An erosion of democracy is occurring in our nation’s capital as Washington, D.C., prepares to dilute the votes of American citizens.
Washington, D.C. has become the latest city to allow foreign nationals to vote in local elections after the city council passed legislation late last year. Much like the rise of sanctuary cities a decade ago, this has become the latest anti-borders fad in blue cities. What makes D.C. unique is its place as the nation’s capital, which allows Congress to override its laws if it so chooses.
Earlier this month, the House of Representatives exercised this prerogative, voting overwhelmingly to block D.C.’s noncitizen voting laws. All Republicans in the chamber and 42 House Democrats voted to block illegal aliens and other noncitizens from voting in D.C.’s elections. The bill stands a good chance of passing the Senate as well, where it will need 60 votes.
Yet, Joe Biden has already pledged to veto the law, once again prioritizing a far-left ideology over his responsibility to protect American sovereignty. The Biden administration called the bipartisan House legislation “an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded.”
However, the U.S. Constitution is clear that voting is the “right of citizens of the United States” — not illegal aliens and other foreign nationals. Our founding fathers would no doubt be horrified by these attempts to corrupt our elections by allowing noncitizens to vote. The right to vote in U.S. elections is a sacred right and reserved for U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens alone. U.S. citizens cannot vote in other country’s elections, and residents of other countries should not be allowed to vote in ours. This simple ideal is the hallmark of American democracy, and, until very recently, was not controversial.
The movement to allow noncitizens to vote is not just occurring in major cities, such as New York and Chicago, but has been bubbling up in smaller communities as well. Towns in Vermont, California, and Maryland have granted noncitizens the right to vote. To push back against this dangerous trend, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a court brief urging the Supreme Court of Vermont to strike down a law in the city of Winooski which allows foreign nationals to vote in local elections. IRLI also filed briefs in a New York lawsuit challenging an ordinance passed by the New York City Council giving the right to vote in city elections to foreign nationals. Thankfully, a Staten Island trial court struck down the law as unconstitutional.
For years, political opportunists, including Biden, have pushed mass migration as a way to reconstitute a majority of voters in their favor. They have done this in order to change the American electorate and subvert American democracy.
The new effort to allow noncitizens to vote is far more overt. No longer is the left simply trying to grant U.S. citizenship to the tens of millions of illegal aliens currently living in the country. Now, they are trying to remove citizenship as a requirement for voting altogether. These radical ideas no longer reside on the fringes of American politics, but are now being taken mainstream by those in power at the local, state and federal levels.
The effort to grant voting rights to noncitizens is reflective of how governments across the country are prioritizing the needs of foreign nationals over American citizens. New York City is spending billions of dollars providing services to illegal aliens, while many of its citizens can’t afford basic necessities such as housing and food. Mayoral candidates in Chicago are campaigning on a platform of allowing illegal aliens to vote in local elections, in an attempt to pander to the city’s large immigrant population. Americans are facing attacks on our sovereignty and rights as citizens on multiple fronts, but the effort to allow illegal aliens to vote in elections is an escalation that would’ve seemed impossible just a few years ago.
All Americans, regardless of party or ideology, must fight back against these outrageous and radical ideas, or the great Republic we all grew up with will be no more.
William J. Davis is a communications associate for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
