RUTHFULLY YOURS

You would think Democrats have enough to fight President Trump on that they wouldn’t have to resort to stupid, easily dismissed talking points. But again and again, on cable news and social media, the refrain is repeated: Trump is “ruling by executive order” and Republicans are hypocrites for cheering him on when they condemned Obama for – purportedly – doing the same thing.

It is thus necessary to repeat an elementary point that we’ve made over the years: The number of executive orders issued by the president is irrelevant; the issue is the substance of executive orders – specifically, whether they stray beyond the president’s authority.

Since the Left is not big on logical consistency, I will give the Dems this much: The specious argument they are making now is the same one they made during the Obama years. Then, the contention was that Obama could not have been overstepping his constitutional authority – as conservatives and a few honest progressives contended he was – because he had issued fewer executive orders than some of his predecessors. It’s a nonsequitur: The number of EOs has nothing to do with their constitutional validity.

EOs are patently necessary and theoretically unremarkable. The president is the head of the vast executive branch. He must give directions to his subordinates in order for the executive branch to carry out its work. A proper executive order is simply that: the president ordering subordinate executive officials to carry out lawful policies and actions – lawful because they are consistent with the Constitution and statutory law.

Let’s take the president out of the equation for a moment. In the military, a commanding officer may give a hundred orders a day to his subordinates. These are “executive orders” in the sense that the armed forces are part of the executive branch. But as long as they are within the bounds of the law, the fact that there are thousands of such orders causes us no concern. Similarly, when the attorney general gives instructions to Justice Department lawyers, or the secretary of state directs our diplomats, these are “executive orders” and standard fare.

As I listened to Trump’s Inaugural Address, I thought of Aesop’s fable about the mice who were being devastated by a ferocious cat. As they debated what to do, a brash young mouse proposed putting a bell around the cat’s neck. That way the mice would hear its approach and scurry to safety. All applauded until one greybeard mouse posed the question: “Who’s going to put the bell around the cat’s neck?”

Especially in politics, it’s easy to propose simple, if not impossible, solutions to complex problems.

Trump’s speech was a rousing catalogue of promises to “make America great again.” Infrastructure development, rebuilding the inner cities, bringing back jobs to America, securing the borders, returning the power usurped by the feds back to the people, making “America first,” and eradicating Islamic jihad “from the face of the earth” comprise an ambitious agenda, to say the least. Perhaps these are mere negotiating positions to be adjusted later, but politics isn’t business. What a candidate thinks is typical campaign hyperbole, the voting public often considers promises to be taken seriously.

Ask George H.W. Bush, who broke his promise “Read my lips: no new taxes,” and lost his reelection bid. And that was just one costly broken promise. Trump has named a whole pack of cats he has promised to bell.

Just consider Trump’s promise about “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” Sounds good, but he said nothing specific about reducing the size of the feds, or restoring citizen self-rule. Yes, on Monday he imposed a hiring freeze on federal workers. So did Ronald Reagan in 1981, but that didn’t slow down much the fed expansion in the long term. And Trump’s claim that he will reduce regulations by 75% is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but highly unlikely without a lot of help from Congress.

Trump needs to be more specific, and realistic, about how he will restore power to the citizenry by undoing the un-Constitutional concentration of powers in the executive and its metastasizing agencies, enabled over the years by compliant Congresses and activist Supreme Courts. The result is our country’s feral cat, the bloated federal government spawned and nourished by progressives for nearly a century, with significant help from Republicans. As the fed has waxed ever fatter, the intrusive reach of its agencies, councils, and bureaus into all aspects of our lives––corporations, small businesses, churches, schools, private organizations, state and local governments––subjects them to the coercive power of federal agencies to regulate, investigate, and punish anything that challenges their technocratic pretensions to greater intelligence and efficiency than the sovereign citizenry possesses.

This Friday, the U.S. Justice Department, due to the prior actions of the Obama administration, will be conspicuously absent from a federal courtroom in Virginia as a lawsuit kicks off that could prove critical to protecting the integrity of American elections.

The lawsuit before the court revolves around the public’s right, under federal law, to examine election records. In this case, the specific records sought to identify thousands of aliens who were illegally registered to vote in Virginia. Many of these non-citizens actually cast ballots in prior elections.

During the Obama era, the Justice Department regularly went to court to back left-wing groups, such as Project Vote, which sought access to voter-registration records under the same federal law at issue in the Virginia case. But on Friday, the Justice Department will be nowhere in sight.

Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), 52 U.S.C. § 20507(i), gives the public — and the Justice Department — an unhindered right to inspect election records. Under Section 8, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a nonprofit law firm dedicated to election integrity, has been gathering records on aliens who registered and voted illegally in Virginia. Prior to the November election, it uncovered more than 1,000 illegal aliens registered to vote in just eight counties, and those were just the cases it caught by accident; its review was not comprehensive, because some counties refused to comply with the law and provide the records requested. PILF consequently took one of the recalcitrant jurisdictions, the City of Manassas, to federal court.

This time, the Obama Justice Department filed no briefs supporting transparency. It was left up to J. Christian Adams, PILF’s general counsel, to oppose the city’s effort to dismiss the suit and hide its records. (It’s worth noting that there is no indication Manassas forwarded these records to state or federal law enforcement for investigation and prosecution, despite the fact that registration or voting by a noncitizen is a felony under both state and federal law.)

This is the next battlefield for election integrity. Local officials are working to decide how or if to clean up their voter rolls, along with whether the public has a right to check their work. Counties across the country are resisting transparency. This has to stop.

President Trump is about to destroy the P.C. thought police who say interest in valid elections is racist and that claims of fraud are nuts.

Fox Radio News yesterday joined the liberal media meltdown. Driving home, I heard the afternoon news claiming that Fox knows of no studies supporting Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. They must be relying on Google searches instead of reading conservative websites. Tell me Fox reporters don’t read the Wall St. Journal or National Review, which have been publishing alarming columns by the voter fraud expert John Fund for years. No surprise – Fox reporters know less than the readers of AT.

Fox News itself reported on voter fraud in California this November:

Jerry Mosna was gardening outside his San Pedro, Calif., home Saturday when he noticed something odd: Two stacks of 2016 ballots on his mailbox. The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.

Daily Caller:

[As many as] 2.8 million non-citizens voted in the 2008 elections, according to a study published in Electoral Studies journal in 2014. … participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes[.]

American Thinker:

ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote generated an impressive 1.1 million voter registration packages across America in 2008. The problem was that election officials invalidated 400,000 – that’s 36 percent – of the registrations filed …

As John Fund writes at pages 27-8 of Stealing Elections:

‘incentivizing’ of fraud… the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. … Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification … had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar . Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘dead wood’ – people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes … it has fueled an explosion of phantom voters. …

Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were instrumental in the passage of the law by Congress. … Bill Clinton gave a shout-out to Cloward and Piven at the bill-signing ceremony in 1993 that both attended.

“Between 1994 and 1998, nearly 26 million names were added to the voter rolls nationwide, almost a 20 percent increase,” according to Fund. Motor Voter has “been registering illegal aliens, since anyone who receives a government benefit [including welfare] may also register to vote with no questions asked.”

If ten percent of these unvetted voters are illegal, that validates Trump’s claim.