How Will Republicans Force Americans to Comply with Unpopular Laws?
Reader question from this week's coverage of Project 2025 (As always, scroll to the end to listen.)
Project 2025 is the far-right’s public playbook for turning our country into a Christo-fascist state.
It outlines several broad mechanisms they will use to force their unpopular views on every American from Day 1 of a new Administration.
Executive Orders
Project 2025 deploys the aggressive use of Executive Orders. From a Republican president’s utterance of the words “so help me God” on Inauguration Day, they will have a stack of highly targeted Executive Orders for the new President to sign. I’ve included the text of one recommended Executive Order from Project 2025’s list of reforms for the Department of Education below.
Eliminate the “list of shame.” Educational institutions can claim a religious exemption with the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education from the strictures of Title IX. In 2016, the Obama Administration published on the Department of Education’s website a list of colleges that had applied for the exemption. This “list of shame” of faith-based colleges, as it came to be known, has since been archived on ED’s website, still publicly available. The President should issue an executive order removing the archived list and preventing such a list from being published in the future.
Project 2025, page 357
Project 2025 mentions Executive Orders to enable the firing of federal employees at will, the protection of life from conception to natural death, an annihilation of all policies they consider ‘woke,’ upon many others.
Remaking the Federal Government
The mainstream media has made much of Project 2025’s designs on federal employees. During the Administration’s first 180 days, they will reshape the federal government with conservative ‘yes-people’ who will do whatever a conservative President says. THEY ARE ALREADY VETTING THESE PEOPLE.
From the Project 2025 text:
The Conservative Promise lays out how to use many of these tools including: how to fire supposedly “un-fireable” federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government; how to restore the American people’s constitutional authority over the Administrative State; and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process.
Project 2025, page 9
Americans will not be able to flip Congress in the 2026 midterms to undo this step. If they succeed, it will alter the federal government’s composition and inner-workings for decades to come.
Congressional Legislation
Our Congress is a dysfunctional international embarrassment. It’s hard to imagine them passing any meaningful legislation. However, an unassailable Republican majority in both houses combined with the White House WILL remove all obstacles to passing legislation. They WILL use the power of Congress to force unpopular laws on the American people. Project 2025 recommends numerous bills to enact the Republican President’s agenda. An example below:
Permanently codify both the Hyde family of amendments and the protections provided by the Weldon Amendment. Congress can accomplish this through legislation such as the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act56 (Hyde) and the Conscience Protection Act57 (Weldon).
Project 2025, page 474
They could also use legislation to deny federal monies to recalcitrant blue states and localities. For example, if the state of California refuses to follow a federal abortion ban, they could withhold all federal monies from the state to force compliance. Project 2025 recommends this tactic.
The Judiciary
Project 2025 is the far-right’s PUBLIC playbook. They also have a private TACTICAL playbook, and they are already using 45’s remaking of the federal judiciary to pursue their fascist objectives.
Part of the value of this space will be tying their public playbook (Project 2025) to their private tactical playbook. Nowhere is the latter more exposed than in laws they propose and lawsuits they pursue via the judicial branch.
Let’s examine a few recent news items:
Yesterday, the Florida legislature proposed SB 1780. If passed, this bill would define the following speech as defamation punishable by a fine of $35,000: accusing someone of being homophobic, transphobic, racist or sexist, even if the accusation is true. (Source: The Guardian) This law will be litigated, but they are confident they can find enough sympathetic judges to propose it now.
How could this impact YOU? If enacted at the federal level, which they would most assuredly do, anyone could sue you for true statements you make about them. Those statements would no longer be protected under the First Amendment. You would be forced to spend months or years of your life and untold thousands of dollars to defend yourself. This action alone could ruin many Americans.
In December 2023, Louisiana filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for hundreds of emails between journalists, advocates and community organizations. (Source: The Guardian) They have since used that information to harass and intimidate residents of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” the subject of an ongoing battle between the state and the Environmental Protection Agency.
How could this impact YOU? These are the tactics of fascist governments. They already show a willingness to use whatever means necessary to quash dissent, bully their enemies, and punish informers.
In December 2023, POLITICO highlighted a story about the effort to create a publicly-funded Christian school in Oklahoma. (Source: POLITICO) This effort is designed to be brought before conservative judges with the goal of demolishing the wall between church and state, a stated policy goal of Project 2025.
How could this impact YOU? Taxpayer-funded schools could force Christian Nationalist religious instruction on every student, regardless of their family’s personal faith. Religious organizations could become the main portal for delivery of all welfare, while requiring recipients to ‘earn’ their help with activities like Bible study attendance, avoiding sex outside marriage, no dating, and weekly check-ins with approved Christian ‘mentors.’
The far-right is also setting a precedent to ignore judicial rulings they don’t like. We see that tactic in Alabama’s initial refusal to follow the Supreme Court’s order to draw a second Black congressional district. Or Texas governor Greg Abbott’s defiance of federal court orders on immigration law.
I chose to swerve from my outline and answer this great reader question now because it will help readers as we go through specific sections of Project 2025. I hope you will bookmark this post and refer to it every time you think, “They’ll never be able to do this. Somebody will stop them.”
Project 2025 is part of their ongoing coup. It addresses every failure from their first attempt to retain power against the will of the people. It removes guardrails. It fires recalcitrant bureaucrats. It deletes months of transition time between administrations by being ready to go on Inauguration Day.
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The specifics are really helpful. The three news stories you use are excellent illustrations and there are countless more out there. Abortion is the issue on which they've shown more of their hand than on any other, and if we could make that connection with the broader public it would go along way (i.e. this is what they have done and are planning to do to pregnant women, you can see the results here, now here's how they are going to do equally outrageous and unpopular things to the rest of us). The abortion stories are evidence for our case. But yes we need examples on every issue, it's just that most of those are more at the proposal stage than the implementation stage, so they can encounter 'they'll never be able to get away with that' doubt. But always always specifics. By analogy, talking about the Holocaust in general terms ('Nazis murdered X million people') is less effective than more specific stories about individuals or about the exact details that had to be attended to and the individual actions that had to be and were taken by millions of Germans to make the killing machine work. (Disclosure: most of my family heritage is German, so not trying to imply anything beyond the historical record, but rather show it can happen to anyone.) The horror is in the details. This is not my best-written comment :) but the specifics are what are most persuasive. Also, I think it's okay to put links to posts here in your comments on AED because there is a LOT of mission overlap and I can't imagine anyone thinking it was inappropriate self-promotion or something like that; like JV, you're doing this for all of us. Sometimes it's easier for people to click through while reading than to say, 'oh yeah, I should look up Andra's substack sometime'.
I'm in the screw that camp too. The stakes are too high!