WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar: 03.29.25

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

This week on "Under the Radar," hear about the President's efforts to punish law firms that targeted him politically, an executive order that strengthens voter ID requirements, a Supreme Court decision about the administration's efforts to speed up deportations, and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media. While they’re covering the President’s latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to “Under the Radar.”

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about the president's efforts to punish law firms that targeted him politically, an executive order that strengthens voter ID requirements, a Supreme Court decision about the administration's efforts to speed up deportations, and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media. While they're covering the president's latest tweets,

Here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is a series of executive orders signed by the president this week that target a few different law firms across the United States that have, President Trump feels have targeted him politically. So the three law firms that there have been executive orders against are Wilmer Hale, which is the most recent one, Jenner and Block LLP, and Perkins Coe. What the executive order does is it revoked any security clearance from any members employed by those three law firms in particular. And the federal agencies and government contractors are now supposed to terminate any contracts that they have made with these three law firms. The last part of this, which speaks a little bit more to why this might be happening, is that the order also directs the chair of the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to investigate the practices of these large law firms for consistency with title.

So basically saying that they may have violated Title VII through race-based or sex-based discrimination in private employment. So I'll read a little section of the executive order, the one particularly about Jenner and Block, because that's a good representation of what all three of them sound like. They're very similar executive orders. They're very similar wording in how they address each law firm. But here's what it really gets down to. They say that Jenner and Block, LLP, is yet another law firm that has abandoned the profession's

highest ideals, condoned partisan lawfare, and abused its purpose. Bono practice to engage in activities that undermine justice and the interests of the United States. For example, they engage in obvious partisan representation to achieve political ends, support attacks against women and children based off of refusal to accept the biological reality of sex, and on and on. Moreover, it goes further on to say, and each one of the executive orders feature a little section about this. It goes further to say, in addition, Jenner was thrilled to rehire the unethical Andrew Weissman after his time engaging in partisan prosecution as part of Robert Mueller's entirely unjustified investigation. So each of the three law firms hired people

or directly dealt with the Mueller report in 2016. The investigation into President Trump conducted by Robert Mueller that was mostly debunked, it had connected him to Russia in a lot of various ways that implied that he was at very least dishonest and at the very most a Russian spy. It was debunked. There were five sources within the FBI that worked with Robert Mueller on it. each one of those five were arrested and imprisoned for lying to the FBI as an informant. The report has been largely debunk. However, it did play a major political factor in the time, right? So that election and the first couple of years of the first Trump term were hampered by these connections of these false connections of Trump to Russia. And a lot of that was painted

through this Mueller report. And I think understandably so, Trump hasn't forgotten about that yet. I mean, the ramifications of the Mueller report and of the investigations that came out of it and of the first impeachment that partially came out of that had major effects on his political career and his reputation, particularly with the 2020 election. So I understand Trump not having forgotten about that yet, but when he was choosing these law firms for these executive orders, he talks about the fact that they've engaged in activities that protect transgender individuals who have tried to go into the bathrooms that they identify with. They talk about efforts to protect illegal immigrants from deportations. He talks about a lot of different things that these law firms are doing that kind of go against his agenda and the agenda of his administration. And that's understandable. However, what they're doing is totally illegal.

And Trump understands that too, right? So, I mean, he calls them un-American in these executive orders. He says that they're acting against the interests of the United States. And therefore, it's his prerogative to say that no government agencies or contractors are going to work with those particular law firms. Which is understandable, right? He's not targeting them politically, right? He's not suing these law firms. He's not doing anything like that. He's just saying, we're not going to give them any security clearance and we're not going to contract with them. However, there's already been some blowback to this. So Perkins Coy has already brought a lawsuit to the United States District Court in D.C.

saying that the Trump administration was retaliating for people that he viewed against people that he viewed as political enemies. And I think there's certainly a case to be made for that. However, I don't think. that their lawsuit is going to be successful in saying the Trump administration has to reinstate their national security clearance or has to uphold contracts with them because that's the Trump administration's prerogative, right? They can revoke security clearance. They can revoke contracts as they please when they're hiring private companies. But there certainly is a view that's being painted of the Trump administration here, which is that they are retaliating against groups that they feel that are political enemies. And as a political spectacle, that's just not a great move.

This is not a priority for the Trump administration. It has become one in their minds, in Trump's mind, at least. This does not need to be a priority in any way, shape, or form. They have an agenda that they're trying to get done. And when you do things that hurt your public reputation, that's going to inhibit your agenda. The reason that the Trump administration has been able to do so many things in such a short amount of time thus far, I mean, they've only been in the office for two months at this point and we feel like every day it's just a swarm of new things that they're doing. The reason they're able to do that is because they have public sentiment behind them. They have the support of the people in the majority of the stuff that they're doing.

And that's given them a lot of leeway to act very quickly on a lot of different things. If they are to lose public sentiment, that goes away. And they can't afford for that to go away. And they can't use this time where they have public sentiment at their behest. They can't use this time. They can't waste this time on stuff like this. When you have public support, you need to use that time to get the stuff done that you promised in your campaign. You don't need to use that time to do things like this that might turn public will against you.

And just as a political strategy going forward, these kind of things are what turn the tide, right? So these kind of things that hurt the reputation of the Republican candidates won't just affect the Trump administration. Because a lot of people will see stuff like this and say, okay, it's kind of stupid. Okay, I understand where he's coming from. but he's not seeking re-election next term. But Republicans are looking at trying to win a presidential election in 2028. They're trying to win more seats in 26. They're trying to maintain the House and the Senate.

And there's a legitimate shot of them doing that with how much public support that they have. And you can't just throw it away with stuff like this. And I'm not saying that this one thing is going to do that. But it's little things like this that happen over time that gradually begin to turn the tide. And he doesn't need to get going that direction. So the Trump administration, if they want to see Republicans elected in 2026 and another Republican president elected in 2028, they need to use the backing of the people that they have right now to actually enact the stuff that matters and not petty things like this. And I understand, yes, he's more than able to terminate contracts. He's more than able to pull national security clearance. But he doesn't need to waste time on stuff like this and target particular groups that he feels have targeted him politically. The next piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order signed by the president on March 25th, entitled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Election. This executive order is a voter ID measure that is aimed at enforcing the citizenship requirement on U.S. federal elections.

So in the beginning of the executive order, they lay out the problems that we currently face with security in our federal elections. They say, quote, despite pioneering self-government, the United States now fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections. employed by modern developed nations. India and Brazil, for example, are tying voter identification to a biometric database, while the United States largely relies on self-attestation for citizenship. Germany and Canada require use of paper ballots counted in public by local officials, which substantially reduces the number of disputes as compared to the American patchwork of voting methods that can lead to basic chain of custody problems. Countries like Denmark and Sweden sensibly limit mail-in voting to those unable to vote in person

and do not count late-ariving votes regardless of the date of postmark, whereas many American elections now feature mass voting by mail with many officials accepting ballots without postmarks or those received well after election day. So the Trump administration believes we're falling behind the eight ball as far as securing our elections goes. And there's some evidence to support that. So there's a few things that they outline in the executive order to address those problems. The first thing is that they want to be sure foreign nationals and non-citizens are not registered on the voter rolls. Just a couple of years ago in 2023, the Pennsylvania State Department. department had to admit they had a quote unquote glitch in the system that had been accidentally

registering foreign nationals to vote for 20 years in the state of Pennsylvania, which is an intense battleground state. There were many states, Arizona is one of them. There were many other states that had to remove thousands of non-citizens from their voter rolls just because it's really hard to ensure that people are actually citizens, which is kind of a crazy thing to say, but that's just how it worked with voter registration right now. And that's particularly because of the motor voter rule. The National Voter Registration Act that makes it a federal requirement that state motor vehicle offices offer voter registration to people when they get driver's licenses and things like that. So there are instances of this kind of thing happening where there are non-citizens

who are being registered to vote. This executive order addresses that and tries to strengthen the voter ID requirements to make sure that foreign nationals are not voting in American elections. The first way that they do that is to, they say, to enforce the federal prohibition on foreign nationals voting in federal elections, they say that the national mail voter registration form will require documentary proof of United States citizenship that will require either a U.S. passport identification document compliant with the real ID or an official military identification card. So it narrows down what qualifies as valid ID for federal elections in mail-in voting, which is where a lot of these discrepancies can really take place. The executive order also

addresses how to identify unqualified voters registered in the voter rolls and assigns the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that local officials have access to the federal government's technological systems to help them verify citizenship or immigration status of people registering to vote or who have already registered. And then the last thing that's really important about this executive order is that the president has assigned the Doge administrator to work with the Department of Homeland Security to review publicly available voter registration lists, which means that Doge, because they can kind of go around a lot of red tape through Doge because it's not the same kind of federal agency as a lot of the other ones are. They can skirt around the red tape and get Doge to look into these voter registration

lists a little bit more quickly and easily than a lot of the bureaucratic systems would require. So Doge is going to work with the Department of Homeland Security. The goal being to purge the voter roles and to make American elections more secure. You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is about a Supreme Court case. So the Trump administration filed this application with the Supreme Court asking the justices to enforce a March 15th executive order that would allow the administration to deport members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. So the Alien Enemies Act granted the President unilateral authority to deport non-citizens who are subjects of foreign enemies. So the concept is that you wouldn't want military age men who are citizens of a country that your enemies with to be in America spying.

That's what the Alien Enemies Act was designed to do. It was used during World War II to detain Japanese Americans who they thought might be spies. The president had the authority to deport those citizens under those wartime conditions. That's kind of been a very important part of this is it's only really been used under wartime conditions. However, President Trump has been trying to appeal to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in deporting these Venezuelan gang members. So on March 15th, the White House issued an executive order that targets this gang called Trend de Aragua, which is a large Venezuelan gang. They blame the gang for sex trafficking, drugs, and human smuggling in America and particularly along the southern border. They were also the gang that was accused of taking over that apartment complex in Colorado that became

an important issue during the election when immigration was coming up. Right before the election, there was this instance where this gang had taken over an apartment complex in Colorado. This was the gang that was blamed for that. In the executive order, Trump noted that Secretary of State Marker Rubio had designated the gang as a foreign terrorist organization and claimed that they're perpetuating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. So based on that, the executive order said that all Venezuelan citizens, 14 years old or older,

who were suspected to be part of the gang, could be deported under the Alien Enemies Act. Now, just like has happened in so many other instances recently, a district court judge blocked the executive order, and now Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court to allow the executive order to be enforced and to allow for the deportation of these Venezuelan gang members. There are two things that make this interesting. First, the fact that the authority to exercise the Alien Enemies Act has been given unilaterally to the president in history and there's precedent for that. However, the other side of that coin is there's only precedent for that happening when Congress has already declared war.

So it happened during the war of 1812, during World War I and during World War II. But in all of those instances, Congress had already declared war on another nation before the Alien Enemy Act was used by the president. So this is a kind of a different way of trying to use it. They're trying to get around the wartime precedent of it by saying that this is an invasion or a predatory incursion into the United States by this Venezuelan gang, and therefore they can be deported under the Alien Enemies Act. Problem is we haven't declared war with Venezuela. We're not at war with Venezuela. They want us to be at war with the gang, which they have declared a terrorist organization. And that's the question of whether the Supreme Court will decide that foreign

terrorist organizations are America's natural enemies, which I think can open up a can of worms. It was only five years ago that the FBI had labeled parents who were protesting at school board meetings against transgender students being able to use the opposing gender's bathrooms, the FBI had labeled them domestic terrorists. That was only five years ago that that had happened. And if you set a precedent where anybody who the government labels terrorists becomes the natural enemies of the United States and can be deported, I think that opens up a can of worms for a little bit too much discretion from the president alone about who is an enemy of the United States. Because you could hypothetically then label a domestic terrorist organization, enemies of the United States, and deport American citizens.

So I'm glad this case is going up to the Supreme Court because it has to be handled delicately and in such a way that will allow the government to effectively target criminal gangs and terrorist organizations, but without letting the federal government overreach their powers there. The next piece of news I have for you this week is another Supreme Court case entitled the National Republican Senatorial Committee versus the FEC. This case was actually originally filed by now Vice President J.D. Vance during his time in the Senate. and the case asks the FEC to overrule the limit that they imposed on campaign spending

from the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. That act was upheld in 2001 by the Supreme Court enforcing the fact that party-coordinated spending could not exceed certain limits. However, since 2010, with a very important case called Citizens United versus the FEC, the Supreme Court essentially has allowed super PACs, the political action committees, to have access to virtually unlimited spending, which kind of makes meaningless the 2001 case upholding the Federal Elections Campaigns Act, because the Supreme Court's whole argument in that case was that the limits would prevent the circumvention of contribution limits by individual donors

with party connections. So they didn't want individuals being able to bypass the rules that were already on the books, and so they strengthened them to say that party coordinated spending could only get up to a certain amount. However, with the rise of super PACs, this is pretty much become obsolete, especially with the Citizens United case. So, for example, in the 2024 election, Elon Musk spent tens of millions of dollars on the Trump campaign, and none of that was in party coordinated spending. That was all through the America First Super PAC. And the America First Super PAC just spent that money on the campaign to elect Donald Trump. So they were really circumventing the contribution limits anyway. That's what Elon Musk was doing there. So with the Citizens United case,

it essentially makes the 2001 ruling and the Federal Elections Campaigns Act obsolete. So what J.D. Vance and his colleagues in the National Republican Senatorial Committee were arguing is that if you overrule the original 2001 case, if you overrule the limit on party-coordinated campaign spending, then a lot of that money is going to go more directly through the parties as opposed to the super PACs. And that means the money is going to be more well dispersed between the congressional races and the presidential races. It also means that private interests in super PACs aren't playing as big of a monetary factor in elections and just overall allows. the money that goes into presidential campaigns and to congressional campaigns to be centered in the party infrastructure, which has certain goals and certain agendas that they want to forward with certain candidates, as opposed to a private company, a private super PAC, which has its own particular interests and agenda at heart. I mean, for good or bad, people like Elon Musk who donate millions upon millions of dollars to super PACs have an agenda behind it. And that's pretty much undeniable. So that's what the Supreme Court case is going to decide, whether they can overrule

the limit on party-coordinated campaign spending and put a lot of that spending that is currently in Super PACs back into the parties themselves. The last piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order signed by the president called additional recisions of harmful executive orders and actions. On January 20th, he rescinded 78 executive orders from the Biden administration. This week, he rescinded 18 more, bringing him up to an even 90 executive orders that he has rescinded from the Biden administration. A few of those include one that would.

advanced human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons around the world, which directed federal agencies to hire people to engage abroad, to strengthen existing efforts to combat criminalization of LGBTQI plus status or conduct efforts to combat discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, and intolerance on the basis of LGBTQI plus status or conduct, etc. There's a bunch of other ones that are like that. A few of the other orders that President Trump just rescinded were ones that scaled and expanded the size of different federal agencies so as to conduct different domestic programs, a lot of which were DEI related or things like that that were to investigate discrimination, various things like that. There are two things I want to point out about this. The first one is that all of them

scale back the size of government in some way, shape, or form. All of the ones that he rescinded were things that added jobs to the federal bureaucracy. And so cutting these executive orders, cuts the requirements to expand the size of the federal bureaucracy. The second thing I want to point out is this is the problem with advancing your whole agenda through executive orders is that it's so easy for the next administration to just overturn it. 90 executive orders, that's a lot of accomplishments that a president is going to put on the resume. But all those executive orders are gone now with two signs of the pen. So the current politics of passing your whole agenda through executive order after executive order after executive order gets quick results because people want quick results,

right? We live in a time of short attention spans and some level of political unrest or unease at the very least. And so people want to see stuff happen and they want to see it happen quickly. That's an incentive for presidents to enact their agenda through executive orders. And that really just doesn't last. It never does. So when you see President Trump signing executive orders, if you like them, say, good, now send it to Congress to codify it into actual lasting law. And if you don't like it, well, don't worry, it's probably going to be overturned in a few years anyway. So to wrap up this week, we had three executive orders, one addressing major law firms involved in the Mueller report, one securing voter ID laws, and one rescinding Biden administration executive orders.

And we had two Supreme Court cases, one to determine whether the president can legally use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang members and another to reevaluate campaign spending rules. Tune in next week for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell under the radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller, here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.