Posted on 06/05/2020 4:17:20 PM PDT by jazusamo
Judicial Watch Testifies to Congress: Secure the Vote! Trump’s 2016 Campaign
Court Rules Cash Payments to Illegal Aliens Likely Violate Federal Law
Appeals Court Weighs Whether We Can Depose Hillary Clinton
Facebook Censorship Board Has Ties to Leftwing Billionaire George Soros
Virus Update: Data Wars Rage Over Trump-Boosted Drug
Judicial Watch Testifies to Congress: Secure the Vote!
I was pleased to represent you in providing testimony to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties during a hearing titled “Protecting the Right to Vote During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
I reminded the committee that Judicial Watch has “been involved for almost a decade in ensuring the honesty and integrity of our electoral processes” and “is now the nation’s premier enforcer, public or private, of the election integrity provisions of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).”
“The American people see what they conclude are disingenuous fights over electoral procedures and lose faith in the honesty of our elections,” I said. “With this background in mind I turn to measures proposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the more common suggestions now is to require greater reliance on mail-in ballots. For example, last month Governor Newsom issued an executive order requiring that county elections officials transmit mail ballots to every registered voter in the State. I view this as a real threat to the integrity of American elections.
“It is now about five months until election day, and the pandemic’s infection curve has flattened. Insisting now on all-mail ballot elections seems less like a response to a health crisis and more like a partisan application of the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel: ‘Never allow a good crisis to go to waste.’”
For more than 25 years, Judicial Watch has been known for its aggressive, leading edge use of public records laws and lawsuits, as well as taxpayer, civil rights, and whistleblower protection litigation to fight government corruption. In 2012, we launched a nationwide effort to promote voting integrity and protect voting rights. As part of this effort, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who have fought gerrymandering in Maryland, stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.
In 2018, California settled a federal lawsuit with Judicial Watch and began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls. In April, Judicial Watch sued North Carolina and Pennsylvania to force them to clean up their voter rolls. We also just filed a lawsuit to stop the special, statewide vote-by-mail mandate issued by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Other participants in the hearing included:
I suspect the Left wasn’t terribly happy with my testimony, as I called them out for using coronavirus to scare Americans from voting in person. This is the real voter suppression.
Thank you to Subcommittee Chairman Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) and Ranking Member Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA) for running the hearing and allowing Judicial Watch the opportunity to make our case for more secure elections.
My written testimony is available here . Video from the hearing is available here .
Court Rules Cash Payments to Illegal Aliens Likely Violate Federal Law
A federal court just ruled that a Montgomery County, MD, program that provides $10 million in cash payments to illegal aliens likely violates federal law and irreparably harms county taxpayers.
The court ordered the county to hold back 25% of any unspent funds until the court can fully consider the merits of our taxpayer lawsuit ( Bauer, et al, v. Elrich, et al. (No. 20-cv-01212)). However, the court denied our request for a temporary restraining order.
This action comes in our lawsuit on behalf of Montgomery County taxpayers Sharon Bauer and Richard Jurgena, originally filed on May 13 in Montgomery County Circuit Court, which Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich and Raymond Crowel, director of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, subsequently removed to federal court . The lawsuit seeks to permanently enjoin Elrich and Crowel from expending taxpayer money on the cash-benefits program known as the “Emergency Assistance Relief Payment Program” (EARP). Payments under EARP would amount to $500 per single adult, $1,000 per family with one child and $150 per additional child, up to a maximum of $1,450 per family.
Under federal law, certain categories of aliens, including unlawfully present aliens, are ineligible for state or local public benefits. Such benefits include direct, cash payments. If a state chooses to provide such benefits to unlawfully present aliens, it must enact a state law affirmatively providing for such eligibility.
We argue that EARP violates federal law because the Maryland State Legislature has not authorized Montgomery County to provide these benefits to unlawfully present aliens. Therefore, Elrich and the County Council overstepped their authority when they created the program. The Montgomery County DHHS has stated that “unlawfully present aliens are eligible to apply for and receive cash payments.”
The court agreed with us, ruling that:
Based on an analysis of the federal statute alone, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs have demonstrated a strong likelihood of success on the merits.
Although the court denied a request for a temporary restraining order, it did order that county retain at least 25% of any unspent funds until the court could fully consider the merits of the case.
This ruling pushes back on the abuse by county officials who want to send taxpayer coronavirus money to illegal aliens in violation of federal law. The coronavirus challenge doesn’t give politicians a pass to violate the law. If politicians want to use tax money from law-abiding taxpayers and send cash payments to illegal aliens, they must be accountable and transparent, and, as federal law requires, pass a state law to do so.
Appeals Court Weighs Whether We Can Depose Hillary Clinton
Off the Wall Ping!
Contact to be added.
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