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Government Corruption

Clarice: If it Ain't One Law, it's Another

2026-09-27

Some key paragraphs. Go read the whole thing.

[AT] The Trump Administration’s latest Supreme Court victory is a tribute to its persistence and innovation. It is, as well, a measure of the great changes in governance for which we owe Elon Musk and DOGE thanks.

Stymied by the congressional refusal to enact the SAVE Act, which would put teeth in the constitutional proscription against non-citizen voting in federal elections, the Administration kept searching for other ways to ensure that non-citizens did not vote in federal elections. Under a 1996 law, Section 1373(c), the federal government must provide state and local officials, upon request, verification of the citizenship of voters. The system in use before this Administration stepped in was an archaic, unworkable clunker which made a joke of the legal requirement. This relic, the Systematic Verification Act for Entitlements (SAVE, not to be confused with the proposed SAVE Act), had been in the law books since 1986. That little-utilized forty-year-old law allowed federal, state, and local governments to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens who applied for public benefits. That no one apparently used it to verify voter eligibility (or even benefit eligibility) is no surprise. This Administration dug into it, found it was not suitable for the purpose of citizen verification, and altered it. The very mechanics set up for the SAVE verification scheme were expensive for users and unwieldy (if not impossible) to meet its stated purpose of benefit eligibility, nor a broader purpose -- voter eligibility.

In March of last year, the President rectified this and signed an Executive Order directing the Department of Homeland Security to put a better-designed SAVE system in place. The new system would, for once, enable state and local authorities to speedily verify the citizenship status of existing and prospective voters. The states’ use of this system is completely voluntary. If they don’t wish to use it, they need not do so. (On the other hand, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has made it clear that the Department of Justice is prosecuting vote fraudsters, while election officials found to have knowingly allowed vote fraud may find themselves prosecuted for their complicity in it.)

The District Court vacated the modified SAVE program and denied the government application for a stay pending appeal. A divided Court of Appeals also denied a stay pending appeal. The Supreme Court granted the stay, ruling that the plaintiffs’ claims likely lacked merit, that Section 1373(c) contemplates an information-sharing regime like the modified SAVE program, and that the court was likely to reverse the District Court’s holding vacating SAVE.

The lead plaintiff in this case was the “League of Women Voters,” another once honestly non-partisan organization which in recent years regularly unmasked itself as a left-wing Democrat front. Forum shopping the case to D.C. Judge Sparkle Sookanan, the League tried to halt the only reasonable and efficient way to carry out a constitutional mandate: ensuring that votes in federal elections are cast only by eligible (that is, citizen) voters.

Posted by:Frank G

#1 comments); ?>werwer

Posted by: Skidmark 2026-09-27 16:07

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