” with White House officials on July 12, 2021, under six months after Biden became president.
Two days before that “listening session” via Zoom between White House officials and the left-wing groups, Raben Group associate Dylan Tureff wrote on behalf of Demos to DeWayne Goldman, USDA’s senior adviser for racial equality to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Tureff’s goal: to set up a meeting with Goldman to “discuss how your office can play an essential role in protecting and expanding democracy.”
Biden signed the executive order in March 2021, directing federal agencies to partner with private organizations to increase voter registration and participation in elections.
Since that time, records emerged through Freedom of Information Act requests from multiple agencies showing that the Biden administration’s bureaucracy has enlisted an army of left-leaning nonprofits to mobilize voters.
Critics of Biden’s order have called it “BidenBucks.”
They also say Biden’s Executive Order 14019 weaponized taxpayer-funded agencies to advance his reelection effort—and those of Democrats.
Demos long has been associated with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
“Demos and its organizational partners have identified the below-stated agency systems and programs as areas of great opportunity for the implementation of this vital executive order,” Tureff told USDA’s Goldman in his July 2021 message.
Writing on behalf of Demos, Tureff said get-out-the-vote efforts for Agriculture Department offices could include online portals; “direct interaction programs”; grant programs “for both state and private actors” grants for governments and authorities; and programs focused on tribal services and support.
Goldman wrote to colleagues July 27: “Do we have any activities around this EO [executive order] on Voting Access? I have a meeting request from Demos to engage with USDA, but could use some help understanding the prioritization. Do you have any knowledge of this group?”
In response, Lynn Overmann, USDA senior adviser for data and technology, seemed to raise some concerns in the email thread under the subject line “Demos Meeting Request on Voting Rights EO.”
Overmann wrote to Goldman and others: “Has USDA supported voting rights efforts in the past? Given our footprint in communities, I could imagine offering voter registration information at in-person locations or sharing information broadly across our communications channels, but think there would be privacy/consent issues around sharing data.”
The Biden executive order directed all federal agencies to develop a strategic plan for increasing voting by September 2021.
The Agriculture Department’s first interim response to a records request by The Daily Signal didn’t include the department’s strategic plan, but did include emails discussing what its key priorities likely would be.
Kumar Chandran, acting undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services, sent an email to colleagues on May 29, 2021, that said an attached draft strategic plan contained the “top 5 suggestions.”
The email released to The Daily Signal, in which several redactions were made, summarizes the top five recommendations as including voter registration at “Voter Registration & Information at Food and Nutrition Service Program Sites Though WIC and SNAP sites.”
WIC is an Agriculture Department food program for “women, infants and children.” SNAP, better known to Americans as food stamps, is an acronym for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Critics of Biden’s executive order allege that government agencies could give a false impression to the public that benefits of social programs are tied to voting.
The USDA also listed “Rural Development” as the second of the top five suggestions. Details were redacted.
Third on the list was “voter registration and information through production and conservation,” but again details were missing.
Fourth was ensuring that the Agriculture Department’s 100,000 employees were registered to vote and had leave time to vote.
The fifth and last suggestion for implementing Biden’s order pertained to social media and communication about voter information using Twitter and other such platforms.
An email dated April 7, 2021, from Paul Zeiss with the White House scheduling office sent a list of “stakeholders” on voting issues to Akhil Rakam, then a USDA official.
The mail included the mentions of the United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC.
UFCW, the sixth-largest labor union in the United States, represents workers in the food production, retail, and chemical industries.
LULAC, an advocate for Hispanic Americans, sued Texas in 2006 over the state’s redistricting, alleging that the new election districts violated the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld the districting plan, but found some districts needed to be revised.
In 2021, the League of United Latin American Citizens served subpoenas on several Republican state legislators in Texas in connection with a lawsuit over the state’s election reforms.
Other “stakeholders” the White House identified for USDA are more directly related to agriculture and not overtly political.
These groups include the Intertribal Agriculture Council, the National Black Farmers Association, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, the National Association of Counties, the Rebuild Rural Coalition, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the American Public Human Services Association, and Rural Organizing.
A USDA spokesperson didn’t respond to The Daily Signa’s request for comment on this report.
Demos, the Raben Group, UFCW, and LULAC also didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Harvesting Voters? These Left-Wing Groups Are Teaming With USDA appeared first on The Daily Signal.
White House officials met with liberal activists to discuss boosting voting among prisoners and immigrants just four months after President Joe Biden signed an executive order on turning out the vote, newly released records show.
On July 12, 2021, White House officials held a “listening session” that included dozens of organizations, many known for turning out Democrat voters. Justin Levitt, who was the White House senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights at the time, kicked off the event along with Jesselyn McCurdy of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Keeda Haynes, legal adviser with the Sentencing Project, a legal assistance and training organization for prisoners, said the administration should assist “eligible voters who are incarcerated have been left out of voting,” according to notes of the meeting. Haynes added, “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression.”
The records were obtained from the Justice Department by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through the Freedom of Information Act. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)
That session with White House and other Biden administration officials included staffers from more than four dozen left-leaning groups, including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Democracy Fund, the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network, the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. But only a few of the groups were participants in the meeting. Participants were sent a Zoom link.
The meeting and agenda were first discovered by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a government watchdog group in 2022. What’s new from the recently released batch of documents are details about what was said in the meeting, as well as Justice Department communications leading up to the conference.
The records also show the email correspondence between the White House and the Justice Department for the weeks leading to the meeting. The documents showed that voting for certain incarcerated individuals was a priority.
Less than a month after Biden signed the order, then-associate White House counsel Larry Schwartztol emailed Associate Deputy Attorney General Myesha Braden on April 1, 2021.
Schwartztol said the White House counsel’s office is working with the Domestic Policy Council and wrote about helping people in custody or under the supervision of the Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service to vote.
“Section 9 of the [executive order] directs the [attorney general] to take various steps to facilitate voter registration and voting for people in [Bureau of Prisons] and [U.S. Marshals Service] custody and to coordinate with the probation and pretrial services on providing similar resources and assistance to people under supervision,” Schwartztol wrote.
The Daily Signal previously reported that the Bureau of Prisons partnered with left-leaning groups such as the League of Women Voters, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee to boost voting among eligible citizens who were incarcerated while awaiting trial or other circumstances, or in restoring their voting rights after serving their sentence.
At the July 2021 meeting with White House officials and liberal groups, Nik Youngsmith, legislative staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, spoke to the gathering about “immigrants and noncitizens.”
The public record showed Youngsmith wanted to be cautious.
“We support registration efforts. We also want to make sure they are done in a careful way,” the meeting notes paraphrase Youngsmith as saying. “All fed employees must be well trained in this. Need to trust people are acting in bounds of the law. Especially when there are language issues. Federal employees should know who should be properly registered and not. Don’t want someone to face charges for registering on bad info.”
The Washington Examiner first reported on the Justice Department documents obtained by the Oversight Project.
“One of the biggest dangers to free and fair elections is the Biden Administration’s weaponization of every single federal agency to work with far-left groups for the biggest get-out-the-vote operation in human history,” said a joint statement from Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Oversight Project, and Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project.
“Of course, these efforts are only being pointed in one direction in an illegitimate attempt to keep President Biden in the White House,” the Howell and Brosnan statement continued. “Our findings prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this whole effort was implemented in a radically partisan manner. We will be releasing much more on this threat soon and urge all members of the public to stay alert.”
Jose Morales, the deputy director of Fair Fight Action, an anti-voter ID group founded by twice-losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, also spoke. Morales called for allowing federal employees to take the day off to vote. He also complained that “based on experiences last year and this year, there are many new ID requirements,” according to the Justice Department notes about the session.
Fair Fight didn’t get everything it wanted from Biden on federal employee voting.
While the administration did not give federal employees a whole day off to vote, The Daily Signal previously reported the Office of Personnel Management adopted a policy to give four hours of leave to federal employees to vote and volunteer to be election workers.
Two staffers from the ACLU—Sarah Brannon and Ceridwen Cherry—told the gathering that the HealthCare.gov website, better known as the Obamacare exchanges, reaches 20 million people per year and should be used for signing up voters.
Demos, a liberal think tank that drafted much of the executive order after Biden was elected but before his inauguration, was also part of the gathering.
Laura Williamson, then associate director of Demos, said the Department of Housing and Urban Development should register voters at public housing units. It also called for the Fair Housing Administration to engage in voter registration when making loans to buy homes.
The Daily Signal first reported that under the executive order, HUD authorized targeting votes at public housing units.
The post Prisoners, Noncitizens Topics at White House Meeting With Left-Wing Activists to Increase Voter Turnout appeared first on The Daily Signal.
For Rep. Chip Roy, it’s a frustrating conversation that happens all too often with fellow lawmakers on his side of the aisle.
“‘Chip, we have a razor-thin majority. We just have to win the White House; we just have to win the Senate,’” the Texas Republican recalled in a speech Tuesday.
When he hears colleagues concerned about the narrow 217-212 House Republican majority, he notes the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority—51 senators in the Democratic caucus compared with 49 Republicans.
“Well, when do they ever look across there and say Chuck Schumer has a razor-thin majority?” Roy said of the Senate Democratic leader from New York. “When do they ever look and say, ‘You’re actually in charge of the House of Representatives, which James Madison told you in [Federalist Paper 58] actually has the power of the purse. Do something with it. Stop making excuses.’”
That prompted applause from the audience at The Heritage Foundation at an event, “Defunding the Left.” (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Roy had earlier quoted Madison—father of the Constitution and later the fourth president of the United States—who wrote in Federalist 58:
The House of Representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. … This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.
Though the GOP mostly prevented nondefense spending hikes, and kept the political focus on border security, he said irresponsible spending is a bipartisan problem that “infests the entire swamp” in both parties.
“The fundamental problem is not just the weakening of the dollar and the strength of our financial system. It’s actually the radical Left funding the tyranny, funding the government that’s at war with your way of life.”
He noted the Republican-controlled House approved $62 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid rising crime and fentanyl deaths in the U.S. resulting from the border crisis.
The House majority also went along with $200 million to fund a new FBI headquarters and overall about $40 billion for the Justice Department, despite concerns about politicized lawfare. He noted $824 billion went to the Defense Department with no demands to scrap its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that are hurting armed forces recruitment.
The House majority allowed $80 billion for the Department of Education; $9 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency; and $117 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services, while requiring no accountability for mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic by departmental subordinate agencies, such as National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While his GOP colleagues often talk about the need to win the next election, Roy said, conservative control of both houses of Congress and the White House are not guaranteed to reverse the trend.
“Literally, on Day One, they are going to say, ‘Chip, we can’t do all you want to do because we don’t have 60 in the Senate. You’ve got to be reasonable.’” Roy predicted. “I promise you that’s coming. So, we have to win majorities. But we have to plan now for driving a steamroller over the weak-kneed individuals in Congress that will use 60 [as a premise] not to fight for you.”
In the Senate, 60 votes are required to end filibusters.
Roy noted there were some positive accomplishments, however. Since winning the majority, House Republicans have for the most part “kept the ball on our side of the field,” he said.
Nondefense spending was largely held flat, while increased defense spending in 2023 was initially paid for by taking money out of the Internal Revenue Service and unspent COVID-19 funding.
That occurred after then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., put caps in place, even though the caps were discarded in January. Further, Roy noted that House Republicans didn’t let Democrats redirect the border debate to one of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
“Amnesty was off the table. All we talked about this last year was border security. We didn’t achieve it, but we didn’t allow the Democrats to start moving the ball down the field and have a debate about amnesty,” Roy said. “It matters where you set the goal post and how you set your mission.”
The Texas lawmaker criticized the recent $95 billion foreign aid package that passed without the support of most Republicans. He said that too often, members of Congress “default to fear” on defense spending.
“I want the strongest military that we can possibly produce. I want it to be sparingly used,” Roy said, adding:
I don’t want to use it often, but if we do, I want it to destroy everything in its path. But we just default to fear, and we use the national security-defense complex to run over everything else.
“People literally come into [House Republicans’] meetings and say, ‘We just can’t risk defense.’ Well, if that’s what you do, you’re never going to change the town,” he continued, “because they are always going to use defense as the leverage to say, ‘We’re not going to cut [the Justice Department]; we’re not going to cut education; we’re not going to make reforms.”
The post Texas Lawmaker Reminds GOP of Madison’s Words About Power of the Purse appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Under new federal guidelines, an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a pronoun the person doesn’t want used.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the guidance on Monday. The guidance passed on a 3-2 vote, along party lines on Friday, a source familiar with the EEOC confirmed.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new enforcement guidance says.
The guidelines would affect most employers, private or public.
The EEOC announced last fall a proposed update of its harassment policy affecting to include sexual orientation and gender identity rules. This prompted opposition from 20 state attorneys general, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.
In November, the attorneys general contended what was then the proposed “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” updates would threaten the First Amendment rights of employers, employees, and possibly customers.
“Here, the proposed guidance would require employers to affirm or convey to employees and customers—often against religious conviction or deeply held personal belief—messages that a person can be a gender different from his or her biological sex, that gender has no correlation to biology, or that they endorse the use of pronouns like ‘they/them,’ ‘xe/xym/xyrs,’ or ‘bun/bunself,” the letter from the attorneys general says.
“This mandate flouts First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech—yet EEOC rejects any role for accommodation of contrary religious beliefs or speech,” the attorneys general add. “Further, EEOC’s for-cause insulation from direct presidential supervision unconstitutionally blurs the lines of accountability for this overhaul of workplaces nationwide.”
In 2021, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows attempted, in a statement, to unilaterally include these actions under harassment without public comment or a vote by the full commission. However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. A separate federal court in Texas
vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The commission did not appeal the rulings.
Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer with more than 15 employees.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” said Burrows, a Democrat, of the new guidelines in a public statement issued Monday afternoon. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrat commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Kalpana Kotagal. The two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
Women’s rights are under attack by the EEOC, said Lucas in a statement issued Monday.
“Biological sex is real, and it matters. Sex is binary (male and female) and is immutable,” Lucas said in a public statement. She added, “It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths—or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly. Relatedly, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home. It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests.”
In 2020, the Supreme Court held in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County that a firm violates Title VII if it fires an employee “simply for being … transgender.” But, the Republican state attorneys general argued in the November letter, “Bostock gives no license to these and other of EEOC’s novel proposals.”
“Nor, in all events, can EEOC permissibly require these deeply controversial gender-identity accommodations without express congressional authorization—authorization not found in Title VII,” the letter continued.
The guidance does not carry the same weight as a law passed by Congress or a regulation imposed by an agency. However, the guidance essentially states the position of the EEOC. This means an employee inclined to claim harassment regarding a restroom or pronoun dispute would have the guidance to refer to. Also, under private litigation, a plaintiff could refer to the formal position of a federal agency.
“If you still believed that the Biden administration’s pedal-to-the-metal advancing of gender ideology is all about freedom and individual rights, this new EEOC ‘guidance’ should dispel that myth,” Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)
“Employers may now find themselves in legal hot water if they prefer to use language, including pronouns, and preserve private spaces that comport with biological reality rather than the bizarre canons of gender ideology,” Richards continued. “We’re dealing with a totalitarian ideology that wants to destroy the present order. The sooner normal people understand that, the sooner we can dispatch this ideology to the history books.”
The EEOC website describes guidance as “official agency policy and explains how the laws and regulations apply to specific workplace situations.”
“The Biden administration is no stranger to twisting federal law to suit its aims, and the publication of the EEOC’s final rule on workplace harassment is a prime example,” Sarah??? Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
Perry added:
According to the Biden administration, gender identity and expression are tantamount to ‘sex’ in federal law and require an employer to facilitate an employee’s ‘preferred pronoun’ use and requested bathroom use or face a possible complaint for sexual harassment.
This is both an untenable conclusion, and not supported by the underlying Supreme Court decision on which the Administration so greatly relies: Bostock v. Clayton County. What’s more, biological women are again rendered to second-class citizens under the EEOC rule and forced to give up any vestige of privacy and security they previously enjoyed.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the mandatory use of an employee’s requested name and pronouns—those which differ from that employee’s biological sex—is a patent violation of the 1st Amendment, and creates an unavoidable conflict between gender ideology, and freedom of speech and religion. I expect the swift filing of multiple legal challenges against the new rule.
This story was updated to include comments from commission members of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
The post ‘Harassment’: Feds Impose Trans Agenda on Employers for Pronouns, Bathrooms appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The left-wing Arabella Advisors network has raked in more money than either of the two major political parties and affects almost every element of public policy and elections, argues Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a Washington-based investigative think tank.
Walter’s new book “Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America” shows that in the 2020 election cycle, Arabella Advisors’ nonprofits took in $2.4 billion. That’s $1 billion more than the combined fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.
That amount rose to $3 billion in the 2022 election cycle, Walter says. Moreover, he adds, nothing on the Right comes close to competing.
“Arabella does not discriminate. It is working on arcane regulatory issues … but it also is running Facebook ads, attacking certain congressional candidates and boosting others. It plays in environmental issues. It plays in abortion issues. It plays in election policy,” Walter says on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Walter is set to testify Tuesday before the House Natural Resources Committee about what he calls “left-wing dark money [used] to influence environmental policy.”
“Arabella also continues to be very active in the environmental policy area in all sorts of ways,” he adds.
Arabella-backed organizations have been involved in battles over abortion and Supreme Court nominations and advocated that biological males compete in women’s sports.
Walter’s book details how two Arabella-aligned groups, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections and the Institute for Responsive Government, are involved in shaping election policy at the local level.
He notes that an Arabella-sponsored group funded by billionaire financier George Soros helped formulate the Biden administration’s recent change in Title IX policy to make it easier for biological males to compete in girls’ scholastic sports.
“That was plotted through a highly secretive group in the Arabella network, funded entirely with Soros money,” Walter said. “Governing for Impact, which they started in 2019, two years before the Biden administration was even sworn in. And they worked with Harvard Law School folks to do very sophisticated legal strategy memos of how to overturn dozens of regulations in the federal government, the most famous being Title IX.”
What’s differentiates Arabella from other major donors on the Left is the level of secrecy, Walter says. The network is more secretive than most nonprofits financed by Soros and his family, he says.
“We have tracked the institutional donors, and we can tell you that for almost all of the Arabella nonprofits, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which provides donor-advised funds to wealthy people, is the largest,” Walter said. He added, “Other really big donors to the Arabella network have [included Microsoft co-founder] Bill Gates. He is one of the largest, mostly through his foundation. [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg has given tens of millions, mostly for criminal justice reform—quote unquote—[that results in] letting criminals back on the streets.”
A spokesperson for Arabella Advisors didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
Listen to Walter outline Arabella’s reach in a discussion of his book in the podcast below:
The post Arabella Network’s Leftist ‘Dark Money’ Influence Expanding, Author Reveals appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The only two states that apportion Electoral College votes in presidential races by congressional district are poised to scrap what makes them unique.
In these systems, presidential candidates get one electoral vote for each congressional district they win in the state. Unlike in other states, the Democratic, Republican, and other party candidates could end up splitting a state’s electoral votes among them.
The usually blue Maine and generally red Nebraska each had one battleground congressional district that would sometimes draw presidential candidates.
But the Maine Legislature moved to give its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote—regardless of who carries the state.
Nebraska lawmakers are considering becoming like 48 other states with winner-take-all elections, meaning the candidate who captures the majority of the state’s popular vote takes all of the state’s electoral votes. Nebraska’s change—if adopted—would affect the 2024 presidential election, while the Maine change likely wouldn’t.
Last week, Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills announced she would let a bill making Maine the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact become law without her signature after it narrowly passed the state Legislature.
Maine Joins National Popular Vote Compact https://t.co/e6tvfYRH6H via @democracynow
— NationalPopularVote (@NatlPopularVote) April 21, 2024
Under the multistate compact, Maine agrees to give its four electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote. The states that make up the compact thus far represent a combined 209 electoral votes. Those votes will only activate when the compact reaches the required 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president.
Meanwhile, Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen is considering calling a special session of the state Legislature, which already adjourned on April 18, to adopt a winner-take-all system for the state’s five electoral votes.
Pillen said he would only call a special session “when there is sufficient support in the Legislature to pass it.”
Prominent conservative commentators such as Charlie Kirk and Mark Levin have supported the change in Nebraska.
JUST IN—The Great One, Mark Levin, gets behind turning Nebraska into a winner-take-all electoral college state.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 9, 2024
The coalition is growing. Listen to @marklevinshow break down why this is critical ahead of November? pic.twitter.com/97PbsKAp3P
Maine enacted its rule to divide its electoral votes by congressional district ahead of the 1972 election. It took another 20 years for Nebraska to follow suit, which it did ahead of the 1992 election.
However, split votes have been rare.
The first time Nebraska had a split came when Democrat Barack Obama won the swing Nebraska district in the Omaha area in the 2008 election, the first time since 1964 that a Democrat won an electoral vote in the state.
In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes most of the state outside of Portland or Augusta, netting one electoral vote from the state. He was the first Republican since 1988 to win a Maine electoral vote.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden captured Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District and its electoral vote.
The post These 2 States Are Poised to Scrap Fractured Electoral College System—in Different Ways appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Standing next to former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced legislation to require proof of citizenship to vote.
Non-U.S. citizens are already banned from voting in federal elections now. However, the National Voter Registration Act—better known as the Motor Voter Law—doesn’t allow states to check because the federal forms already contain a check box.
Johnson said that polling showed 78% of Americans supported requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote. He suggested he would put the bill straight to the full House for a vote, bypassing the committee process.
“When we put this bill on the floor, you’re going to see a recorded vote by Republicans and Democrats. You’ll see that Republicans stand for election integrity,” Johnson said. “We’ll be able to ask this very important question of the Democrats. They are going to have to go on record. Do you believe that Americans and Americans alone should be the ones who vote in American elections? We are about to find out.”
Since Biden took office, more than 7.2 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border.
During his opening remarks, Trump addressed both issues.
“We have a border that’s open. We have a lot of problems in our country. We have an election problem and that’s really what we’re here to talk about today,” Trump said. “I would like to demand that our border be closed because we have millions of people coming into our country, millions and millions of people at levels that nobody is reporting, nobody is going to talk about.”
Johnson said the legislation will require states to remove noncitizens from their existing voter rolls, with help by allowing states access to databases from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
My book “The Myth of Voter Suppression” details how several watchdog groups found voter registration rolls filled with ineligible foreign citizens, dead people, and people who have long moved out of a state despite the National Voter Registration requirement to update voting lists.
Johnson referred to the border crisis resulting from dozens of executive actions from President Joe Biden. He says he constantly gets questions about why it’s happening.
“Why would they do this? It’s chaos. Why the violence?” Johnson said, before answering his own question. “Because they want to turn these people into voters. Right now the administration is encouraging illegals to go to their local welfare office to sign up for benefits. Guess what? When you go to a welfare office, they also ask you if you would like to register to vote. Many people, we think, are going to do that.”
Weeks after coming into office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing every federal agency, including social service offices, to boost voter registration.
Earlier this week, the House advanced legislation that would require a citizenship question on the census form and that officials no longer count noncitizens of jurisdictions when drawing up congressional maps.
The post Speaker Johnson to Put Democrats on Record With Vote on Proof of Citizenship to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
During a conference call with White House officials, top state election officials wanted to know how the Biden administration intended to implement its government-backed get-out-the-vote effort in 2024.
The White House answer essentially was that “those plans are not public and they never intended for them to be public,” according to two secretaries of state who were on the call last week.
“The sad part is, that answer should have been a surprise but it wasn’t,” Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, told The Daily Signal.
Secretaries of state typically are their states’ chief election officials. Their growing frustration comes as more than two dozen state lawmakers in Pennsylvania, a major battleground state, ask the Supreme Court to block President Joe Biden’s executive order to increase voter registration.
Mississippi’s Watson noted that in 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife spent $400 million for election administration grants targeting key jurisdictions that would drive up the Democrat vote.
But, he added, Biden’s putting the power of the federal government behind a similar effort is “1,000%” worse.
The call with White House officials was coordinated by the National Association of Secretaries of State, Watson said.
“We might join in that Pennsylvania case with an amicus brief,” West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, told The Daily Signal. “Now we are leading an effort among secretaries of state to push back against partisan election interference and a get-out-the-vote effort using federal tax dollars.”
In 2022, Warner led a group of 14 other secretaries of state who asked Biden to rescind his executive order from the year before, since states are supposed to run elections.
“There is something surreptitious about the Biden administration and the lack of transparency that reveals what is going on here,” Warner said. “The federal government is not supposed to be doing this. We need states to stand firm on this.”
Federal plans largely have been shrouded in secrecy since Biden signed Executive Order 14019 in March 2021, directing federal agencies to work with nonprofit groups to boost voting.
Involved nonprofits include left-leaning organizations such as Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Brennan Center for Justice, as The Daily Signal has reported using details obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“It was troublesome on the phone call [with the White House]. Several spoke up that none of these third-party groups partnering with federal agencies are associated with Republicans or conservatives,” Watson said. “They responded, ‘We welcome anyone.’ Well, they aren’t bringing them to the table.”
In July 2021, the White House held a “listening session” with dozens of left-leaning groups on plans for implementing Biden’s executive order, according to documents obtained by the Foundation for Government Accountability through the Freedom of Information Act.
Those groups include the Southern Poverty Law Center, People for the American Way, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, an the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center.
The White House did not respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this report.
In Pennsylvania, 27 Republican members of the state Legislature sued both Biden over his executive order on elections and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, also a Democrat, over his own executive order implementing automatic voter registration.
The plaintiffs contend that both orders violated the constitutional rights of state legislators to make election law.
“The executive order is beyond the scope and powers of a president, not to mention he is interfering in an election where he is on the ballot,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Dawn Keefer, a Republican who is chair of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus and lead plaintiff in the case.
“We need courts to clarify if legislators have standing. We believe it is a solid case,” Keefer said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “We believe we have standing not only as legislators but, for most of us, as candidates who will be affected by these actions.”
In late March, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the case on standing without considering the merits, stating that the Pennsylvania Legislature wasn’t harmed as an institution. The lawmakers are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, asserting that the rights of individual legislators were violated.
“The judge’s decision would imply that every single member of the Legislature [must] agree on something before the constitutional and civil rights of legislators can be enforced,” Heather Honey, executive director of Election Research Institute, a watchdog organization whose lawyers represent the suing lawmakers, told The Daily Signal. “There is no way you could ever get agreement.”
Honey noted that Democrat legislators twice proposed automatic voter registration, but the bills were defeated in committee.
The effort, she said, was a tacit acknowledgment that such a measure would require legislation and couldn’t be done through a governor’s executive order. Shapiro implemented automatic voter registration through an executive order anyway.
The federal government’s coordination of voter registration efforts has the most far-reaching impact, Honey said.
“The federal government has no right getting involved in the method of selecting presidential electors,” Honey said. “Time, place, and manner of elections is to be decided by Congress, such as the Help America Vote Act. Otherwise, it’s up to the states.”
“There is no role for the president in regulating elections. The full force of the federal government unleashed by an unlawful executive order is interfering in a presidential election,” she added. “Obviously, the Founding Fathers never intended for a president to have the power to use the government for a get-out-the-vote campaign.”
GOP lawmakers contend that the president’s executive order puts the federal government’s thumb on the scale in elections, which are supposed to be the purview of states.
Republicans also argue that Biden’s order could prompt federal employees to violate the Hatch Act, which bars them from any political activity on government time or using government resources.
The post How States Are Punching Back on Biden Federal Election Takeover appeared first on The Daily Signal.
After a key House committee advanced legislation this week to require a citizenship question on the U.S. Census, support for the measure could be growing in the backdrop of the border crisis and its potential impact on congressional reapportionment.
Heritage Action, a policy advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, announced Friday the Equal Representation Act would be scored as a key vote. The bill is S 3659 in the Senate and HR 7109 in the House. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Under current law, foreign citizens living in the United States are counted in the Census, and thus toward congressional apportionment. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., publicly admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”
Democrat Congresswoman Yvette Clarke on illegal immigrants in America:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 9, 2024
"I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes."
The end game: Dems are willing to destroy what it means to be an American citizen to help themselves politically. pic.twitter.com/3XmBDqYEsH
“Joe Biden’s deadly border policies have made the illegal immigration crisis the number one concern of the American people, and voters are pleading for Congress to fight back,” Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker said in a statement.
The House version has 100 co-sponsors and was approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. After being in all but one census from 1820 to 2000, the Census citizenship question was abandoned in the 2010 questionnaire during the Obama administration.
?PASSED?
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) April 10, 2024
We just passed this commonsense bill through our committee.
Unsurprisingly, every Oversight Democrat voted against it.
On to the floor! https://t.co/DztcpKaBZN
“Congressional apportionment and electoral votes should be based solely on the needs of American citizens. Heritage Action is proud to have helped push this bill past the 100 cosponsor mark and will keep working with conservatives across the country to finish the job,” Walker said.
The Heritage Action announcement comes the same day House Speaker Mike Johnson was set to join former President Donald Trump for a press conference on election integrity Friday, The Hill reported.
Reps. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, introduced the House version and Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., introduced the Senate version. The goal is to protect Americans’ electoral power and congressional representation.
“Members of Congress represent U.S. citizens, not foreigners,” Davidson said in a statement. “Under the Democrats’ open border policies, sanctuary cities and states inflate their population with illegal aliens. Then they’re rewarded with more congressional representation by a Census that counts illegals. The inflated count is then used to draw congressional maps, undermining fair representation for our citizens.”
Edwards stressed only American citizens can legally vote, “so only American citizens should be counted when determining federal representation.”
“In the 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, the justices defined ‘the people’ to mean all members of the political community. To be a member of a political community, you must be an eligible voter,” Edwards said in a statement. “The Equal Representation Act addresses one of the many consequences of our open border—illegal immigrant influence in America’s electoral process. America is waking up to this insidious threat to our democracy.”
The post This Bill Would Prevent Illegal Immigrants From Swaying Congressional Representation appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Amid increasing suspicion of China’s aggression, the leaders of the United States and Japan are touting an “enhanced” security agreement.
“Our alliance we have with Japan is purely defensive in nature,” President Joe Biden said during a Rose Garden press conference Wednesday with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“It’s not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region,” Biden added. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict. This is about restoring stability in the region.”
Under the new agreement, the U.S. and Japan will upgrade a joint base in Tokyo with 54,000 U.S. troops, set up a joint military council to produce more missiles and other weapons, and increase joint research on artificial intelligence. The two countries also will join a security partnership with the United Kingdom and Australia as a deterrence to China.
Biden met with Kishida at the White House, where a state dinner was set for Wednesday night. On Thursday, the two are scheduled to meet with Philippines President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. at a time when Chinese and Philippine vessels have had run-ins in the South China Sea.
The United States already has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. Chinese ships also have been repeatedly intimidating Taiwanese ships in the area.
For Japan’s part, Kishida stressed the need for “rule of law” with regard to China’s hostilities at sea.
“Regarding the challenges concerning China,” Kishida said during the White House press conference, “Japan and the U.S. as global partners should work in close coordination. The president and I are committed to continuing our dialogue with China, but we continue to call on China to fulfill its responsibilities as a world power.”
Biden said he recently spoke to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“I spoke at length to President Xi and we agreed to No. 1, have personal contact with one another … so we know exactly what the other is thinking,” Biden said. “We had a discussion about two weeks ago now. It’s the best way to reduce the chance of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
The president stressed that the U.S.-Japanese alliance isn’t aimed at China.
“The things we discussed today improve our cooperation and are purely about defense and readiness,” Biden said. “It’s not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region. And it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict. This is about restoring stability in the region.”
The post Biden Says Enhanced Military Alliance With Japan ‘Not Aimed’ at China appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Biden administration is proposing a new rule that would further entrench unelected federal bureaucrats from accountability to President Joe Biden or his elected successors.
Key to the new rule from the Office of Personnel Management is the effective “grandfathering” of federal employees into their current category of employment, making it harder for a future president to issue an executive order like the one that then-President Donald Trump signed in October 2020 to rein in the bureaucracy.
A rule listed in the Federal Register, like this one was Thursday, could be more difficult to overturn than an executive order because it would have to be reversed under the provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act, one former senior OPM official said.
“If such a rule were allowed to stand, it would tie a future president’s hands—at least temporarily—in carrying out his responsibilities to make and implement his policies,” said Robert Moffit, who was at OPM during the Reagan administration and is now a senior research fellow for health and welfare policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
The president cannot run the huge federal government from his office in the West Wing of the White House, Moffit told The Daily Signal.
Some career federal employees who have civil service protection are neither impartial nor nonpartisan, he added.
“To effect his policy, therefore, the president must not only have the ability to hire political personnel who will carry out his electoral mandate, but also remove career personnel who attempt to obstruct that mandate,” Moffit said. “So, any attack on any president’s capacity to carry out the policies upon which he was elected is fundamentally ant-democratic; it is an attack on the American people who elected him.”
Among other things, the OPM’s proposed rule would clarify that “the status and civil service protections an employee has accrued cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service, or from one excepted service schedule to another.”
“Once a career civil servant earns protections, that employee retains them unless waived voluntarily,” the rule says.
In October 2020, just before the election he lost to Biden, Trump signed an executive order to create a new category of federal employee called Schedule F. Personnel in this category are in confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions that remain on the payroll when a presidential transition occurs.
The executive order from Trump, who faced resistance to his policy changes from within the federal bureaucracy, gave agencies more flexibility and oversight for career employees in critical positions that affect policy.
Upon taking office in January 2021, Biden scrapped the Trump order. The final version of the new rule would make it more difficult for a future president to reverse, because it is a regulation published in the Federal Register rather than an executive order. Undoing it would require going through a time-consuming administrative procedure.
Career federal employees enjoy civil service protection, making it nearly impossible to fire them; by contrast, political employees serve at the pleasure of an elected president.
Career federal bureaucrats tend to be overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning based on their campaign donations; federal employee unions donate between 70% and 90% to Democrat candidates. Republicans have accused some career employees of blocking implementation of Republican presidents’ policies.
Project 2025, an initiative led by The Heritage Foundation that establishes a plan for the next conservative presidential administration, calls for restoring Trump’s Schedule F as part of a broader effort to rein in the federal bureaucracy.
This has been a long-standing policy goal for Heritage, Moffit noted.
“Respecting the president’s prerogatives to have the appointees necessary to carry out policies is one of the major reasons why former Heritage President Ed Feulner strongly opposed Republican attempts to hamstring Democratic President Clinton and reduce the number of his political appointees,” Moffit said.
“Political appointees can formulate the details of the president’s policies and see to it that they are implemented all the way down the chain through departments, agencies, subagencies, and bureaus of the federal government.”
Biden’s Office of Personnel Management issued the final rule Thursday, asserting it received 4,000 comments about it, and said the rule would be published Tuesday in the Federal Register.
“This final rule honors our 2.2 million career civil servants, helping ensure that people are hired and fired based on merit and that they can carry out their duties based on their expertise and not political loyalty,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a public statement. “The Biden-Harris administration is deeply committed to the federal workforce, as these professionals are vital to our national security, our health, our economic prosperity, and much more.”
According to the OPM press release, the new rule also would clarify that the phrase “confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating” refers to positions that are noncareer, political appointments.
The rule also would establish procedural requirements for moving positions from “career” to “political,” and set up an appeals process for employees.
“Career officials are obviously crucial in the implementation of presidential policy,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “Those of us who served in presidential administrations all have war stories, however, about how politically hostile civil servants, through various means, including intentional slow-walking or foot-dragging, can delay, thwart, or undermine the president’s policies.”
“A career civil servant who does not or will not carry out the policy of any president, regardless of party affiliation, should have the honor and the decency to resign,” he said. “They should not enjoy regulatory protection.”
The post Biden Protects Deep State Bureaucrats With ‘Anti-Democratic’ Rule appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Before voters approved a constitutional amendment to make their state the 28th in the nation to ban private funding of election administration, Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison, already had spent over $1 million in private grants.
Madison, like jurisdictions in three other states that ban private dollars from paying for elections—Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri—is a member of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The organization, founded by the left-leaning Center for Tech and Civic Life, doled out $350 million in election-administration grants in 2020 funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
Wisconsin’s move to ban private money to pay for elections was significant progress for election integrity but not a silver bullet, said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.
“It is like staying ahead of hackers,” Cuccinelli told The Daily Signal. “But this is the real world and not digital, where we are dealing with votes and maintaining clean elections.”
“The other side will keep trying to muddy the waters and we will keep trying to clean it up,” he said. “Some jurisdictions are bragging about already spending the money. Good. This is about stabilizing elections going forward.”
In the book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” I detail the impact of the Zuckerberg grants in battleground states. Democrat-leaning counties in Pennsylvania got about 92% of the grant money. In Arizona, more than half of the “Zuckerbucks” went to Maricopa County.
A special counsel appointed by the Wisconsin Legislature concluded the Zuckerberg grants functioned as a state-sanctioned get-out-the-vote campaign conducted almost entirely in the heavily Democrat areas of Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Madison.
The city of Madison got $1.5 million in private dollars before the ballot initiative, which won’t be affected by the voter-approved ban.
“The city has spent the second grant it received from CTCL in the amount of $1.5 million to purchase equipment that will automate the process of mailing absentee ballots and sorting them upon return, as well as security carts to transport voting equipment,” Madison City Attorney Michael Haas told The Daily Signal.
“There was also a grant to help the city pay for its membership in the [Alliance] for Election Excellence,” Haas said in a written statement. “Since that grant was made and the membership was purchased prior to the constitutional amendment being passed, I do not believe the amendment applies to it.”
“Plus, the amendment prohibits the use of money or equipment from a grant to conduct elections,” the city attorney added. “I think it is a stretch to argue that learning and developing best practices, which is what [the alliance] does, is actually conducting an election.”
The Daily Signal previously reported that DeKalb County, Georgia, accepted a $2 million grant from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence last year despite a 2021 Georgia law that banned the use of private money to administer elections.
DeKalb County contended that it could accept the money because the 2021 law said only that “no superintendent” who oversees elections could accept the money. So the county’s general treasury accepted the money and then passed it to election officials.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans accused DeKalb County of skirting the ban. In 2023, the Georgia Legislature closed the loophole and made it a felony for any public official to accept private dollars intended for elections.
DeKalb County officials acknowledged an inquiry from The Daily Signal, but didn’t respond before publication of this report.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life was founded in 2012 by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May, who previously worked together at the New Organizing Institute, which The Washington Post referred to as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts of digital wizardry.”
For the Alliance for Election Excellence, CTCL partners with several nonprofits, including the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, that are funded by Arabella Advisors, a left-wing dark money organization.
Coconino County, Arizona, is also a member of the alliance. But it’s not getting any grants, County Recorder Patty Hansen said.
“We received a $614,000 grant from the CTCL in 2020 before the Legislature passed the ban,” Hansen told The Daily Signal. “We don’t accept any money from the alliance. We accept services. … The alliance works on developing best practices and standards that can be shared across the country.”
Both Arizona and Georgia were formerly solid-red states that flipped blue in the 2020 election. Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Donald Trump in each state was assisted by large margins of victory in Coconino County, where the largest city is Flagstaff, and DeKalb County, where the largest city is Decatur.
Two Missouri counties, Boone and Scotland, are also members of the Alliance for Election Excellence and neither received grants, Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said. She made it clear when the county signed up that it couldn’t receive private funds, Lennon said.
“Boone County is a member of the Alliance for Election Excellence; however, we do have the prohibition in Missouri law for private funding and, as a result, our county has not received grant funding from the alliance,” Lennon told The Daily Signal in a written statement.
Missouri, which leans heavily Republican, isn’t a battleground state in elections.
Boone County, which includes Columbia, the state’s fourth-largest city, also went heavily to Biden in 2020. Scotland County, with a population under 5,000, went overwhelmingly to Trump.
“Scotland County, Missouri, is our other Missouri member of the alliance and they also have not received private funding,” Lennon said in the written statement, adding:
The membership gives us access to subject matter experts that are current or former local election officials on administrative areas like poll worker recruitment (finding enough election judges, especially judges that affiliate as Republicans, is a perennial problem for us), better ways to design forms and applications so that voters can understand them, and ways to make our existing elections processes more efficient.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report.
The center’s Alliance for Election Excellence gave $3 million to Clark County, one of the larger jurisdictions in Nevada, which is considered a battleground state in 2024 with no ban on private money to run elections.
The other jurisdictions in the alliance are in solidly blue areas and have no ban on private dollars bankrolling local elections. They are Shasta and Contra Costa counties in California; Kane and Macoupin counties in Illinois; and the city of Greenwich, Connecticut.
The post Left-Wing Election Group Still Rooted in These Areas With ‘Zuckerbuck’ Bans appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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