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By executive order signed last week citing a “national emergency,” agencies of the executive branch are now empowered to intrude on the states’ election apparatus and given plenary power to do it clandestinely. Under the pretext of “foreign interference,” universally alleged by the deep state and mass media but never proved, federal agencies are given unchecked power to oversee election infrastructure, defined as “information and communications technology and systems used by or on behalf of the Federal Government or a State or local government in managing the election process, including voter registration databases, voting machines, voting tabulation equipment, and equipment for the secure transmission of election results.”
If we had actual journalists reporting our news instead of disk jockeys, comedians and quizmasters, we might recognize this executive order as the flagrantly dangerous act it is. Reporters might point out that our constitution is explicit in enumerating the powers of the central government, and control of elections is not among them. Rather, elections are left, intentionally and unconditionally, to the states. Any attempt by the executive branch to usurp this power ought to be recognized as meddling. Reporters might like you to worry about Russian posts to Facebook undermining “our cherished democratic processes,” but meddling by our own federal government, neglected by the mass media, is far more dangerous.
If federal authorities actually get their mitts on databases, voting machines and tabulation equipment, what do you suppose they might do with those resources? Might they guarantee a Congress sympathetic to Donald Trump or committed to a permanent state of war or to the further enrichment of rich people? If you depend on US mass media for information, you won’t be conscious of such risks until it’s too late to do anything about them. For some reason, news editors want you to worry about Russian meddling, but you need not be concerned about this executive order and its “framework for the process . . . which may be classified in whole or in part.”
Compare the risk posed by federal government interference in your state’s electoral process, in which federal officers have authority to oversee the operation of voting machines, with the risk posed by Russians, whose meddling seems principally to have involved paid advertising trashing one or another candidate. That seems to be the character of the national emergency conjured as a pretext for this executive order, which will almost certainly be used to swing the 2018 congressional election in favor of the order’s authors and sponsors.
Don’t depend on NPR or the New York Times to tell you about this. The Constitution and the text of this thoroughly illegal, subversive and antidemocratic executive order might as well be in a foreign language, as far as their reporters are concerned, and all discussion of its implications for what’s left of our republic is carefully censored.