Executive Order 14019 was signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, during his first 100 days in office. The order empowers federal agencies to engage in Get Out the Vote measures for federal, state, and local elections, including in federal prisons. It is telling that you cannot access the executive order on White House dot gov. However, the United States Employment Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has fully overviewed and outlined the purpose behind this EO and the implementation plan.
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Executive Order 14019, Promoting Access to Voting, states the Administration’s policy to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections. The Executive Order also asserts the Federal Government’s responsibility to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.
Describing the right to vote as “fundamental” and as “the foundation of American democracy,” the Executive Order notes the challenges encountered by many Americans who seek to exercise that right, including people of color, individuals with limited English proficiency, people with disabilities, members of the military serving overseas, and other American citizens living abroad. The Executive Order identifies several legal authorities that protect and promote the right to vote, including the U.S. Constitution, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
The EEOC claims in this plan that it is in no way violating the Hatch Act and that it takes it very seriously. Now pull the other leg.
Republican officials beg to differ and are taking action. However, this has been three years in the making, and much of the damage has already been done.
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WATCH:
Republican state attorneys general are pushing back through lawfare.
On Tuesday, attorneys general from nine states — Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota — filed a federal lawsuit asking a U.S. district court in Wichita, Kansas, to shut down an executive order that is using federal agencies to register and mobilize left-leaning voters, with the assistance of White House-approved leftist organizations. Among the charges, the complaint alleges the Biden administration has usurped the appropriating power of Congress, which did not grant the executive branch authority to fund the unprecedented GOTV initiative.
“We’re not going to stand by and let the federal government get turned into a giant voter turnout machine for Democrats. We’re going to make sure you follow the law,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen told me in an interview this week. “You’ve got an executive branch that is far exceeding the authority that has been given to them. This is something that’s never been done before at the federal level.”
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In 2020, Zuckerbucks, along with leftist AGs like Michigan’s Dana Nessel and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro (now the governor), ensured a Biden-Harris administration through mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, and other means. Did you think they would give up that successful formula? Nope, they’ve just used the executive branch to federalize it. Funny how there’s all this clutching the pearls by Democrats that a 2024 win by former President and GOP nominee Donald Trump would bring in a dictatorship, when Biden is already doing exactly that right underneath our noses.
That’s because, as the AGs argue in the federal lawsuit, the executive branch cannot “take money Congress allocated and reuse it for improper purposes.” And they certainly cannot do so without following the laws that establish procedures laid out by Congress. Biden and crew also can’t encroach on the state’s sovereign rights over the administration of elections, including registering voters.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R) spoke exclusively to The Daily Signal about this abuse of the Constitution and bureaucratic overreach.
Known action by the Biden-Harris administration, combined with secrecy, “creates an impression” that the federal government has its “thumb on the scales” for the Nov. 5 presidential election, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach says.
Kobach, a Republican, is leading a multistate lawsuit to strike down President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order on elections.
“It appears it could be designed to register more Democrats than Republicans,” Kobach said of Biden’s order in a phone interview Wednesday with The Daily Signal.
The Kansas attorney general referred to a March letter, cited in footnotes in the lawsuit, from Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin of Illinois and other Senate Democrats to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland about voter registration through the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
“Durbin’s letter is applauding registration in prisons, and prisoners have disproportionately been Democrats,” Kobach told The Daily Signal.
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Too little, too late? Possibly, since the 82 days before the 2024 elections do not give anyone time to quantify the damage done.
“This is very late in the game, but better late than never,” lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who chairs the Election Integrity Network, told The Daily Signal. “Anything that can be done to stop this use and misuse of taxpayer resources for partisan political activity needs to be done.”
Kobach said that the reason for the late filing is because of the secrecy surrounding the EO and its implementation.
“Part of the reason is we didn’t know what the impact would be,” Kobach said. “If the administration had done this under the Administrative Procedures Act, there would have been public notice and comment. They just proceed ahead.”
The Kansas attorney general added: “It would be interesting to know how many people were registered [to vote] through federal agencies, and if specific states were targeted.”
Pennsylvania would be the first place I’d start, and then move through the other battleground states. Let us hope the election integrity grassroots organizations that exposed the failures and falsehoods of 2020 are equipped for this battle.