House Republicans investigating the Biden administration ahead of the 2024 election are raising concerns over revelations from documents reported by the Washington Examiner about a key meeting between the White House and left-wing activists on voter registration.
GOP lawmakers are growing increasingly worried that an executive order issued by President Joe Biden in 2021, which mandated that federal agencies develop voter registration plans with “approved” outside groups, will be unlawfully weaponized this November to boost Democratic turnout. The Biden administration has framed the unprecedented operation as nonpartisan, though internal documents show the government hosted a July 2021 order planning call that appeared to serve overwhelmingly as a platform for left-wing organizations to suggest sweeping election policy changes.
“President Biden’s EO is an overreach of the executive branch’s constitutional authority and disregards the Constitution’s federalist election system,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told the Washington Examiner. “The states set the time, manner, and place of their own elections, and this EO must be looked at seriously.”
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said the internal meeting notes reveal “illegal coordination” between the Biden administration and progressive activists to plot “election interference,” adding that lawmakers are investigating the 2021 executive order “to ensure our elections are free and fair.” Stefanik is widely considered as in the running to be former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick in 2024.
According to a RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump leads Biden by roughly 1 percentage point. To Republicans, who have launched investigations into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s funding of a progressive-left group that lawmakers say helped tilt the 2020 election for Democrats, the 2021 “Bidenbucks” order is legally questionable. The order directs agencies to solicit and facilitate the approval of “nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”
The order, in the minds of lawmakers and conservative legal experts, is unconstitutional and flouts numerous federal rules, including the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from spending funds beyond those approved through Congress, and the Hatch Act, a law restricting government employees from engaging in certain political activities.
The meeting notes reviewed by the Washington Examiner, which were obtained through separate records requests by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and Foundation for Government Accountability, show attendees from activist groups discussed topics such as registering illegal immigrants and integrating voter registration into public housing as a requirement under federal law. The Oversight Project said in a memo last week that it’s clear the 2021 executive order is a partisan “attempt to influence the outcome of future elections through the use of federal resources, infrastructure, and reach.”
The 2021 meeting was virtual over the platform Zoom and attended by representatives from the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice, among other agencies, as well as staffers from groups such as the Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center, End Citizens United, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.
Stewart Whitson, an attorney who works for the Foundation for Government Accountability, said the touted proposal related to public housing is evidence of a coordinated effort between the White House and left-wing activists to target vulnerable populations determined to be likely Biden voters through the unlawful order. The housing proposal was mentioned at the 2021 meeting by Laura Williamson, a then-employee at the left-wing Demos think tank who now works for the Southern Poverty Law Center. GOP lawmakers have said Demos crafted a document in 2020 that ended up appearing “nearly identical” to the Biden order.
Like other lawmakers, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said the meeting notes reveal a coordinated and since-secretive effort by Biden to work with progressives “to figure out a way to leverage federal resources and enhance Democrat political power.”
“It’s all political in nature, and it’s totally wrong,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told the Washington Examiner.
At the 2021 Zoom meeting, a representative from the League of Women Voters urged agencies to register people to vote at citizen and naturalization ceremonies run by federal courts.
Meanwhile, one representative from the Sentencing Project, a left-wing group that supports defunding prisons, called for the use of federal resources to register inmates to vote in prisons, noting, “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression.”
The 2021 executive order at the center of the meeting has also prompted an investigation by the GOP-led House Small Business Committee, which is looking into the Small Business Administration over its voter registration efforts.
One lawmaker on the panel, Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA), said it’s clear Biden is working hand in hand with progressives — not nonpartisan groups — “to enlist the federal government in a national voter registration operation” that is likely unlawful.
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The House Small Business Committee is, in particular, “extremely concerned that the Biden administration is using the SBA as a campaign arm in the battleground state of Michigan,” according to Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), the panel’s chairman.
“My colleagues and I are troubled by this alleged electioneering and allocation of taxpayer dollars to activities blatantly outside of the SBA’s jurisdiction,” Williams said. “The committee will continue to use every tool at our disposal to stop these blatant political acts.”
