Release Biden’s secret voter plan
Opinion by Washington Examiner
Democrats have a well-established pattern of behavior when it comes to enacting policy changes at the federal level. First, they try to change federal law through Congress. If they fail, they all too often turn to plan B — they enact their preferred policy agenda illegally through executive action.
When Congress refused to pass amnesty for illegal immigrants, then-President Barack Obama did it anyway through executive action with his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans programs. When Congress refused to enact a carbon cap-and-trade plan, Obama did it anyway with his Clean Power Plan. When Congress refused to provide amnesty for those who had borrowed money to pay for college, President Joe Biden did it anyway with his student loan debt relief plan.
None of these executive actions were authorized by statute, but at least the specifics of each policy were made public.
The same cannot be said for Biden’s secret voting plan.
Less than two months after being sworn into office, Biden issued an executive order directing government agencies to “expand” voting access and “combat misinformation.” The order is light on specifics of what agencies should do, but it does mention providing voter registration and vote-by-mail applications “in the course of activities or services that directly engage with the public.” It also directs agencies to solicit and facilitate the cooperation of “nonpartisan” third-party organizations in voter registration.
The order also directed each agency, within 200 days, to submit a “strategic plan” for implementing the executive order to the assistant to the president for domestic policy — that is, to Susan Rice, the woman chosen by the Obama administration to lie on national television about the Benghazi terrorist attack on the eve of the 2012 presidential election.
So now that the Democrats have failed in their efforts to pass a new law federalizing elections, where are these strategic voting plans? What specifically will each agency be doing to comply with Biden’s voting executive order? Are far-left groups going to receive privileged access to government property and communications to target voters they believe will vote for Democrats? The public deserves to know.
Biden isn’t telling. None of these strategic plans have been released. The Foundation for Government Accountability filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Department of Justice’s strategic plan, and the Biden administration illegally ignored it. The FGA took the DOJ to federal court, and a judge ordered the department to release its plan. On the last possible day, the DOJ released a few emails — but no plan. Instead, the department claimed that all materials related to Biden’s secret voting plan are exempt from disclosure under FOIA’s internal government deliberations exemption. Government transparency advocates have rightly called this exemption the “withhold it because you want to” exemption.
From what little the Biden administration did release, we do know that top officials in the DOJ held a meeting on July 12, 2021, with a who’s who of far-left activists whose organizations, though nominally nonpartisan, are essentially unofficial appendages of the Democratic Party — for example, the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Lives Matter, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Is the intention here to use government resources to target only heavily Democratic constituencies for get-out-the-vote operations? Maybe. Either way, no Republican should trust the DOJ when it colludes with such a rogues’ gallery of leftist activists on voting registration and vote-by-mail applications. Just 20% of people say they trust our nation’s voting system, and Biden’s clandestine coordination with far-left groups on a secret voting plan is not helping matters.
Biden must make his voting plan public immediately.
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