Project 2025, Trump’s blueprint to mandate Christianity, is finally hitting the news.
Project 2025 would degrade civil rights nationwide by outlawing abortion, imposing Christianity and relegating LGBT citizens to second class status. But these culture wars are merely a ruse, a sexy distraction for the media to disguise the real objective: Project 2025 is financed by private fossil fuel wealth to block progress on climate change.
And while the media debates Trump’s disingenuous disavowals of Project 2025, the real story is the extent to which the Supreme Court has already begun implementing it.
A compromised Supreme Court advances Project 2025’s agenda
While many pundits have acknowledged the implausibility of Trump’s “lack of knowledge” about Project 2025, few have noted that the Supreme Court has already begun to implement its key objectives:
Abortion - The High Court implemented Project 2025’s abortion ban with the Dobbs decision. In overturning Roe v. Wade after 50 years of protected abortion access, Justice Alito summarily declared that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause could no longer protect women’s medical privacy, because the Court previously determined “that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification.”
Bribery - SCOTUS implemented Project 2025’s deference to a strong (and crooked) executive in Snyder v. the United States. Republicans on the Supreme Court declared in Snyder that bribing an elected official isn’t bribery if it’s paid to the official after the fact, because then it’s really just a “gratuity.”
Weakening federal regulations - The Court implemented Project 2025’s goal of killing the administrative state and stopping “the war on oil and gas” in Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo. Republicans on the Court ruled outrageously that judges should not rely on federal experts’ scientific or medical expertise, but should rely instead on their own personal opinion, bias and scientific ignorance in interpreting statutory ambiguities. This ruling, along with other recent cases eviscerating the power of the EPA, will cripple climate initiatives in service to Project 2025.
Imposing Christianity on the nation - The Court implemented Project 2025’s goal of Christian Nationalism in 303 Creative LLC and in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. In 303 Creative, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority designated the right to refuse to do business with gay people as “free speech.” In Kennedy, they ruled that a football coach could lead his team in prayer on a public school football field despite Establishment Clause precedent dating back to the 1940s that barred school officials from leading school prayer due to the coercive pressure it put on atheist, Jewish, Muslim and other non-Christian students to either pray along or be ostracized.
Each of these decisions, punctuated with the shocking presidential immunity ruling that presidents can break criminal laws with impunity, is in lockstep with the authoritarian blueprint of Project 2025. This Court is so extreme, its roughshod violation of legal precedent so dangerous, that even President Biden, an institutionalist who has long resisted Court reform, now urges it.
Biden, like many Americans, was aghast after the Supreme Court’s Republican bloc granted Trump broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. As Biden put it, “If a future president incites a violent mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power — like we saw on Jan. 6, 2021 — there may be no legal consequences.”
Perhaps, for Christian Nationalists on the Court, that is exactly the point.
Without recusal, conflicted justices will stop climate action
Biden’s proposed term limits should be accompanied by the Code of Ethics, requiring justices to recuse from cases in which they are compromised. This last point will stick, because each of the six conservative justices is in bed with fossil fuels: Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a “highly active and respected member of the American Petroleum Institute for more than two decades.” Justice Samuel Alito’s family leases over 100 acres of land for oil and gas private development. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has accepted over $4 million in “gifts” from conservative donors, has been in fossil fuel investor Harlan Crow’s pocket for years.
Not only do Coney Barrett, Alito and Thomas have direct ties to fossil fuel wealth, all six conservative justices belong to the Federalist Society, and are backed by the Heritage Foundation. Both organizations are driven and supported by Koch and fossil fuel dark money. Although they distract public attention with shiny culture wars in Project 2025, they exist largely to promote climate change denial to protect their own formidable wealth.
Project 2025 and the extreme private wealth promoting it isn’t going away, regardless of what happens in November. The media needs to expose the hidden ties between Project 2025, Trump and justices protecting fossil fuels, and anyone concerned about rising temperatures and disappearing water sources needs to vote as a matter of life and death.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
