Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma and South Carolina joined the lawsuit before it was filed on Tuesday.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen joined Republican attorneys general from Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota in filing a federal lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Administration on Tuesday, seeking to invalidate President Joe Biden’s election campaign. Executive Order 14019.
The plaintiffs cited multiple damages resulting from Biden’s vote-boosting campaign, including procedural damages and harm to states’ sovereign interests, and asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas to declare Executive Order 14019 and its implementation “unlawful and unconstitutional.”
The Republican state lawsuit, filed following a Blaze News report highlighting a handful of attempts by various Republican officials around the country to thwart the purported “election interference” plot, also asks the court to quash and enjoin all government agency action to implement the order.
“Although much damage has already been done, it’s not too late to mitigate this constitutional disaster in which the current administration is using its power and people’s dollars to ensure its own reelection,” Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s government watchdog group, the Oversight Project, recently told The Blaze News.
“We’re at a point now where more states need to take the initiative and take action, not just question and complain,” Howell added.
Biden’s March 2021 executive order has been criticized by Howell and other critics asBiden Bucks” would effectively force federal agencies, including the Treasury, Labor, Interior, and Veterans Affairs, to mobilize and register historically Democratic voter bases and potentially ineligible voters.
According to the left-leaning think tank
Recommended by Ostensibly the catalyst for the executive order, the move could result in “approximately 3 million new or renewed voter registrations per year,” which could help swing the vote to Democrats. Close race.
Knudsen’s complaint accuses Biden of “trying to turn the federal bureaucracy into a voter registration organization and turn every interaction between federal officials and the public into a voter registration pitch.”
“I will not stand by and watch while the Biden-Harris Administration shamelessly seeks to harvest votes by hiring its own agencies to register voters.”
This shift alone is worrying, given that the administrative state is overwhelmingly left-leaning and has shown antipathy toward Trump in recent years.
For example, in the 2016 election, The Hill
Reported 95% of campaign contributions from 14 government agencies went to Clinton. In 2020, the majority of federal employees Donate again to the Democratic candidate.
It’s hard to imagine President Donald Trump ingratiating himself with the federal bureaucracy since then. After all, he is once again looking to potentially make it easier to fire rebellious and underperforming federal employees.
The lawsuit further alleges that Biden’s secretive transformation of a partisan federal bureaucracy into a voter registration organization “exceeds the authority of the executive branch under federal law, violates the Constitution, threatens states’ attempts to regulate voter registration, and ultimately undermines state-established voter registration systems.”
“Fair elections are essential to our republic, and Congress years ago gave states the authority to oversee their elections,” Attorney General Austin Knudsen said in a statement to The Blaze News.
“We will not stand by while the Biden-Harris Administration uses its own agencies to register voters and shamelessly attempts to harvest votes in defiance of states’ voter registration systems, jeopardizing the integrity of our elections,” the Montana attorney general added.
When asked how Montana might respond if the lawsuit ultimately loses, a spokesperson for Knudsen told Blaze News, “While it remains to be seen what steps will be taken, Attorney General Knudsen will not stand idly by while the President and his agencies overstep their authority and will fight federal overreach regardless of administration. It is his job to protect the rights of Montanans.”
A coalition of other Republican-leaning states have taken legal action in recent months to repeal the order and protect the rights of their residents.
For example, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston
Litigation Late last month, he accused Biden of “attempting to unlawfully use federal resources to support Democratic campaigns by mobilizing a vast federal bureaucracy to orchestrate vote outreach and get-out-the-vote campaigns.”
West Virginia, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Wyoming
Amicus Brief On May 28, the U.S. Supreme Court “asked the Supreme Court to rule that Executive Order 14019 is unconstitutional and violates the election administration powers given to the states by the United States Constitution.”
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