The right-wing Heritage Foundation is working on a plan that would impose "Biblically based" law on America through every layer of the executive branch under the next Republican president, wrote Steve Benen for MSNBC.
The plan comes from Project 2025, a right-wing vision Heritage has built for reshaping the federal government, and is laid out in a book entitled, "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise."
As Benen noted, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts states that the book aims to safeguard "our God-given individual rights to live freely against a 'woke' threat,'" and that, "Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent."
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Roger Severino, the group's VP of domestic policy, envisions Project 2025 splitting all laws into "religious" and "nonreligious" categories and applying them across many different departments that touch on cultural issues. For example, he wants the Department of Health and Human Services to “maintain a biblically based, social science reinforced definition of marriage and family” that rejects “nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act.”
The Respect for Marriage Act, passed last year, gives some protections to same-sex couples in case the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court overturns the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Most chiefly, the law requires the federal government and states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. It also protects interracial marriage.
The Heritage Foundation's blueprint has previously come under criticism for its proposal to undo most civil service protections and let the president control basically all enforcement of laws. Specifically, the plan would eliminate the independence of agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, bring back the long-banned practice of "impounding" congressional funding for programs the president opposes, and reclassify most lower-level civil service employees in a way that lets them be hired and fired at will based on loyalty to the president.
The group is even recruiting people for administrative positions in advance of the next Republican president taking office, putting out a call for recruits in what has been described as a "right-wing LinkedIn."
