The House Judiciary committee held a hearing this morning on the NY case against Donald Trump, with a witness list including FEC Commissioner Trey Trainor, as well as Missouri AG Andrew Bailey, Ambassador Norm Eisen, and Elizabeth Price Foley. Testimony is here; Trainor’s got an additional op-ed in the Daily Caller with a summary of his part.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo have apparently agreed to testify in a follow-up hearing one day after Trump’s sentencing.
That’s the Fox headline for the continuing swirl of nonsense around Executive Order 14019 – but as I’ve mentioned before, the reality of the alleged “scheme” is an instruction to federal agencies to help facilitate customer service in a profoundly nonpartisan way, and only as consistent with each agency’s legal authority. (Disclosure: as mentioned before, in my role as a federal official, I had a hand in helping to implement the Executive Order.)
Here’s the set of cover letters for the subpoena mentioned in the piece. One of the cover letters is to the Department of Defense, and asserts that “Congress’s delegation of authority to the Department of Defense does not include using funds and resources to provide Americans with voter registration materials.” Which, as just one example, is a pretty weird understanding of the NVRA’s designation of DOD recruitment offices (52 U.S.C. 20506(c)), not to mention UOCAVA’s requirements (52 U.S.C. 20301(b)(2) and (b)(5) and 20305), all of which very explicitly authorize (indeed, mandate) the Department of Defense to provide Americans with voter registration materials.
Agency implementation of the Executive Order varies, because different agencies have different touchpoints with the public and different legal authorities. Agency brainstorming that hasn’t crystallized into final agency action hasn’t been made public, but individual agencies that have made concrete decisions have announced those efforts. And the Administration has periodically posted updates on agency steps in connection with the Executive Order, including cooperation with a bipartisan roster of state election officials.
Here are the updates I know of: Sept. 2021, Mar. 2022, Sept. 2022, Mar. 2023, Feb. 2024. Since then, I’ve seen the SBA accept designation by Michigan as a voter registration agency (joining the Department of the Interior in Kansas and New Mexico, and Veterans Affairs in Kentucky and Michigan), pursuant to the express requirement of 52 U.S.C. 20506(b). There may have been other releases I don’t know of (and I’d welcome reliable news of other agency actions). But none of those announcements of agency efforts to implement the Executive Order amount to the mysterious nefarious boogeyman the House committee seems to be suggesting.
In order to sue in federal court, a plaintiff must have “standing,” an actual or imminent concrete and particularized injury in fact caused by the defendant and redressable by a federal court. Many lawsuits are thrown out for lack of standing. In particular, and of particular relevance in election cases, many lawsuits are thrown out because the plaintiffs allege a “generalized grievance,” an injury shared in common with the public and not “particularized.” In federal court, an increasing number of plaintiffs have been non-profit organizations alleging a distinct harm to them, and they have survived the standing inquiry.
But the Supreme Court’s decision today in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine might have just disrupted this litigation path in election cases.
Continue reading Could the Court’s unanimous decision in FDA v. AHM upend some federal election litigation?An excerpt from the NBC report:
U.S. intelligence agencies are closely tracking attempts by foreign adversaries to influence the 2024 election through “deepfakes” or other false information and are ready to alert the public if necessary, officials said Wednesday.
A decision to notify the public about attempted election interference by foreign actors would be up to the leaders of the country’s intelligence agencies, including intelligence chief Avril Haines, officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, told reporters.
The decision to issue a public warning would follow a review by digital forensic experts and intelligence analysts, the ODNI officials said. It would be based on an assessment of whether the disinformation was serious enough that it “could affect the election outcome,” an official said.
UPDATE: A slightly different take on the briefing here, from the AP.
This Politico piece describes a fight that’s probably as much about statewide uniformity v. local control as it is about voter ID and securing data.
The Prison Gerrymandering Project crunches the numbers, and finds that even with the delayed census data this cycle, most of the states that sought to count incarcerated individuals at their home address rather than the prison address managed to get clean addresses that did the job.