A New York appellate court stands up for citizens’ rights
Leftists are not importing illegal aliens because they want these people to have a better life. They’re importing them because they want their votes. For this plan to work, though, these votes must come sooner rather than later. Giving illegal aliens amnesty and then citizenship is slow, so leftists are finding workarounds. One workaround is to grant voting rights to non-citizens who are legal residents. If leftists get amnesty passed, they’ve got an instant, huge political bloc. It’s also inevitable that, eventually, legal residency will be irrelevant. However, for now, an appellate court in New York says the approach violates the state’s constitution and must stop.
From the New York Post:
A controversial New York City law that would have allowed 800,000 noncitizens, but legal residents, to vote in municipal elections was struck down as unconstitutional by a state appeals court Wednesday.
“We determine that this local law was enacted in violation of the New York State Constitution and Municipal Home Rule Law, and thus, must be declared null and void,” Appellate Judge Paul Wooten wrote in the 3-1 majority decision.
Wooten said the state constitution broadly refers to only citizens having the right to vote in elections, municipal as well as statewide or for state legislative offices.
“Article IX provides that the elected officials of ‘local governments’ shall be elected by ‘the people,’ which incorporates by reference the eligibility requirements for voting under article II, section 1, applying exclusively to ‘citizens,'” the judge wrote.
The decision also points out that, once started down this road, it’s perfectly possible for a non-citizen to end up as mayor of New York. Had the judge wanted, he could have added that, in San Francisco, a non-citizen now has a say in the city’s election processes.
If I read the NY Post article correctly, the single dissenting judge (a woman, of course) was unconcerned with little things like the law. Instead, she said it was unfair that New York citizens couldn’t vote to violate New York law:
“The majority, by deeming the noncitizen voting law invalid, effectively prohibits municipalities across the state from deciding for themselves the persons who are entitled to a voice in the local electoral process,” she wrote.
“The majority’s determination also disenfranchises nearly one million residents of the City, despite the fact that its people’s duly elected representatives have opted to enfranchise those same residents.”
This is the same mindset, of course, that sees Joe Biden boasting about ignoring the Supreme Court’s prohibition against his administration unilaterally forcing taxpayers to pay for the loans of baristas with $200,000 in debt for their “womyn’s studies” degrees.
Citizenship matters because it speaks of ties to and an investment in a community. Whether you look back on a lineage that goes deep into American history, your parents waited years to come legally to America and then waited more years to earn their vote, or whether you waited patiently to come to America and earn a vote, it bespeaks a belief in and commitment to what America stands for.
If voting rights are handed out like cheap flash drives at a Vegas convention, they are meaningless things that will swiftly be discarded or sold to the highest bidder. Citizenship is no longer a precious right; it is a commodity—and that’s exactly the way Democrats want it.
Thankfully, three judges in New York State are, at least for now, holding the line. It remains to be seen whether (a) they’re providing instructions for how to do a better job violating the law; (b) they’re an anomaly, which is judges in a leftist enclave who believe in legal principles; or (c) they’ve read the political tea leaves and are beginning to realize that the tide is turning against ascendant leftism, even in New York State.
Image: Voting in Washington D.C., 1964. Library of Congress.
THE RULING MAKES NO DIFFERENCE, ILLEGALS VOTE WHENEVER AND WHERE EVER THEY PLEASE!
HOW MANY VOTING PLACES OFFER EVERYTHING IN SPANISH?
Braithwaite said folks in the neighborhood are being given short shrift as the city favors Biden’s flood of illegal aliens.
Migrants ATTACK Cops & DEMAND More Free Stuff
Appeals Court Upholds Ruling Striking Down NYC Voting Rights for Foreigners
A New York appeals court upheld a prior ruling that struck down a New York City law giving local voting rights to nearly a million foreign nationals.
As Breitbart News chronicled, Democrats on the 51-member New York City Council approved a plan in January 2022 that gave more than 800,000 foreign nationals with green cards, visas, and work permits the opportunity to vote in citywide elections so long as they have resided in the city for at least 30 consecutive days.
Black New Yorkers, along with naturalized American citizens, the New York State Republican Party, the Republican National Committee (RNC), and Democrat officials like Councilman Robert Holden subsequently sued Mayor Eric Adams (D) and the city’s Board of Elections.
In June 2022, the New York Supreme Court ruled that giving local voting rights to foreign nationals violated the state’s constitution, which explicitly reserves voting for American “citizens.”
On Wednesday, the New York Appellate Division upheld that decision:
Since this is, in part, a declaratory judgment action, we remit the matter to the Supreme Court, Richmond County, for the entry of a judgment, inter alia, declaring that the Local Law is null and void on the grounds that it violates the New York State Constitution and the Municipal Home Rule Law. [Emphasis added]
Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) President J. Christian Adams, who filed suit against Adams over the law on behalf of black New Yorkers, said the ruling “marks an important step to stop foreign interference in New York City’s elections.”
“The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s lawsuit shows that not only did this foreign citizen voting law violate New York’s laws but also the U.S. Constitution and Voting Rights Act,” Adams said. “Members of the New York City Council made explicit statements that race was the motivation behind this voting law. In America, we do not allow race-based voting restrictions.”
The Appellate Division suggested that the law would have eventually opened elected offices to foreign nationals and that foreign voters would become about 15 percent of the city’s electorate — often much larger than the margin of victory.
The case is Fossella v. Adams, No. 85007-22 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division: Second Judicial Department.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
ew York to hand out $10,000 cards to illegals, no I.D. required, what could go wrong?
For a mayor who claims that the migrant influx is going bankrupt his city, he sure has a funny way of responding to it.
According to Nicole Gelinas at the New York Post:
Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Eric Adams is giving out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.
Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and his administration for nearly a month has failed to correct several public misperceptions about it.
One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50 million to migrants.
No wonder the mayor has been reticent.
This debit card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multibillion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.
It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.
What could go wrong?
Just on the surface, the plan stinks, as the $53 million to be spent was doled out by a no-bid contract.
It gets worse when one learns from the Gelinas report that the $53 million is just the set-up fee. The money to be doled out to the migrants is extra.
Worse still, the migrants will be entitled to as much as $10,000 a month at city expense, the pre-loaded debit cards to be doled out on the honor system that migrants will spend that free cash only for food and baby supplies. The idea of handing out cash was based on news that migrants were throwing out their food and the food handed out on a no-bid contract was spoiled and rotten.
Instead of assuring that its existing no-bid “emergency” contractor fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid “emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for waste, fraud and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.
It's a grotesque sump of potential corruption, and one can almost just hear the Venezuelan gangs getting up on the details of these cards to find some way to steal a lot of them, either through helpless Venezuelan migrants, or through their own gang activity.
The company has no experience in this kind of distribution, Adams apparently met the guy who runs the company at a party, and fraud is all but certain under this plan.
With nobody checking for fraud, it's a golden opportunity to draw a massive amount of money with which to extend their crime and thuggery through every aspect of the city. We all know that much of the COVID funding went to fraud because government is not good at distributing large amounts of money quickly. The fraud in this one wll be through the roof.
Which tells us a lot about where this migrant crisis is going -- like with wars, to consultants and NGOs to service the migrants, entrenching themselves as special interests -- and the costs are going to get big.
With no end in sight to the migrant invasion, it is starting to outline itself like warfare such as it's practiced in the U.S.
We don't need this crisis any more than we need more wars.
But by the strangest of coincidences, big funding packages are being debated in Congress on the border and on wars, and they are attached to each other.
They are pretty much the same thing. The NGOs gain and the swamp grows. The only losers are the taxpayers.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
