Originally by Mary Sanchez at www.dailyfreeman.com
This is how bad ideas, fueled by politicians desperate to curry favor with Donald Trump, can turn draconian.
Behold “Project 2025.”
Immigration attorneys have long been sounding the alarm about a 900-page policy draft written by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Our nation’s system of laws and policies governing immigration isn’t the only topic addressed, but it is one where it’s easiest to see how misinformation, nativist attitudes and frankly, racism, are baked into the document.
Consider this fact alone: If enacted, legal immigration, the kind most people claim to have no issue with, would be severely cut back.
Project 2025 is a transition plan, a blueprint for Trump if he wins the presidential race. It was written with the input of many, most of whom see opportunity and who play to Trump’s ego and ineptitude.
The plan is a conservative effort to sideline the likelihood of another circus-like Trump administration, and get to the business of substantially upending the federal government.
Democrats also tee-up such administration wish lists. But they don’t tend to include giving more powers to the president, gutting federal agencies, or neutering investigative arms like the FBI. Project 2025 hopes to do this, and more.
Contemplate just about every backward idea, especially those that would distract the nation from managing real-world problems, and you get the general drift of the document.
Here’s a few of its points that have been dissected and criticized:
It calls for lifetime caps on Medicaid, a change that would shove an estimated 18.5 million people out of coverage, mostly low-income, like the blind or otherwise disabled. This one spins from the conservative, but hardly Christian idea, that some people are takers and others are providers. And the takers are ne’er-do-wells, “losers” in Trumpian verbiage.
Renewable energy is treated as hogwash by Project 2025. Rather, the plan supports leaning further into fossil fuels.
The plan calls to eliminate the Department of Education, pushing instead towards vouchers and charter schools, which under some outlines, can take public taxpayer dollars and send them to religious-based schools.
Never mind that this would also dismantle the constitutional mandate that every child deserves a quality public education, not only those whose parents can get them into a charter school.
Said more bluntly: A lot of Latino and African American children would be left in low-quality schools under this plan.
A huge warning needs to be made about the plan’s ideas for federal career civil servants. These are the legions of nonpartisan workers. They work through differing administrations, not loyal to either party, but rather to the work of running the nation.
The plan calls for those people to be more readily replaced by political appointees, people who would be beholden to Trump or his spineless political allies.
Yes, Project 2025 takes “make America great again” and showcases how much of that belief is fueled by a message that depicts America as less multicultural and more aligned with the vision of a 1950s mostly white middle class.
Immigration, a constant talking point for Trump, fits into that MAGA mantra.
Compliance will be gained, not by just trying to make life unbearable for immigrants, but for anyone who seeks to aid them.
For example, under the plan, states that offer in-state tuition to undocumented children would risk losing federal financial aid. This alone could strip federal aid from two-thirds of America’s students.
Building the wall at the southern border is in Project 2025.
It’s been reiterated a bazillion times, but a nearly 2,000-mile long wall is nonsensical and completely ignores how technology and simply having a working immigration system could accomplish so much more in terms of national security.
Work visas, now crucial to agriculture, the construction industry, restaurants and so many other industries would be undercut.
It’s simply demographics. The nation needs more workers, at all levels, in skilled trades, manual labor and yes, for jobs requiring college and post-college degrees.
But anger and misinformation about immigrants and what they offer the country is an old trope, easy to dust off during each election cycle.
Project 2025 spins from this fact: Trump is a vindictive man who holds grudges.
Each instance where he felt someone did him wrong — his former attorney generals, his staff’s inner circles, the federal agencies that had a role in investigating him — all of them are ripe for elimination or neutering within the goals of Project 2025.
That’s a whole lot of payback that could come.
But to codify one man’s vices into policy, to change laws and completely reorder the federal system of government to fit Trump’s worst traits is ludicrous.
Thankfully, there’s still time to stop it.
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