Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries just filed a lawsuit to block President Trump’s executive order requiring federal agencies to verify that voters are actually United States citizens. Let that sink in for a second. The two highest-ranking Democrats in Congress are spending taxpayer money on lawyers to make sure nobody checks whether the people voting in our elections are legally allowed to vote.
Totally normal behavior from people who definitely aren’t cheating!
The executive order that’s got Democrats reaching for their lawyers is straightforward enough that a fifth-grader could understand it. It requires federal agencies to cross-reference voter rolls with Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security databases to confirm citizenship. It assigns unique barcodes to absentee ballots so they can be tracked from printing to counting. And it directs the Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters who appear on approved state registration lists — not to every address in the zip code like a pizza coupon.
That’s it. Verify identity, track ballots, mail them to real people. The Democrats looked at this and said, “We need to sue immediately.”
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday by the DNC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — basically every fundraising arm of the Democratic Party. Schumer and Jeffries put their names on it personally, which is a nice touch. Nothing says “we believe in fair elections” like personally suing to prevent election security measures.
Their legal argument — and try to keep a straight face here — is that the executive order represents an unconstitutional power grab. The complaint invokes the Founding Fathers, claiming “our Constitution’s Framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power.” They’re comparing citizenship verification at the ballot box to tyranny. George Washington crossed the Delaware in the freezing cold so that someday, a senator from New York could make sure nobody checks your ID when you vote.
The White House responded with a fact sheet stating that “unlike the Biden administration, which pursued its political agenda instead of fair elections, President Trump is putting the American people back in charge.” Trump himself posted on social media that Democrats “want to continue to cheat in Elections” and promised “Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!”
Here’s what Schumer and Jeffries know that they’re hoping we don’t figure out. The SAVE America Act — which would have accomplished most of this through legislation — already failed in the Senate because Democrats killed it. They blocked the legislative path, and now they’re suing to block the executive path. They don’t want citizenship verification to happen through Congress. They don’t want it to happen through executive order. They don’t want it to happen at all.
And they’re telling us exactly why with this lawsuit. If your voters are all citizens, you don’t sue to prevent citizenship checks. You welcome them. You put out a press release bragging about how your voters are so legitimate that the verification will only prove what you already knew. You don’t sprint to a courthouse with the entire party’s legal war chest to stop the government from looking.
The barcode tracking provision is the one that’s really got them sweating. Right now, mail-in ballots are basically anonymous pieces of paper that arrive in envelopes. Unique barcodes would create a chain of custody from the moment the ballot is printed to the moment it’s counted. Every ballot accounted for. Every ballot traceable. If you’re running clean elections, that’s a feature. If you’re not — well, you file a lawsuit.
Trump warned in the same post that if Democrats regain power, they’ll “add states, expand the Supreme Court to 21 justices, and eliminate the filibuster.” He’s not wrong about the playbook. But right now, the immediate play is simpler than all that. They just need to make sure nobody cross-references the voter rolls with the citizenship database before the midterms. That’s the whole game.
Every election cycle, we hear Democrats swear up and down that voter fraud doesn’t exist. Then the second someone proposes checking, they lawyer up faster than a mob boss at a grand jury hearing. The lady doth protest too much, Chuck.
