The Local Version of Project 2025 Is Already Causing Devastation
SlateProject 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s toxic playbook for a second Trump administration, has so inflamed Democrats that it was invoked every night of their convention in Chicago last week. And whereas Project 2025’s proposals would be advanced mainly by federal agencies and prosecutors, these state programs are enforced by everyone from sheriffs to school boards and ordinary citizens. Related From Slate The Courts Are Already Starting to Implement Project 2025, Without Trump States’ mini–Project 2025s are already dividing communities and unleashing terror in the jurisdictions where they’ve been adopted, triggering an exodus of marginalized families from red states to safer havens. For example, one of the most widely reported proposals in Project 2025 is its threatened “campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” of the Comstock Act “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.” That law, enacted in 1873 amid a sexual-purity crusade, purports to make it illegal to mail any “article or thing … intended for producing abortion.” For decades, federal agencies under both Republican and Democratic administrations interpreted the Comstock Act narrowly, to apply only when the person mailing an article or thing intended that it be used unlawfully. These measures will go a long way toward leveling the playing field between opponents of Project 2025’s agenda and red states that are implementing it.