Gov’t watchdog: What’s Behind Joe’s Voter Drive?

President Biden’s order for federal agencies to promote voting “may sound benign,” but it isn’t, warn Tarren Bragdon and Stewart Whitson at The Wall Street Journal. For starters, “the Constitution doesn’t grant the president authority over federal elections”; it grants it to states and Congress. More worrisome, such efforts “can be directed at groups expected to vote for the president’s party” and may even “take the form of pressure.” And though Bragdon and Whitson’s Foundation for Government Accountability filed Freedom of Information requests in July seeking information on plans to follow through, “not a single agency has provided the documents we’ve requested.” So now the group is suing — in the hopes that “Americans can learn if anything inappropriate is happening before they cast their midterm ballots.”

From the right: Border Woes Feed Crime

With crime surging in cities across the nation, “Americans feel unsafe — and they blame Biden and other Democrats,” The Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen contends. One prime culprit: “the disaster Biden unleashed on our southern border.” “Overdose deaths from fentanyl coming across the border hit record levels in 2021,” and the crisis has forced Customs and Border Protection to “shift resources away from drug interdiction.” Meanwhile, “the same cartels are engaged in both human and drug trafficking” and use caravans to distract CBP and let shipments slip through. Finally, urban drug gangs supplied by cross-border shipments regularly engage in gun violence. “Until Democrats reverse course on border security … the crime wave will continue — as will Biden’s collapse in the polls.”

Conservative: Corp. America’s Woke Racism

“Since the death of George Floyd nearly two years ago, the largest American corporations have made massive spending commitments to support racial justice,” observes Daniel Lennington at The American Mind. “Initial corporate investments in racial justice initiatives have now topped $200 billion,” but that’s not all. Major Fortune 500 companies “have decided to engage in explicit race discrimination against their own customers.” Case in point: Cable giant Comcast sponsors a program that gives minority-owned businesses “free consulting, media, advertising and tech assistance, along with $10,000 in grants.” Businesses owned by white males are excluded from the program. And this is only one such program championed by corporate America. Such “widespread tolerance [of] race discrimination is a dangerous shift in American culture. … There are no caveats to equality.”

Foreign desk: So Much for Dem ‘Smart Power’

Amid rising fears of Putin using nukes in Ukraine, National Review’s Jim Geraghty asks: “Wasn’t the Democrats’ much-touted ‘smart power’ supposed to generate better results than this?” “In a world full of frightening problems, this one really grabs us by the lapels” — recalling “Barack Obama, John Kerry and other prominent Democratic elected officials boasting of their philosophy of ‘smart power,’” no matter how many times it led “to strategic disasters and mass death” in Syria and Afghanistan. There’s “a recurring pattern: A Democratic challenger declares that … it is time for a smarter, more sophisticated Democratic replacement to come in and fix everything,” before admitting “that the world is complicated and messy, and achieving U.S. foreign-policy goals is extremely difficult.”

Media desk: CNN Bias Is Killing the Network

“It took Warner Media 23 days to fold CNN+,” notes Stephen Miller at Spectator World. Why? “CNN has become the network of resistance to Donald Trump and the Republicans, without a single opposing viewpoint for balance” — though “the network continues to pretend otherwise.” And “until it can reconcile those two models, it will never succeed.” Brian Stelter “acts as though he is a straight news man” despite being “a janitor for a largely agenda-driven industry,” and “CNN won’t recoup any kind of value … until it cuts loose personalities like that.” One thing’s for sure: “CNN cannot continue down the road it’s on. The problem is that no one in charge seems to realize it.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board