Project 2025 and the Project to Take Over Our Courts and Our Rights
By Lena Zwarensteyn
Past is often prologue, and in the case of Project 2025 it may be our future. Project 2025 lays out exactly what a future would look like if extremists are empowered. The Leadership Conference has considered what’s at stake for civil rights and how Project 2025 would impact our communities, including what’s at stake for our courts and our future. The full agenda of Project 2025 would completely reshape our federal government to benefit white nationalists and the rich and powerful. Although it does not articulate a plan for our courts specifically, many of the authors have long been part of a manufactured and coordinated campaign to transform our courts to roll back our civil and human rights. Project 2025 exploits the ways in which our courts have been stacked with many extremist conservative judges and justices who have paved the way to reverse our fundamental rights.
Throughout the previous administration, President Trump and the then-Senate majority, led by Mitch McConnell, rigged the federal judiciary to work against everyday people. They tipped the scales of justice, rewarding extremists who worked to erode our hard-won civil and human rights with lifetime federal judgeships. Through the outsourcing of the selection of judges to groups like the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society, Trump and Senate Republicans deliberately — and openly — chose judges whose backgrounds and records are hostile to abortion, voting rights, access to health care, workers’ rights, immigrant rights, disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the separation of church and state, freedom from discrimination based on religion, environmental protections, gun safety, and more. Already, we have felt the disastrous impacts not only from catastrophic decisions by the extremist majority on our Supreme Court, but also from countless lower court decisions throughout the country. Project 2025 entrenches and accelerates the degradation of our rights and erodes the ways in which our multiracial democracy can thrive.
Our courts — and ultimately our rights and our future — would be harmed by this radical proposal, especially given what we already know has been done by the authors.
Project 2025 is crafted by the same forces that manufactured the takeover of our federal judiciary.
We know the authors and contributors to Project 2025. They are the same forces that have long been funded to coordinate the rolling back of the progress we’ve made, including the litigation and judicial staffing efforts that have enabled this backlash against civil and human rights. In addition to the lead organizer, the Heritage Foundation, many organizations that are part of Project 2025’s advisory board have long worked to create a legal landscape that could usher in many of the extremist ideas sketched out in Project 2025. For example, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and First Liberty are at the forefront of some of the most egregious challenges to our civil and human rights. ADF led the anti-LGBTQ litigation in 303 Creative v. Elenis and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and they worked alongside Mississippi to revoke the fundamental right of abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. First Liberty has also led litigation to provide license to discriminate in cases such as Carson v. Makin and challenged the constitutional requirement of separation between church and state in cases such as Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. These organizations — along with the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, and others — have extensive experience leading and supporting the selection of extremist, anti-civil rights individuals who would serve in lifetime positions in our judiciary.
Ahead of and throughout the previous administration, Trump sought to cultivate support from the far right and relied on the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, and other institutions that have been masterminding the takeover of our courts for decades. In 2016, he outsourced to them the creation of a list for who he might nominate to our nation’s highest court. Trump entrusted them to provide him names of potential Supreme Court nominees who he would choose from to fill the vacancy created by the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, which was egregiously held open for more than a year by then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Nominees on this shortlist and others selected for district and circuit court seats across the country were, as Trump’s first White House Counsel Don McGahn bragged, “too hot for prime time . . . the kind of people that would make some people nervous.” Trump promised that his nominees would eviscerate Roe v. Wade, limit the way our federal government can implement and enforce civil and human rights laws and protections, strike down gun safety laws, and more.
During President Trump’s four years in office, he fulfilled that cruel promise. He appointed three U.S. Supreme Court justices, all plucked from the shortlist provided by the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society. He also selected district and circuit court judges with similarly sinister profiles, many of whom had connections to the extremist organizations that helped craft Project 2025. For example, jurists affiliated with ADF include Judges Allison Rushing (4th Cir.), Lawrence VanDyke (9th Cir.), Stuart Kyle Duncan (5th Cir.), and Lee Rudofsky (E.D. Ark.), as well as Justice Amy Coney Barrett (Supreme Court). Notorious Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk (N.D. Tex.) was a deputy general counsel at First Liberty. Indeed, the former president and his allies expressed confidence that the judges they chose would have the “courage” to achieve their long-term policy goals to reverse progress on civil and human rights. Unfortunately, they were right. For the first time in our nation’s history, jurists appointed by the former president revoked a fundamental right — the right to abortion. Trump-appointed judges also made it much more difficult for public servants to implement and enforce civil rights laws and protections, allowed for the criminalization of homelessness, gave presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution, and further frustrated enforcement of our voting rights laws.
Many of these individuals and organizations are inextricably and unacceptably escalating the ethics crisis at our highest court. Most recently, Ginni Thomas, wife of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, was revealed to have emailed First Liberty’s president and CEO with overflowing appreciation of their efforts to stop measures that might stem the ethics and misconduct violations at the Court. The leader of First Liberty touted receipt of this email in a call with donors shortly after President Biden announced support for a binding ethics code for the Court as well as 18-year active service term limits. First Liberty’s leader went so far as to accuse Associate Justice Elena Kagan of being “treasonous” after she suggested she supported an enforcement mechanism for the Court’s ethics code, a pronouncement he has tried to walk back. By helping to author Project 2025, training and advocating for judges with their agenda, and then advocating shielding our nation’s highest court from any level of accountability, these organizations will continue their efforts to transform our courts to work for the wealthy and powerful, not all of us.
The extremist majority on our Supreme Court laid the groundwork to quickly execute Project 2025.
The architects of Project 2025 focus on what the executive and legislative branches can do to accelerate the reversal of our civil rights laws and protections, and the plan lays out how they can quickly usher in these regressive policies and ideas by seizing upon the groundwork laid by extremist judges and justices. For example, Project 2025 calls for the concentration of power in the executive branch. This year, the Supreme Court’s extremist majority dealt a devastating blow to the concept of equal justice under law and to the very core of our democracy in the recent U.S. v. Trump decision. They provided the president with near absolute immunity, violating one of the fundamental principles that our country was founded on — that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Project 2025 outlines that the former president and his allies aim to further concentrate power in the executive branch. For example, their plan would classify more federal civil service workers as political appointees who would be employed to be loyal to the president, and it would remove critical checks and balances that are crucial to the basic functioning of our democracy.
As we have documented, Project 2025 plans to jeopardize our census and data equity, weaponize technology, stoke fear and reduce the effectiveness of public safety measures, dismantle diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility to further divide and erase our communities, harm the civil rights of children in schools, create communities where hate can thrive with little consequence, undermine fair housing and consumer protection, imperil health care access and exacerbate existing economic disparities, terrorize immigrant communities, devastate voting rights and democracy more broadly, and damage the rights of working people. These kinds of legislative and executive actions are frequently adjudicated in our courts, and the judges and justices who decide these cases are extremely important to determine whether our rights are protected or discarded. For decades, our coalition has worked together to promote and advocate for fair-minded, ethical judges from diverse demographic and professional backgrounds, and we’ve made significant progress in the past few years. Still, with some of the current justices and judges, as well as possible future judges in the same mold, Project 2025’s most harmful policies could go unchecked.
Already, the justices who were hand-selected to roll back our civil and human rights continue to follow through on that agenda. The extremist majority on our Supreme Court has taken away the fundamental right to abortion, curtailed voting rights, devastated affirmative action in higher education, destabilized our federal government, and continues to threaten our civil and human rights protections. All of these decisions, and other cases that are winding their way through our district and circuit courts, have ushered in an environment in which the extremist policies outlined in Project 2025 can be accelerated.
Project 2025 and the previous administration’s work demonstrates that they are well-practiced in rigging our government, including our judiciary, against all of us. And while not expressly written in this blueprint, the plans to install additional anti-civil and human rights judges and further embolden extremist judges who are unmoored from any responsibility to the people they are supposed to serve would accelerate if given the chance. For “equal justice for all” to be more than just the words inscribed atop our Supreme Court, we must work together to counter these forces in the courtroom, in the legislature, and in our executive offices. We must work toward a future where our courts will protect and advance the rights of all of us.
Read more: Damage to the Federal Judiciary During the Trump Administration and Project 2025: What’s At Stake for Our Courts, Our Rights, and Our Future
Lena Zwarensteyn is the senior director of the fair courts program and an advisor at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.