Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation applauded Attorney General Ken Paxton for defending Texans’ 10th Amendment rights and the rights of states to make their own election laws. By joining with 23 other states in opposition to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, Texas continues to demonstrate leadership in protecting the ability of states to govern themselves, as well as serving as a necessary check against an overzealous Biden administration.
“The current legislation being discussed in D.C. disregards the bedrock of our 10th Amendment rights in ensuring states are able to restore trust and fairness in their electoral systems,” said Chad Ennis, senior fellow for TPPF’s Election Protection initiative. “Taken in total, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would weaponize the Department of Justice and shred the ability of states to administer their own elections. Uncontroversial changes such as moving a polling place across a street would require a DOJ permission slip. We commend Attorney General Paxton’s strong stance in protecting Texas from unaccountable federal bureaucratic overreach.”
“The Constitution’s framers clearly gave primacy in the election of federal legislators and presidential electors to the states. In fact, New York delegate Alexander Hamilton declared in Federalist Paper No. 59 that limited federal intervention was ‘ultimately’ granted only to protect the national government from efforts by the states to ‘annihilate it, by neglecting to provide for the choice of persons to administer its affairs,’” said John Hostettler, vice president of federal affairs for TPPF’s States Trust initiative. “Texas has shown with the enactment of SB 1 that, far from attempting to annihilate the federal government, Texans want robust elections free from the specter of fraud. Attorney General Paxton is right to push back against a clearly unjustified intrusion in authority which the U.S. Constitution explicitly provides as reserved to the state of Texas.”