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Project 2025: Abortion policy

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Six lauded for running Capitol Hill offices that work even when Congress doesn’t

Six lauded for running Capitol Hill offices that work even when Congress doesn’t

Sen. Marco Rubio was honored for superior constituent service by the Congressional Management Foundation.

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Our Staff
By Our StaffMay 30, 2019
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
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Hoping to persuade the public that not all of Congress is broken all of the time, a nonprofit that works to make Capitol Hill run more smoothly recognized six lawmakers today for operating particularly noteworthy offices.

"Americans usually only hear about Congress when something goes wrong," Congressional Management Foundation President Bradford Fitch said in announcing the bipartisan roster of awardees, who were chosen by a panel of former members and staffers. "The Democracy Awards shines a light on Congress when it does something right."

For top-notch constituent service, the winners were GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California.

Awards for fostering a humane work-life balance and opportunities for professional development went to GOP Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho and Democratic Rep. Salud Carbajal of California.

And for official websites and other public communications distinguished by informational depth and clarity, rather than public relations puffery, the winners were Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana and Democratic Rep. Mark DeSaulnier of California.

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Project 2025: The Department of Labor

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of 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 The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.

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LaRue writes at Structure Matters. He is former deputy director of the Eisenhower Institute and of the American Society of International Law.

The following article was accepted for publication prior to the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump. Both the author and the editors determined no changes were necessary.

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Project 2025: A C-SPAN interview

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.”

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People protest outside the Supreme Court as the justices prepared to hear Grants Pass v. Johnson on April 22.

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High court upholds law criminalizing homelessness, making things worse

Herring is an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, co-author of an amicus brief in Johnson v. Grants Pass and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.

In late June, the Supreme Court decided in the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass that the government can criminalize homelessness. In the court’s 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the conservative justices ruled that bans on sleeping in public when there are no shelter beds available do not violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

This ruling will only make homelessness worse. It may also propel U.S. localities into a “race to the bottom” in passing increasingly punitive policies aimed at locking up or banishing the unhoused.

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Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

Republican House members hold a press event to highlight the introduction in 2023.

Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

Biffle is a podcast host and contributor at BillTrack50.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of 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.

Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, includes an outline for a Parents' Bill of Rights, cementing parental considerations as a “top tier” right.

The proposal calls for passing legislation to ensure families have a "fair hearing in court when the federal government enforces policies that undermine their rights to raise, educate, and care for their children." Further, “the law would require the government to satisfy ‘strict scrutiny’ — the highest standard of judicial review — when the government infringes parental rights.”

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