If you’re on our website, you probably already know about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. You might be asking how any of it is possible.
Project 2025’s plot to make Donald Trump this country’s first all-powerful leader depends on replacing 54,000 government employees with MAGA diehards. But that’s not the first step.
Bringing Project 2025 to life starts with a reinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution that began nearly 40 years ago. Worse: Republican presidents have already pulled it off.
In November 2019, while serving as Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr spoke at an event for the Federalist Society (a member of the Council for National Policy, like the Heritage Foundation).
During his speech, Barr argued that Congress had become too powerful. Neither the legislative branch nor the judicial branch, he said, should have enough power to override the president.
Barr’s argument is known as the “unitary executive theory.”
It’s an alternative interpretation of the Constitution in which any checks and balances on the president would be seen as unconstitutional since our three branches of government are “equal.”
If the Supreme Court ever legitimized this spin on the Constitution, the U.S. president could operate as a near-total dictator.
Unfortunately, Barr didn’t come up with this himself. One of our Supreme Court justices did.
In 1986, Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old attorney at the Justice Department, proposed the idea of overriding Congress’s power to write laws by giving the president authority over how to interpret them. His idea hinged on “signing statements.”
When a president signs a bill into law, he (or she) can attach a signing statement as commentary on their decision. Since Alito shares Barr’s belief that Congress should have no power over the executive branch, he suggested that a president could use signing statements to declare his right to interpret any law as he pleased.
A year later, Ronald Reagan did just that. Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, stating that only he could decide how the law would be executed. He added that the president is not required “to follow the orders of a subordinate,” and that expecting him to do so would infringe on the constitutional rights of “the head of a unitary executive branch.”
Reagan was the first, but he wasn’t the last. In 2004, when Congress outlawed a once-secret U.S. torture program, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.”
And then there’s Trump.
In April 2020, reporters asked Donald Trump why he thought he could force governors to “reopen” their states. After all, the country was gripped by a deadly and still-mysterious pandemic. Trump’s response: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.”
No written document asserts that a president can ignore Congress or the courts. But the Supreme Court has yet to challenge any president’s right to declare unitary executive privilege. SCOTUS also never explored how to stop a president from extending his own power.
The opposite is true. Just last month the Supreme Court granted Donald Trump “presidential immunity,” a free pass to get away with almost any crime so long as that crime includes an “official act” of a U.S. president. Samuel Alito, the DOJ attorney who told Reagan to declare his unitary executive power, was one of the six Federalist Society / Council for National Policy justices that made presidential immunity a reality.
There are ZERO safeguards to protect us from Trump and Project 2025’s assault on our rights and our democracy if he wins this year. The only way to prevent this authoritarian takeover is through the democratic process that he tried to “reinterpret” in 2020 and plans to destroy if he gets a second chance.
It’s time to stop asking whether or not Project 2025 is possible and start asking how many people we can get to the polls in November.