Project 2025 — a road map for the next Trump White House — urges overturning Supreme Court precedent, and a trickle of bills may tee up challenges.
Zany: I’ve already written about the dangers of Project 2025. I try to remind everyone about it at every turn. Now, once more (that’s a lie. I’m sure I’ll say this again at some point.) I will urge you to read the entire thing. It’s just too important that we’re prepared for what will happen should Trump win in 2024.
Having rolled back decades of precedent on abortion and reproductive health, conservatives are looking for ways to recycle the playbook that took down Roe v. Wade — and they’ve got their sights on the death penalty.
Republicans and their allies are eager to expand capital punishment, and U.S. Supreme Court cases that currently limit the crimes that can lead to executions are a prime target.
Conservatives’ eagerness to create more capital crimes is laid out in the sprawling Project 2025 manifesto, a road map for the first 180 days of “the next conservative administration.” Project 2025 urges the next administration — presumably, a second Trump White House — to throw the Justice Department’s weight into overturning the constitutional limits established by the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, Republican legislators are laying the groundwork to expand the death penalty to crimes beyond murder by passing “trigger laws” that would spring into effect once these Supreme Court Court guardrails are eliminated.
“They have a very high hill to climb.”
So far, Florida and Tennessee have enacted laws that allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty for child sex abuse. The laws’ proponents flaunted the contradiction with a Supreme Court decision from 2008, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which bars the death penalty for crimes other than murder based on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”
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Shawn Musgrave is a media law attorney and reporter based in New York. As counsel to The Intercept, Shawn brings considerable experience in government transparency, including the federal Freedom of Information Act, state public records laws, and court access. Prior to joining The Intercept, Shawn worked at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and MuckRock. His reporting has been published in Politico, The Verge, Vice, Reason, and the Boston Globe, among other outlets.
