Login
An agency of the District of Columbia held a training session last month to teach illegal immigrants and other noncitizens how to vote, according to documents obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch.
News of the training session held by the local government in the nation’s capital comes as House Republicans push a bill—with the backing of Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.—to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
The D.C. Board of Elections conducted the April 10 event, called “Non-Citizen Voting Education Virtual Training.”
Judicial Watch obtained 13 pages of the training session’s PowerPoint presentation through a request under the Freedom of Information Act. On one slide, the presentation says:
Non-U.S. citizen residents can vote in District elections for the offices of Mayor, Attorney General, Chairman or member(s) of the D.C. Council, member(s) of the State Board of Education, or Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner(s) Non-U.S. citizen residents cannot vote for Federal Offices.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project previously raised concerns about noncitizen voting in the District of Columbia. (Heritage established The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Washington, DC’s Voter Guide for Illegal Aliens is up! pic.twitter.com/COeIpOba5w
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) May 1, 2024
The District of Columbia is joined by local governments in California, Maryland, and Vermont in allowing foreign citizens to vote in local elections. Federal law allows only U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections.
State courts blocked New York City from allowing noncitizen voting there.
“Illegal aliens and noncitizens should not vote in any elections,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “That Congress allows the votes of citizens to be legally stolen by illegal aliens in our nation’s capital is inexcusable.”
The District of Columbia amended its election code last year to allow noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, to vote for local D.C. offices.
As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” Democrats long have sought to change election laws to gain a political advantage. These noncitizen voting laws mimic a tactic used by New York City’s legendary Tammany Hall and other political machines that controlled big city politics.
The District’s presentation explains the qualifications for registering to vote when someone isn’t a U.S. citizen.
“To register to vote in the District of Columbia as a non-citizen, you must: Be at least 17 years old and 18 years old by the next General Election; Maintain residency in the District of Columbia for at least 30 days prior to the election in which you intend to vote; Not claim voting residence or the right to vote in any state, territory, or country; Not been found by a court to be legally incompetent to vote,” the presentation says.
Neither the D.C. Board of Elections nor the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on this report.
The post DC Holds Training Sessions for Noncitizens to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In response to new federal rules on pronouns and bathrooms based on gender identity, 18 state attorneys general are suing the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The lawsuit, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, was filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
“This end-run around our constitutional institutions misuses federal power to eliminate women’s private spaces and punish the use of biologically accurate pronouns, all at the expense of Tennessee employers,” Skrmetti said in a public statement.
The Daily Signal first reported last month that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published guidance determining that 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 personal pronoun that the person doesn’t want used.
The guidance, which the EEOC adopted on a party-line vote of 3-2, would determine how the commission would handle an employee complaint on the matter and also could affect other employee litigation as the formal federal policy.
EEOC has 2,331 employees, according to its 2023 annual report.
Joining Tennessee in the lawsuit are Republican attorneys general from the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
“In America, the Constitution gives the power to make laws to the people’s elected representatives, not to unaccountable commissioners, and this EEOC guidance is an attack on our constitutional separation of powers,” Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney general, said. “When, as here, a federal agency engages in government over the people instead of government by the people, it undermines the legitimacy of our laws and alienates Americans from our legal system.”
The EEOC issued new sexual harassment guidance that extends Title VII’s prohibition of sex-based discrimination to cover gender identity. Title VII forbids employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer, public or private, with more than 15 employees.
Under this guidance, an employer may be responsible under Title VII if the employer, or another employee, uses a name or personal pronoun other than the one an employee prefers for his or her gender identity, or limits access to a restroom or other sex-segregated facility that isn’t consistent with what the employee prefers to use.
This rule prevails regardless of the biological sex of the employee in question.
“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,” EEOC’s new enforcement guidance says.
An EEOC spokesperson referred The Daily Signal to the Justice Department for comment on this report. A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t respond by publication time.
In a previous public statement, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows, a Democrat, praised the enforcement guidance.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” Burrows said shortly after the commission announced the guidelines. “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 Democrats, Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels and Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal. The commission’s two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
In 2021, Burrows attempted to unilaterally include such actions under what constitutes harassment through a press release, without public comment or a vote by the full commission.
However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. Another federal court in Texas vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did not appeal the rulings.
The post 18 States Fight Federal Trans Agenda on Pronouns, Bathrooms appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A foreign national named Paul registered to vote at a local office of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles and records show that he voted, although he says his American wife voted after being accidentally checked in under his name.
Another noncitizen, Najib, also was registered to vote at a motor vehicles office, and his name was discovered on the voter rolls after a year, but he hadn’t voted in that time.
In these and other cases, the city of Boston flagged the noncitizens and removed them from voter registration lists.
In fact, the largest city in New England—although commonly viewed as a liberal bastion—could serve as a national model on this aspect of election integrity, according to new findings by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative watchdog group.
“In Boston, voter registration records disclosed to PILF demonstrate that Boston and other Massachusetts municipal systems—although not perfect—are a good example for how other states could tackle the noncitizen voting question,” says the report, first provided to The Daily Signal.
Public Interest Legal Foundation’s findings come as Congress considers requiring proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections and another bill to restore a citizenship question to the U.S. census form.
“We are not looking at this through an ideological lens so much as a data lens,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “This illustrates how this population data can be used by states to help in election administration.”
Adams noted that Massachusetts is among a few states that conduct their own census, or population tally, outside the census conducted by the U.S. government every 10 years.
The proof-of-citizenship legislation is not likely to pass the Democrat-led Senate, but at least in this narrow area, Massachusetts provides an example for other states on the issue of foreign citizens listed on U.S. voter registration rolls, Adams said.
“Rather than reimagining the future, states should take this data tool that Massachusetts uses and apply it,” he said.
Although every Democrat in the House recently voted against restoring a citizenship question to the census, Massachusetts law requires an annual census, or “annual resident listing,” that includes questions about citizenship status and voter registration and is used by local governments.
“Any registered voter who fails to complete the annual survey is warned that their voting status will be changed to INACTIVE until they comply,” says the report by Public Interest Legal Foundation, which is narrowly focused on tracking citizenship.
Overall, The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard ranks Massachusetts as 45th out of 50 states. (The Heritage Foundation launched The Daily Signal in 2014.)
The study by Public Interest Legal Foundation concludes that Boston’s voter registration system manages to “catch and cancel foreign nationals listed throughout the roll on a roughly two-year churn.”
“Unfortunately, a significant percentage of these disclosed records show that votes are still cast and counted within those years before discovery,” the report says.
The Boston city government this year provided information to Public Interest Legal Foundation that showed the city canceled voter registrations of 70 noncitizens. Most canceled registrations occurred in 2016 and 2017, with 13 in each year.
On average, foreign citizens were registered to vote for two years before being discovered and dropped from the rolls. But the longest known period was 24 years, and the earliest known year it occurred was 1995.
“Roughly 18% of Boston registrants were mailed confirmation notices prior to a reclassification to inactive status during the period,” the foundation’s report says. “Also, during this time, about 13% of Boston registrants were shed from the voter roll for reasons such as relocation, inactivity, and death.”
The report also points to other specific examples, such as a noncitizen named Hai who was registered to vote for a year and a half before Boston removed him, and Fred, who was registered for two years before being removed. Neither voted and both were registered at a local motor vehicles office.
A pattern of ineligible voters being registered at motor vehicle offices is a national problem that can be traced back to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, popularly known as the “motor voter law,” which allows someone to register to vote while getting a driver’s license.
“Foreign nationals are reflexively offered applications to vote and they unwittingly accept,” Public Interest Legal Foundation’s report says, adding:
The 24 states plus D.C. that have automatic motor voter [registration], meaning they are not giving the immigrant a chance to decline registration, exacerbate the problem. States giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants increase traffic to DMVs. States with higher amounts of legal immigration mean even more driver’s licenses or state IDs are needed for daily life (and increases the risk of screening immigrants for voter registration).
The post EXCLUSIVE: Here’s Where This Blue State Could Be a National Model for Election Integrity appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.
Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.
Biden’s controversial Executive Order 14019 requires federal agencies to participate in voter registration activities and help third-party organizations perform those activities on agency premises.
Potentially, this could involve spending government funds, contracting with third parties for the payment of those funds, or accepting voluntary services by these “approved” third-party organizations such as Demos.
Biden’s order appears to violate at least two provisions of the Antidefieicncy Act, said Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.
But, Whitson added, to determine whether the Biden administration is violating that law, it’s necessary to know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and what it’s being used for.
Existing pots of money, for example, could be distributed by the Department of Agriculture to state agencies to help carry out voter registration activities, he suggested.
“Even if the Biden administration were to claim that no public funds are spent to carry out EO 14019—a dubious and laughable claim—this effort would still violate the Antideficiency Act because it would mean federal agencies were accepting voluntary services from these third-party organizations to help carry out EO 14019, who also happen to be politically aligned with the current administration,” Whitson said.
Neither the Agriculture Department nor the Office of Management and Budget responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
OMB “created a template for budget requests for the Voting EO [executive order] within their equity template in case any funding is needed for implementation,” says a Sept. 23, 2021, email among Department of Agriculture officials.
Biden’s executive order also directed agencies to team with private organizations to boost voting. Chief among those groups is the liberal think tank Demos, which drafted the executive action before Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Akhil Rajan, then an assistant to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, sent the September 2021 email message about the OMB’s template to USDA senior adviser Kumar Chandran, now the department’s acting undersecretary. Rajan is now a senior policy adviser to the White House’s deputy chief of staff.
Rajan’s email to Chandran noted, “Contact K. Sabeel Rahman,” apparently meaning he was the one to contact with any questions.
By that fall, Rahman, who was president of Demos when the liberal think tank drafted the executive order on voting, had joined the Biden administration’s OMB as part of its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. (Rahman is now a professor at Cornell Law School.)
The Daily Signal obtained 73 pages of emails from the Department of Agriculture through a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents were USDA’s second interim response to a request from The Daily Signal regarding Biden’s executive order on encouraging voter registration and voting. Some pages are heavily redacted.
The documents also prominently mention meetings and guidance from Demos, which is based in New York. The left-wing think tank drafted Biden’s executive order to agencies about voter registration in December 2020, the month after Biden defeated Donald Trump before he took office.
Although describing it as “minimal,” USDA acknowledges some budgetary impact from Biden’s order. Any amount, however, could mean obligating tax dollars without congressional authorization, in violation of the Antideficiency Act.
In an email dated Sept. 21, 2021, Anne DeCesaro, chief of staff for the USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, wrote to Chandran about several issues, including “assessment of budgetary impact.”
“For all actions, we expect minimal budgetary impact as providing memos and letters and regular interactions with states are part of our normal business practices,” DeCesaro wrote.
In that same email, DeCesaro explained to Chandran how other agencies within USDA could participate: The National School Lunch Program could promote voter registration in high schools, for example, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, could register its beneficiaries to vote.
Ten days earlier, on Sept. 10, 2021, Chandran emailed several senior USDA staff about Biden’s executive order on increasing voter participation.
“Thank you for your past work to complete our interim strategic plan for the voting rights executive order,” Chandran wrote in the email. “We are now being asked to submit a final strategic plan, based on what we provided in our interim plan.”
He later added: “The WH [White House] team leading this effort has put together a template for the final strategic plan. This template largely follows the same format as that for the interim [plan], except it also includes instructions for how to flesh out each proposed action.”
The second interim response from the USDA to The Daily Signal’s FOIA requests didn’t include the department’s strategic plan or the template provided by the White House or its Office of Management and Budget.
An email dated Aug. 3, 2021, refers to a meeting between USDA officials and Demos executives to discuss Biden’s order on voting.
The Agriculture Department and Demos communicated again about the president’s executive order in November 2021.
“We’d love to reconnect soon to learn about your plans and see how Demos and the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union] may be able to support you in their continued development and implementation,” Demos senior policy analyst Lauren Williamson wrote Nov. 5 to senior USDA officials.
“When we met last, we talked about wanting to explore additional programs in more detail to ensure maximal impact of the EO for the communities the USDA serves and we’re eager to continue that conversation,” Williamson said.
Four days later, Rajan, assistant to the secretary of agriculture, wrote to Chandan, saying: “[D]emos has been extremely helpful in thinking about ways to expand opportunities for voting, and the coalition they assembled for our last call was rich in the types of groups that have assembled rigorously-tested best practices. So from that perspective it may be helpful to hear from them but understand that REDACTED.”
Because USDA redacted Rajan’s next words, it is impossible to know what Vilsak’s assistant wanted Chandran to understand.
The post EXCLUSIVE: White House Issued ‘Template’ to Impose Biden’s Voter Mobilization Executive Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Pointing to the combination of an open border and declining confidence in elections, congressional Republicans are backing legislation to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
“Due to the wide-open border that the Biden administration has refused to close, practically engineered to open, we now have so many noncitizens in the country that if only one out of 100 voted, they would cast hundreds of thousands of votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Wednesday during a press conference in front of the Capitol.
Because America’s borders are wide open and Democrats want to turn noncitizens into voters, Congress must act to protect our federal elections.
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) May 8, 2024
Today, we introduced the SAVE Act to ensure that only Americans get to decide American elections.
Thank you to @RepChipRoy and… pic.twitter.com/dXANdzUuoC
“Since our elections are so razor thin these days—just a few precincts in a few states decide the makeup of Congress and who is elected to the White House—this is a dangerously high number and it is a great concern to millions and millions of Americans. It could actually change the outcome of our elections,” Johnson said.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, is sponsored in the House by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, in the Senate.
The House speaker noted that about 16 million illegal aliens have entered the United States since Joe Biden took office as president.
Although it’s already illegal for these illegal immigrants to vote in federal elections, Johnson said, election officials have no mechanism to deter them from registering to vote.
“If a nefarious actor wants to intervene in our elections, all they have to do is check a box on a form and sign their name. That’s it,” Johnson said.
The legislation would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “motor voter law,” to require that states obtain documentary proof of citizenship from someone before he or she may register to vote. It also would require states to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls.
“The most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in elections and undermine integrity of elections by making it unclear as to who is voting and limiting our ability to know that only citizens are voting,” Roy told reporters, adding:
We are here for the proposition supported by the vast majority of the American people: that only citizens of the United States should vote, that we should have documentary proof, that we should have a system to guarantee that only citizens of the United States vote in federal elections where we have the clear authority under the Constitution of the United States, under our laws as Congress, to set the terms of those elections.
For his part, Lee argued that the one-citizen-one-vote measure should have lawmakers’ unanimous support.
“When federal law has been interpreted as precluding in many ways the voter registration officials in various states from even inquiring into someone’s citizenship when addressing voter roll issues, we have a problem,” Lee said.
“It’s legislation that really ought to pass unanimously in both houses of Congress because the only reason to oppose this—that I can think of—would be if you are comfortable with or somehow want noncitizens to vote and noncitizens in some instances to influence the outcome of elections,” the Utah Republican continued.
However, there is opposition. It’s “not true” that noncitizens are voting, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal advocacy group that opposes voter ID and other election security measures, posted on X.
Speaker Johnson, explaining bill to require passport or birth certificate to register to vote: "We ll know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it's not been something that is easily provable." That's because … it's not true! (Intuitively?)
— Michael Waldman (@mawaldman) May 8, 2024
Johnson announced the legislation last month while visiting former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
The press conference featuring Johnson, Lee, and Roy came one day after House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., sent a letter demanding answers from the District of Columbia Board of Elections, which allows noncitizen voting in local races. Steil’s letter inquires how the District will ensure that noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections.
“Not only is D.C. allowing noncitizens to vote, but the board is actively encouraging it,” Steil writes. “In addition to board staff hosting a virtual town hall focused on the ability of noncitizen D.C. residents to vote, the committee has received notice regarding a postcard mailed by the board to ‘residential customers’ advocating for noncitizens to register to vote in D.C. elections.”
During his remarks Wednesday, Johnson also raised the issue of jurisdictions that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.
“A growing number of localities are blurring the lines by allowing noncitizens to vote in municipal local elections,” the House speaker said. “In cities and towns in California, Maryland, and Vermont, and even right here in D.C., you might not know this, but noncitizens are voting.”
But Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chairwoman of Tea Party Patriots Action, said at the Capitol press conference that just because it’s already illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
“It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote, but just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. If you’re not a citizen, it’s illegal to enter our country without authorization. but that happens multiple millions of times every year,” Martin said. “We’re trying to get ahead of the curve here.”
The post Roy, Lee Introduce Bill to Require Citizenship Proof to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Years before the prosecution called the former porn star to testify Tuesday in Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial in Manhattan, Democrats viewed Stormy Daniels as an avenue for impeaching Trump when he was president.
My 2020 book “Abuse of Power” details the origins of Left’s lawfare against Trump, which began immediately after his 2016 election to the presidency.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, led the first criminal case against Trump, followed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and two federal prosecutions by special counsel Jack Smith.
Indicted in four separate criminal cases for a total of 91 counts, Trump got some good news Tuesday when a federal judge in Florida postponed indefinitely his trial in the classified documents case, one of Smith’s.
Below is an adapted excerpt from “Abuse of Power”:
It’s funny how “legal experts” who would pop up working for Democrats were talking and writing about Trump’s demise for other reasons months earlier.
Two lawyers whom the House Judiciary Committee hired for impeachment, Norman Eisen and Barry Berke, wrote a New York Times opinion piece along with Noah Bookbinder, also a lawyer, with the headline: “Is This the Beginning of the End for Trump?”
The lawyers suggested Trump could be taken down for a possible campaign finance violation tied to alleged flings with former porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Or, as the lawyers characterized it in their Times piece, federal prosecutors determined that “Mr. Trump, the Trump Organization, and the campaign were all directly involved in an illegal scheme to silence two women who claimed they had affairs with Mr. Trump.”
The lawyers’ op-ed in the Times further says Trump “could be named as an unindicted co-conspirator” or “charged if he leaves office before the statute of limitations runs out (most likely in 2022).”
Still, regarding the hush money [for Daniels and McDougal], even House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi had said after the news of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s planned guilty plea that it wasn’t grounds for impeachment, even as some of her members were pushing for that.
“Impeachment has to spring from something else. If and when the information emerges about that, we’ll see,” Pelosi said in 2018. “It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”
But impeachment was a priority for members of the House Democratic Caucus, which she led.
In December 2018, when Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation for paying hush money to Daniels, the plea agreement referred to “Individual 1” as directing him to do so. It was clear that this individual was Trump.
Cohen also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other financial crimes and was sentenced to three years in prison. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In late 2019, with Democrats in control of the House, many of the hardliners in Pelosi’s caucus were pushing the speaker to go beyond Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as grounds for impeachment.
Democrats in the House Progressive Caucus wanted to include the ambiguous obstruction arguments from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the discredited Trump-Russia claims, the campaign finance allegation in the Stormy Daniels case, the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and potentially other matters. By this point, the House had launched 12 separate investigations into Trump.
But after initial resistance, Pelosi had already caved once to the members demanding Trump’s impeachment on the Ukrainian phone call. The other matters would only prolong the process.
Trump admitted he and Zelenskyy talked about Joe Biden. Now, Democrats just had to turn it into an impeachable case.
Nevertheless, keeping swing district House Democrats in the loop was one reason why, early in the process, leadership had considered progressives’ demands for a “kitchen sink” impeachment involving Russia, Stormy Daniels, emoluments, and anything else they could think of.
This would allow moderate Democrats to go home and say they had voted against some articles of impeachment while still voting to oust Trump in order to appease the base and avoid a potential primary challenger from the left. In the age of MAGA and #Resistance voters, primary challenges are a forefront concern for incumbents on both sides.
During the impeachment hearing, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee called former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to testify.
As with other witnesses, Yovanovitch’s legal counsel was steeped in Democratic politics. Lawrence S. Robbins represented both Republican and Democrat clients.
But in a December 2018 op-ed for Politico, Robbins called for either impeaching or prosecuting Trump for campaign finance violation regarding the Daniels hush money.
Robbins wrote: “The Department of Justice’s description of the role of Individual 1—the president himself—leaves no doubt that career Justice Department prosecutors regard Trump as a full blown co-conspirator. And most serious-minded criminal lawyers agree that, if these allegations are true, the president, but for his day job, would have been sitting in the dock with his long-time fixer.”
Robbins further wrote that Trump would use his office as president to shield himself from prosecution, so “Congress would surely have no choice but to hold him accountable in the way prescribed by the Constitution.”
That way, of course, was impeachment.
The post How the Left Tried to Use Stormy Daniels to Impeach Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Wisconsin is one of the most fiercely contested battleground states in this election cycle, but it lacks federal transparency requirements for voter registration imposed on most states, according to a lawsuit by an election watchdog.
Minnesota, generally a solidly blue state although it saw a razor-thin margin in the results of the 2016 presidential race, also doesn’t make its voter rolls available to the public, the lawsuit contends.
Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity advocacy organization, announced the litigation last week, alleging that the exemption of six states from a provision in the National Voter Registration Act violates the principle of equal state sovereignty.
“No state should be exempt from transparency,” J. Christian Adams, president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, said in a written statement. “All states should be treated equally under the law and no exemption should allow certain election officials to hide documents relating to voter list maintenance activities.”
In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “Motor Voter Law,” which allows Americans to register to vote when they get a driver’s license.
The federal law also requires states to update voter registration lists to ensure that dead people or those who have left a jurisdiction no longer are listed.
For accountability, the law says that states must “make available for public inspection and, where available photocopying at a reasonable cost, all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters.”
However, Congress carved out an exception to the transparency requirement for seven states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Idaho, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine, and Wyoming.
The reason was that the seven states offered same-day voter registration or, in the case of North Dakota, didn’t require voter registration.
After briefly stopping same-day voter registration, Maine lost its exemption from the disclosure provision of the federal law.
The new complaints, filed in two federal courts, contend that the exemptions from U.S. law violate the principle of equal state sovereignty by treating the remaining states differently.
Public Interest Legal Foundation is suing Minnesota and Wisconsin first.
“This lawsuit is the first step to bringing the National Voter Registration Act’s transparency requirements to all 50 states,” Adams said.
The Wisconsin lawsuit names Wisconsin Election Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe as the defendant. The Minnesota litigation names Secretary of State Steve Simon as the defendant.
A Wisconsin Election Commission spokesperson declined comment for this report, but pointed to the applicable portion of state law, which says the commission and local governments can decide the cost of obtaining voter information.
“The commission shall establish by rule the fee for obtaining a copy of the official registration list, or a portion of the list. … The amount of the fee shall be set, after consultation with county and municipal election officials,” a portion of the law says.
The Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
The litigation cites the Supreme Court case of Shelby County v. Holder, in which the high court reaffirmed that all states enjoy equal sovereignty and determined that if Congress treats states differently, it must be “sufficiently related to the problem [the statute] targets” and must “make sense in light of current conditions.”
Public Interest Legal Foundation’s complaints argue that Minnesota and Wisconsin grant and remove voting rights through voter registration and maintenance of that voter list. So, they argue, Congress’ goal of making the process transparent should apply to both states.
Thirteen of the 20 states that offer same-day voter registration are still subject to the federal transparency requirements, the litigation notes.
The post These States Withhold Voter Registration From Public That Most States Are Federally Mandated to Disclose appeared first on The Daily Signal.
As the veepstakes speculation grows, Donald Trump—Republicans’ presumptive nominee for president for the third straight time—has had plenty to say about the group of contenders for the second spot on the ticket.
Axios reported over the weekend on an audio recording obtained from a gathering at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in which the former president comments on numerous contenders for his choice to be vice president.
Those possible Trump choices include three fellow Floridians who are in Congress: Sen. Marco Rubio and Reps. Byron Donalds and Michael Waltz. Trump also talked about two former 2024 primary opponents, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
The names of three more senators also were in the mix: Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mike Lee of Utah, and JD Vance of Ohio. And Trump commented on the often-mentioned chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, Elise Stefanik of New York.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican who made the news last week for telling a story in her new memoir about shooting and killing a 14-month-old farm dog, was among those that Trump commented on. (For her part, Noem said the dog posed a danger to her family and other animals after killing chickens.)
“Somebody that I love,” Trump says of Noem in the audio recording released by Axios. “She’s been with me, a supporter of mine, and I’ve been a supporter of hers for a long time.”
Axios reported that Trump’s “most prominent surrogates” went to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday to “audition for vice president.” At a private luncheon, Trump commented on the potential running mates, the outlet said.
In the recording,Trump doesn’t seem to resent by name any former opponents in the 2024 Republican primaries who reportedly have been in the running for his nod to be vice president. (However, he doesn’t mention Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, who didn’t drop out until March 6.)
As for North Dakota’s Burgum, governor of a state next door to Noem’s, Trump says: “I didn’t know this: He was a supporter of my two campaigns. He’s a very rich man.”
On Scott, the South Carolina senator, Trump says: “As a candidate, he did a good job, but as a surrogate, he’s unbelievable.”
In a press release Monday, BetOnline announced that it was updating its betting odds after the Mar-a-Lago meeting, giving Scott and Burgum the best odds at 4-1. Vance, once seen as a longshot, rose to 5-1. Rubio is 8-1.
Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a Democrat in Congress who became an independent after leaving office, is at 9-1. Gabbard’s name, however, doesn’t come up in the Trump audio leaked to Axios.
Interestingly, none of the possible contenders mentioned by Trump were from battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.
Trump notes that Vance wasn’t always on board, according to the audio, but calls the junior senator from Ohio “great,” Axios reported.
“He wasn’t a supporter of mine at the very beginning [and] was saying things like ‘the guy’s a total disaster’… Anyways, I got to know him a little bit,” Trump says of Vance. “As a non-politician, he’s become one of the great senators.”
In the 2016 Republican primary cycle, Trump mocked Florida’s Rubio as “Little Marco.” Rubio at one point referred to Trump’s small hands.
In the audio, Trump only says of Rubio: “His name is coming up a lot for vice president.”
Significant news coverage has shown Trump gaining support among black men. Beyond Scott of South Carolina, Trump mentions two other possible black running mates in the audio recording.
Of Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas, Trump says: “Another friend of mine … makes the best commercials … beautiful family.”
Of a potential choice that would create a team of Donalds, Trump says of Donalds, the Florida congressman: “Somebody who’s created something very special politically. … I like diversity. Diversité, as you would say. I like diversité. [Donors] worth millions of dollars … all want a piece of Byron.”
There has also been plenty of speculation about Trump picking a woman to close the gender gap.
Regarding Blackburn of Tennessee, Trump says “she was like the Energizer Bunny” in 2018, when she successfully campaigned to leave the House for the Senate. “She would go from stop to stop to stop.”
Of Stefanik, Trump says in the audio: “A very smart person. She was in upstate New York when I met her. … little did we realize she would be such a big factor.”
Trump is a former resident of New York City, where he built much of his real estate empire. He is now a resident of Florida.
There is some debate about whether the 12th Amendment allows a president and vice president to be from the same state, and that debate could come into play if Trump wanted to select Stefanik, Rubio, Donalds, or Waltz.
Of Waltz, Trump says in the recording: “A man that knows more about the military. When I want to know about the military, I call him.”
Lee is a one-time critic of Trump who supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2016 presidential primaries for the GOP nomination, when Lee also sported more hair.
In the audio, Lee gains some praise from the former president, who says of him: “I love your haircut” before adding: “And he’s a good man too.”
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
The post Do Trump’s Words on These Contenders Hint at His VP Pick? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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 Here’s the Kind of Voters Left-Wing Activists Are Scheming With the White House to Turn Out in November 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.
Vaunce News 