ABOVE PHOTO: Spencer Chretien, left, and Kristen Eichamer in the Project 2025 tent during the performance of the national anthem at the Iowa State Fair, on Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. More than a year away from the 2024 elections, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second term for Donald Trump in the White House. The Project 2025 effort is led by the Heritage Foundation think tank. (KeynoteUSA Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
By Lisa Mascaró
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Washington – Warning about the far-right agenda of Donald Trump’s Blueprint 2025 White House, a group of House Democrats has launched a task force to begin fighting the proposal and prevent it from taking hold if the former president Republican returns to power.
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California will unveil the Stop Project 2025 Task Force on Tuesday, the latest sign that congressional Democrats and outside groups are taking Trump’s campaign seriously in his expected rematch against Democratic President Joe Biden this fall. .
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Huffman told The KeynoteUSA.
Huffman said the Project 2025 agenda will have an impact “like a blitzkrieg” and that lawmakers must be prepared.
“If we try to react and understand it in real time, it’s already too late,” he said. “We need to see it coming well in advance and prepare accordingly.”
The Democratic-led task force comes at a time when groups inside and outside the Capitol are increasingly alarmed by Project 2025, a sweeping plan from the conservative Heritage Foundation that is preparing to quickly help staff a new Republican administration with plans to dismantle aspects of the federal government and install Trump loyalists for a second term.
While the Trump campaign has repeatedly said that outside groups do not speak for the former president, the 1,000-page Project 2025 proposal was drafted with input from a long list of former Trump administration officials who are poised to fill the positions. highest of a possible new administration. .
The core of the Project 2025 plan is to fire thousands of public officials and replace them with staff from a database of applicants, an effort to reverse the setbacks of Trump’s first term, when many of his most extreme ideas were thwarted and blocked by those who They refused to break up. rules, violate laws or excessively extend presidential powers.
Huffman’s group is the latest to take on the Project 2025 proposal and plans for a Trump White House.
Last week, one of the country’s leading civil rights organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, announced that it was preparing possible legal action to stop Trump’s campaign promise to launch mass deportations of immigrants on the first day of his presidency if is chosen. It is the first of several memos the ACLU is releasing that offer a blueprint for how it plans to respond to a second Trump or Biden term.
And others detail the threats to democracy if Trump’s attacks on the justice system, plans to pardon those convicted in the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, and threats of revenge against political enemies take hold. .
Huffman’s group is made up of about a half-dozen House Democratic lawmakers in a loose coalition separate from party leadership. He plans to begin briefing fellow lawmakers about Project 2025, holding a forum at the Capitol and informing voters about the ideas.
The idea is for the group to provide a central hub of information for lawmakers, voters and organizations on various policy proposals, including immigration, reproductive rights and others.
As founder of the Freethinking Caucus on Capitol Hill, Huffman said he was particularly alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism within the ranks of the Republican Party and efforts to push for more conservative theology in government.
“We were able to push back some of the worst of this Christian nationalist agenda, this authoritarian agenda, in the first Trump presidency, because they didn’t really know what they were doing,” Huffman said. “The fact that they’ve been putting all this forethought, research and planning into a second Trump presidency means that we will face a much more formidable foe this time around, if the time comes.”
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