April 18th, 2024
Advancing American Freedom issued the following statement after the Senate dismissed articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Mayorkas.
“The U.S. Senate derelicted its constitutional duty to hold a trial today by voting to dismiss articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Mayorkas without rendering judgement, said AAF Executive Director Paul Teller. “While only a proper trial could have exposed Mayorkas’ role in the nightmares playing out every day at our southern border, AAF is confident that elected officials will find other ways to shine a spotlight on those tragedies and overcome the disturbing precedent set today.”
April 15th, 2024
Advancing American Freedom led an amicus brief with over 30 other amici in GenBioPro v. Raynes, in which abortion drug manufacturer GenBioPro has sued West Virginia, claiming that the state’s pro-life law is preempted by federal law which the company claims gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to regulate chemical abortion and thus prohibits states from doing so.
“Where the federal government fails to protect the fundamental rights of those within its jurisdiction, states have both the authority and responsibility to do so,” said AAF General Counsel Marc Wheat. “If Congress intends to preempt state law on an issue as controversial and significant as abortion, it must do so clearly so that the courts can assess the legitimacy of that delegation of power. AAF supports West Virginia’s effort to protect the right to life of the most vulnerable people in the state; the unborn.”
Read the amicus brief here.
You can read the statement here.
April 9th, 2024
A political advocacy group connected to former Vice President Mike Pence is pressuring Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to hold a vote on a bill that could ban TikTok.
Advancing American Freedom has launched a new ad supporting the bill, which would require TikTok’s China-based parent company to divest from the popular app or face a ban on U.S. app stores and web hosting services.
The $2 million ad campaign will run in Washington, D.C., and several key Senate swing states, including Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to Politico.
“Chinese TikTok is building a profile on every American user and has become a digital fentanyl,” the ad says. “Republicans and Democrats in Washington agree on one thing — we need to stop China by stopping TikTok.”
The House easily passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act last month in a 352-65 vote. However, the bill since has stalled in the Senate.
Following the House vote, Schumer appeared noncommittal about bringing the legislation to the floor.
“The Senate will review the legislation when it comes over from the House,” the Senate majority leader said in a statement at the time.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.), who has supported the TikTok bill, also said late last month that he didn’t have the “foggiest idea” when a vote might be held.
“They moved obviously very aggressively and quickly in the House. I’m not sure the Senate has that same kind of timetable,” Warner said.
Read more here at TheHill.com.
April 9th, 2024
Former vice president Mike Pence’s policy organization is launching a seven-figure ad campaign pushing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to move the TikTok divestiture legislation to a full floor vote.
Advancing American Freedom, Pence’s 501(c)(4) conservative advocacy group, will be spending $2 million on TV and digital ads in Washington, D.C, and Nevada, Montana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, National Review has learned. Each of those states is home to a Democratic senator up for reelection in 2024, with Montana Senator Jon Tester and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown being particularly vulnerable.
“TikTok is the Chinese Communist Party’s way to feed America’s youth their propaganda and collect data on all TikTok users,” Pence said in a statement provided to National Review.
“Last week, TikTok launched a $2 million ad campaign to stop the legislation that would disentangle the app from the CCP, but AAF is fighting back, launching an ad campaign to urge Congress to get the bill passed and signed into law. We can’t cede our national security to the Chinese Communist Party. The time for the Senate to act is now.”
Pence noted his opposition to TikTok’s current ownership when he announced last month his decision not to endorse former president Donald Trump. Trump came out against the TikTok bill on the grounds that it would benefit Facebook parent company Meta, which Trump called “an enemy of the people.” The comments represent an about face for Trump after his administration previously attempted to force a sale of the platform. Trump announced his position on the bill after meeting with billionaire Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass, an options trader who has a significant stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Pence noted his opposition to TikTok’s current ownership when he announced last month his decision not to endorse former president Donald Trump. Trump came out against the TikTok bill on the grounds that it would benefit Facebook parent company Meta, which Trump called “an enemy of the people.” The comments represent an about face for Trump after his administration previously attempted to force a sale of the platform. Trump announced his position on the bill after meeting with billionaire Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass, an options trader who has a significant stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Prior to the house floor vote, TikTok flooded the zone with lobbyists and placed a pop-up notification urging users to call their lawmaker and advocate against the legislation. The lobbying campaign caused lawmakers to be inundated with calls from concerned TikTok users, many of whom were teenagers unaware of the specifics of the legislation. Some members even received graphic threats from callers. TikTok’s push ultimately backfired, and the bill passed through the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously.
TikTok is widely used by Millennials and Generation Z, and its highly addictive video algorithm has been linked to a range of mental-health issues. A new parents-rights organization has put forward ads focusing on the child welfare concerns surrounding TikTok and its ties to China.
Read more here at NationalReview.com.
April 9th, 2024
A coalition of conservative groups led by former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom wrote a letter this week calling on congressional Republicans to once again ban earmarks.
A pair of spending bills to fund 12 agencies of government over fiscal year 2024 contained some 8,099 earmarks with a total cost of $14.6 billion.
‘This never should have happened. However, the remedy is simple and the same as always: ban earmarks,’ the letter, obtained by DailyMail.com, read.
It was signed by leaders from 17 advocacy groups, including Heritage Action, Family Research Council and the State Freedom Caucus Network.
‘Washington uses earmarks to grease the skids for runaway spending, Advancing American Freedom executive director Paul Teller told DailyMail.com.
Washington’s sentiment on earmarks has changed over the years. Directing funding for members of Congress’ pet projects back in their district was banned for a decade. At one point President Obama threatened to veto any bill that contained earmarks.
The practice of directing federal money for specific state and local projects began in the 1980s and swelled until they became codified in 2007.
Around that time concerns grew about corruption that peaked with the Alaskan ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ — where Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens led the direction of $223 million of taxpayer funds to construct a bridge between a small Alaskan town and an island with a population of 50 that housed an airport.
In a 2005 incident, Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) resigned from Congress and admitted to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors for directing earmarks to them. Other lawmakers were found to have gotten campaign contributions in exchange for submitting earmark requests.
In response to the outrage, Congress enacted a 10-year moratorium on earmarks in 2011.
Earmarks made their return on 2021 when both parties agreed among themselves to allow the practice once again.
They were rebranded as ‘community funding projects’ and new guardrails were meant to weed out ethical conflicts.
The difference between earmarks and the regular appropriations process is that they are generally targeted at projects that serve only a local or special interest, rather than giving a lump sum to an agency to distribute through its own evaluation process.
Without earmarks, members of Congress could encourage groups to submit grant requests to relevant agencies or argue for funding before a committee.
Democrats were the first to embrace earmarks, and Republicans were at first more reluctant – only around half of them requested earmarks in 2022. Then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was in leadership when the practice was banned a decade earlier, did not request any for his own district.
After the GOP took the majority in 2023, they further embraced earmarks, and this fiscal year some two thirds of the Republican Conference stands to score funding for district projects.
Some examples of pet projects in this year’s funding bills include:
The Waadookodaading Ojibew Language Institute in Wisconsin will get $5 million courtesy of Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
New York Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman clinched $1.65 million to build and ‘artists’ living and workspace’ with the Environmental Leaders of Color.
Louisiana Republicans Rep. Garrett Graves and Sen. Bill Cassidy got $1 million for sugarcane research in their state.
Another $1 million will go to ‘electric vehicle infrastructure ‘masterplan’ in Chicago, thanks to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
In Providence, Rhode Island, $1 million will go to a ‘city-wide climate assessment.’
Rep. Greg Steube, a Republican of Florida, will get $190,000 for a ‘shark repellent study’ in Sarasota.
Juvenile Pacific Salmon Research in Alaska will get $4 million thanks to Sen. Lisa Murkowsi, R-Alaska.
A 50-acre business development site in Lexington, Ky., known as Legacy Business Park will get $10 million thanks to Rep. Andy Barr, R-KY.
Public housing residents in Democratic Rep. Nanette Barragan’s California district will get $1 million for an electric vehicle car share thanks to her.
Alabama state route 167 will get $20 million thanks to GOP Sen. Katie Britt.
The NAACP headquarters in Baltimore will get $500,000 thanks to Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.
A boy scout camp, Camp Maluhia, will get $1 million for a new dining hall thanks to Sen. Brian Schatz.
Read more here at TheDailyMail.com.
April 9th, 2024
By Paul Teller and Jason Snead
Imagine a Super Bowl referee bending the rules to give his favorite team the win. Few would call that fair. Yet that is precisely what the Left wants to do to America’s elections. From noncitizen voting to lawsuits inviting activist judges to rewrite our election laws, left-wing activists are taking every opportunity to change elections permanently for partisan gain.
Their latest tactic is to undermine the basic principle of “one person, one vote” with a new scheme called ranked choice voting.
As we speak, liberal special interests are leading a sophisticated national campaign to push ranked choice voting in nearly every state. They have hired lobbyists, formed astroturf activist groups, and are financing state ballot measures across the country. This year alone, more than a half-dozen states, including battlegrounds such as Arizona and Nevada, are facing initiatives to change their elections with ranked choice voting.
Ranked choice voting’s proponents cloak it in deliberately misleading messaging. Advocates say it “make[s] elections more fair and more democratic.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, ranked choice voting makes voting harder and puts the public’s trust in elections in jeopardy.
The most common form of ranked choice voting being pushed nationwide is called “Final Five Voting,” and it is designed to upend elections in two fundamental ways. First, it replaces party primaries with California-style jungle primaries in which all candidates compete in a single contest. That means no more Republican and Democratic nominees and no guarantee that voters will have a choice between the two parties in November.
Then, for the general election, voters must rank up to five candidates in each ranked choice voting race. In federal election years, ballots typically feature a dozen or more major races. That means voters must wade through and carefully rank 60 or more candidates each election.
It only gets more complicated from there. If no candidate wins a majority of the vote, ranked choice voting manufactures one. Tabulators strike the candidate with the fewest first-place votes and redistribute his or her ballots to each voter’s next-highest choice. These elimination rounds continue until someone (often the person who initially came in second or even third place) wins a majority of the remaining votes. Needless to say, the ranked choice voting process takes much longer to tabulate, leading to delayed results, recounts, and frustrated voters.
Only a few dozen localities and two of the smallest states, Maine and Alaska, use ranked choice voting. Their experience shows how quickly ranked choice voting can go off the rails. In 2022, for example, officials in Oakland, California, certified the wrong winner in a school board race and failed to catch their own mistake. It took four months and a lawsuit to seat the true winner. In Alaska, officials concealed full election results for 15 days while the state labored to gather and tabulate votes.
Ranked choice voting’s track record is a litany of failed promises. Studies show ranked choice voting makes campaigns more negative, makes candidates more reliant on “dark money” groups, discourages turnout, and disproportionately harms minority voters.
Unsurprisingly, buyer’s remorse is common with ranked choice voting. Oakland is now trying to junk this troublesome system, and Alaskans will have the chance to vote on a citizen-led ranked choice voting repeal this fall. Aspen, Colorado, repealed the system after just one election. And in Utah, half of the cities that signed up for a ranked choice voting pilot program have walked away.
Ranked choice voting pretends to be a bottom-up, bipartisan reform. But it is actually the product of a concerted national campaign bankrolled by an elite group of liberal megadonors such as John Arnold and George Soros. The backers of ranked choice voting on the Left are spending tens of millions promoting it, backing ballot measures to lock ranked choice voting into state constitutions, and hiring consultants and lobbyists, including voices on the Right — all to peddle a voting scheme aimed at pushing politics to the Left.
Fortunately, conservatives are fighting back. Our organizations are proud partners in a national coalition dedicated to stopping the spread of ranked choice voting. This important task is being carried out in states across the country. So far, five states have banned ranked choice voting, and more are advancing bills this year to halt this partisan scam in its tracks.
That is remarkable progress, but the fight for fair elections is far from over. Progressive elites are doubling down, aiming to lock as many states as possible into their partisan scheme before voters realize how flawed ranked choice voting really is. If they succeed, 2024 may be remembered as the year the Left permanently changed elections in America for their own gain.
Read more here at TheWashingtonExaminer.com.
