About That Fourteenth Amendment Thing…

I am not a lawyer, nor do I claim to be one. However, I am concerned about the lawfare being conducted against President Trump.

In the January 2024 issue of Newsmax Magazine, Hans von Spakovsky wrote a commentary about the use of the 14th Amendment to keep President Trump off of the primary ballot in several states.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states:

Section 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Note that Congress may remove such disability.

The article in Newsmax notes:

In 1872, Congress passed an Amnesty Act providing that the “political disabilities” imposed by Section 3 “are hereby removed from all persons whomsoever” except for members of Congress who had served just before and during the Civil War, as well as a limited number of other officials.

In 1898, Congress passed a second Amnesty Act getting rid of these remaining exceptions, providing that the “disability imposed by section 3…heretofore incurred is hereby removed.”

That sounds to me like using the 14th Amendment to keep President Trump off of the ballot does not agree with the laws Congress has passed since the 14th Amendment.

Also, doesn’t there have to be a trial and a conviction?

It should also be noted that the removal of President Trump from the ballot represents taking away the right of the American people to vote for whoever they choose. This sounds like something that happens in dictatorships. The only reason to remove someone from the ballot is if they do not have enough support to run for election. Obviously that is not the problem with President Trump.

 

An Unfortunate But Necessary Decision

Yesterday One America News posted an article about President Trump’s shutting down of the Voter Integrity Commission. There is no question that we do have a problem with voter fraud–it is a problem we have traditionally had (Chicago?). The question is how much voter fraud is there and what can we do to combat it. One of the problems is the fact that all states are not updating their voter registration lists on a regular basis. Last year a friend of mine checked the voter rolls and found that there were three voters registered at her address who did not live there. When she approached the Board of Elections, she was told that she did not have the authority to remove those people from the voter rolls. Hopefully there is a procedure to verify the information and remove them, but her word was not enough.

The article reports:

Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky says that members received an email only shortly before the president signed the Executive Order to end the commission.

Mr. von Spakovsky explains the problems with the commission:

Von Spakovsky says that he understands why the president made the decision to do so, despite his disappointment and frustration.  Von Spakovsky validated the president’s explanation for the decision.  Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement that “rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense.”

Von Spakovsky says the demise of the commission can be attributed to two reasons– the refusal of some states to share voter registration information and litigation.  “We’ve had almost a dozen lawsuits filed against the commission, all of them frivolous. And those lawsuits were intended to keep us from being able to work and unfortunately they were successful,” said the former commission member.

According to von Spakovsky, commission members spent nearly 100% of their time fighting litigation rather than investigating voter integrity.  “It basically became impossible for us to do the work we were intended to do,” added Von Spakovsky.

Members of the panel also suffered personal attacks. Von Spakovsky was accused of sending an email to the Department of Justice requesting that “democrats” not be allowed to serve on the panel.  However, the Heritage Foundation fellow refutes that claim saying that he had expressed concerns about democrats joining the panel in a private email months before he himself joined the panel. That individual forwarded the email to the DOJ.  Von Spakovsky said that his concern was that democrats would join the panel to sabotage its work–a prediction that proved true according to von Spakovsky.

“One of the democratic members, Matt Dunlap- he’s the Secretary of State of Maine- actually filed a lawsuit against the commission as a member.  Again, making all kinds of frivolous claims.  And it was lawsuits like that that made it practically impossible for us to work,” said von Spakovsky.

One wonders why anyone would want to block a commission to ensure the integrity of America’s elections.

The article concludes:

Trump signed an executive order abolishing the panel and turning the matter over to the Department of Homeland Security. However, von Spakovsky is concerned DHS will focus solely on cyber security attacks rather than addressing illegal immigrants that may be voting and those people are registered and voting in more than one state.

The ending of this commission illustrates the difference in how the government works and how a businessman thinks. As Ronald Reagan said, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” A businessman ends a program if it isn’t working. Obviously we need more businessmen in our government.

Voter ID Would Solve This Problem

Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial today about the charge by Donald Trump that non-citizens voted in the last presidential election.

The article lists a few examples:

  • Election officials in a Kansas discovered that about a dozen newly sworn citizens had already voted in multiple elections when they offered to register them in 2015.
  • An investigation into a 1996 California House race in which Loretta Sanchez defeated incumbent Rep. Bob Dornan found 624 invalid votes by noncitizens in a race where Sanchez won by fewer than 1,000 votes.
  • A September report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation found more than 1,000 noncitizens on Virginia‘s voter rolls, many of whom had cast votes in previous elections.
  • A district-court administrator estimated that up to 3% of the 30,000 people called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period were not U.S. citizens.

The article also quotes John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, who have both tracked voter fraud extensively,. They made the following statement, “we don’t know how big of a problem voter fraud really is because no systematic effort has ever been made to investigate it.”

The only way to know how much of a problem voter fraud is would be to investigate it and to purge voter rolls of illegal or deceased voters.

I believe President Obama encouraged illegals to vote. Here are some quotes from an interview President Obama did with the Latin-oriented YouTube channel mitu, millennial actress Gina Rodriguez asked Obama:

“Many of the millennials, Dreamers, undocumented citizens – and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country – are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will Immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?”

Obama responded: “Not true, and the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself. And there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, etc. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential.”

The video of that interview can be found here.

 

 

An Unfortunate Choice Of Nominee

Yesterday’s Washington Times posted an article stating that present and former justice department attorneys do not support the nomination of Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez to be secretary of labor. It seems as if some of Mr. Perez’s actions as Assistant Attorney General were not in full compliance with the law.

The article reports:

“People should be raising serious questions about this nomination,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a veteran Justice Department lawyer who formerly served as counsel to the division. “This is a man who misled both Congress and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“He was the focus last week of the most devastating indictment of a federal government agency I have even seen,” he added, noting that the Justice Department’s office of inspector general in a 258-page report documented widespread intimidation, harassment and even threats of violence under Mr. Perez’s leadership.

 This does not sound like someone we want in charge of the Department of Labor.

This is another part of this story that is deeply troubling.  Mr. Perez intervened in a legal case involving the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The case involved St. Paul’s agreement to drop its appeal in exchange for an agreement by Justice not to join a fraud lawsuit against the city. The case had the potential to return more than $180 million in damages to the U.S. treasury.

The article reports:

They (Three House members — Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee; Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; and Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, North Carolina Republican and chairman of the House Oversight financial services subcommittee) said they were “shocked to learn” that Mr. Perez — over the objections of career Justice Department attorneys — had enticed the city to drop its lawsuit that he “did not want decided by the Supreme Court.” They said Mr. Perez was concerned that a decision in the city’s favor “would dry up the massive mortgage lending settlements his division was obtaining by suing banks for housing discrimination based on disparate effects rather than any proof of intent to discriminate.”

 We have seen this problem in other areas. One of the reason that Congress has not really gone after the big banks is that the fines that can be levied against the banks for various charges are an easy flow of money into the treasury. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the ultimate source of that money is the consumer. Another reason Congress hasn’t done much about the banks is that an investigation of the bank’s roll in the 2008 collapse would also reveal the part the Congress and the Community Reinvestment Act played in the collapse.

 At any rate, Mr. Perez is not a good nominee, and his name should be withdrawn. He is another potential part of gangster government.