Opinion: Project 2025 and the U.S. Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court is seen on Sept. 2, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images / TNS

Published: 08-29-2024 6:00 AM

Opinion

Nelson H. Lawry holds a Ph.D. in cell biology. He has written extensively about local history, the history of technology, the freshwater environment, the New Hamphire coastal forest and the role of cyanobacteria. He is the author of “Armed Bluejackets Ashore: US Navy Landing Guns 1850–1942.” He lives in Rollinsford.

Project 2025, the holy grail of the Heritage Foundation and its adherents on the far right, would accomplish a number of ends, most of which may fairly be described as authoritarian and downright cruel. Thinking adults in the Granite State concerned with keeping a liberal democracy are likely aware of them, but just to be sure, a few reminders. There is first and foremost the grievous risk to a vast number of experienced civil servants, who see to it that our federal government operates efficiently and keeps the American people safe, to be replaced by a corps of deferential toadies lacking both the experience and expertise for the job.

Such determination would totally eliminate the Department of Education, ensuring disadvantaged youth have even fewer opportunities. Also slated for the ax are the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Who then will track destructive hurricanes and tornadoes, and provide sufficient warning to those at great jeopardy, largely in the South and Midwest where Trump voters abound? The project also seeks to disrupt the CDC, NIH, and FDA, when COVID-19 is rising again worldwide. Remember the first time around?

Other aspects anticipate remolding the DOJ and FBI to make them the internal police organizations so beloved by Vladimir Putin; halting measures designed to reduce climate change, when this earth, including the United States, is already at a crisis; cutting ties with China, a move almost certain to lead to war among the superpowers; and a shift in immigration policy that would make mockery of the inspiring words by Emma Lazarus — not only a woman but a Jew — writ large on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Finally, there are the old faves of the far right, having to do with sex, of course, preventing abortion and effectively ending the reproductive rights of women, and returning to the bad old days when American society treated gay people as individuals outside the law. One wonders if stripping the vote from women and gay people, which conservatives have long muttered about, can be far behind.

It comes as no stunner that former President Trump claims never to have heard of Project 2025, despite having been the Heritage Foundation’s keynote speaker in April 2022, in which speech he fully supported its intentions. Perhaps Trump just forgot. Project director Paul Dans may be off the mound, but he’s still in the dugout and is not going away. Said project remains very much the plan intended for a Trump return to the White House.

This brings one to the U.S. Supreme Court and the close conformity between Project 2025 and the Court’s recent decisions so contrary to the wishes of the majority of the American people. What is most alarming is the dogma that the potential consequences of its rulings must never be taken into account when making those rulings. A case in point is the tortured logic that bump stocks do not convert semiautomatic rifles to machine guns, which begs the question of why our society even needs bump stocks, given the horrendous frequency of mass shootings. Essentially with this stock, the weapon fires as fast as a machine gun, it just isn’t one when splitting the hair fine enough, a distinction the several hundred casualties in the Oct. 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting will assuredly find convincing. It certainly was convincing enough for Justice Clarence Thomas.

The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were deemed absolutely necessary to our collective public health. But in their infinite wisdom, the conservative members of the Court struck down the 1984 Chevron v. the Natural Resources Defense Council decision and a number of the regulations imposed by the acts, one suspects because they interfered with profit-making by ‘Big Biz.’ Given the atrocious example from Flint, Michigan, and the certain deleterious results from relaxing those standards, count on a significantly increased level of ill-health, made even worse by the increasing mean temperature from global warming. The awful risk to wetlands, so vital to a stable ecology, the propagation of species in the natural food web, and as stopover refuges for migrating birds, has been increased by at least an order of magnitude thanks to the conservatives on the high court.

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