One major part of Project 2025 is falling apart

[marmar]

One major part of Project 2025 is falling apart
The conservative legal community appears to be rejecting the Trump team's vision of "radical constitutionalism"

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published May 14, 2025 8:57AM (EDT)


(Salon) If it's not enough that Elon Musk's DOGE has been taking a chainsaw to the federal labor force, about three weeks ago, the Trump administration announced that it is going to begin implementing "Schedule F," the creepy huxleyan name for the Executive Order they produced at the end of the first term to make it easier to fire civil service employees deemed disloyal. President Biden threw it in the trash, but, as expected, it's back. After all, it's part of Project 2025 architect Russell Vought's tools of the trade, and now that he's back at the Office of Management and Budget he's been itching to use it.

It's estimated that 50,000 people will be subject to the law once they are re-classified from civil service protections to "at will" policy employees. It's pretty obvious that a witch hunt for personnel that any rando MAGA appointee suspects of being a turncoat (or just a Democrat) will soon be fired. The whole idea was to fill the jobs with the kind of people Russell Vought thinks have America's best interests at heart. That means white, Christian nationalists.

....(snip)....

Vought believes that we are in a "post-constitutional" time which explains a lot about how the administration is going about its work through the courts. In a piece he wrote back in 2023, Vought laid out his critique of what the MAGA types refer to as the "deep state" insisting that a federal government staffed with experts and bureaucrats had taken over the government and usurped the will of the people. It's a bit confusing since he seems to also think that "the Left" has been degrading the Constitution for over a hundred years and that the Congress needs to have more power — but maybe not so much. In any case he concludes with this rousing cri de guerre:

But the long, difficult road ahead of returning to our beloved Constitution starts with being honest with ourselves. It starts by recognizing that we are living in a post-Constitutional time. Our need is not just to win congressional majorities that blame the other side or fill seats on court benches to meddle at the margins. It is to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it. That and only that will be how American statesmanship can be defined in the years ahead.

....(snip)....

It doesn't seem to be taking, at least not in the way Vought hoped. Ian Millhiser of Vox attended a Federalist Society gathering and found the conservative legal community "far more ambivalent about their president’s second term than one might expect after such a fruitful partnership."

“They are going to have the same level of success they had in the last administration” with getting rid of long-standing rules and regulations, George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce told the conference, “which is virtually none.”

Implicit in this critique is a belief that the web of procedural barriers, bureaucratic trap doors, and paperwork burdens that prevent any presidential administration from changing too much, too fast will survive the second Trump administration more or less unscathed. Pierce predicted that many of Trump’s deregulatory efforts would simply be struck down in court.

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https://www.salon.com/2025/05/14/one-major-part-of-project-2025-is-falling-apart/