Abuse of Power

“In an emergency, the president is able to do a lot of things he normally could not do, but only because he has been designated these powers by Congress in laws such as the National Emergencies Act,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a nonprofit group that advocates for eased ballot access. “But in this case, the Constitution empowers Congress, not the president, to select Election Day. No laws passed by Congress have delegated these powers to the president, even in an emergency, so Congress is the only entity that has the power to change the date of the election.”

“Usually we see a winning president begin to impose ethical restrictions during a transition, but I think this is unprecedented,” said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog. “The Biden campaign’s policy is a breath of fresh air after more than three years of a Trump administration that has been mired in conflicts of interest.”

So remarkable is his run that, for many, “term limits is code in this state for opposition to the speaker,” said Jay Young, executive director of Common Cause Illinois. Young calls limits a “blunt-force tool” when other reforms, such as overhauling the way legislative districts are drawn, would do more good.

But even if it is likely the directive would lose in court, it is necessary to seek an immediate block to the directive because it could affect the 2020 Census count that is underway, said Kathay Feng, Common Cause’s national director of redistricting and representation. “It could affect response because most immigrant families have a mix of people of different status,” she said. The directive could also affect the Census Bureau’s process in deciding which households to go to, Feng said. Instead of attempting to count every household in the United States, she said, the bureau could “only go to households which they think fall into the category that the president wants counted.”

Groups led by Common Cause, a government watchdog group, have filed the first federal lawsuit against the Trump administration in response to President Trump's call to make an unprecedented change to the population numbers used to divide up seats in Congress among the states. The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday, two days after Trump issued a memo calling to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the country that is used to redistribute seats in the House of Representatives.

Today, Common Cause filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging President Trump’s July 21 memo ordering the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the apportionment of seats in Congress. In that memorandum, the President purported to exclude those undocumented immigrants from reapportionment for the first time in our nation’s history, and ordered the Department of Commerce to assist him in that effort, in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes.