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Is Biden’s Executive Order 14019 Designed for Electoral Wrongdoing?

By Walter Donway

October 20, 2022

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None dare call it a bureaucratic putsch.  Perhaps because so few people have even heard of it. How to briefly characterize President Joseph Biden’s March 7, 2021, Executive Order 14019, “Promoting Access to Voting”? How about as the greatest leap forward toward disenfranchising the states since Congress in 1912 passed a constitutional amendment establishing direct election of senators by the people of each state.

The Biden Administration’s plan to federalize elections—just in time for the 2022 midterms—is the most decisive step since 1912.

Prior to that the state legislatures each sent two senators to Washington. Sold as a move toward “democracy,” the amendment in fact delivered a body blow to the separation of powers. In a chapter in her brilliant, The God of the Machine, Isabel Patterson pointed out that the immediate result was a quantum increase in the federal bureaucracy (obviously continuing to this day).

With a solid structural connection with Washington, the state legislatures had shaped national programs and then coordinated their implementation via state bureaucracies. The Seventeenth Amendment radically altered that. It shifted the structural relationship to one between the federal government and the people and enormously potentiated the federal role.

Disenfranchisement of the states did not stop there, but arguably the Biden Administration’s plan to federalize elections—just in time for the 2022 midterms—is the most decisive step since 1912.

The Executive Order, which has gotten minimal attention from the mainstream media, popped up again in the news with a refusal of the Department of Justice, despite a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to release a crucial 15-page section of the Order known as “the strategic plan.”

What is known of the “Promoting Access to Voting” Order? As Joel B. Pollack put it in a September 12 story in Breitbart News, the Order “reads like a Democratic Party wish list of ‘reforms,’” codifying practices adopted on a temporary basis during the pandemic:

  1. Using federal agencies to promote voter registration.
  2. Using federal agencies to inform Americans about voting.
  3. Linking federal agency websites to state voter registration websites.
  4. Providing voter registration and vote-by-mail applications.
  5. Using “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations” to register voters at federal agencies.
  6. Using identification documents issued by the agency to help people register to vote.
  7. Providing more multilingual services to potential voters.
  8. Giving public employees “time off to vote in Federal, State, local, Tribal, and territorial elections.
  9. Promoting voter registration for federal prisoners.

The U.S. Constitution, of course, gives states primary power to make decisions about elections. That includes voting qualifications and procedures, polling places, staffing polling places, collection and counting and certification of votes, and much more. Obviously, the Constitutional intent is that the states run elections.

The “problem” with that for Pres. Biden and the Democratic Party is that not all states give highest priority to getting people who don’t vote—and “marginal voters”—to the polls. And, as we know, Republicans are much more consistent voters than Democrats.

How to shift effective control of voting to the federal government without running afoul of the Constitution? And also, by the way, without involving Congress? This is an Executive Order. One provision states:

“It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.”

The Biden Administration (for now) can accomplish its aims with the “soft power” of bureaucracy—without a change in state laws and regulations.

In other words, the Biden Administration (for now) can accomplish its aims with the “soft power” of bureaucracy—without a change in state laws and regulations. Many of the Order’s other directives, as listed above, the Democratic National Committee could do—but without the awesome force of the federal bureaucracy (about 2.6 million employees). Take a single example:

“The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) encourages all state agencies administering the child nutrition programs to provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.”

The Executive Order may have been inspired by “innovations” in the 2020 election. In the June issue of The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway reminded us that Democrats and their donors (billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, for example) funded and became involved in administering local elections in key counties in crucial swing states.

The Executive Order may have been inspired by “innovations” in the 2020 election.

The Department of Justice was not about to release information on the Executive Order. The Foundation for Government Accountability filed a FOIA request in 2021. Only last week, a federal court compelled the DOJ to produce the information—just two months before the 2022 midterm elections, which are the obvious target of the Executive Order.

The DOJ did produce some documents but seized upon a loophole in the FOIA to withhold what is called the “strategic plan” to implement Executive Order 14018. So, what the Biden Administration is planning to do to implement the order for the midterm election is under wraps.

But Mr. Pollack reports this clue that got by the DOJ censors. It is a report on “listening sessions” held July 12, 2021, with “activists” working on voting rights in the run-up to the midterm elections.

Presumably, organizations represented at the sessions are the private sector counterparts of the federal bureaucrats directed to implement the Access to Voting scheme. So, who attended these sessions?

Dozens of individuals, all from left-leaning groups. For example, 10 from the American Civil Liberties Union, five from the Campaign Legal Center, five from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, two from Black Lives Matter—and many others. Does it sound as though implementation will be rigorously nonpartisan?

You might think that the “Promoting Access to Voting” scheme would be front and center among issues debated by candidates in the coming elections. I had not read a single recent report in the media until Pollack’s story. There doubtless were some; there may be more with DOJ documents released. But how much media coverage and debate would there be of a Republican administration secret plan to shift the locus of control over elections to the federal government?

In military strategy, a classic move is the “diversionary attack,” which draws the attention of the defending forces away from the real attack from another direction. This week, Congress announced that it would reconvene public hearings of the January 6 committee and subpoenaed dozens of Republicans involved in the 2020 presidential election.

These are the Republican counterparts of the organizations whose members attended the DOJ “listening sessions.”

During the run-up to the November elections, we will have weeks of televised testimony from subpoenaed Republicans who raised doubts about the conduct and outcome of the 2020 election in various states and locales. Many are members of private organizations that supported the candidacy of Donald Trump. These are the Republican counterparts of the organizations whose members attended the DOJ “listening sessions.”

Who will rise to challenge the “strategy,” when President Biden, Democrats, and their media allies characterize as “enemies of democracy” those who question the 2020 election? And when the President bandies about labels for individuals and organizations such as “extremist,” “traitor” and “semi-fascist”?

 

 

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