Now Democrats Are Making Up Reasons to Obstruct President Trump's Qualified Judicial Nominees

Senate Democrats have created a new reason to obstruct the confirmation of qualified judicial nominees for purely partisan reasons, as part of their continuing campaign: deference to non-existent commissions.  In a letter Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley stated: 

"[W]e cannot return a blue slip on any judicial nominee that has not been approved by our bipartisan judicial selection committee. . . . We have a long history of organizing a committee charged with thoroughly vetting applicants from the Oregon legal community.”

The only problem is such a committee does not exist for circuit court nominees and never has.  Don’t take a partisan's word for it; take the word of the last person from Oregon nominated to the Ninth Circuit:

The last Oregon vacancy in the ninth circuit came during the Clinton administration when Oregon Judge Edward Leavy assumed senior status in 1997. Leavy's replacement, Judge Susan Graber, did not come out of a selection committee—in fact, she said that one didn't even exist.

"There is no selection commission in my jurisdiction to recommend candidates for nomination to the United States Court of Appeals," Graber wrote in her official judicial nominee questionnaire.

Graber went on to explain she was selected for the seat after she reached out to President Clinton.

"I informed the President by letter of my interest in being considered for that vacancy," Graber wrote. "His response stated that he had referred the matter to the White House Counsel's Office."

Senator Wyden was an Oregon Senator at the time and supported Ms. Graber despite never having been consulted by President Clinton’s White House Counsel or Ms. Graber having gone through any commission selection process.   

So actually, Senator Wyden, Oregon tradition (which you established) means deferring to the White House Counsel’s office. 

While that is unlikely to happen, it just goes to show that Democrats are literally making up reasons to obstruct President Trump’s judicial nominees.  

Election News You May Have Missed, Part 2

Last week, Maine voters approved ranked choice voting as a means of choosing the governor and state and federal legislators:

Maine residents have approved a ballot question that will allow voters to rank their choice of candidates. 

Under the election overhaul, ballots are counted at the state level in multiple rounds. Last place candidates are eliminated until a candidate wins by a majority. . . . 

Proponents of ranked-choice voting say it will prevent a governor from being elected with less than 50 percent of the votes. That was the scenario when Gov. Paul LePage was elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014. 

Ranked-choice voting is sometimes also called "instant runoff."

Voters in Oregon elected the first Republican to statewide office in 14 years, Dennis Richardson as Secretary of State:

In the state of Oregon, the secretary of state is charged with auditing public accounts, managing elections, and administering public records. It's a glorified administrative role . . . . 

Throughout the campaign, [Brad] Avakian highlighted [Dennis] Richardson's anti-abortion stance while highlighting his own environmentalism and pro-choice bona fides. Richardson, meanwhile, while undeniably a social conservative, ran as basically a numbers guy. . . . In an overwhelmingly Democratic state, Avakian managed to lose to Republican Dennis Richardson. Indeed, Richardson's victory was the first time a Republican had won a statewide office in Oregon for fourteen years. (Hillary Clinton carried the state by ten percentage points, by the way.) 

Avakian's defeat is synecdoche for everything the Democrats did wrong this year. He ran, basically, the Lena Dunham race: Stress social issues (truly irrelevant in a race like Oregon secretary of state) and ignore what mattered to voters. Dennis Richardson stressed that he would be a competent auditor; Avakian noted that the Sierra Club liked him. Donald Trump said he would bring jobs back to the industrial Midwest; Hillary Clinton focused on the fact that Trump was rude about a Miss Universe candidate two decades ago. In both cases, we see how that worked out for the Democrats.

While indicative of the larger 2016 election cycle, the Secretary of State's race in Oregon demonstrates what voters consider important for an election administrator: understanding of the job's responsibilities and limits, competence, and valuing the integrity of elections.  Efforts to turn election administration into a vehicle for progressive social change rightly failed in Oregon last week.

Mandatory Voter Registration - Ongoing Analysis Continues to Show No Increase in Voter Turnout

This week, many lefties in Oregon are touting the success of the state’s mandatory voter registration initiative reaching a milestone and claim that 68,500 new voters have been added to the rolls, increasing democracy on a grand scale. In theory that sounds like excellent news. But, for all the generally loud noise, the claims of “improvement” and increased voter turnout are lacking in a very crucial element - fact.

The Bus Project, a Democratic oriented get out the vote organization, is extolling the virtues of Motor Voter based on the primary voting results. Their press releases have been picked up by national news organizations and the press is including this misleading graphic.

The graphic is false.

It purports to show the great success of Oregon Motor Voter program and claims that automatically-registered voters had good turnout numbers in the May 2016 Oregon primary election. But it is based on several fundamental errors. And it entirely omits the turnout result for 84% of all Automatic registrants–the non-affiliated voters, of whom only 6% turned out to vote in the primary election (compared with 23% of traditionally-registered non-affiliated voters).

The graph seems to say that a higher percentage of Automatic registrants turned out that Traditional registrants. But, in fact, the overall turnout of the Automatic registrants was 18.7%. The overall turnout of all registrants together was 53.7%. That means that the turnout of the Traditional registrants was in excess of 53.7%. So how could that graph be correct? It is not.

First, the graph for “Independent Voters” is wrong. The numbers graphed are only for members of the Independent Party of Oregon, not for non-affiliated voters — who comprise 84% of all Automatic registrants. So the graph entirely omits 84% of all of the Automatic registrants and bases its conclusions on a population of only 16% of the Automatic registrants–the most politically motivated ones (because they bothered to join a party). In fact those 84% of all Automatic registrants had turnout rates of under 10% for every age category other under 60 (and only 13% above that). All of their turnout rates were about 70% lower than those of Traditional non-affiliated registrants.

The obvious deficiencies in the information being heralded as a win indicates something that is an all too common trend in statistical data on mandatory voter registration. We have discussed at length the idea that adding more voters to the rolls simply does not translate into more voters at the polls. In fact, while MVR claims to bolster the rolls, it has only been shown to actually decrease voter turnout. The sad part is that this information is not new. Entire countries have already shown automatic registration has a negative effect on overall voter turnout. Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton favors universal mandatory voter registration.

As voter rolls swell with people who have no intention of voting, vote fraud will likely follow. Another concerning impact mandatory voter registration is going to have is the disenfranchisement of new voters in closed primary states. 

While I believe the intent behind Motor Voter was good, decoupling the act of voter registration from the selection of a political party in a State like Oregon with closed primaries and gerrymandered safe districts could be one of the most undemocratic acts we’ve seen here.

Merely registering everyone who comes through the DMV, assuming the often dysfunctional organizations can handle the additional task (which is far from a given, see post 1, post 2), will not increase voter turnout and will serve only as a detriment to the election process and election integrity in general. As a country we should be closing loopholes that generate fraud, not making more of them.

Disenfranchisement of New Voters in Oregon Primary Benefits Clinton over Sanders

Yesterday, Joanne W. Young published a piece at the Daily Caller that further illustrates the dangers associated with mandatory voter registration. Oregon, a bastion for most things liberal, attempted to force mandatory registration through the DMV. This drew more than a few warnings from Young earlier this year. It turns out the initial concerns were well founded as new voters are likely being disenfranchised as a result of the system.

Oregon was the first state to enact a system of automatic or mandatory voter registration. At the beginning of 2016, Oregon began mandatorily registering its citizens to vote when they visited the Department of Motor Vehicles, changing from an “opt-in” to an “opt-out” registration system. Liberals hailed this as a leap forward in making voting easier for everyone and encouraging broader engagement by citizens in our democracy.

Mandatory voter registration is a new experiment in the United States, and there is no proof it will meet its intended goals. Indeed, there is evidence from other countries, such as Canada, that have had systems of mandatory voter registration for years that, instead of increasing voter engagement and turnout, it actually decreases it . . . .

The issue will undoubtedly effect many voters in the Oregon primary today as those who are not declared for a party will be unable to vote given the state’s primary rules.

Oregon is a closed primary state, meaning that only those voters registered with a political party may vote in that party’s primary. The government cannot choose a party for a person, so by default, all new voters registered through the mandatory voter registration system areregistered as non-affiliated voters. To be registered with a party, new voters, who did not take the initiative to register to vote, must take the initiative to proactively indicate a party on a follow-up postcard they mail back to the Secretary of State.

In what should come as a surprise to very few, many of those who were mandatorily registered failed to return the postcard and as a consequence will be unable to vote in the primary.

At the end of April, only 16 percent of new voters had returned the postcard selecting a party. Fully76 percent of newly registered voters did not return the card at all, meaning they are registered to vote but registered as not affiliated with any party. The Oregon presidential primary is May 17, and the deadline for registering with a party was April 26 . . . . 

Further complicating matters, Oregon is an entirely vote-by-mail state, meaning that those non-affiliated voters have not even received a ballot and may not realize they are being disenfranchised.

The mandatory voter registration process in Oregon has been a glaring failure on many levels. It has achieved only the exact opposite of what it was advertised to do. Other countries have shown its impact to be at best negligible, and more than likely detrimental. 

The recent voter disenfranchisement in Oregon simply adds to a growing list of questionable policies emanating from the left. Young goes on to discuss who the situation does likely help; none other than the Democratic “establishment candidate,” Hillary Clinton. While I personally loathe Sanders ideals and general platform, it is hard to look at the integrity of this election from his perspective and not cringe. Step by step, state by state, super delegate by super delegate, the establishment is stealing the Democratic nomination away from him. Elections should have integrity. As Joanne Young pointed out regarding the New Hampshire primary in February, elections should always be right and just, not stolen.