Project 2025: Part II

The public interest group Common Cause described Project 2025 as “a dangerous policy playbook for the next Republican president. It could threaten basic freedoms by gutting checks and balances and consolidating power in the office of the president, like other authoritarian governments.”

Spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, the $22-million-dollar Project 2025’s authors and partners draw heavily from the Trump administration. More than two-thirds of its “partner organizations” are funded, at least in part, by the Koch network of right-wing financiers, or the activist Leonard Leo, whose organization has placed six Republican partisans on the Supreme Court—along with hundreds of other federal judges nationwide.

Voting Rights and Civil Rights

Perhaps the most dangerous change of Project 2025 would be the disenfranchisement of millions of voters by rolling back key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, thus eliminating the hard-won opportunities African Americans have achieved to vote—and have their votes counted. With that as a first step, the Heritage Foundation plan would, ultimately, bring about Donald Trump’s goal, enunciated to a “Believers Summit” organized by the white supremacist group Turning Point Action, that 2024 will be the last election Americans will see. The event took place in West Palm Beach, FL, on July 26. Trump’s full closing comments were:

“We have to win this election, most important election ever. We want a landslide that’s too big to rig. If you want to save America, get your friends, get your family, get everyone you know and vote. Vote early, vote absentee, vote on Election Day. I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote. And again, Christians, get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

A Three-Pronged Process

The Heritage plan is three-pronged: through the courts, through laws and executive actions, and through the direct takeover of the entire government through the appointment process. The first steps of “prong 1” have already been taken, beginning with SCOTUS’s 2013 Shelby County decision, which eliminated the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act.

Ten years later, in the 2023 court case NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, a federal Appeals Court panel ruled last November that no individual has the right to sue under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, despite hundreds, even thousands, of lawsuits brought successfully over nearly 60 years. In that case, two Trump and Bush judges ruled that only the Justice Department may sue a jurisdiction that has, for example, removed all Black voters from the state’s voter registration rolls.

The claim by the state Board of Apportionment was, in effect, that no actual voter has legal standing to demand the right to vote; only a US Attorney, appointed by the president, has that standing. That ruling is the latest in their plan to eliminate the Voting Rights Act: as explained in the next section, a Republican president would simply order his Attorney General not to bring any actions against officials subverting voting rights.

Prong 2: the Power of the Imperial Executive

For decades presidents have tried to gain greater control over all facets of the government and its many branches, and good-government groups have responded with the clear intent of the Constitution: that we have three separate but equal branches of government—the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial—to serve as “checks and balances” on one another and, specifically, to ensure that America does not, and cannot, suffer the rule of a king with unfettered power.

By vesting all power over the Department of Justice in the president himself, rather than ensuring that the DOJ is insulated from political pressure by the White House, “2025” would upend policies in place for half a century, since the Watergate scandals of Richard Nixon, Edwin Meese, and other corrupt Republicans who used the Department as Nixon’s personal law firm. The policy has specifically kept the Justice Department at arm’s length from the White House, so that it will focus solely on law enforcement, not political favoritism—or retribution.

But the latter is precisely what the Heritage Foundation has wanted since its founding in 1973. Trump’s A.G., William Barr, was (like Meese) a proponent of the imperial presidency, and regularly took his orders directly from Trump, subverting the law in the process.

Heritage believes that not only should the DOJ be subordinate to the president, but so should the court system. For more than 50 years they have worked quietly, diligently, and under the radar to convert the US judiciary from an independent branch of government to a subsidiary of the Republican Party (with help from the Federalist Society), and they feel that they are now near their goal of complete restructuring of the United States government.

Prong 3: Eliminate the Civil Service

The third key to enacting Project 2025 is to pack the Department of Justice with Trump-aligned ideologues, replacing the career attorneys and public servants who are sworn to uphold the laws of the United States. Under Trump’s vision, reinforced by the Heritage project, those ideologues would be required to swear fealty to Donald J. Trump, rather than the United States Constitution.

To the Victor Belong the Spoils . . .

How would they do this? More than 140 years ago, in 1883, the Pendleton Act was passed to eliminate the corruption encouraged by the old saying, “to the victor belong the spoils.” Under the old system, each new administration appointed political cronies, financial benefactors, and family members to crucial jobs—all with the goal of carrying out the president’s desires rather than the laws they were sworn to uphold. Under Pendleton, civil servants are protected from political retribution and replacement, and also prohibited from engaging in partisan activity.

Four years ago, near the end of his term, the Trump White House implemented a new, so-called “Schedule F,” designed to overthrow the Pendleton Act by Executive Order 13957—to overturn an Act of Congress by presidential fiat. The Schedule F order would reclassify civil servants with up to 50,000 new political appointees.

Who would they be? The Heritage Foundation has already identified more than 10,000 activists—not conservatives, but revolutionaries—to fill jobs in a new Trump Administration and carry out his goals. Their loyalty to the president rather than to the law will empower the DOJ (and other government agencies and departments) to ignore wrongdoing by loyalists and punish opponents without consequences.

Change the Right to Vote to a Privilege

An immediate goal of Project 2025 is to eliminate the rest of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, based on the premise that any activity, ruling, law, or decision that benefits minority groups that have traditionally been discriminated against—Black, Hispanic, Asian, GLBTQ+, women, students, etc.—is in fact “reverse discrimination” against straight white men who, “by right,” have enjoyed control of the nation for 248 years.

The section on the Department of Justice was written by Hans Von Spakovsky, who has built a lucrative career on purging voter rolls of Democrats and, specifically, Black voters, throughout Florida and elsewhere in the South. Here he proposes “investigating and prosecuting” election officials who help voters correct their ballots, rather than individuals or groups that commit voter fraud, deny voters the right to vote, or refuse to offer absentee voters a chance to correct (or “cure”) a ballot with an error or deficiency.

The error may be as minor as the wrong date on the mail-in envelope, or a signature that does not precisely match that on a registration form (e.g., “Mamie Danforth Wright” registered to vote, and then, several years later, signed “Mamie D. Wright” on the ballot).

Von Spakovsky writes, “Voter fraud includes unlawful practices concerning voter registration and ballot correction. When state legislatures are silent as to procedures for absentee ballot curing or provide specific rules governing that curing, neither counties nor courts may create a cure right where one does not exist, may not modify the law on curing, and certainly cannot engage in creating consent orders with the force of law that are inconsistent with the orders of other similarly situated counties.”

Voter Suppression

Currently, and for decades, the DOJ has included several offices designed to investigate voter suppression: the Civil Rights Division, an Election Crimes Branch (to prosecute fraudulent voter registration, including mail-in ballot fraud like that allegedly perpetrated by the late GOP activist Leslie Dowless in Bladen County, NC, in 2018), and the Criminal Division’s Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses.

Under the last office, schemes that violate equal protection constitute prosecutable “voter suppression,” and state-based investigations of election crimes are supposed to be referred to the Public Integrity Section for review. Historically, the DOJ investigated state officials whose statements violated the equal protection rights of voters, or deliberately misinformed voters, concerning the eligibility of their ballots. And for decades the DOJ has given jurisdiction over such investigations to the Civil Rights Division.

As noted by Project 2025, “The Criminal Division [of the DOJ] … advised states that in the case ‘of a crime of violence or intimidation,’ [precinct officials] should ‘call 911 immediately, because state and local police have primary jurisdiction over polling places,’ despite clearly applicable federal law.”

That is because, under the current Voting Rights Act and its application by the DOJ, if there are voting intimidators (like men harassing voters at a polling place, or chasing or challenging voters as they drive in, taking down license plates, etc.), the poll judges are supposed to call local law enforcement first to intervene and arrest the disrupters. It’s only later that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will get involved—if they believe they can make a case for actual or attempted voter suppression.

Subverting Voters’ Rights

For the most part, such guidance makes sense, because averting, investigating, and prosecuting voter intimidation is a violation of the civil rights of each and every voter. However, the Heritage Foundation turns the role of the DOJ on its head.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) required that provisional ballots be made available to voters who are not on a state voter registration list. The act also mandated that states provide correct voting information, update and upgrade voting equipment, develop and maintain statewide voter registration databases, publish clear voter identification procedures, and establish administrative complaint procedures.

Just Don’t Tell ’em

In Pennsylvania, to end-run HAVA, the Republican-led legislature passed “Act 12” in 2020, requiring that a voter with a spoiled mail-in ballot bring that spoiled ballot to the polling place along with an affidavit (a legal, notarized document) asserting that the ballot should be replaced. But there is no way for a voter whose mail-in ballot was “spoiled” to know about it; election officials would simply not count it, without telling the voter. The legislature deliberately did not include a provision for the voter to be informed.

During the Covid crisis, the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania issued guidance to voting officials that they should, in fact, inform voters of a spoiled or rejected ballot, so as to give that voter the opportunity to “cure” it.

But in response, the PA state Supreme Court ruled in a lawsuit that “the Election Code contains no requirement that voters whose ballots are deemed inadequately verified be apprised of this fact. Thus, unlike in-person voters, mail-in or absentee voters are not provided any opportunity to cure perceived defects in a timely manner.” And therefore the Secretary of State was prohibited from telling voters “affirmatively” that their ballots were not going to be counted.

Arrest Those Who DO Tell Them

The Heritage Foundation would go even further. Von Spakovsky concludes, “the Pennsylvania Secretary of State should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted for potential violations of 18 U.S. Code § 241” for the “voter fraud” act of telling a voter that they messed up their ballot and may re-vote using a provisional ballot.

In other words, don’t prosecute an official who arbitrarily removes Black voters from the voting rolls; don’t prosecute a voter who fraudulently tries to vote in several different precincts; don’t prosecute an election official who throws out imperfect mail-in or absentee ballots . . . instead, prosecute the person who wants to help all voters vote and have their votes counted.

Von Spakovsky concludes, “Investigations and prosecutions under 18 U.S. Code § 241 are currently within the jurisdictional oversight of the Civil Rights Division, not the Criminal Division. Only by moving authority for 18 U.S. Code § 241 investigations and prosecutions back to the Criminal Division will the rule of law be appropriately enforced.

Who’s Behind It All?

The Heritage Foundation’s leaders and supporters see their absolute power slipping from their grasp as the nation becomes ever more diversified. They have worked for fifty years to reverse historical trends of diversification, often aiming at the pre-Civil Rights era to reestablish Jim Crow laws and rules.

What’s Its Ultimate Goal?

Project 2025, though now “disavowed” by Donald Trump, is a blueprint for ending the United States as the great experiment in democracy that it has been for two-and-a-half centuries. And despite its authorship (at least 140 of its contributors worked for Trump’s administration) from a “respectable DC-based policy group,” its goals align perfectly with numerous white supremacist, white nationalist, Christian nationalist, and hate groups such as National Alliance, America First, Groypers, Identity Evropa, Turning Point USA, Aryan Brotherhood, National Association for the Advancement of White People, and the White Aryan Resistance.

Fighting this anti-American scourge will take the combined efforts of every patriotic citizen, whether Black, white, multi-racial, female, male, LGBTQI+, or other identity, and whether they follow progressive, liberal, or conservative political views about our economy, culture, history, and national and international standing.

Read The Ultimate Goal is Autocracy >>

Read Project 2025 Part I: What is Project 2025 and Why Is It So Alarming? >>

Look for Project 2025: Part III in our September 2024 issue.