July 5, 2017 at 4:23 p.m.
More nonsense
More nonsense
This time it has to do with the request by Trump's presidential commission on voter fraud, which he created by executive order in May. To analyze possible voting and registration irregularities and fraud, the commission sent a letter to the 50 states, requesting voter roll data, including names, addresses, dates of birth, political party, last four digits of social security numbers, voter history (elections voted in) and other things.
And everybody, especially liberals and the media, went berserk.
For nothing.
Much of the line was that Trump is trying to suppress voter participation and, to build his national voter harassment file, is using his administration's request to gather "sensitive personal information" that the government has no business having.
One Wisconsin Now called on Gov. Scott Walker to protect Wisconsin voters' privacy from Trump and to refuse any request from the administration for voter information not available to the public.
Of course, the presidential commission did not request any information from any state that was not releasable by law or that wasn't available to the public. Nor did the commission ask any state to waive a fee the public would have to pay.
In other words, the Trump voter fraud commission isn't seeking anything that you or I or anybody else couldn't request and get.
So what is the big deal?
Well, first, it's just gotcha politics. The Left must, by any means, paint Trump as an unbalanced dictator out to destroy civil liberties and threaten American democracy. The Democrats are unable to win over the American public to their big-government policies, and so now they are resorting to sensational accusations to take Trump down.
As such, the voter data tantrum is but a sidebar to other efforts to destroy the president. There were the charges of collusion with Russia, then declarations of obstruction of justice, and, now that impeachment on those mythical crimes doesn't seem viable, some congressional Democrats just want Trump to be declared insane.
By them, of course.
But really, when you look at the behavior of the Left, who is insane? Their efforts amount to nothing less than an attempted coup d'état, an effort to overturn the results of an election they lost at the ballot box.
Second, the voter data request scares the Left silly because the commission's work just might expose all the voter fraud that undoubtedly goes on, most of it for the Left.
The Left likes to say that there is scant evidence of significant voter fraud, and that is true, but there is a caveat. Evidence is scant because, the way our electoral systems are set up, it is hard to catch the fraudsters.
With Election Day registration and no requirements for photo IDs in most places, it is quite easy for ineligible voters to come in, register, vote, and then disappear into the wind. Try tracking those people down.
But there's enough anecdotal evidence - enough real cases prosecuted - and enough statistical red flags - gobs of Election Day registrations in election after election in Milwaukee, for example, even though the city's population wasn't growing - to warrant an investigation.
Just where were the Election Day voter registrations in heavily Democratic Milwaukee coming from? When close to 20 percent of the total vote registers on Election Day, as happened in Milwaukee in 2012, and that number is repeated in multiple elections in a city that isn't growing in population, you have to wonder about the genesis of all those instant voters.
An investigation is certainly warranted, and to conduct an investigation, information is needed.
The criticism from Republicans and conservatives takes on a little more heft. The U.S. constitution puts the authority to regulate federal elections squarely in the hands of the states, though secondarily Congress "may at any time by law make or alter such regulations."
Even here, though, the Founders were keen to keep federal meddling in state affairs confined to Congress and did not give such power to the executive or judicial branches. So there is some justification when conservatives growl that the Trump administration is sticking its nose into where it has no business sticking its nose.
Still, though, the administration only wants to conduct an investigation, and it is only seeking publicly available information, something the federal government does all the time. We don't hear liberals howling when the U.S. Census Bureau seeks all sorts of personal information from millions of Americans through the American Community Survey, for example.
And in that case, the government actually threatens to fine people if they don't give them the information it wants.
We say, let the voter-fraud investigation proceed. It's in everyone's interest to prevent voter fraud, and to shut it down where it is already happening.
When and if the presidential commission makes recommendations based on its findings, we can take whatever action, if any, is necessary and possible through legal and constitutional means. In the meantime, though, we will know just how pervasive the problem of voter fraud is or isn't.
Make no mistake, the liberal hysteria over the data request is just that, hysteria.
Liberals are hysterical not because they believe the rights of Americans are threatened. No, not at all. They are hysterical because a president who keeps exposing them for what they are could be about to expose them again.
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