What was the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) Role in Trump’s Supreme Court Takeover, January 6, Project 2025 Infrastructure?

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Laurie Woodward Garcia

Jul 18, 2024

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Court Accountability Releases Statement on What was the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) Role in Trump’s Supreme Court Takeover, January 6, Project 2025 Infrastructure?

What Happened?

This morning, The New Yorker published an exposé of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which served as a hub for planning the January 6 insurrection and is now playing a central role in architecting Project 2025, a sweeping plan led by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 far-right groups to impose theocratic authoritarian rule over the United States should Donald Trump re-assume the presidency. The story places CPI and the Heritage Foundation in the innermost circle of Trump’s orbit, destroying any shred of credibility in Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the Project 2025 agenda.

Key Findings:

CPI, which was conceived as a staffing agency for the first Trump administration, is now positioning itself as a staffing agency for a second Trump administration, basing its recommendations on fealty to Trump’s authoritarian agenda.
- CPI’s leadership and staff, alongside other conservative activists—including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas—have spent years “assembling lists of ‘bad people’ in the government for Trump to fire or demote,” identifying individuals as “anti-Trump” based on “little more than an instance of someone obeying the law or observing ordinary bureaucratic procedure.” Such transgressions included “unwillingness to criminally investigate multiple women who had accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.”
- According to a source involved in Project 2025, Trump plans to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray upon taking office, in the hopes of “us[ing] the agency to target [Trump’s] political opponents.”
- If CPI’s Jeffrey Clark “gets a top job at the D.O.J., he is expected to use the position to try to remake the department as an instrument of the White House.”
CPI founder and former Heritage president Jim DeMint worked alongside the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to select Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. In 2016, when Trump privately suggested that he “put out a list publicly of people who could be the sort of people I would put on the Supreme Court,” “DeMint immediately volunteered Heritage for the job of drafting it.”
The effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including planning meetings that immediately preceded January 6th, was largely run out of CPI headquarters. CPI hosted several meetings between members of Congress and Trump lawyers between the 2020 election and January 6, 2021, with the aim of overturning the results of the election, and helped organize turnout for the January 6 protest.
- CPI and its in-house law firm, Compass Legal, were directly involved in organizing legal defense for supporters of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including at least one elected official.
CPI’s extraordinarily close relationships with Republican lawmakers calls its nonprofit tax status into question. According to today’s New Yorker report, “C.P.I.’s pitch to donors is also predicated on its close relationships with legislators in Washington,” some of whom have reportedly been “directly involved in C.P.I.’s fund-raising efforts.”

What’s the Big Picture?

Project 2025 represents a grave and credible threat to American democracy. Its architects have made clear their intentions to install 20,000 political operatives as federal employees to impose regressive, authoritarian rule in any new right-wing administration.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, threatened Americans with civil war last week, saying that “we are in the process of a second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The individuals and groups behind Project 2025 have also raised plans for taking military action in Mexico; imposing tariffs of up to ten percent on foreign goods, with disastrous results for the U.S. economy; attacking reproductive healthcare nationwide; and much more.

Project 2025’s architects, including CPI, are working hand-in-hand with right-wing lawmakers and judges. This story shows that Trump’s judges are not just Federalist Society judges, but Project 2025 judges, as well.

As such, we cannot expect the judiciary to act as a bulwark against Project 2025’s extreme, anti-democratic agenda. The Supreme Court has already shown itself ready and willing to use its raw power to advance the reactionary political aims of extremists who helped put them on the court. It’s up to the American people to fight Project 2025’s authoritarian power grab.

TAKE ACTION

Draw attention to Project 2025’s extremist agenda, including a plan to bar the mailing of abortion pills immediately following the oath of office, limiting access to contraceptives, and “returning the consequentiality to sex.”
Educate Americans on the economic threats Project 2025 poses. Economic concerns “consistently rank as top issues among likely voters,” and people need to understand the likely consequences and chaos for our economy and American families if Project 2025 affiliates are able to carry out their dangerous agenda.
Urge Congress to pass reforms clarifying the Insurrection Act, which Trump plans to invoke to deploy the military against the American people, on his first day in office.
Raise awareness of the seeds being planted by Trump and his allies to deny the results of the 2024 election if it doesn’t go their way. Trump has refused to commit to accepting legitimate election results if he does not win, and his allies are laying the groundwork for election denial through lawsuits and false claims about election fraud.
Share Stand Up America’s Supreme Court Voter website, which aims to educate and mobilize voters on the impact the next president will have on the future of the U.S. Supreme Court.