Doctors fire the Biden presidency for alleged vote-gathering racketeering ,’putrid political aroma’
Lawyers tell The College Fix that the Biden presidency has a program that requires colleges and universities to give students with tax money to “get out the ballot” in an extraordinary interpretation of the Higher Education Act that is good illegal.
In February, the U.S. Department of Education announced that national work-study funds, normally used to offset tuition costs from working a part-time campus job, could be used to fund student expenses for “broad-based get-out-the-vote activities.”
The department’s financial aid office issued a memo on April 2022 warning universities that their federal funding might be in jeopardy if they did not distribute voter registration forms, citing the Higher Education Act’s call to make a” good faith effort” to do so. The memo came after the department’s financial aid office made the announcement.
The Biden administration’s one-two punch is being characterized by some observers as an clearly partisan effort to coerce universities into paying college students tax dollars to carry out voter registration campaigns on campuses that are increasingly populated by Democrats-sheer voters.
The cited part of the Higher Education Act” basically states that universities should do their best to deliver voter registration information to their own kids,” according to Hans von Spakovsky, older legal brother in the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
It forbids the use of federal funds to pay kids to participate in such activities, mainly by paying them to visit other colleges to enroll voters who are not learners. That is unparalleled”, he said.
He claimed that using the funds in this way had really violate the Hatch Act and the Anti-Deficiency Act, two distinct laws. The Hatch Act limits the social activities of individuals paid by the federal government, and the Anti-Deficiency Act forbids the use of federal money for reasons that go beyond their particular legal arrangement.
” Moreover, if you look closely at Section 487 ( a ) ( 23 ) ]of the Higher Education Act], which the administration is citing, it says very specifically that this section does NOT apply in any state that either has same day voter registration or does not require voter registration”, Spakovsky said.
He claimed that North Dakota does not need to register with the state of North Dakota, but that twenty-two claims and the District of Columbia do, and that North Dakota does not.
The Department of Education is not required to require schools in those 23 claims and the District of Columbia to participate in any kind of voter registration actions, he said, yet under its erroneous interpretation of the law.
Robert Eitel, leader of the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies, who served as senior advisor to the Secretary of Education from 2017 through 2020 under the Trump presidency, said the education ministry under Biden is overreaching.
According to Eitel,” the Biden administration has had a long history of making a good belief effort” to deliver voter registration forms to students,” the role of colleges and universities that receive federal funding has been a somewhat unambiguous requirement of federal student aid compliance.
Eitel said the administration’s “heavy hand” is an aggressive reading of the Higher Education Act of 1965.
” When one combines this guidance with the president’s illegal efforts to cancel student loans, it gives off a pretty putrid partisan aroma”, he said.
In April, nearly 20 Republican state attorneys general requested that the U.S. Department of Education rescind its recommendation to allow administrators to pay students for get-out-the-vote initiatives. The AGs claimed that using federal funds would” serve overtly political purposes” and would violate the law.
In other words, “events that are noble like encouraging voter turnout and voter registration must take place somewhere, and that place determines elections.” Your instructions effectively authorize colleges and universities to use taxpayer money to fund this activity, which could lead to swing elections, according to the letter.
The guidance is legal because, according to a Department of Education spokesman in a previous email to The College Fix, “federal work study positions with government agencies” are only used for “federal work studies positions,” which means that “any election work that they are doing is not partisan, and is already paid for with taxpayer funds.
The department argued that using federal funds for this purpose did not fall under the purview of “political activity” because it did not fall under the purview of” the general criteria for public interest work.”
MORE: Republican AGs accuse Ed Dept. of partisan vote harvesting for Democrats
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