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Project 2025 – Talking Points to Protect our Democratic Institutions

June 28, 2021

Editorial credit: Shutterstock.com

Project 2025 embodies an agenda led by the Heritage Foundation to revise, reorganize and eliminate vast portions of the statutes, rules and norms that were built over decades, and that have guided our democracy and preserved our freedoms during Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Embodied in a 900-page document entitled “Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Promise,” and developed in collaboration with more than 100 other organizations, Project 2025 would dramatically change both.

It is important to stress that recent changes in the Project’s leadership alter neither the document’s text nor the “Mandate for Leadership” that lies behind it.

All of us, and lawyers in particular, have a role to play in discussing with others the nature of the proposed changes and how they endanger our freedom. To facilitate those discussions, Lawyers Defending American Democracy is publishing a series of “Talking Points” that highlight changes Project 2025 is intent on making and their potential effect.

Each Talking Point will quote directly from the document and explain its impact on our democracy, our freedom, and the rule of law. Please share this information widely with your friends, family, and colleagues in the upcoming months.

Project 2025 Talking Points

 Introductory Chapter: A Note on Project 2025 (Page xiv)

"Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State."

Why it Matters: Talking Points

The words "Administrative State" have become a pejorative description used to denigrate workers who perform the functions of the federal government. Those functions include, for example: national defense; law enforcement; the protection of public health and the environment; the postal service; public works; and all forms of public transportation, including rail and air travel. 

The dismantling of these functions ignores the carefully crafted checks and balances that have been built into the governmental workforce over many decades. As future LDAD Talking Points will further develop, Project 2025 seeks to upend these checks and balances in a way that will directly threaten the rule of law by removing legions of federal workers whose fidelity remains fixed on the oath they took to support and defend, and to bear true faith and allegiance to, the Constitution of the United States. But, as future comments will show, Project 2025 envisions measures far beyond dramatic changes in personnel, measures that, if enacted, would have a dramatic impact on our democracy and on our freedoms.

Foreword (Page 5)

“In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

Parents surely have a strong interest in the education their children are receiving. They always have and they always should. However, this proposal must be viewed against the backdrop of recent efforts to empower individual parents to veto teaching from or about books they do not like and course components with which they disagree. Such a veto power invites a chaotic free-for-all in which choices made by one parent seriously and adversely affect the freedom other parents have to make a different choice. Elected school boards and administrators have maintained a robust educational system for decades and can continue to ensure that all parental voices be heard in the process of choosing a curriculum and other aspects of a public education.

Foreword (Page 6)

“[C]onservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

This proposal is designed, in the words of the authors, to “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”  The proposal builds on and celebrates Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s recent decision that, after fifty years, overturned Roe v. Wade, a decision recognizing a woman’s constitutional right to control her own body and to make her own decision about whether to have a family. Project 2025’s proposal for a universal ban on abortion would not only take the family-planning decision away from women and places it in the hands of the state, but would similarly control other reproductive health decisions. A more extraordinary assault on individual freedom is difficult to imagine.   

Comstock Act (Page 459)

“Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

This is a reference to the Comstock Act, a moribund federal law passed in 1873 and named for Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice crusader who advocated for female chastity and against pornography, birth control and abortion.

As part of his assault on fundamental freedoms, Comstock’s law purports to prohibit mailing anything that could be used in an abortion – even ordinary surgical supplies such as gloves and sutures. For more than 100 years, however, the courts and the Justice Department have consistently ruled that the law does not apply to mailing items for a lawful purpose.

Project 2025 would reverse this understanding and prosecute people if they mailed FDA-approved abortion medicines, even to states where abortion is legal. This would effectively institute a national abortion ban, depriving women of their rights under state law. It also raises the specter of a President resurrecting and reinterpreting other laws to destroy freedoms.

Director of the FBI (Page 552)

“The Director of the FBI must remain political accountable to the President in the same manner as the head of any other federal department or agency. To ensure prompt political accountability and to rein in perceived or actual abuses, the next conservative Administration should seek a legislative change to align the FBI Director’s position with those of all other major departments and agencies.”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

This proposal is intended to eliminate the FBI Director’s ten-year maximum term of office that was enacted following the 1972 death of J. Edgar Hoover and the revelations that preceded his passing. Equally important, the proposal would take the FBI out of the Department of Justice where, under the supervision and control of law-enforcement professionals, it currently serves as the Department’s principal investigative office. Worse, it would place the FBI under the direct control of a political office-holder with all of the potential for political machinations that would bring, and, in light of the suggestion that the change await the next ‘conservative Administration,’ perhaps is intended to bring.

Legal Actions Against Local Prosecutors (Page 553)

“Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

There are over 2,000 locally elected district attorneys who have authority to pursue criminal charges, enforce the law, and administer justice in accordance with the state and local laws of their respective jurisdictions. They have – and should retain – the sole decision-making authority to determine whether criminal charges should be filed against a person or entity and, if so, what charges are to be filed.

Authorizing the Department of Justice to pursue undefined “legal action” against local prosecutors would constitute an unprecedented, inappropriate, and unlawful federal intrusion into local prosecutorial decision-making. District Attorneys could face lawsuits or possibly criminal prosecution for lawfully deciding not to pursue criminal prosecution against an individual based on the totality of the evidence and the terms of the local criminal statute.

The unmistakable objective is to empower extremists who will control the Justice Department to compel more aggressive criminal prosecution of any cause that meets their agenda, without regard to whether the underlying law is constitutional, whether it fits within the priorities of the local District Attorney's and the region's criminal justice needs and priorities, or whether there are sufficient funds available for local prosecutors to pursue a federal agenda.

Lastly, federal interference in decisions made by local prosecutors who know their communities and the people they serve would substantially diminish the freedoms those prosecutors seek to protect.

Department of Justice – Civil Rights Division (Pages 561-562)

“Even though numerous federal laws prohibit discrimination based on notable immutable characteristics such as race and sex, the Biden Administration— through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and other federal entities— has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity.’ Federal agencies and their components have established so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination, and all departments and agencies have created ‘equity’ plans to carry out these invidious schemes. To reverse this trend, the next conservative Administration should: ...

Reorganize and refocus the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to serve as the vanguard for this return to lawfulness. The Attorney General and other DOJ political leadership should provide the resources and moral support needed for these efforts. The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

From beginning to end, Project 2025 reflects deep-seated hostility to any aspect of diversity, equity and inclusion. This section is an extreme example of this hostility. It proposes not simply to transform the Civil Rights Division, but to reverse the Division’s mission. Rather than prosecute public and private entities which discriminate against people of color and women, the Division would be compelled to utilize “the full force of federal prosecutorial resources” against employers that promote diversity in their workforce. The inevitable result will be that public and private entities will hire fewer people of color and women. The express premise is that any policy promoting diversity in the workforce necessarily constitutes “affirmative discrimination” against whites. This premise is not simply racist and untrue – it is also unconstitutional and inconsistent with established Supreme Court precedent upholding voluntary affirmative action plans adopted by employers to remedy past discrimination.

 Department of Labor and Related Agencies (Page 616)

“The good of the American family is at the heart of conservative labor policy recommendations. The longstanding tradition of a strong work ethic in American culture must be encouraged and strengthened by policies that promote family-sustaining jobs. By eliminating the policies promoted by the DEI agenda, promoting pro-life policies that support family life, expanding available apprenticeship programs including by encouraging the role of religious organizations in apprenticeships, making family-sustaining jobs accessible, simplifying employment requirements, and allowing employers to prefer American citizens when making hiring decisions… we can begin to secure a future in which the American worker, and by extension the American family, can thrive and prosper.”

 Why it Matters: Talking Points

This quotation is from the conclusion to a section in Project 2025 that proposes sweeping recommendations that would eliminate significant laws, including Title Vll of the Civil Rights Act, as well as regulatory and policy requirements implementing these statutes. Rather than strengthening the American worker, these extensive proposals would eradicate longstanding reforms that have taken place over decades to ensure that workplaces are diverse, equitable, inclusive, and promote equal opportunities for all.

Unquestionably, the good of families living in America should be one of the primary goals of American labor policy. The diversity, equity, inclusion, and other policies these proposals would abandon are designed to ensure that all families living in America and contributing to its success share in the available good.

To eliminate such policies that provide families with a pathway to achieving family-sustaining jobs would be to reinstall barriers that long have blocked that pathway.

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