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Four city and county governments, led by Nashville and the county where it’s located, sued the Trump administration Monday over election security-related mandates placed on grants to combat terrorism.
“FEMA has no authority to impose those conditions — not under its governing statute and not under the Constitution,” the suit argues. “Congress authorized FEMA to help jurisdictions protect critical infrastructure from terrorist and cyberattacks. It did not authorize FEMA to decide who may vote, how ballots must be counted, or how states maintain their voter rolls. Never before has FEMA purported to regulate how states and counties run elections. Such a transformative assertion of federal authority in an area of traditional state control requires clear congressional authorization that FEMA does not have. The power to administer elections belongs to the states, subject only to conditions imposed by Congress — not the President, not the Secretary of Homeland Security, and not FEMA.”
A group of cities and counties alleges the Trump administration is threatening to withhold anti-terrorism funding unless they adopt strict election rules.
The Texas counties of El Paso and Harris, as well as the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County and the City of Columbus, are suing the Department of Homeland Security, according to a news release from the Brennan Center for Justice, one of the organizations representing the group.
El Paso County and Harris County on Monday sued the Department of Homeland Security alongside communities in Tennessee and Ohio over new requirements for federal grants that they argue undermine election security and public safety.
“That is incredibly unusual,” Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told the Post. The group is suing the administration over what it says is the withholding of public spending information.
“That is incredibly unusual,” said Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel for Protect Democracy, an advocacy group that is suing the Trump administration for allegedly withholding public information about federal spending.
Trump may have the pardon power, but all those people making bank off of shady contracts from the administration or doing pay-to-play can lose all that money through forfeiture and seizure laws already on the books. Taxpayers are going to want their money back. And why are Chinese nationals continuing to bribe the president of the United States—and does his soft-on-China policies have anything to do with it? Plus: Trump used a catering cart to sneak out of Turkey, the Dems need to do a better job highlighting the fact that the White House is doing socialist-style company takeovers, and the National Guard will now be in DC until 2029.
Amanda Carpenter joins Tim Miller.
“You don’t need to have boots in your streets or in your community, for you to have a stake here. It’s something that affects all of us,” Beau Tremitiere, counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal center that has been tracking the D.C. deployment.
“These tabletop exercises are a standard planning tool for experts and stakeholders to prepare for potential scenarios. We’re not predicting exactly what would happen,” said Justin Vail, who leads the DC office of the non-partisan advocacy group Protect Democracy. “But we do want to create a realistic context that can help us identify gaps, test our assumptions, and strengthen coordination, and then ultimately develop some recommendations to increase our preparedness.”
Is the chaos of today’s American politics accidental? Not at all, according to Protect Democracy Executive Director Ian Bassin. This week, he tells host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush about the seven-point playbook of modern authoritarians – and how to counter it. Ian also describes the three “d” strategy to attack democracy: Deceive, Disrupt, and Deny. He also shares a Protect Democracy resource for understanding and defeating this strategy, the Executive Override Report, available at protectdemocracy.org/DDD
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