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As the war in the Middle East launched by President Trump continues to unfold, the president has yet to appear before Congress to seek approval or even to explain his objectives. As we said over the weekend, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to decide when the nation goes to war. There’s been no deliberation, no vote, no clear justification. The attack on Iran is unconstitutional.
There will be much more to say about this in the coming weeks.
Underneath the intense drama, we want to draw attention to something else going on. As President Trump’s polls plummet and his political standing grows shakier, the effort to undermine our elections has been intensifying. Now it looks like operatives and officials may try to claim national security as a rationale to mess with the vote.
Indeed, just hours after launching the Iran war, Trump reposted a headline on Truth Social claiming, “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.”
Governments, especially authoritarian regimes, often use crises to try to manipulate elections. (Fears are escalating in Hungary that Viktor Orbán will use Russia’s war on Ukraine to distort or delay voting there, for instance.) Here, Trump has been spending months trying to justify his escalating efforts to meddle in our elections.
Last week during the State of the Union address, Trump demanded passage of the SAVE Act — the bill that could disenfranchise tens of millions of American citizens by effectively requiring people to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Indeed, he devoted as much time in the speech to that cause as he did to Iran. Trump claimed “rampant cheating” in elections justified restricting the vote.
We’ve encouraged people to weigh in with Congress, and they have flooded lawmakers with hundreds of thousands of messages urging opposition to the SAVE Act. Public outcry seems to be working.
Since Trump spoke, the bill has lost some momentum in Congress. Senate Majority Leader John Thune cautioned that Senate Republicans were not unified around a strategy that would lead to the legislation’s passage. On Saturday, some House Republicans pushed unsuccessfully yet again to add the SAVE Act to the funding bill at the heart of the partial government shutdown.
What’s a resourceful election denier to do? The less chance they have to restrict the vote through congressional action, the more frenetically they scramble to find ways to subvert the election through executive action alone.
First came a Washington Post article disclosing that Trump allies have been circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would use claims that China interfered in the 2020 election to call a national emergency and upend elections, banning mail ballots and voting machines, among other things. (Trump told PBS that he had not read the draft order and would not declare an emergency.)
To be clear, presidents do not have the power to rewrite election rules, even during a real emergency — let alone a fake one.
Then, yesterday, came a report from ProPublica describing a “summit” late last week in which election deniers who tried to overturn the 2020 election met with top administration election security officials, all aiming for Trump to declare a national emergency and take over the midterms (something that none of the powers available in a national emergency, which the Brennan Center has cataloged, would allow). Kurt Olsen was there. He’s the White House lawyer whose conspiracy theories were the principal source relied on in the affidavit that provided the basis for the FBI raid on the Fulton County, Georgia, election offices. (He also has been sanctioned by a federal court for pushing misinformation about elections in 2022.) So was Heather Honey, an election denier now in charge of election security at the Department of Homeland Security. Also on hand: Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump on the infamous 2021 phone call when he demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” more than 11,000 votes.
No doubt, it’s a motley crew, and we ought not overreact to every claim and threat. Government officials often meet with advocates, no matter how unsavory the cause, and the proposal that ProPublica describes is the same one the group has been pressing for months. Yet we know wars heighten national security concerns and that governments often misuse the anxiety that ensues to achieve other goals at home.
So what’s the takeaway?
As my colleague Sean Morales-Doyle wrote in The New York Times, “We are still nine months out from Election Day, but it seems that every day we get a new elections-related headline from this administration. That’s not an accident.”
Courts will need to rule, again and again, that presidents exercise no lawful control over our elections. In October, a federal court struck down a narrower executive order on elections in a case brought by the Brennan Center and others. The judge made clear: “Because our Constitution assigns responsibility over election regulation to Congress and the States, not the President, that command exceeds the President’s authority.”
Judges, including magistrate judges, who typically assume good faith on the part of governmental representations will need to look with a gimlet eye at the effort to use federal power to subvert the election.
Mayors, governors, and state legislatures will need to be on alert, too. Election officials and voters need defending.
The news media, such as it is, must commit to covering the story as it unfolds, as part of a new plot to undermine the ballot.
And, as ever, citizens will need to step up. Make a plan and learn your voting options. Know that your vote will count and that we can have free, fair, and secure elections despite the scary claims of those in power.
Much is at stake this year. A war launched without congressional authorization is bad enough. Let’s make sure it is not used as further excuse to meddle with the vote.
