Washington, DC – With just under 70 days to go until the November election, the dangerous  Republican promise of Project 2025 is targeting state and local politics. This week, The Nation’s Elie Mystal explained the ever-present threat of Project 2025 and how the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) plans to promote the extremist agenda by supporting and funding Republican attorneys general candidates in key races.

Key Highlights:

• “By controlling the office of a state’s top prosecutor, Republicans can break into people’s homes and bedrooms and turn their culture-war obsessions into criminal penalties and prison time. Should Trump’s dystopian reelection come to pass, it likely won’t be SEAL Team 6 standing with its jackboots on the necks of civil liberties and pluralistic tolerance. It will be a state trooper, acting under the direction of an elected state attorney general, who comes to your wedding to break up your same-sex marriage, deport your friends, or force your daughter to bring a pregnancy to term against her will.”
  
  
• Mystal continues on to describe the 27 Republican state attorneys general as having “…a broadly extremist agenda, regardless of the particularities of their state. They’re all anti-immigrant, and they’re willing to use every shred of their power to harass, detain, and deport people who are out of status. They’re in favor of forced birth. They’re anti-trans, anti-labor, and anti-environment, and they support smash-and-grab capitalism. Only five are women. Almost all of them are white.” 
• “The call-and-response between RAGA AGs and their allies on the Supreme Court is an essential way that Republicans are able to bypass Congress and enact policies that extend far beyond their states and take away the rights of people living in New York or California.” 
• “And RAGA’s biggest funder, Leonard Leo, wants more. Leo has called on RAGA to ‘flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress.’ That threat can be made a reality thanks to Leo’s other great quest—to remake the Supreme Court—which he more or less achieved four years ago and which resulted this summer in the conservative justices’ overruling judicial deference to regulatory agencies. The court’s ruling throws into question thousands and thousands of regulations, and RAGA AGs will likely try to deregulate entire industries, one lawsuit at a time.”

Mystal then turns his attention to the two highly competitive attorney general races in North Carolina and Pennsylvania:

• In North Carolina, Mystal highlights the stark differences between Rep. Dan Bishop (R) and Rep. Jeff Jackson (D). He writes on how Bishop “supported North Carolina’s infamous House Bill 2—the country’s first ‘bathroom bill.’” Bishop was the author of the bill while serving in the state legislature. “That law, passed in 2016 (and repealed in 2020), dictated where people were allowed to pee, forcing them to use bathrooms according to the sex assigned to them at birth, while also allowing discrimination in public accommodations. One can reasonably expect Bishop to use the full powers of the state AG’s office to harass transgender kids at every available opportunity.” 
• “Since he joined Congress in 2019, Bishop has been a member of the far-right ‘Freedom Caucus’ and has voted against every abortion access bill that has been proposed in the House. He has also opposed immigration reform and voted against the Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for children brought to this country by parents who were out of status. Bishop voted in favor of impeaching Secretary of Homeland Security [Alejandro] Mayorkas but voted against impeaching former president Donald Trump. Anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, and anti-trans, Dan Bishop is the essential distillation of a RAGA candidate.” 
• Writing on Democratic nominee in North Carolina Rep. Jeff Jackson, Mystal states, “In addition to defending reproductive rights, Jackson has taken strong stances against sexual assault. He was a proponent of a critical 2019 revision to a North Carolina law that a ‘loophole’ that prevented women from revoking consent during sexual relations. Jackson has also been a defender of LGBTQ rights and has come out in favor of regulating artificial intelligence.” 
• The other key battleground state in Attorney General races this year is Pennsylvania between GOP extremist Dave Sunday and Democrat Eugene DePasquale. Mystal calls out Sunday for his non-answers on abortion, casting doubt on whether he would enforce the law given that he didn’t enforce then-Governor Tom Wolf’s regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Writing, “when I see a guy so hooked into the conservative matrix that he won’t even enforce a Covid mandate, I struggle to believe that he will let the Legislature decide whether pregnant people should be afforded human rights.” 
• For DePasquale, Mystal highlights his experience as auditor general. “That’s essentially the state’s top investigator, which is a credential for AG…He is campaigning on prosecuting individuals who commit hate crimes, defending abortion rights, and opposing voter suppression tactics.” 
• “RAGA attorneys can be beaten, even in states that will ultimately go to Donald Trump. The key to winning these races is for people to understand that they’re important.”

Read the full story here. 

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