Recent stinging redistricting losses not withstanding, Democrats at least outwardly remain confident about their chances to take back the House in November. And the left-wing legal apparatus is laying the groundwork to go to war on election-integrity warriors the minute they have a friendlier Congress to work with.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has been tracking the left’s playbook as Democrats line up their targets for the next session of Congress.
“You are going to see a nationwide campaign,” Logan Churchwell, the foundation’s research director, told The Federalist in a recent interview. “Liberals are preparing for payback, assuming the political winds shift in their favor.”
There’s not much the minority party can do at the moment beyond political temper tantrums, but they’re looking to 2027 with ravenous eyes.
Eye on Their Prize
Historically, midterms have been unkind to the party in power at the White House. Democrats were feeling pretty cocky about taking back the House, maybe even the Senate — that is until their gerrymandering gambit blew up in their faces. A double whammy of Virginia Dems failing in their scheme to steal four congressional seats via a rigged redistricting plan and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling ending racially gerrymandered districts has made the road to the House majority much more complicated.
And polling, always subject to change and generally suspect, suggests Democrats are stuck in their own mud. A You/Gov poll last week found 37 percent of respondents would vote for the Democrat in their district, while 34 percent would vote for the Republican. All things considered, that’s effectively a dead heat.
But there’s a whole lot of dissatisfaction in the middle. The poll found 29 percent are undecided, voting for candidate C, or taking a pass on voting in November.
And while many of its members may be clinically insane, the Democratic Party has a secret political weapon heading into November: majority Republicans in the Senate. Their leadership doesn’t seem all that interested in fighting for President Donald Trump’s agenda. And the president, too, has veered from some of his key agenda points in the minds of a lot of MAGA conservatives, not the least of which is his military intervention in Iran. There’s definitely disaffection there, and it could prove costly for Republicans in November.
And if Democrats win back the House, expect plenty of speed bumps for Trump, including the return of impeachment theater. His allies, too, will take a hammering from a Democrat majority.
‘A Long, Nasty Pedigree’
Investigation letters from congressional committee ranking members and Freedom of Information Act lawsuits reviewed by The Federalist tip off what House Democrats are planning when they’re back in power. They will weaponize every committee they can against the leaders of the election-integrity movement.
In December, the Democracy Defenders Fund, a leftist lawfare “nonprofit” led by former Obama administration diplomat Norm Eisen, filed a Hatch Act complaint against U.S. Election Assistance Commissioner Christy McCormick. Why? Because McCormick used the term “the left” in public remarks during the Oct. 29 Recent Progress in Election Security Roundtable hosted by the America First Policy Institute’s Secure Elections Center. The attack group accused McCormick of politicking by mischaracterizing the Democratic Party and communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was campaigning for the position at the time, of being “proponents of voter fraud.”
“These remarks appear to constitute impermissible political activity ‘directed toward the success or failure of a political party [or a] candidate for partisan political office’ in violation of the Hatch Act,” the complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel alleges.
But DDF edited McCormick’s remarks in an attempt to make its case, inserting the word “Democrats” at times when the EAC official was referring to the left in general, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. As PILF President J. Christian Adams noted at the time, DDF submitted the complaint to federal investigators with the certification that all their “statements made in this complaint are true, complete, and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief.” Lying to the agency is a criminal offense.
Adams said McCormick’s comments about the left, particularly neosocialists like Mamdani, were true — and defensible.
“McCormick was correct: the ‘left’ has fought against efforts to keep aliens off voter rolls. Free speech is important and those who would weaponize the government against truth tellers have a long, nasty pedigree in world history. That’s who you are, Norm Eisen,” Adams wrote in the pointed statement.
Like the ‘IRS Targeting Scandal Days’
In February, the ranking members of three House committees launched an investigation into a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee accused of improperly handling Social Security data. The lawmakers sent letters to more than a dozen nonprofit election-integrity groups. They accuse the advocates— including PILF, the America First Legal Foundation, the Election Integrity Network, and True the Vote, of being “anti-voting” organizations. The Democrats are seeking documents related to the “use of government data derived from SSA or any federal agency to conduct election monitoring in U.S. states.” And they want “all agreements that bear the signature of any member of the U.S. DOGE Service or SSA.”
In a March response, Churchwell disabused the ranking members of their flawed characterizations and off-the-mark documents grab.
Last month, the leftist Democracy Forward Foundation sued the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division seeking records from the EAC on “election subversion activities.” What is “election subversion”, according to the foundation? Filing lawsuits demanding states with perhaps much to hide to turn over voter roll information for the DOJ’s investigation into whether noncitizens and other ineligible voters are registered. The group demands communications with individuals and groups associated with “election denial” — a catch-all descriptor invented by groups like Democracy Forward to attack election integrity efforts.
Democracy Forward, it should be noted, is led by Marc Elias, former general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and his dirty hands were all over the Russia collusion hoax. Elias and his law firm have been drivers of the left’s lawfare assaults on conservatives. He’s lost a lot of cases.
A few days later, Elias’s operation filed a sweeping FOIA lawsuit against the Election Assistance Commission seeking communication records between EAC and ANYONE not using a .gov email.
“All email communications (including email messages, complete email chains, email attachments, calendar invitations) sent by (a) the EAC Commissioners listed below to (b) email addresses that end in .com, .co, .us, .net, .org, .mail, .edu, .law, .legal, .ch, .me, or .group that (c) concern official business,” the lawsuit states.
There’s more. And it’s all just the beginning. Congressional Democrats and their “non-partisan” minions are preparing to try once again to silence — or shut down — organizations fighting for free and fair elections.
“Taken together, you see a playbook not used since Elijah Cummings and the IRS targeting scandal days,” Churchwell said.
