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Forbes
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Forbes
Project 2025 At Supreme Court: How Groups Influenced Court This Term
Groups involved with controversial right-wing agenda Project 2025 were broadly successful at the Supreme Court this term, a Forbes analysis shows, as justices sided with arguments pushed by organizations linked to the agenda in a majority of major cases but ruled against three groups who were directly representing parties at the court. People gather to protest Project 2025 in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on March ... More 16. AFP via Getty Images While spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, more than 100 conservative organizations were listed as being on the 'advisory board' for Project 2025, a multi-pronged agenda drafted before the 2024 election that proposed a broad overhaul of the executive branch by the next conservative president. Approximately 30 of those organizations filed briefs with the Supreme Court in major cases this term, according to an analysis of 12 significant cases the court decided between October 2024 and June. There were four major cases in which parties were directly represented by groups linked to Project 2025: Alliance Defending Freedom represented challengers in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic—concerning religious charter schools and Planned Parenthood funding, respectively—while America First Legal represented parties in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, on the Affordable Care Act, and Texas Public Policy Foundation represented challengers to the Federal Communications Commission's universal-service obligation in FCC v. Consumers Research. Those organizations and dozens of others also signed on to amicus briefs—filings by outside parties that urge the court to rule a particular way—nearly 60 times in major Supreme Court cases this term. Justices rejected the cases Project 2025-linked groups brought over religious charter schools, the Affordable Care Act and the FCC, as well as a case challenging federal rules regarding ghost guns. The organizations that have both been listed as members of Project 2025's 'advisory board' and filed briefs with the Supreme Court last term are the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs, Alliance Defending Freedom, America First Legal, American Principles Project, Americans United for Life, the Association of Mature American Citizens, The Claremont Institute, Concerned Women for America, Defense of Freedom Institute, Eagle Forum, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Family Policy Alliance, Family Research Council, Foundation for Government Accountability, Gun Owners Foundation, Institute for the American Worker, Leadership Institute, Makinac Center for Public Policy, Moms for Liberty, Mountain States Policy Center, National Center for Public Policy Research, National Religious Broadcasters, National Rifle Association, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Project 21, Protect Our Kids, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (through its research arm, the Charlotte Lozier Institute), Texas Public Policy Foundation and Young America's Foundation. That list is based on an archived version of Project 2025's website from July 2024, before some organizations removed themselves from the Project 2025 website as the policy agenda gained controversy. Which Project 2025-Linked Group Had The Biggest Supreme Court Presence? The group with the biggest presence at the Supreme Court was right-wing legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. In addition to the two cases in which it was a party, ADF also filed three amicus briefs in its own name in various cases, and its lawyers drafted multiple briefs on behalf of other organizations that hold similar views. The Heritage Foundation was the main organization behind Project 2025. It did not have any involvement in major Supreme Court cases this term, and noted to Forbes that Project 2025 has no connection to anything involving the judiciary branch. The organization directed Forbes to a number of statements the organization put out praising many of the court's rulings this term, however, including on transgender healthcare, Trump's birthright citizenship case, Texas' age verification law, LGBTQ books in schools and Planned Parenthood funding. Contra Project 2025 noted on its website that its opinions 'do not necessarily represent the opinions of every one of its advisory board partners,' and multiple organizations listed as members of the group's advisory board told Forbes they do not consider themselves to be affiliated with Project 2025. Americans United for Life removed its name from Project 2025's website in summer 2024, telling Forbes it is a nonpartisan organization that no longer wished to be affiliated with Project 2025's right-wing aims, and the National Center for Public Policy Research told Forbes it was unexpectedly listed as a member of the advisory board after a staff member attended one meeting in 2023. Mike Farris, general counsel at National Religious Broadcasters, told Forbes he has not read Project 2025 and any affiliation between the group and Project 2025 'came from the action of prior staff members on the legislative team—none of whom are still at NRB.' 'I can say with complete confidence that our amicus briefs had absolutely nothing to do with Project 2025 and any parallel is because members of the conservative movement often have similar views,' Farris told Forbes in an email. Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller, who founded America First Legal, also told ABC News last year he had 'zero involvement with Project 2025,' after America First Legal removed its name from Project 2025's website. Groups who did acknowledge an affiliation with Project 2025 also distanced the project from the Supreme Court's rulings, with Family Policy Alliance CEO Craig DeRoche telling Forbes the court's decisions 'are unequivocal wins for children and parents,' but 'these cases and their corresponding decisions had nothing to do with Project 2025, which was focused on what President Trump would do in his second term.' Do The Supreme Court's Rulings Follow Project 2025's Agenda? Project 2025 is focused solely on actions through the executive branch, and does not discuss any policies that could be enacted through the judicial branch or involve the courts in its plans. But its conservative policy blueprint has a number of places where its policy aims overlap with the Supreme Court's most recent rulings. Project 2025 decries 'woke transgender activism' and describes gender-affirming medical procedures as 'dangerous' and unsupported by medical evidence, a view that conflicts with many medical professionals, but is in line with the bans on gender-affirming care for minors that the Supreme Court upheld. The agenda also places a strong emphasis on parental rights in education, as the court did with its ruling allowing parents to opt children out of objectionable content—with Project 2025's agenda claiming, 'Schools serve parents, not the other way around.' The Supreme Court further supported Project 2025's policy aims by upholding the federal ban on TikTok and greenlighting state bans on Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, which Project 2025 proposes banning at the federal level. Justices' decision to uphold Texas' age verification law for porn sites, which makes it harder for minors to access obscene content, is also in line with Project 2025, which calls for a ban on pornography and argues it 'has no claim to First Amendment protection'—a stance that goes further than the Supreme Court's opinion. One area where the Supreme Court diverged more with Project 2025 was charter schools, as the court voted not to allow a religious charter school in Oklahoma, while Project 2025 pushes to increase charter schools in the U.S. education system and roll back existing federal regulations over them. Key Background Project 2025 was a multi-faceted project by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups to prepare for the next GOP administration, providing a LinkedIn-style database of potential White House workers, White House employee training materials and a reported playbook for Trump's first few months in office. The group's 900-page policy agenda gained the most attention, proposing a policy blueprint for all major federal agencies that pushed controversial right-wing policies and sought to give the president more power by replacing career civil servants with presidential appointees. While the Heritage Foundation said it has provided similar documents to past Republican presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan, the 2025 plan became embroiled in national controversy ahead of the 2024 election, as Democrats highlighted its proposals as a key reason to oppose Trump. Trump publicly disavowed Project 2025 ahead of the election and denied having any connection to it, despite it being created by many people who worked with him at the White House in his first term. Since taking office, however, Trump has appointed many people involved with Project 2025 to key roles in his second administration, and many of the president's policies overlap with policy suggestions made in Project 2025. In a March interview with Politico, former Project 2025 head Paul Dans described Trump's agenda in office as being 'actually way beyond my wildest dreams.' 'What we had hoped would happen has happened,' Dans said about Trump's policies reflecting Project 2025's agenda. Forbes Here's How Trump's Executive Orders Align With Project 2025—As Author Hails President's Agenda As 'Beyond My Wildest Dreams' By Alison Durkee Forbes Project 2025 Author Russell Vought Confirmed By Senate: Here Are All The Trump Officials With Ties To Policy Agenda By Alison Durkee Forbes Project 2025 Explained: What To Know About The Right-Wing Policy Map Ahead Of Tonight's VP Debate By Alison Durkee
The Hill
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Supreme Court turns to backlog of transgender cases after Tennessee ban ruling
The Supreme Court on Thursday will confront the next frontiers of the legal battles surrounding transgender rights now that the justices have signed off on Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. After the justices announce opinions from the bench, they'll meet behind closed doors to discuss how to proceed with more than a half-dozen petitions concerning states' transgender athlete bans, bathroom restrictions and prohibitions on gender-affirming surgeries in Medicaid plans. Transgender rights advocates are holding out hope that the conservative majority's ruling last week upholding the Tennessee law is limited and they can still eke out victories as the cases press ahead. 'As frustrating an answer as it is, I don't actually think this tells us much at all of how those other contexts will proceed before this court,' said Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of Lambda Legal's constitutional law practice. 'In as much as I think we can try to read tea leaves and find doctrinal through-lines, this is one of those instances where the court made clear that they were just doing something different and specific here.' The Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, marking one of their biggest cases implicating LGBTQ protections in recent years. Petitions asking the court to hear other transgender rights disputes piled up for months as the justices punted action to consider the Tennessee case, U.S. v. Skrmetti. With the decision now in, the freeze is thawing. At their weekly closed-door conference Thursday, the justices will return to nine petitions implicating transgender rights, case dockets show. Their usual practice is to send them back to lower courts to take another look in light of an intervening decision. But two Republican-controlled states are urging the court to forgo that exercise, warning it won't resolve their disputes, so the court should take them up now for their next term. In West Virginia, Attorney General JB McCuskey (R) asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to hear the state's defense of its transgender athlete ban. It is the third time the state has asked the justices to step in to allow it to enforce the 2021 law, which lower courts have blocked. In court filings, McCuskey, the Alliance Defending Freedom and attorneys for several West Virginia Board of Education members said the Tennessee case left constitutional questions relevant to the case unanswered. 'United States v. Skrmetti disclaims any guidance on the Title IX question presented here, and the decision's equal-protection analysis does not address critical questions unique to athletics,' they wrote. Public schools, they said, remain 'between a rock and a hard place,' citing President Trump's executive order to ban trans students from girls' and women's sports and the administration's statements that Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination, prohibits trans athletes from competing. 'Should they follow an executive order that threatens all their funding — even funding unrelated to athletics? Or should they follow a court order that has not yet been applied to them?' McCuskey's office asked in court filings. 'The years of delay that would follow were the Court to grant, vacate, and remand here would not help.' In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little (R) similarly asked the court to take up his state's trans athletes law, saying that lower court proceedings would otherwise 'delay the inevitable.' 'Whether designating sports teams based on biological sex violates the Equal Protection Clause is a critically important issue that has been roiling the lower courts, frustrating female student athletes, and confounding every level of government for years,' the state wrote in court filings this week. Other cases are also waiting in the wings Thursday, though those parties haven't tried to sway the justices following the court's Skrmetti ruling. Arizona's Senate president is defending the state's transgender athlete ban. West Virginia and Idaho are defending their gender-affirming surgery bans in Medicaid plans. North Carolina is trying to vindicate its similar ban for a government employee health plan. And Oklahoma wants the court to uphold its law banning people from changing their sex designation on official documents to match their gender identity. Challengers to Tennessee's gender-affirming care ban for minors had hoped to convince the Supreme Court that the law, S.B. 1, classified based on sex and transgender status, which could require it to clear a more exacting constitutional standard known as heightened scrutiny. Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion said it did neither and instead drew lines based on age and the treatments' medical purpose. 'Rather, S.B. 1 prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers and hormones to minors for certain medical uses, regardless of a minor's sex,' Roberts wrote. But in some of the other cases set for the justices' consideration Thursday, Republican-led states directly admit their laws turn on sex, which could force the court to confront the issue. And because the justices deemed that Tennessee's law does not discriminate against transgender Americans either, the court has yet to decide whether they qualify as a 'suspect class' that would independently trigger a higher level of constitutional scrutiny. Only three conservative justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett — signed onto concurring opinions explicitly rejecting the idea. 'That important question has divided the Courts of Appeals, and if we do not confront it now, we will almost certainly be required to do so very soon,' Alito cautioned in a solo opinion.
Fox News
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Attorney Arrested After Opposing Trans Treatments for Kids Speaks Out
The Supreme Court's decision to affirm Tennessee's ban on so called 'Gender Affirming Care' was a victory for people like activist/attorney Lois McLatchie Miller. On June 6, police in Brussels, Belgium arrested her and child protection advocate Chris Elston (aka 'Billboard Chris') for peacefully displaying signs promoting the protection of children against transgender medical treatments. Their signs read 'Children are never born in the wrong body' and 'Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.' The pair went to the EU capital to engage members of the European Parliament about the dangers of puberty blockers for children. On this episode of Lighthouse Faith podcast, Miller, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom International, reacts to the Justices' decision, and also talks about her experiences being arrested for standing up for her deeply held beliefs that 'children are made in the image of God, and they are made as beings that should be loved and cherished.' Miller shares how instead of addressing the mob threatening them, the police arrested the two holding signs. She says it's a blatant example of how deep Western culture has aligned itself with the transgender movement and pushes back aggressively against any who challenge its orthodoxy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
India Today
19-06-2025
- Health
- India Today
US judge strikes down Biden-era rule protecting privacy for abortions
A federal judge on Wednesday struck down a rule adopted by the administration of former President Joe Biden that strengthened privacy protections for women seeking abortions and patients who receive gender transition District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, said the US Department of Health and Human Services exceeded its powers and unlawfully limited states' ability to enforce their public health laws when it adopted the rule last rule prohibits healthcare providers and insurers from giving information about a legal abortion to state law enforcement authorities who are seeking to punish someone in connection with that abortion. "HHS lacked clear delegated authority to fashion special protections for medical information produced by politically favoured medical procedures," wrote Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, a Republican, during his first in December blocked HHS from enforcing the rule against a Texas doctor who had brought the lawsuit, Carmen Purl, pending the outcome of the case. Wednesday's decision blocks the rule did not immediately respond to a request for is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. Matt Bowman, senior counsel with the group, praised the decision in a statement, saying the 2024 rule "would have weaponised laws about privacy that have nothing to do with abortion or gender identity."advertisementThe Biden administration issued the rule as part of its pledge to support access to reproductive healthcare after the conservative-majority US Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that made access to abortion a constitutional right came in response to efforts by authorities in some Republican-led states that ban abortion, including Texas, to restrict out-of-state travel for has filed a separate lawsuit challenging the rule, which is pending in federal court in Lubbock, Texas. HHS in a court filing last month said agency leadership appointed by Trump is evaluating its position in this a Democrat, said in announcing the rule that no one should have their medical records "used against them, their doctor, or their loved one just because they sought or received lawful reproductive health care."Must Watch
Reuters
18-06-2025
- Health
- Reuters
US judge invalidates Biden rule protecting privacy for abortions
June 18 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday struck down a rule adopted by the administration of former President Joe Biden that strengthened privacy protections for women seeking abortions and patients who receive gender transition treatments. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services exceeded its powers and unlawfully limited states' ability to enforce their public health laws when it adopted the rule last year. The rule prohibits healthcare providers and insurers from giving information about a legal abortion to state law enforcement authorities who are seeking to punish someone in connection with that abortion. "HHS lacked clear delegated authority to fashion special protections for medical information produced by politically favored medical procedures," wrote Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, a Republican, during his first term. Kacsmaryk in December had blocked HHS from enforcing the rule against a Texas doctor who had brought the lawsuit, Carmen Purl, pending the outcome of the case. Wednesday's decision blocks the rule nationwide. HHS and Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that represents Purl, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Biden administration issued the rule as part of its pledge to support access to reproductive healthcare after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that made access to abortion a constitutional right nationwide. It came in response to efforts by authorities in some Republican-led states that ban abortion, including Texas, to restrict out-of-state travel for abortion. Texas has filed a separate lawsuit challenging the rule, which is pending in federal court in Lubbock, Texas. HHS in a court filing last month said agency leadership appointed by Trump is evaluating its position in this case. Biden, a Democrat, said in announcing the rule that no one should have their medical records "used against them, their doctor, or their loved one just because they sought or received lawful reproductive health care."
