Montana files multistate lawsuit against Biden admin over 'Bidenbucks' scheme

Editor's note: The article has been updated to reflect that Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina joined the lawsuit prior to filing on Tuesday.

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen filed a federal lawsuit against the Biden-Harris administration Tuesday in concert with his fellow Republican attorneys general in Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota, in hopes of neutralizing President Joe Biden's Executive Order 14019.

Citing multiple harms traceable to the implementation of Biden's get-out-the-vote operation — including procedural harms and harms to states' sovereign interests — the plaintiffs asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas to declare EO 14019 and its implementation "unlawful and unconstitutional."

The red-state lawsuit, which comes on the heels of a Blaze News report highlighting the few efforts by various Republican officials across the country to kneecap the alleged "election interference" scheme, also requests that the court vacate and enjoin all agency actions implementing the order.

Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation's government watchdog Oversight Project, recently told Blaze News that "a ton of damage has been done already, but it's not too late to at least mitigate this constitutional disaster where the incumbent administration is using their power and our money to ensure their own re-election."

"We're at the stage now where more states should be stepping up and taking overt action instead of just asking questions and complaining," added Howell.

Biden's March 2021 EO, often referred to by Howell and other critics as "Bidenbucks," effectively compels federal agencies — such as the Departments of Treasury, of Labor, of Interior, and of Veterans Affairs — to mobilize and register elements of historically Democratic voting blocs along with potentially ineligible voters.

According to the leftist think tank whose recommendations ostensibly inspired the order, the implementation of the order could result in "approximately 3 million new or updated voter registrations per year." That could help hand the election over to the Democrats in what is shaping up to be a tight race.

Knudsen's complaint accuses Biden of seeking to "convert the federal bureaucracy into a voter registration organization and to turn every interaction between a federal bureaucrat and a member of the public into a voter registration pitch."

'I will not stand by while the Biden-Harris administration attempts to shamelessly garner votes by employing its own agencies to register voters.'

This conversion alone is troubling given that the administrative state overwhelmingly leans left and has evidenced its antipathy to Trump in recent years.

For instance, in the 2016 election, The Hill reported that 95% of all campaign donations from 14 government agencies went to Clinton. In 2020, the majority of federal employees again donated to the Democratic candidate.

It is unlikely that President Donald Trump has endeared himself to the federal bureaucracy in the years since. After all, he has entertained the possibility of once again making it easier to remove insubordinate and poorly performing federal employees.

The lawsuit further claims that Biden's secretive transmogrification of the partisan federal bureaucracy into a voter registration organization "exceeds any authority executive entities have under federal law, violates the Constitution, threatens States' attempt to regulate voter registration, and thus ultimately undermines the voter registration systems set up by the states."

"Fair elections are an essential part of our country's republic. Congress gave the states the power to oversee elections years ago," Attorney General Austin Knudsen told Blaze News in a statement.

"I will not stand by while the Biden-Harris administration attempts to shamelessly garner votes by employing its own agencies to register voters and disregard states' own voter registration systems, putting the integrity of our elections at risk," added the Montana AG.

When asked what Montana will do in the event this lawsuit ultimately proves unsuccessful, a spokeswoman for Knudsen told Blaze News, "It's too early to tell what further action we might take, but Attorney General Knudsen will not stand by while the president and his agencies overstep their authority and would fight federal overreach no matter the administration. It is his job to protect the rights of Montanans."

Other red-state coalitions have taken legal action in recent months in hopes of axing the order and protecting the rights of their respective residents.

For instance, Secretaries of State Jay Ashcroft of Missouri and John Thurston of Arkansas filed a lawsuit late last month accusing Biden of unlawfully seeking "to use federal government resources to aid Democrat campaigns by enlisting the immense federal bureaucracy in a get-out-the-vote and ballot harvesting campaign."

West Virginia, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Wyoming filed an amici curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on May 28 "asking the Court to rule that Executive Order No. 14019 is unconstitutional and violates the authority granted to the states to administer elections by the United States Constitution."

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