The Daily Populous Wednesday May 7th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by newrepublic.com and submitted by thenewrepublic

It’s not at all clear that the president has any power to issue such instructions in a country where elections are managed by the states and the bipartisan EAC. Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, believes many parts of the executive order are unconstitutional. The EAC “is an independent agency,” he said. Trump “may try to argue under the unitary executive theory that he has such power, but that will have to be resolved in the courts.” (Trump was dealt a blow on April 24, when a U.S. District Court judge halted the executive order’s proof of citizenship requirement.) Hasen characterized Trump’s executive order as a “power grab,” issued “perhaps in the hopes of influencing how future elections are run in order to try to help his preferred candidates and party win.”

Constitutional law professor Doug Spencer of the University of Colorado Boulder said that, while the EAC order is a “gray area,” he, too, fears that the likely result of any such effort would be to disenfranchise voters who have trouble proving their citizenship, putting an “onus” on voters to secure what should be an inalienable right. It’s “going to lead to many people who have a fundamental right not being able to exercise it,” he said, “and, in my opinion, that’s a problem for a country that wants to call itself a democracy.” Spencer also cautioned that it was far from obvious that the executive order would actually work as intended. In recent years, the Republican Party’s share of low-propensity voters—those who don’t consistently vote, a group disproportionately affected by restrictions—has grown significantly. In other words, the issuance of an executive order intended to make it easier for Republicans to win elections could ironically disenfranchise a growing part of its base.

But even if it does disenfranchise some Republican voters, the executive order goes further than simply making voting more onerous, providing several ways for Republicans to both win elections and challenge elections they have lost. It directs the U.S. attorney general to sue states that count mailed ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive afterward, effectively killing vote-by-mail. It also mandates that state election officials share voter databases with the secretary of homeland security, and the administrator of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting commission run by billionaire Elon Musk, all of whom could challenge lists, potentially purging voters.

StoppableHulk on May 6th, 2025 at 19:16 UTC »

They will never stop until they are stopped. These people have no other refuge. It has been decades since the GOP has had anyone other than swindlers in its ranks. It fundamentally does not know how to govern. There's no one left. No adults in the room who know how any of this works.

So they'll never stop doing crime, until they're imprisoned or completely disempowered federally, state and locally.

If you want to stop them then you need to step the fuck up, in some way, somewhere, and oppose them. Hold the line.

Financial-Special766 on May 6th, 2025 at 19:16 UTC »

Make sure to infiltrate the Republican party across the US so that they're forced to run against actual candidates instead of being the only name on the ballot. It's hard to lose when you're the only choice.

thenewrepublic on May 6th, 2025 at 19:12 UTC »

> For Trump, this is a question of existential importance, and not just because he doesn’t want Democrats to regain power and litigate everything he’s doing as president. The last time he lost power, after all, he quickly found himself embroiled in several criminal and civil cases, some of which related to his conduct as president. He may have ended up being sentenced to prison had he not won the 2024 election. He believes his political rivals were directly responsible for the legal problems that ensnared him after he left office in 2021 and likely fears returning to life as a private citizen under a Democratic president.

> He’s also spoken recently of seeking out a third term, despite the apparent constitutional restrictions on doing so. If he decides to actually pursue this route, surely it would be nice for him to know that he’d be starting off with a field goal–like advantage, and that, if he loses, he can simply direct the attorney general to start challenging every vote that went against him. That seems a much easier route than the last time he tried to overthrow the government.