It’d be one thing if Minnesota’s Somali community were simply stealing money from the American taxpayer. If that were the extent of it, we might be able to gnash our teeth and chalk it up to just one more grift, just one more perversion of the American Dream.

If only.

In fact, the Somali fraud scandal is just one-third of a three-part criminal enterprise that also includes the enrichment of Democrat political machines and the census-related theft of U.S. congressional seats.

The patronage toward Democrats makes perfect sense, as theirs is the hand that feeds these welfare fraud schemes both in Minnesota and elsewhere. As for the census piece, Texas Congressman Wesley Hunt called it out during a recent congressional hearing, noting that the counting of illegal immigrants in the 2020 census — which included overcounts of blue states and undercounts of red states such as Florida and Texas — may have given the Democrats a whopping 18 extra House seats and electoral votes.

As House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer put it, “Six of the eight states benefiting from overcounts tended to favor Democrats in awarding congressional apportionment and electoral college votes. Meanwhile, five of the six states that were unfairly penalized by undercounts tended to vote for Republicans. These miscounts had an impact on representation. In the 2020 apportionment, a difference of only 89 people was the tipping point for New York being apportioned 26 seats instead of 27. Just 89 people.”

John Solomon at Just the News noticed, as well. “As the magnitude and complexity of Minnesota’s Somali immigrant welfare fraud scandal come into clearer focus,” writes Solomon, “Republicans in Congress are more boldly talking about it being part of a larger scheme by Democrats to use illegal immigrants and purported refugees to hijack federal elections and manipulate apportionment that determines Americans’ congressional representation and federal funding.”

Yesterday, I covered the Left’s weaponization of illegal immigration, a quiet coup that’s remaking the demographic fabric of our nation by flooding it with future Democrat voters. What we’re seeing in Minnesota, though, is more sophisticated and every bit as devastating. And it’s why the Democrats have been so slow to respond and so quick to vilify as racist the Republicans’ efforts to get to the bottom of it.

Investigative journalist Ben Weingarten calls the Minnesota scandal “The Blue Model of Government” and puts it this way: “Democrats and regime media have been gaslighting the country, casting critics as bigots, and shooting the messengers who sent the long-neglected story viral — and why, now, state and local leaders are trying to turn Minneapolis into a powder keg.”

Indeed, given this leftist scheme to rig our elections and our congressional representation, it’s hard to imagine anyone more usefully idiotic than the white women fighting our federal agents to keep them from deporting illegal alien child rapists. But here we are.

Simply put, in the Blue-State Model, when the Democrats see illegals, they think: dollars and votes and House seats.

How to fix it? As I said yesterday, we need to kick these people out of our country and remove their incentives for coming here in the first place. As Republican Senator Rand Paul argues, “People say, ‘Well, gosh, these poor people come from war-torn areas. How will they survive?’ Well, they will survive the way we traditionally did when we admitted people. If you sponsor them, they’re your responsibility.” He added, “So you have many of these church charities involved with bringing people here, and then the church charity thinks that charity involves signing them up for welfare. If your charity brings them here, and they can’t, they aren’t working enough to have food you feed them.”

As Paul trenchantly concludes, “It’s charitable to give your own money. It’s not charitable to take someone else’s money.”