Welcome to our first installment of Democracy Under Attack: A Wren Collective Newsletter
For decades, those with power have weaponized the criminal legal system to prevent Black, brown, and poor people from participating in our democratic society. Every year, they incarcerate nearly 7.5 million people in jails and prisons in the name of public safety while divesting from preventative solutions that actually keep people safe, because incarceration takes people out of civic society and helps those who have power preserve it.
Those same officials are dramatically expanding their use of the legal system to solidify and expand power. They want to restrict who gets a say in how we live.
This newsletter will break down the ways that the right is manipulating the criminal legal system to preserve and even expand its power over a growing bloc that opposes it. We often talk about these issues in silos, pointing separately to the criminalization of abortion as if those responsible for the rollback of Roe v. Wade have different motivations from those driving mass incarceration. These attacks are a coordinated effort to suppress democracy, and we must recognize this plan in order to harness our collective power.
In each installment, we will highlight the myriad ways elected officials are working to keep people from democratic participation. We will show, for example, how new restrictive laws coming out of state legislatures, though framed as unique to those areas, are actually part of a nationwide strategy to attack entire communities. We will discuss how removals of elected officials are intentional efforts to disenfranchise urban voters.
We will also highlight ways that people are fighting back. We hope to learn from the heroic efforts of organizers, elected officials, legal teams, and protestors as we work to preserve our right to say how this country functions.
Thanks for reading,
The Wren Collective
The Conservative Plan to Reshape the Country: Project 2025
By now, you have likely heard of Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the next conservative presidency, co-written by the Heritage Foundation and more than 100 conservative groups across the country. The nearly 900-page playbook lays out an extremist vision for the nation that promises to “defang and defund the woke culture warriors” by concentrating power in the hands of the president and his appointees while also ramping up the immigration, criminal legal, and military apparatuses; dismantling efforts to combat climate change; stripping reproductive rights; and gutting core provisions important to LGBTQ folks, migrants, and people of color. This plan raises genuine concerns about the future of our democracy.
In the upcoming weeks, Wren will highlight some of the key provisions of the manifesto. This week, we focus on Power Realignment and Criminal Justice. Stay tuned for notes in our next newsletter about Immigration and Reproductive Rights.
Power Realignment
“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State” (xiv)
- Replacing Civil Servants with Loyalists. Project 2025 aims to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” by reviving the much-critiqued Schedule F policy, which would reclassify at least (and likely more) than 50,000 civil servants as at-will employees, opening the door for the next conservative president to replace them with loyal partisans. The plan includes stripping career employees of the power to authorize and distribute federal funding and placing that power in the hands of political appointees.
- Concrete Plan in Place. The Project provides a concrete roadmap to “deconstruct the administrative state” (xiv) by purging “unelected career bureaucrats” (8) and “fill[ing] its ranks with political appointees” (20). Political operatives, armed with an $100,000 grant from the Heritage foundation, are already working to investigate federal employees who are suspected of being disloyal, and Project 2025 itself has been building a database of replacement “conservatives from all walks of life to serve in the next conservative Administration.”
Criminal Justice
“…not reforming the Department of Justice will…guarantee the failure of [a] conservative Administration’s agenda…” (p. 547)
- Politicizing the Department of Justice. Project 2025 aims to disrupt the independence that typically insulates the Department of Justice from political influence while also instituting a “vast expansion” of political appointees in the department (p.569). Largely in the crosshairs is the FBI, which the Project accuses of “domestic election interference and propaganda operations.” The Project calls for a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the agency, which includes ceasing all FBI investigations the administration dislikes and bringing the FBI under tighter White House control (pp.548-549).
- Derailing Criminal Justice Reform. Citing “catastrophic increases in crime” that are actually contradicted by data, Project 2025 also advocates an aggressive agenda to combat violent crime and threatens to “initiate legal action against local officials–including District Attorneys–who…refus[e] to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions” (553). As others have noted, this threat chills even modest efforts at criminal justice reform and positions conservatives to punish prosecutors for not enforcing extreme laws that further criminalize conduct like abortions, protests, and immigration. The GOP’s attack on prosecutors who do not kiss the ring is already happening on the state level across the country. (More on this later).
- Expanding the Use of the Death Penalty. Project 2025 calls for the immediate execution of the 44 inmates who are currently on death row (p. 554) while also urging prosecutors to pursue the death penalty for an expanded list of crimes. Such a move would end the existing moratorium on federal executions.
Next up, we’ll discuss the sweeping proposed changes to our immigration system and the next stage of attacks on reproductive rights, launched through the legal system.
Only Some Voters Get to Elect Their Representatives
The assault on urban voters’ ability to elect their own officials in the criminal legal system continues. Those who are trying to remove elected prosecutors often claim they are doing so to protect public safety, but there is no truth to their claims. They are engaging in a naked power grab, plain and simple.
- In Tennessee, Republican Representative Brent Taylor has promised to file a resolution to remove Shelby County (Memphis) DA Steve Mulroy for being too progressive. If filed, both the Senate and House of Representatives would need to vote in favor with two-thirds of the vote. The Commercial Appeal found that Taylor’s claims that Mulroy has failed to prosecute numerous types of crimes– his stated basis for a potential removal– lack any basis in facts. The paper described Taylor’s allegations as “rooted in misinformation” – which follows a similar pattern by elected officials seen across the country.
- In Florida, for example, Governor Ron DeSantis removed the 9th Judicial Circuit State’s Attorney Monique Worrell one year ago. He blamed her for rising drug trafficking. But according to an Orlando Sentinel investigation, most cases in that category were dropped because of deficiencies in the police department’s work. “If facts matter,” the paper wrote, “Worrell should prevail” in her court challenge for reinstatement. Nonetheless, the Florida Supreme Court upheld her suspension in a legal challenge. She is currently running unopposed in the Democratic primary.
- Worrell is the second elected State’s Attorney DeSantis removed– Andrew Warren in Hillsborough County (Tampa) was removed one year prior, and he too is currently running to obtain his seat back.
- In Texas, the Attorney General has proposed a reporting rule that applies only to District Attorneys in counties over 250,000 people. It requires D.A.’s to provide entire case files in an extreme number of cases, including all those where a police officer is charged, but also where prosecutors drop a case. The rule is so onerous that it is impossible to comply with, which could provide further grounds for removals across the state. The proposed rule is awaiting a hearing.
- In Mississippi,the state legislature created a separate judicial circuit to separate out the largely white portion of Hinds County from the largely Black areas. There is extensive litigation occurring challenging this legislation.
Fighting Back: What’s Working
- Arkansas advocates have collected enough signatures for a state constitutional amendment safeguarding reproductive rights to be on the ballot in November. Similar measures are already on the ballot this year in six states and, with Arkansas meeting the threshold for signatures, it becomes one of five additional states awaiting final certification before the issue goes to the voters. Seven states, including Ohio and Kentucky, passed related initiatives last year. All across the country, even in deeply conservative states, the public is showing broad support for access to reproductive healthcare.
- After Dobbs, Alabama’s right-wing attorney general threatened to prosecute anyone who assists a pregnant Alabamian travel out of state for reproductive care and a local abortion fund has fought back. Yellowhammer Fund’s federal lawsuit was recently allowed to proceed over the state’s objections, as the district court ruled that the attorney general’s threats would violate the constitution.
- In Louisiana, the Promise of Justice Initiative won a TRO against the infamous Angola prison’s brutal use of punitive “farm line” forced labor in the crushing summer heat. Angola–a former slave plantation–is known for its use of modern-day slavery as a punishment, where prisoners toil in extreme heat, squalid, and unsafe conditions, and near-death injuries are rampant. In a rare victory at the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the TRO was recently upheld.