In the wake of last week’s federal court order blocking part of President Trump’s executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, one legal expert says that the ruling ignores the federal statutory authority of the president to enforce election laws.

On April 24, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked two portions of Trump’s March 25 executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The first provision Kollar-Kotelly blocked would have obliged the Election Assistance Commission to require documentary proof of citizenship on standardized voter registration forms, and the second blocked provision would have compelled federal agencies to “assess” the citizenship status of people on public assistance before allowing them to register to vote.

Kollar-Kotelly explained her ruling by claiming, “No statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.” She reasoned that, according to the Constitution, only Congress and the states have “the authority to regulate federal elections.”

But legal experts like Cleta Mitchell, who serves as senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), beg to differ, arguing that Trump’s EO is a commonsense and simple solution to verifying the identity of potential voters.

“[T]he first thing it does is it says that the federal the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) should amend the federal voter registration application to provide not just a box that you check to say that you’re a citizen, but documentary proof of citizenship,” she explained during “Washington Watch” last week. “And it also … says that the documents to be accepted are those that people provide at the DMV in order to get a Real ID, and it’s very simple. People have been taking those documents to the motor vehicle agencies for 20 years. … The Real ID law was passed in 2005. All states have been compliant with it since September of 2020, and it takes full effect on May the 7th. And all that means is you have to be a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident in the United States in order to get a Real ID, and that’s what you have to have to board a commercial airplane [or] in order to enter a federal building or in order to enter a federal military installation. And this would just extend that to saying that you have to be a citizen to register to vote.”

Mitchell, an attorney and the founder of the Election Integrity Network who formerly served in Congress representing Oklahoma, went on to highlight a crucial oversight that Kollar-Kotelly made in her ruling.

“The judge says, ‘Oh no, the president has no authority, and he’s changing election rules,’” she remarked. “What the judge does not pay any attention to is the fact that … there are five federal statutes that govern elections. And all of those federal statutes require and vest the attorney general of the United States with enforcement authority. Well, the attorney general of the United States is the president’s designee. So by congressional act, the Congress has said that the executive branch of the federal government has enforcement authority. This judge just pretends that those laws don’t exist, pretends that there’s no statute that makes it a criminal offense for someone to misrepresent on an official form their citizenship status, ignores the fact that it’s a criminal offense for an alien to register and vote in the United States in a federal election, pays no attention to the fact that the Real ID law already requires that people provide citizenship documents in order to get an ID. … So this judge has just picked and chosen various provisions of law and utterly disregards the role of the executive branch of government that has been vested by Congress with the responsibility and enforcement power for these federal laws.”

Mitchell concluded by urging Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to move ahead with voting on the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship in order to vote in federal elections.

“I’m becoming pretty distressed at the fact that the Republican majority in the Senate is not figuring out how to start legislating again,” she lamented. “They’re just rolling over and playing dead. … John Thune needs to figure out how to get the Senate back to work. And they say, ‘Oh, well, we have the filibuster. Everything requires 60 votes.’ Well, no, actually it doesn’t. There are things in the rules, and it’s time that the Senate started back to work. [T]hey [need to make] the Democrats actually go and meet the requirements of the Senate rules for filibuster. … Make them speak. Make the senators work.”