'Major prongs of Project 2025 have already been enacted': legal expert

25 July 2024

Although Joe Biden on Sunday, July 21 dropped his bid for reelection, the president has promised to implement US Supreme Court reform during his final six months in office.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that Biden urged the Congressional Progressive Caucus on a phone call to "back his Court reform plan, which he hinted would soon be made public."

The president said, "I’m going to need your help on the Supreme Court, because I’m about to come out — I don’t want to prematurely announce it — but I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court … I’ve been working with constitutional scholars for the last three months, and I need some help."

During Thursday's episode of MSNBC's Deadline: White House, host Nicolle Wallace spoke with Slate senior editor and lawyer Dahlia Lithwick about just how "serious" Biden is about making these changes to the conservative majority high court.

"We knew despair and hopelessness was a tool for the autocrat — a tool for anti-democratic forces," Wallace said. "And yet it felt inescapable under the Trump presidency and the years Trumpism refused to go away. And we still have him. He's still around — just had his [Republican National] convention. He's pretty close in the polls to Vice President Harris. But there is some renewed hope, both in her candidacy, and President Biden's unrelenting focus now on something he spent a lifetime in public service thinking wasn't necessary, and that's court reform. I wonder if the folks on the other side of that debate understand how serious this president is about it."

Lithwick replied, "The one thing i would say is, I keep looking at Project 2025 as a marker of how seriously they're taking this because — think this is really important and we talked about it at the end of the term — but in many ways a lot of the prongs, the essential prongs of Project 2025 that we're saying, 'Oh, we don't want that to come into effect, and if Donald Trump wins the White House, we don't want to see all these things happen — It's worth saying out loud and unequivocally that every one the major prongs of Project 2025 have been enacted in one way or another, this last term at the court."

The Amicus podcast host continued, "Whether it's massive executive power — we saw that in the immunity decision, whether it's the end of the regulatory state — we saw that in the chevron overturn, or whether it's the rise of this very archaic Christian right notion of family and purity and who gets to get married and who gets to have kids. That, too, is everywhere at the Supreme Court.

Lithwick then emphasized, "I think it's really useful to connect Project 2025 to what's already happened at the Supreme Court, whether or not Kamala Harris wins. And I think it's really worth saying, if in fact that is the juggernaut, and it's coming from the court, what are we going to do about it? The fact that Donald Trump and JD Vance are running away from Project 2025 tells you how much it really doesn't poll well, and it tells you how much this is an opportunity to use it to say, this is already coming, it's already happened, and it's happening at the Court."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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