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Project 2025: A C-SPAN interview

Beau Breslin on C-SPAN
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The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumJul 24, 2024
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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Beau Breslin, a regular contributor to The Fulcrum, was recently interviewed on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” about Project 2025.

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “ A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.” He writes “ A Republic, if we can keep it,” a Fulcrum series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

Most recently Breslin has also contributed to The Fulcrum’s 30-part series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross-partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

While an in-depth analysis of what works and doesn't work in our democracy is a laudable and much-needed task, unfortunately Project 2025 is a biased political report designed to build a case for conservative solutions. The Fulcrum believes that a version of Project 2025 approached from a cross-partisan perspective, void of pre-determined left or right solutions, would serve as a guide for citizens and our elected representatives to ensure the healthy democratic republic we all desire.

Breslin’s interview on C SPAN offered an in-depth overview of the 990-page Project 2025 report and is a much-needed scholarly analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s comprehensive, far-reaching proposal.

In the interview, Breslin discusses the many controversial components of Project 2025, including its neo-isolationist and Christian nationalist temperament. He also discusses what Project 2025 would mean for America and how it promotes a degree of social, racial and religious intolerance. Callers to the show examined topics ranging from foreign aid to DEI policies, the proposed closing of the Department of Education and the reasons former President Donald rump might want to distance himself from the project. Consistent with the mission of The Fulcrum, Breslin tries to find common ground in a polarized and difficult political environment.


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In April 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting killed twenty children, the US Senate voted on the Manchin-Toomey Act to expand background checks and to include gun-show and internet sales of firearms. Roughly nine in ten Americans, including a majority of gun owners, supported the bill—a figure that has held steady across more than a decade of polling. It fell short of the 60-vote threshold by six votes. This was not an outlier. On complex issues, representatives often fail to translate public consensus into reality. Research shows that legislators consistently vote in line with donor and interest group preferences over constituent opinion. Before the vote, the National Rifle Association (NRA) warned every senator it would “rate” their vote on its annual rating system, and a low NRA rating could cost senators their next primary. Consequently, the bill died 54-46, and the majority of Americans watched, powerless, as their consensus was overridden by self-interested representatives.

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