M.D. Kittle writes for the Federalist about an important election-year appeal to the nation’s highest court.
President Joe Biden has no authority to order federal agencies to run a voter registration campaign assisted by leftist third-party organizations, argue members of Congress and top state elections officials filed in support of a lawsuit looking to shut down “Bidenbucks.”
Eleven Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and nine state secretaries of state have submitted amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that Biden’s Executive Order 14019 is unconstitutional for many reasons.
“Allowing the executive branch and its political appointees to operate a ‘get out the vote’ program on the national level and with the assistance of federal authority and funding threatens to convert the White House into a partisan political campaign headquarters,” asserts the court filing from the House members, including seven representatives from Pennsylvania.
The high court is considering taking up the appeal of 27 Pennsylvania state lawmakers who earlier this year filed the complaint in federal court alleging the order “nullifies the votes of the individual legislators, nullifies the enactment of the Legislature, violates the Electors Clause, violates the Elections Clause, deprives the legislators of their particular rights, and jeopardizes candidates’ rights to an election free from fraud and abuse.”
The amicus filings from the House members and the top election officials in Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming echo those charges.
“The President’s use of executive action to convert federal agencies into get-out-the-vote operations is prohibited by the United States Constitution,” the secretaries’ brief states. “The Elections Clause of the Constitution empowers the states to regulate elections subject to Congresses’ pre-emption power. No such authority is granted to the executive branch.”
They argue that Biden’s order is a violation of Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act, which “requires that States offer voter registration opportunities at certain State and local offices, including public assistance and disability offices.”
