The ‘Emergency’ Executive Order Proposal That Trump Activists are Rallying Behind
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Trump-aligned activists were presenting the president with a draft executive order that would declare an “emergency,” drawing on debunked allegations of foreign interference in the election, to order a list of changes desired by the far right in the way elections are conducted in America.
This list is long. It would attempt to revolutionize elections just as President Trump and his allies are looking for ways to reduce the ease of voting in the run-up to the midterm elections later this year. Voting by mail would be banned, as would electronic voting machines.
This proposal is unlikely to succeed in the short term, even if Trump signs it in the form of an executive order. It would likely face immediate legal challenges and the Supreme Court is unlikely to uphold the order, according to Ned Foley, the Ebersold professor of constitutional law at Ohio State University.
“There is no doubt that the Court would hold that, given existing federal laws regarding congressional elections, the President does not have the authority to prohibit mail-in ballots and voting machines, even if the President has reasonable factual grounds to believe that these instruments of the electoral process are vulnerable to malicious interference by a foreign government,” Foley wrote in response to the Washington Post article.
One of the activists involved in this proposal is a Florida lawyer named Peter Ticktin, who studied with Trump.
A representative from the Ticktin law firm shared their version of the proposed ordinance with Talking Points Memo on Friday. The draft shared the date, length and other details with the document described by the Post.
According to the Post and a subsequent ABC News article, Trump revised versions of the order. Ticktin told ABC that he has been in touch with key influencers in the election denial space about the issue, including Michael Flynn, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.
But when asked by reporters Friday about the order, Trump responded: “Who told you that?”
When pressed, the president replied, “No, I’ve never heard of it.” »
Read the proposal here:
