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The next Republican president will try to destroy this country as we know it [1]
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Date: 2023-07-27
What do Republicans have in store for this country if they ever again attain the White House? Well, it isn’t good. In fact, it’s much worse than anything you could imagine if you still cling to the illusion that the GOP is now anything other than an extremist and neofascist organization, far to the right of anything this nation has ever witnessed on such a broad scale. If anything, it resembles something akin to an episode of Black Mirror. But at the same time, it’s all too predictable if you’ve paid any attention to what the Republican Party has become in the past seven years.
If, like most casual consumers of news, all you read was the anodyne headline for this article in last week’s New York Times, you’d probably file it away in your head as yet another tiresome outrage from the fever swamps of Trumpism: “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025.” Vaguely alarming, sure, but Trump’s about to be hit with his third and fourth indictments, right? The chances of him getting back into office aren’t that great, at least at this point in time, right?
You might start to read the article, though. Authored by Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, and discussed here and elsewhere on this site, it’s about how Trump plans (if he wins in 2024) to reconfigure the entire U.S. Executive into a quasi-dictatorship, with complete and total control of all of the federal agencies that make up that branch of government. The Department of Justice would be transformed into Trump’s private Stasi. The Departments of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency would basically cease to exist. The State Department and Pentagon would be gutted and replaced with Trump sycophants. For thirteen paragraphs -- well beyond the attention span of all but a miniscule segment of the population — you get nothing from this article but Trump: “Donald J. Trump and his allies...; “”; “Mr. Trump and his associates ...”; Mr. Trump intends to...” and so on.
Then, in the fourteenth paragraph, you are abruptly given to understand that this isn’t just Trump’s plan, despite the fact that the folks Times interviewed happen to be John McEntee and Russell Vought, two former Trump administration officials. It’s the detailed plan that will almost certainly be followed by any Republican president, be it in 2024, 2028, 2032 or beyond:
Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.
The plan is to subject every significant action by any agency to the control of a “unitary executive.”
The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.
Ask yourself whether a there is a single Republican with any realistic chance of nomination by the GOP in its current state who wouldn’t eagerly adopt this Heritage-vetted, prefabricated blueprint for the complete dismantling and co-opting of our federal government, the very instant he or she steps into the Oval Office.
There is none. Which means, as David Atkins, commenting on the Times article for Washington Monthly, observes:
If the next president is a Republican, it doesn’t matter whether that person is Donald Trump. Political infrastructure is being put in place, so any Republican administration will gut federal agencies from environmental protection to education to national security; obliterate the independence of the Justice Department and federal law enforcement agencies; and fire career civil servants and replace them with ideological apparatchiks hostile to the mission of the agencies that employ them.
The implications of such a transformation are as staggering as they are horrifying. Under this Republican scheme the country, that one we all grew up in, would become effectively unrecognizable. All federal agencies within the Executive would be converted into a pro-business, pro-profit juggernaut for the nation’s wealthiest, most regulation-averse corporations. Individual interests would become subordinate to an overwhelming ethic of rapacious, unfettered capitalism and our government would be transformed into a vehicle for looting the U.S. Treasury. As the Times’ article notes, here are literally plans to regulate the Fed in order to rig elections in the GOP’s favor:
Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.
What would happen if this became a reality? Environmental regulation would essentially cease, along with clean air and clean water enforcement. Civil rights enforcement would stop. Workplace safety regulations and fair labor standards would vanish. Trade policies would be written to benefit the GOP’s donor base, their political allies and no one else. The military would be completely politicized along with the State Department. Career civil servants would be fired if they refused to toe the administration line. Public lands would be sold to the highest bidder and measures to mitigate climate change would written out of existence. The Justice Department would be “weaponized” (in a very real sense of the word) against any “liberal” (read: pro-minority, pro-LGBTQ or pro-women) interests.
Worse, there would be minimal (if any) effective ways to stop it from happening. Congress cannot control the decision-making of the Executive Branch. It can fund and de-fund federal agencies, but it cannot thwart an Executive bent on total, unqualified control from completely refashioning those agencies in its own warped, pro-corporate image. The Heritage plan, funded and devised by the biggest donors to the GOP, would by definition sidestep any involvement, protest, or even objections by the American public through their elected representatives. Simply by voting for president they would have, in all practical effects, voted for dictatorship.
Nor, as Atkins points out, is the Supreme Court -- currently dominated by radical conservative ideologues — likely to put any effective curbs or limits on such a power grab.
As Atkins writes:
The Roberts Court knocked down some Trump policies, but they approved the bulk of his agenda. The chief justice and his majority are famously hostile to the power of federal agencies, even when they’ve been afforded specific powers to regulate. Should the Court constrain Trump’s consolidation of federal power in a second term, the then-47th president might adopt the Jacksonian nullification approach— refusing to acknowledge judicial review, as many Republicans propose. Besides, the next GOP administration may be less ham-fisted than the DOJ of Trump’s first term and may craft their right-wing policies to survive judicial muster.
Atkins also does something the Times conveniently forgot to do. He dispels the notion that this phenomenon is somehow limited to Donald Trump and will magically disappear once his malignant personage exits the stage.
This project will outlast Trump, whether he wins or loses next year. Governor Ron DeSantis has waged a similar battle against executive accountability in Florida. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wants to chuck the constitutional rights of birthright citizenship and the 18-year-old vote. This extremist revolutionary movement is not the product of one or two candidates. Its promoters know they cannot win majority support in an increasingly diverse and progressive electorate, so stealing elections and wiping away checks and balances drives it.
The fact that the country this Republican Project 2025 envisions is not a place where most Americans would want to live does not factor into their analysis. That’s because it is a project designed to serve only the GOP’s wealthy benefactors who presumably believe they can insulate themselves from the dystopia they created. Atkins recommends that Democrats begin passing legislation to impose limitations on these plans, including for example, establishing criminal penalties on those who intend to undermine the independence of the justice system. He also suggests that states begin to anticipate the cutoff of federal services that they’ve counted on for the past century, replicating federal agencies on a statewide basis, as the radical transformation proposed by these Republicans will effectively undo most of the reforms that took shape during the New Deal.
But most of all, Americans must do their level best never to allow the Republican party to obtain control of the White House again.
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