2025 Mandate for Leadership cover
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An organization of professional indexers I belong to is in the midst of a public service-- indexing a document of more than 900 pages, reminiscent of a similar gesture not long ago, an index created for Barbra Streisand's autobiography. Many will agree that, particularly in the case of nonfiction publications, indexes are very helpful. A broad dissemination of the index will encourage more readership and more analytical readership, I'm sure.
The document being indexed is the 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, aka Project 2025, recently published online by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
Enough has been published about the document, and many analyses in book form, that I need do no more than reiterate how scary it is for the future of our country and how destructive to the elements of democracy we enjoy, admittedly far from an ideal democracy, but hugely preferable to this proffered alternative. I'm all for the "lesser of two evils" this election cycle.
In this article I explore what I've so far culled on the subject of elections. In the section on the Federal Election Commission, which handles issues relevant to US government electoral campaign financing, pp. 861-66, endnotes on p. 867, I found what seems to my editorial eye to be an error. Six commissioners are named, with their year of tenure completion specified. The text reads: "In 2025, when a new President assumes office, the term of five of the current FEC commissioners will have either expired or be about to expire." Note that there is not an assumption here about who the president will be-- not here anyway.
But the six-year terms of four out of six commissioners have already expired: Mr. Cooksey's in 2021, Ms. Broussard's in 2023, Mr. Trainor's in 2023, and Ms. Weintraub's in 2007. That leaves two commissioners, Mr. Dickerson and Ms. Lindenbaum, holding unexpired tenures, 2025 and 2027, respectively. No reason is given why the four commissioners are serving beyond their tenure dates, but Wikipedia states that they will step aside once replaced, though they're free to resign at any time. Presumably the powers that be in the Senate cannot agree on new nominees [by the president].
Also, FEC is not a priority for recent presidents; only one of the commissioners, Dickerson, is a Trump appointee. Lindenbaum was appointed by President Biden. The history of the FEC is fractious and the three to three ratio of parties represented guarantees that few issues will be agreed upon unanimously and many will be gridlocked by a tie vote. This indeed is the case, though I don't have the relevant details for this article.
And this leads me to my last point: the authors of Project 2025 insist that the current partisan distribution, three to three, is essential, though the law that established the FEC in 1974 specifies only that a president can "scramble partisan orthodoxy and appoint independents or Libertarians to the commission--federal law only mandates that the commission feature no more than three members from any one political party." (Click Here)
Project 2025 doesn't consider any other possibility than the presence of the two dominant political parties. In detail, in defending the present balance [gridlock?], it states: "The President should vigorously oppose all efforts, as proposed, for example, in Section 6002 of the "For the People Act of 2021," to change the structure of the FEC to reduce the number of commissioners from six to five or another odd number. The current requirement of four votes to authorize an enforcement action, provide an advisory opinion, or issue regulations, ensures that there is bipartisan agreement before any action is taken and protects against the FEC being used as a political weapon. [italics mine]
"With only five commissioners, three members of the same political party could control the enforcement process of the agency, raising the potential of a powerful [?] federal agency enforcing the law on a partisan basis against the members of the opposition political party. [italics mine] Efforts to impose a "nonpartisan" or so-called "independent" chair are impractical; the chair will inevitably be aligned with his or her appointing party, at least as a matter of perception."
The logic of the above assertions certainly argues well for appointing an even number of Republicans and Democrats to other government entities, such as the Supreme Court--to avoid partisan bias. Is gridlock preferable to partisan control, especially in the negative direction that has most recently assailed the country? The decisive power might revert to decisions issued by lower courts before they were appealed to the "highest authorities."
As far as "enforcing the law on a partisan basis against the members of the opposition political party," what's going on in SCOTUS if not that?
