Dems Need a Project 2027

I’ve written and commented about politics for more than 30 years, but I’ve never before wanted to run for office myself. Yet here I am, running for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District. And it seems that every day I get a reminder of why I’m running and what needs to be done.

It’s not just that Donald Trump wants to seize unlimited executive power, and that a Republican Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court are enabling him. What drew me into the Democratic primary is that Democrats often seem unprepared to mount any effective opposition. I’m running to make sure we are prepared and we know how to fight back.Here’s an example of what I’m worried about. A recent report described an effort to come up with a “Project 2029”: a Democratic agenda to counter the Republicans’ notorious Project 2025, their playbook for Trump’s second term.

This is a great idea. We need an answer to Project 2025.

But if you read what they’ve come up with, you may experience a familiar feeling of disappointment. Their blueprint is a lot of small-ball, technocratic stuff, like overhauling the regulation of electric utilities, some vague ideas about childcare programs, and, erm, a ban on spam phone calls? Some of these might be worthwhile efforts. But there’s nothing new—and more to the point, none of it is an answer to Project 2025.

Project 2025 was not just a list of ordinary conservative policy ideas. The real heart of Project 2025, which I warned about before the 2024 election, is that it was a plan to seize power—a plan to pack the administration with loyalists and break down any element of independence in the government. Project 2025 targeted particularly the independence of the FCC, which is not supposed to answer directly to the president, and the Department of Justice, which is really not supposed to answer directly to the president. The goal was to remake the whole federal government to centralize all power in one person.

A Project 2029 that is just a bunch of warmed-over policy proposals is not an answer to that. The real answer is that we have to restore the constitutional limits on the president and restore the power of Congress to enforce those limits. And Congress really does have immense power—you just wouldn’t know it by looking at them. We have to have a plan to assert that power.

Project 2027

So we can’t wait for a “Project 2029,” and we don’t have to. We need a Project 2027: the plan and the will for Congress to assert its power and really stand up for the people and their interests. And we need to start doing this the moment Democrats arrive in Congress next January.

That agenda should be based on what we can do with a simple majority—and with Trump still in the White House—which is the most likely outcome of the coming election. What can we do, with just the power of a congressional majority, to rein in Trump and reform the system?

Here are my suggestions.

Declare a national emergency of national emergencies.

We have a national emergency of presidents declaring national emergencies. Over the years, Congress has foolishly written loopholes into many laws allowing the president to claim the power to act without consulting Congress in an “emergency.” Some of these emergency powers have lasted for decades—a period of time that is, by definition, not an emergency.

Donald Trump has taken full advantage of these powers, for example to impose tariffs. When his first attempt to claim emergency tariff powers was found by the Supreme Court to exceed the powers granted in the law, he seized on another set of emergency powers in another law to try to keep as many of his tariffs as possible. Similarly, he reached all the way back to the Alien Enemies Act—the only unrepealed part of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts—to claim power for mass deportations without due process.

The US Congress can put a stop to all of this at once. We should pass a law immediately suspending all emergency executive powers, requiring the president to submit such powers for review by Congress, one at a time, if he wants any of them reinstated by ordinary law.

Above all, we should repeal the Insurrection Act, which gives wide leeway for the president to call up troops and deploy them on the streets of our cities. Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to do so, and according to a recent report, JD Vance argued for a military occupation of Minneapolis early this year—after federal agents had already murdered two citizens there. 

Even if a Congressional withdrawal of emergency powers is blocked by a presidential veto, the mere vote to repeal the Insurrection Act would undermine its legitimacy, functioning as a pre-emptive deterrent against the president invoking it.

We need to learn from the mistakes of 2021. After the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Democrats thought Donald Trump was a spent force. They devoted their first months with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president pursuing favorite Democratic agenda items—but doing little to protect our system against a return of authoritarian politics. We don’t dare make the same mistake again.

That’s the same principle behind the next major reform.

Take away executive discretion.

Congress has the power of the purse, the power to decide on spending. This means Congress can mandate money for specific purposes and recipients, removing the president’s discretion about when to spend money and who gets it.

Congress approves large sums of money for scientific research at universities, for defense programs, for welfare programs managed by the states—and then the specific projects on which the money is spent is left to be decided by the executive. Trump has used that power to arbitrarily suspend or redirect spending unless the recipients agree to quash all criticism of him and bend to his agenda, extorting state governments, universities, and our allies (the few we have left).

Congress can simply take this discretion away. If the president is holding up scientific funding for universities—killing their science departments as a proxy for punishing “woke” humanities professors—Congress can simply begin mandating which specific programs get their grants and which don’t. There is a federal bureaucracy that is supposed to make these decisions, evaluating scientific research grants and deciding which deserve money. But if that bureaucracy is not functioning—and it isn’t—Congress can create its own mechanism for making these decisions and writing them into the federal budget directly. We can take away discretion from an executive that abuses it.

We can do the same thing for military contracts, with Congress deciding who gets that sweet Pentagon money based on what’s best for national defense, rather than on who gave stock options to Don Junior.

The same thing applies to federal regulatory power. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has repeatedly threatened ABC and its broadcast affiliates over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s criticisms of Donald Trump. This is made possible by a notoriously overbroad authority given to the FCC to determine whether broadcast licenses are in “the public interest.” Congress could remove such vague terms or replace them with specific, objective criteria that take discretion away from the president’s minions.

Despite concurring with a recent Supreme Court decision, Trump v. Slaughter, that increases the president’s authority over previously independent executive officials, Justice Neil Gorsuch warned that these officials often act “with hardly any statutory guidance, based on broad grants of legislative authority.” Congress should take this as an invitation to make the grants of authority less broad.

Congress seems to only fitfully remember that it can just tell the executive what to do. Remember when Congress passed a law requiring the release of the Epstein files? We can do more of that—and with harsher punishments for refusing to comply.

Rediscover the power and purpose of impeachment.

One of the issues that gets me up on a soapbox is when someone says we have three “co-equal” branches of government. This is not true. We have three independent branches of government, but they’re not equal. If you look at the powers actually granted to them in the Constitution, it’s clear that Congress is more powerful than the others.

Here’s one way you can tell: no other branch of government can remove a member of Congress—but Congress can remove members of other branches. We should invoke that power far more often.

One problem with the agenda I’ve already put forward is that Donald Trump has a record of ignoring and circumventing clear rules set by Congress, often enabled by the Supreme Court’s authoritarian interpretation of executive power. But Congress has a weapon to fight back. It can drag the president or any of his henchmen before Congress to answer for their actions or be removed from office. And yes, that power is very broad: Article II, Section 4 gives Congress the power to remove “all civil Officers of the United States.” Which also includes members of the Supreme Court.

The genius of this approach to impeachment is that the president is only one man. He can give orders and post announcements on social media, but he relies on other people to carry out his wishes. Target those other people, and you severely curtail his ability to impose his will.

Again, we have to look at what can be accomplished in the face of recalcitrance from a Republican minority. Even if impeachment does not succeed in removing people from office, think of what impeachment accomplishes.

First, it bogs Trump’s minions down, forcing them to answer questions and spend endless hours at hearings. Second, it creates a public record of their misdeeds, which among other things provides a basis for future prosecution. (Think of that if you’re one of the guys in the chain of command for murdering shipwrecked sailors.) This itself will have a deterrent effect.

But above all, it brings public attention to this administration’s abuses of power—and it shows that Congress is actually serious about those abuses. The public won’t believe that what Trump is doing is unprecedented or an emergency or an attack on the foundations of the American system if we don’t act like it is. Impeachment is our way of saying that we really mean it, that these actions are beyond the bounds of legitimate power.

The Supreme Court wants to entertain fantasies of unlimited presidential power? Fine, they can go through months of hearings where we explore all the details of Clarence Thomas’s complicated schemes to funnel money from wealthy conservatives and into his own pockets. Months of hearings about Samuel Alito’s open partisanship. Months of hearings on John Roberts’s unprecedented abuse of unsigned edicts on the “shadow docket.”

Trump’s abuses of executive power are so vast they give us grounds for impeachment against the President and Vice President, but also against the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the chair of the FCC, and so on. And who knows, some of the impeachments might succeed. There may be just enough Republican senators who are willing to fight to the bitter end to protect Donald Trump—but would they be as willing to protect, say, Kristi Noem? We already know the answer to that question.

Even if we don’t have enough Senate votes to convict all these officials, the hearings and trials would gather evidence of their abuses and mobilize public opinion against them.

Use the power of the purse.

The central problem for a Democratic majority in Congress will be how to operate in the face of vetoes and obstruction from the executive. We need a plan to bring Trump to heel, and fortunately, Congress has the power to do it.

The power of the purse is the big stick the Constitution gave us to keep the president in line. We don’t need to settle just for symbolic victories. We should make it clear that we can make the gears of the executive grind to a halt until the president makes real concessions. This is the leverage we can use to get everything else on this agenda.

This has already been tested in small and tentative ways. In one funding bill, Congress cut off part of the defense budget until Pete Hegseth released video of his war crimes in the Caribbean. We can do much more of that—and play hardball this time.

The power Congress has over funding is the main reason why the only real action by the current Congress has been to approve massive funding for ICE and Border Patrol. They are locking in the money Trump needs for his mass deportations now, before they lose Congress, so he won’t have to come back and ask for any more before 2029. Obviously, it will be an urgent priority to claw that money back—a quarter of a trillion dollars that we desperately need elsewhere in the budget. But there will be other things Trump wants and needs, and a new Congress can hold those things up to get what we want.

Congress will have to play chicken with Trump on spending, and the key to winning is not to flinch first. We will have to hold up funding for things that really do hurt.

Obviously, if Congress is going to hold up TSA funding or withdraw spending for other vital functions of government, we’re going to have to be smart about picking our battles. We’re going to have to target the pain narrowly, not letting Trump shift spending cuts to only the things he doesn’t like. Then we should make demands that are obvious and broadly popular. Threaten to withhold TSA funding and shut down the airports—and then tell everyone that the airports can open at any time, if Trump just signs our bill to protect your First Amendment rights against the FCC.

This will be the toughest piece of advice to convince the timid Democratic leadership to implement. But to assume ahead of time that Congress using the power of the purse won’t work and we shouldn’t even try would mean that we are pre-emptively abandoning the most fundamental and effective weapon Congress has. Democratic leadership needs to show that they are willing to use all the tools they have.

That should be the real heart of a Democratic Project 2027: using all the constitutional tools we have. Donald Trump’s second term has unleashed a broad, sustained, and stubborn attack on our constitutional system. Rescuing that system and restoring it will require an agenda that is just as broad, just as sustained, and even more relentlessly stubborn.

Featured image is Home of the US Congress, by JessicaRodriguezRivas