The shocking Republican plan to dismantle the American government

[Stevicus]

MSN

www.msn.com

As we learned from last week’s Republican debates, the leading candidates for the GOP nomination all appear to agree on a broad plan to gut American government and replace it with a strongman president and corporate rule.

The modern administrative state, sometimes called the “welfare state” by Republicans, was largely created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Republican Great Depression of the early 1930s. And every day since FDR was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the GOP has worked feverishly to dismantle his legacy.

Outside of Russia, China, and Hungary, this isn’t true at all for the rest of the developed world.

Nations across the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia imitated FDR’s and LBJ’s America, most going beyond our simple development of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the legalization of unions to further expand opportunity and social mobility for their citizens.

Republicans and the billionaires who fund them reject all of that.

They want to abandon modern ideas like prohibitions on child labor and the age of consent; worker and workplace protections and unions; free, quality public schools and colleges; civil rights and the power of women to make their own healthcare decisions.

They’re dedicated to taking America back to the era before the New Deal and, as Steve Bannon said, “deconstructing the administrative state.”

Over the years, the GOP has used a series of plans to reach their goal of a billionaire- and-corporate-owned-and-run America with working people turned into serfs and children in factories instead of school.

In 1971, it was the Powell Memo, written by Virginia tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell and delivered to the US Chamber of Commerce. It called for a rightwing takeover of America’s schools and colleges; building out a corporate-friendly media infrastructure; packing the courts with pro-corporate, anti-labor conservatives; and the wholesale purchase of Republican politicians at both the state and federal level.

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and over the next quarter-century he used that position to put many of his own suggestions into law. In addition to decisions gutting the powers of unions and deregulating industry, Powell’s major achievement was authoring the 1978 Boston v Bellottidecision that struck down hundreds of state and federal anti-corruption laws, explicitly allowing corporations and their senior officers to bribe politicians for the first time in American history.

No other developed country in the world tolerates this; outside of the United States, you only find it in developing countries that have been taken over by corrupt autocrats.

Two years later, when Ronald Reagan cut a traitorous deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages in Iran long enough to destroy Jimmy Carter’s chances in the 1980 election, the Heritage Foundation stepped up with a plan to further gut the rights and powers of working-class people and elevate corporate and billionaire power.

They called it the Mandate for Leadership and, at the time, The Washington Post said it was “an action plan for turning the government toward the right as fast as possible.”

Reagan adopted over half of Heritage’s suggestions and in some cases went even farther, cutting enforcement of our anti-trust laws; ending the Fairness Doctrine; slashing the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent; declaring all-out war on unions; gutting the EPA, Education, and Labor Departments; and selling off federal lands for pennies on the dollar to mining and drilling operations.

Now the partly-billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation has laid out a second-stage plan for the next Republican administration, whether it’s Trump or somebody else, whether it’s next year or in future presidential election cycles.

They call it Project 2025. With it, they intend to finally and fully seize control of and transform America. With it, they will rule.

Project 2025.

As Scott Waldman wrote for Politico:

“Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.

“If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy, and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.”

After ensuring fossil fuel industry profits and the further wilding of our weather, Project 2025 would effectively dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, presumably on behalf of the petrochemical and other polluting industries that are also big GOP donors.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Project 2025 and other plans for future Republican presidencies is their consolidation of power in the hands of the president, reflecting the way government is run in Hungary, China, and Russia rather than the checks-and-balances envisioned by our nation’s Founders.

They would outright end the operational independence of the of the Department of Justice and the FBI, turning both into tools (or weapons) the president alone could wield.

The Federal Reserve, with its ability to turn on the monetary spigot to ensure “the good times roll” or turn off the spigot to induce a recession would also become the president’s political plaything.

Project 2025 and other efforts by the GOP to consolidate power in the Executive branch, as well as their recent successes at packing the courts and buying off Republican members of Congress, should be a clanging five-alarm fire bell for our republic.

This neofascist ideology of “rule by the rich” has been explicitly embraced by both Trump and DeSantis (who, this June, sent a senior advisor, David Dewhirst, to work on Project 2025), and the themes and contents of the plan are also regularly invoked on the campaign trail by Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley.

The merger of billionaire wealth with partisan Republican governance — and their combined efforts to reshape our government in their own corrupt image, the public be damned — threaten the integrity and future of the American experiment.

But it can only come about if we fail to awaken people, mobilize them, and vote.

Step one, then, is to wake people up to what the GOP and its billionaire patrons are planning. Pass it along.

This could have enormous ramifications if any of what they want comes to pass. If only we could have nipped this in the bud back in the 70s and 80s when we had a chance. We still have a chance now, but the left might have to come up with its own "Project 2025" to counter this. We need stronger anti-corruption policies that have teeth in them.

Project 2025 appears to target any agencies or departments which have a certain degree of independence, such as the Federal Reserve, which the article notes would become the President's "personal plaything" under the agenda of Project 2025. It appears that they'll continue to push for this, no matter if Trump is elected or another Republican candidate in the future.

 

[Estro Felino]

It was sufficient to listen to Nikki Haley for five minutes during the TV debate to understand the inevitable political drift....
it's incredibly saddening.

 

[Revoltingest]

Clickbait.

 

[Yazata]

It was sufficient to listen to Nikki Haley for five minutes during the TV debate to understand the inevitable political drift....
it's incredibly saddening.

Nikki Haley is kind of a residual Bush-style "neo-con". So is Pence and perhaps Chris Christie. All three of them seem to ignore the fact that most of the Republican voting electorate has moved well past that towards a more American nationalist position. As Donald Trump once put it, 'I was elected President of the United States, not President of the World'.

I wouldn't call their ideas "the inevitable political drift", among the Republicans at least. Together their share of the Primary polls is less than 10%. None of them is going to become the Republican Presidential candidate.

 

[Twilight Hue]

What a bunch of BS malarkey.

I'd say fix government from the Democrats plan to dismantle government.

Ergo defund the police, socialism wins etc....

 

[Yazata]

As far as dismantling the federal government goes, my own view as a Republican (the only one in this thread so far) is that the United States should finally remember that the US Constitution has a 10th Amendment:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

So how many federal government departments are really doing work assigned to the federal government by the Constitution? Some of them arguably are unconstitutional on their face.

Take the US department of education. Does the Constitution assign the federal government any jurisdiction over schools? Seemingly the US department of education only exists to collect huge sums of federal tax money, and then redistribute it with countless regulatory strings attached, giving them precisely the centralized top-down control of education that the Constitution denies them.

Obviously education is a vital function. But these are decisions that should be exercised by the various diverse states and by childrens' parents, not in highly politicized one-size-fits-all fashion by Washington DC. (That's why I support school vouchers.)

If all the extra-Constitutional federal functions are returned to the states, along with similar sized federal tax cuts so the states can raise state taxes to pay for them if they wish to, the states will probably become much more diverse than they are now. New York or Connecticut state law might end up looking very different than Idaho or Texas state law. Which is perfectly fine with me, it's how the Framers of the Constitution envisioned it. The United States is a huge country with a very diverse population spread across its many regions. Let the people decide closer to home what kind of government they prefer, as opposed to having it imposed on them. Let people vote with their feet if they don't like the direction their state is taking and if they don't feel that they can change that direction through the state ballot box. (Aren't we told over and over to "celebrate diversity"?)

That, BTW, is what I would recommend for the European Union as well. Instead of placing more and more regulatory power in the unelected hands of a European Commission, limit Brussels' power and return functions to the individual EU members, Give them the freedom to differ from one another in accordance with their respective histories, traditions and cultures.

 

[Orbit]

As far as dismantling the federal government goes, my own view as a Republican (the only one in this thread so far) is that the United States should finally remember that the US Constitution has a 10th Amendment:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

So how many federal government departments are really doing work assigned to the federal government by the Constitution? Some of them arguably are unconstitutional on their face.

Take the US department of education. Does the Constitution assign the federal government any jurisdiction over schools? Seemingly the US department of education only exists to collect huge sums of federal tax money, and then redistribute it with countless regulatory strings attached, giving them precisely the centralized top-down control of education that the Constitution denies them.

Obviously education is a vital function. But these are decisions that should be exercised by the various diverse states and by chldrens' parents, not in highly politicized one-size-fits-all fashion by Washington DC.

If all the extra-Constitutional federal functions are returned to the states, along with similar sized federal tax cuts so the states can raise state taxes to pay for them if they wish to, the states will probably become much more diverse than they are now. New York state law might end up looking much different than Wyoming state law. Which is perfectly fine with me, it's how the Framers of the Constitution envisioned it. The United States is a huge country with a very diverse population spread across its many regions. Let the people decide closer to home what kind of government they prefer, as opposed to having it imposed on them. Let people vote with their feet if they don't like the direction their state is taking and if they don't feel that they can change that direction through the state ballot box.

Control of education DOES rest with State Departments of Education! All the Federal Dept. of Education does is allocate funds and, at the college level, Financial Aid. There are strings to receiving Federal Financial Aid, but I wouldn't call them onerous: the institution has to be accredited, the funds have to be spent in ways that clearly contribute to the education of the pupil, and educational institutions can't discriminate. The only "string" that is problematic for me is when K-12 standardized test requirements are tied to that funding, because standardized test requirements prevent teachers from teaching in ways that students learn best because they are forced to "teach to the test".

The majority of public school funding in the US comes from local property taxes, and K-12 educational content is mostly determined at the state and local levels, with local school boards being particularly powerful. When there *are* Federal policies like "Common Core", the states get to determine how to implement them.

At the end of the day, we need a national workforce that is evenly prepared to succeed at jobs in the economy. Having some basic Federal standards for that isn't a bad idea to me; if I hire a worker from Mississippi, they should have the same basic education as a worker from Michigan. Having a hodgepodge of local standards isn't a move in a productive direction overall.

 

[Heyo]

"The Federal Reserve, with its ability to turn on the monetary spigot to ensure “the good times roll” or turn off the spigot to induce a recession would also become the president’s political plaything."

Won't happen. The banks are not giving up that control.

 

[Estro Felino]

"The Federal Reserve, with its ability to turn on the monetary spigot to ensure “the good times roll” or turn off the spigot to induce a recession would also become the president’s political plaything."

Won't happen. The banks are not giving up that control.

I guess he meant that the president will become the official servant of those dynasties. A sort of stooge.

 

[esmith]

I agree with the Rev, clickbait
All the OP is saying is that they do not agree with the policies and is harping about it.

 

[Audie]

I agree with the Rev, clickbait
All the OP is saying is that they do not agree with the policies and is harping about it.

It's the usual garbage both sides spew at eachother.

 

[PureX]

I think there are two groups of people with two different motives at work, here. One is a collection of politicians that seek only to gain and hold as much power as possible. And they are willing to destroy the current methods of governance to do it. The other group is a collection of citizens that have become so angry and frustrated by the indifference of government that they are willing to destroy the current methods of governance to either get their way, or to punish anyone that dares to deny them. And the common trait in both groups is their willingness to destroy the nation to get what they want, or, to punish it if they don't get what they want.

 

[Estro Felino]

I think there are two groups of people with two different motives at work, here. One is a collection of politicians that seek only to gain and hold as much power as possible. And they are willing to destroy the current methods of governance to do it. The other group is a collection of citizens that have become so angry and frustrated by the indifference of government that they are willing to destroy the current methods of governance to either get their way, or to punish anyone that dares to deny them. And the common trait in both groups is their willingness to destroy the nation to get what they want, or, to punish it if they don't get what they want.

And then there are a third group of people who want to preserve the administrative apparatus of government, and just want to fight against the international banking system, until they are chased away by any country of the West.