Project 2025 is everywhere. Don't believe the distancing or "winding down" claims.

Also: A new abortion question before SCOTUS. And: Law Dork in the news.

Donald Trump, his many former staff behind Project 2025, JD Vance, and others involved in the far-right project to bend government to a second Trump administration’s will are trying to tell us that Project 2025 has nothing to do with Trump and, in any event, that it’s “winding down,” as NBC News and others credulously reported.

Do not believe it.

Housed out of the Heritage Foundation, “Project 2025” is not some standalone entity that will disappear — regardless of what happens to its office space at Heritage or even its website (which now is in an amusingly defensive crouch).

The latest sign of how unpopular Project 2025 is came earlier this week, when Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage and one of the key figures behind Project 2025 announced in a ridiculous statement that he had “chosen to move [his] book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”

Vance wrote the foreword to the book. Now is the moment to publish! He’s got the GOP’s veep nominee in his book! But, no, here’s what Roberts told Real Clear Politics.

“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours – and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” Roberts wrote in a statement to RCP. “That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”

No. He might as well have just said, “People actually looked at what we want from a second Trump administration and they think it’s awful. We’re going to hide for now — until the election is over.”

That’s not even the point here, though.

The point is that Project 2025 was not a think tank. It was the combined effort of preexisting organizations with longstanding goals that remain hard at work today. That’s why the Politico piece about Project 2025 was so bad. It’s not that Ian Ward missed a floor at Heritage where there was a secret Project 2025 command center; it’s that Project 2025 is everywhere on the right.

It’s true that there are power struggles on the right, and it’s doubtless that a second Trump administration would continue down the path of some of the dysfunction that characterized Trump’s first term.

And yet, as the right tries to say there is no Project 2025 or that Project 2025 doesn’t represent Trump’s vision (even where it clearly does and even though some chapters are written by his people) and Trump and Vance try to distance themselves from it or whatever else they try next, there is one key thing to keep in mind.

Hundreds of people on the right across dozens of organizations and still hard at work in their offices, including many closely aligned with Trump, were the people actually behind the 922-page Mandate for Leadership book that lays out their vision.

Among the groups on the advisory board — in addition to Heritage — as the book was being put together were: Alliance Defending Freedom, American Center for Law and Justice, American Legislative Exchange Counsel, Center for Immigration Studies, Center for Renewing America, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Family Research Council, FreedomWorks, Hillsdale College, Independent Women’s Forum, Liberty University, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Texas Public Policy Foundation, and Young America’s Foundation.

Those 50+ groups doubled to 100+ groups in the time since. The names on the advisory board now also include: American Family Association, Center for Military Readiness, Eagle Forum, Gun Owners Foundation, Moms for Liberty, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Students for Life, and Turning Point USA.

In short, Project 2025 doesn’t need office space at the Heritage Foundation to continue its work.

It’s already doing it.

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A new abortion question at SCOTUS

Abortion has been a nearly constant focus in the courts and on the news in the two-plus years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. However, a lesser-noted dispute relevant to abortion information accessibility in the post-Roe landscape has been percolating in the courts — and the issue made it to the U.S. Supreme Court this week.

As states’ abortion bans went into effect after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was decided in June 2022, questions were quickly raised about whether and how they would conflict with the Department of Health and Human Services’s rule setting forth requirements for recipients of Title X family-planning funding grants.

The question of post-Roe Title X grants has reached the Supreme Court shadow docket on a decision terminating Oklahoma’s grant.

Judge Robert Bacharach, an Obama appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, explained how those laws and rules are coming into conflict in the post-Roe landscape in his July opinion for a 2-1 panel rejecting Oklahoma’s challenge to the grant termination:

Congress instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to establish eligibility requirements. HHS complied, and its requirements included nondirective counseling and referrals for all family-planning options, including abortion.

Oklahoma expressed concern to HHS about the eligibility requirements, insisting that new state laws prohibited counseling and referrals for abortions. HHS responded by proposing that Oklahoma supply individuals with neutral information about family-planning options (including abortion) through a national call-in number. Oklahoma rejected this proposal, so HHS terminated the grant.

Oklahoma sued, arguing that the rule violates the Spending Clause and a provision referred to as the Weldon amendment and that the rule is arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

The state lost at the district court, as well as at the Tenth Circuit — although the 2-1 vote included Judge David Ebel, a Reagan appointee, joining Bacharach’s decision, and Judge Richard Federico, a Biden appointee, dissenting.

Under the Weldon amendment, funds cannot be made available to a federal agency that “subjects any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination on the basis that the health care entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.”

The question comes down to whether that happened here. Bacharach wrote that the district court concluded that “Oklahoma likely couldn’t show discrimination for refusing to refer women for abortions.” In agreeing, he wrote that the court concluded:

In dissenting, Federico wrote:

On August 5, Oklahoma went to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to issue an injunction prohibiting the denial of the state’s Title X grant during litigation or, alternatively, to issue a stay of HHS’s decision to terminate Oklahoma’s grant award while the Supreme Court decides whether to hear Oklahoma’s appeal. Notably, Oklahoma also suggests the court could grant a stay and remand the case to be reconsidered in light of the Supreme Court’s June decision ending Chevron agency deference.

A response was requested, due from the Justice Department by 4 p.m. August 15.

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Law Dork in the media

I was so glad to join Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo on Rewire News’s Boom! Lawyered podcast to talk about the Biden administration’s Title IX rule, how we got there, and the challenges that followed.

Check it out!