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Why Trump is Doubling Down on the Voter Fraud Fraud

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“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” US president-elect Donald Trump tweeted in late November, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Kind of a sore winner. And now that he’s no longer just president-elect but actually president, he’s doubling down and says he  “will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD …”

That’s dumb. And dangerous.

Dumb because voter fraud is almost non-existent. There are rare cases in which individuals will try to vote illegally. Former Republican congressman Todd Akin of Missouri, for example, who got caught voting at his old polling place after moving, presumably to hide the move from his constituents and opponents. But the key word is “rare.”

Voter fraud is not a strategy used by candidates and campaigns to move the needle on election results. Why? Because it’s just about the most expensive, burdensome, unreliable and risky way imaginable to do that.  A successful voter fraud operation on any scale would require rounding up a whole bunch of people, trusting those people to cast the votes desired instead of just voting however they wanted to vote, and risking any or all of them getting caught (or sprouting a conscience) and blowing the operation. Too many co-conspirators and too many ways for things to go south fast and hard.

If we remove the letter “r” from the end of “voter,” things make more sense. Yes, elections are sometimes rigged. But they’re not rigged the hard way, by impersonating voters.

In some cases they’re rigged at the level of counting votes. Why recruit millions of voters as co-conspirators when a few key election workers (or voting machine programmers) are easier to find, probably more reliable, and far less vulnerable to detection?

In other cases they’re rigged by suppressing the other party’s turnout through fraud (for example, robocalls giving the wrong election date or mailings of fake absentee ballots with the wrong return address) or by law.

Which brings us to the danger of the “investigation” Trump is calling for: Its real purpose isn’t to uncover the truth, but rather to build support for “voter identification” laws.

Some, including me, have described these attempts to impose new and more onerous government identification schemes in the name of “fighting voter fraud” as a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, but that’s not really accurate. It’s a solution to a problem. Not the problem of ineligible voters. The problem of eligible voters who don’t vote Republican.

Instead of this fake “investigation,” wouldn’t it be cheaper, and more honest, to just put a beige sign outside every polling place? As in: “You must be this pale to vote.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Reagan Redux? The Federal Budget Battle Shapes Up

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English: A graph of the US GDP compared with F...
A graph of the US GDP compared with Federal budget outlay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s Donald Trump’s first work week as president of the United States and already, The Hill reports, he “may be headed into a big fight with Republican lawmakers with his plans for dramatic cuts to federal spending.”

Dramatic cuts? Not really: “Team Trump is relying on proposals outlined last year by the Heritage Foundation in its ‘Blueprint for Balance: a federal budget for 2017.’”

The Heritage plan is weak tea. It doesn’t even claim to cut overall government spending, but rather to merely “control the growth” of that spending. And its claim to balance the budget by 2023 is pure sleight of hand. The “primary balance” it mentions excludes interest on existing government debt, which is fast approaching the  half a trillion dollars per year mark.

The  developing Trump plan is the usual tinkering around the edges, searching for “waste, fraud and abuse” in “discretionary spending.” Baby steps like that will never bring the budget into balance, but they’re still too much for Congress.

“Discretionary spending” is politicianese for “spending Congress uses to buy votes back home.”

US Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and US Representative Don Young (R-AK) blew their stacks when they learned that something called the “essential air program” — a federal subsidy for the rural airports so important to their state — might be on the chopping block.

Mississippi Republicans don’t want to lose one of two federal “catfish inspection programs” that hand out artificial government and regulatory compliance jobs to their constituents back home.

A few Republicans will likely peel away from their party to save some discretionary programs usually associated with Democrats: Legal services for the poor, arts funding, and state-subsidized media.

And then of course there’s the single biggest federal budget line: “Defense,” politicianese for “government contracts for expensive planes, ships and weapons systems that keep my campaign contributors happy and let me artificially inflate my district’s employment statistics.”

If you’re not serious about cutting “defense” spending, you’re not serious about cutting spending. The Trump White House and congressional Republicans want to increase, not cut, that budget line.

Some Republicans point out that a balanced budget is impossible without reforming “non-discretionary” spending — Social Security, Medicare and so forth. They’re right. But they’re also making excuses: They won’t cut the spending that it’s easy to cut unless they can also cut the spending that it’s hard to cut, and come hell or high water they’ll find a way to lose the latter fight.

We’ve been here before. Ronald Reagan came into office with plans to balance the budget while cutting taxes and increasing military spending by going after “waste, fraud and abuse,” too. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.

One difference: Reagan could fob some of the blame off on a Democratic House of Representatives. Trump doesn’t enjoy that luxury. The Republican Party owns the House, and the Senate, and the White House — they own the entire federal government. For at least the next two years, that means they also own 100% of the coming fiscal failure.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Rick Perry’s Sudden Change of Heart is Business as Usual

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Rick Perry presidential candidate on campaign ...
Rick Perry presidential candidate on campaign trail interacting with voters in Iowa. This is at the Iowa State Fair. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Rick Perry sought the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nomination, eliminating the US Department of Energy was part of his campaign platform. Granted, he had trouble remembering its name, but he wanted the department gone. Completely.

On January 19, Perry appeared before the US Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, a first step toward his confirmation as Secretary of Energy in the coming Trump administration. How does he feel about the department these days? Well, somewhat differently:

“My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking …. after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination.”

As a cabinet official, Perry’s bailiwick will sprawl across all 50 states and the several US territories. He’ll dispose of a budget a fraction of the size that he controlled as governor of Texas (less than $30 billion versus more than $100 billion), but within his sphere of influence, he’ll actually wield more, and less contestable, power.

Is anyone surprised that Perry doesn’t want to eliminate a particular job now that it’s going to be HIS job? If so, you shouldn’t be. David Stockman told you all about that phenomenon 30 years ago.

US president Ronald Reagan appointed Stockman, a former Republican congressman from Michigan, to the post of Director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1981. He served in that post until 1985 before his candor and honesty got him in trouble and brought him to the point of resignation. Then he authored what, to my mind, remains the classic account of how power corrupts, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.

Most summaries of The Triumph of Politics emphasize Congress’s profligacy in running up huge deficits by increasing spending while cutting tax rates. But Stockman also takes a hard look at the executive branch, and not only from the angle of the president’s willingness to cooperate with Congress.

Each newly appointed Reagan cabinet secretary, swept into power on the promise to hack away at government root and branch, was happy to do so in every department. Except his own. “Yes, cut spending — everywhere but here. THIS department is indispensable and, by the way, under-funded.”

As the Perry saga demonstrates, thus shall it ever be. There may be a way to cut government down to size, but if so “electing the right people” probably isn’t it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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