Rights? Whose Rights?
It seems heartless to begin with an aphorism from American humorist Mark Twain, but this one best describes the stakes of an announced plan to reinvent American government.
“There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule.”
The quote highlights Twain’s belief in personal agency and responsibility, encouraging individuals to make courageous decisions and create their own destinies. That will not be possible on many counts if Project 2025 has its way.
Project 2025 is a massive blueprint for a completely reshaped and unrecognizable American government. It is not about a particular candidate. It is an ultra-right-wing movement bent on taking control of government bureaucracy. It plans to impose its conservative standards, morals, and values on all American citizens. “Impose” is not too strong a word. Never mind democratic norms. Much of the agenda runs counter to stated League of Women Voters legislative priorities.
All that Project 2025 requires to deploy is a sympathetic administration…whether in 2025 or four years later or four years after that. We met Project Director, Paul Dans in the last issue of Sentinel. His own words best characterize Project 2025’s nearly 1,000 pages of blueprint specifications for a new government of regulation, regimentation, and totalitarian control by like-minded individuals from over 90 conservative think tanks across the country.
“The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and
liberty under siege as never before…With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have … one chance to get it right.”—Paul Dans, Project 2025 Director
Just whose freedoms and liberties are under siege?
Project 2025 is many things, but one thing is for sure. It is an overt attempt to impose its conservative doctrine on every American. The social safety nets of the New Deal are in its sights. Hard-fought civil and voting rights legislation of the Great Society are at risk of being reversed. New Deal and Great Society accomplishments are mere obstacles to the future Project 2025 wants to impose.
The website headlines are revealing. Project 2025 is built on four pillars to achieve its ends.
1.] Pillar I—Policy. “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
2.] Pillar II—Personnel. “Want to be considered for positions in a presidential Administration? Submit your resume today to be included in the personnel database.”
3.] Pillar III—Training. “Presidential Administration Academy. Preparing Political Appointees to be Ready on Day One”
4.] Pillar IV—Playbook. “The time is short, and conservatives need a plan. The project will create a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies…designed to deploy teams and plans to move out upon the President's utterance of ‘so help me God’.”
More on these pillars in the coming months. Today, we narrow our focus on Project 2025’s designs to restructure the Department of Health and Human Services and the consequent impacts on women’s rights and the rights of vulnerable communities. You know. Freedoms and liberties.
Back to Twain
The first stiff kick of a mule landed with a mighty blow on June 24, 2022. That was when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health overruling both Roe v. Wade [1973] and Planned Parenthood v. Casey [1992].
Just like that.
The Court held that the Constitution of the United States does not confer a right to abortion thereby returning to individual states the power to regulate any aspect of abortion not protected by federal law.
You may recall that during a rather rowdy Senate confirmation process in 2018, Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh emphasized that Roe v. Wade was “settled precedent.” Four years later, you could almost hear the hand washing when he famously said: "The Constitution neither outlaws abortion nor legalizes abortion." In his concurrence to Dobbs, Kavanaugh attempted to reassure that the ruling did not let states bar residents from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion, or retroactively punish people for prior abortions.
Hold That Thought
Despite Justice Kavanaugh’s reassuring words about legal restraint in this matter, Project 2025 has no intention of being restrained by them. In its published plan to reshape the Department of Health and Human Services under a newly minted and agreeably conservative Secretary, Project 2025 will make sure that abortion and all its component parts—women’s health, women’s choice, life and death health decisions, emergency treatments for ectopic pregnancies, post-miscarriage care, use of mifepristone or any abortifacient (abortion drug), humane interpretations of EMTALA (Emergency Medical and Active Labor Act), current HIPPA protections, and more—will all be outlawed nationwide.
This dystopian scenario unfolds in the Project 2025 blueprint, Chapter 3 “The General Welfare,” Section 14 “The Department of Health and Human Services,” authored by Roger Severino. Here are the salient components.
It Begins with Conception
The basis of Severino’s string of HHS policies leads to the complete elimination of reproductive choice. That is because Severino believes that conception is day one of human life. [Ed. note: and so, should you.] This is the most extreme version of all “fetal personhood” theories. He considers his beliefs to be “biological reality.” [Ed. note: though not specifically “scientific reality.”] The policies that flow from his belief require that we accept his thinking. Imagine that. Religious doctrine wrapped in a shroud of debate that has raged for centuries. End of debate. Imagine that!
Here is the foundational goal for a fully re-formed and recreated Department of Health and Human Services. All citations are from “Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.”
“Goal #1: Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity. The Secretary [of Health and Human Services] should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.”
“From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth.…The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion…is not health care.” [p. 450]
From this first goal, authoritarian control of women’s lives unfolds. Once this bridge is crossed, there is no turning back. Choice is gone. Decisions about reproductive health belong to the state. Abortion for any reason—health, rape, domestic abuse, family planning or otherwise—are now illegal.
Nationwide
States may not interfere or differ under the new HHS regime. Here are some of the elements of the plan to take control of women’s lives.
“Reverse the F.D.A.’s approval of chemical abortion drugs [mifepristone] because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.” [p. 458] [Ed. note: Even if the scientists at the FDA are not on board with this plan, the Secretary, a presidential appointee, can override the FDA. This all may be mute depending on how the Supreme Court weighs in on a case expected to be heard this term. You may recall that avowed anti-abortion Federal Judge Matthew J. Kaczmarek from Amarillo Texas attempted to suspend FDA approval of mifepristone. The Court’s ruling on the continued use of mifepristone is due later this year. For now, the drug remains widely available]
“Eliminate dangerous abortion-by-mail distribution. Allowing mail-order abortions is a gift to the abortion industry that allows it to expand far beyond brick-and-mortar clinics and into pro-life states that are trying to protect women, girls, and unborn children from abortion.” [p. 458]
“Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws.” [Ed. note: This is a reference to the rarely invoked 1873 Comstock Act 18 U.S. Code § 1461, aka Anthony Comstock’s Chastity Laws, forbidding the mailing or interstate carriage of obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance using the U.S. Postal Service. In a repurposed understanding of Comstock, any woman who sends, receives, or uses abortion-related items would be punished.] [p. 459]
“Eliminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate as a potential abortifacient.” [p. 485]
“Withdraw Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidance on abortion.” [Ed. note: privacy is not protected]. [p. 497]
Severino’s edicts don’t stop at women. In a new Health and Human Services Department, Project 2025 also plans to terminate most stem cell research and ignore hard fought rights in vulnerable communities including non-heteronormative families and LGBTQ+ communities.
Take a Look
Ultimately, [the Department will] maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. [Ed. note: biblically based?] [p. 481]
The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism. [p. 284]
Reverse the focus on “‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,” replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families. [p. 284]
HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life [p. 489]
These are not fever dreams. No daffy cult rants. No ruminations of a misguided youth in his parents’ basement. This is a clear-eyed public blueprint available for all to see, albeit backdoor measures to be sure.
They circumvent Congress. Why bother with the grinding wheels of Congress when you can just wave the scepter and mandate by executive decree? By fiat.
If that happens, the lives of every woman in the United States will be affected. There will be no distinction between red states and blue states prerogatives. The Supreme Court abandoned women with the reversal of Roe v. Wade after fifty years of settled law. The Court’s cynical reassurance that women’s choice was to be returned to the states paved the way for chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Now women face life and death health decisions with fear of punishment and reprisal. Even violence. And worse.
This coming election is the most consequential ever. Democracy is on the ropes. We are threatened with authoritarian tactics. Women are threatened with subservience and second-class citizenship. Vulnerable minority communities are threatened with unequal rights. A cadre of extremist conservatives proposes to impose its will, their morals, their doctrinaire prescriptions on what it means to be an American.
In an earlier article, we learned from Ian Bassin’s group, Protect Democracy, that authoritarian tactics are not the swift slash of the sword, but rather the “salami tactics slicing away at democracy one sliver at a time.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism and the Holocaust expands on that theme in her recent Substack Lucid:
Tyranny “advances with the pace of a tightening screw rather than with the dash of the executioner’s blade,” wrote the Italian anti-fascist exile G.A. Borgese in 1937. As stressful as it is to monitor the daily threats to our freedoms, the alternative of being taken by surprise when authoritarian actions happen is far worse. That's why we can help by educating others, by mobilizing at the local, state, and national level against attacks on our rights, and by canvassing and registering others to vote. Every contact gets the word out.
In so many words, Ben-Ghiat is warning us against complacency, denial and desire for normalcy. To support her thinking she provides an extended quote from Robert Kagan, a neoconservative, whose recent piece in the Washington Post went viral.
“We hear a lot nowadays about how Americans are ‘sleepwalking’ into authoritarianism. That term might be applied to millions who don't vote regularly (or ever) and even now avoid political news. But millions of other Americans tune out because they understand the stakes of the current assault on our democracy and it's too much to bear. Dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
The coming election is a referendum on whether voters continue to be the ones to decide issues affecting their daily lives, or whether an activist executive branch will decide for us.
The battle against authoritarianism. The battle for women, for women’s rights, for bodily autonomy, for human rights will be fought at the ballot box in November. There is so much to be gained. There is so much more to be lost if that battle is not won.
Calling all League members, whose mission is to empower voters and defend democracy. Have we done enough? Have we convinced the voters that it takes hard work to defend democracy? That there is no rest from the battle?
Mark Twain Gets the Last Word
Here we are. Standing squarely behind the mule. We can get out in front of the mule, bridle him, and lead him to pasture. Or we can stand there. Hope for the best. And learn nothing from the second, inevitable kick. Can’t say Twain didn’t warn us. |