Igor Derysh at Salon reports that “an unusual coalition of Christian and ‘small government’ groups” is working with state lawmakers to support the 250+ voter suppression bills currently moving through state legislatures. Except there’s nothing unusual about this coalition. These groups have worked together for decades as the Council for National Policy (CNP).
Trump’s [election fraud] claims raised tens of millions from his supporters, though he spent just a small fraction of that on actual legal costs while dropping far more on fundraising ads and pocketing the rest for his super PAC. Now his conservative allies are targeting donors who bought into his false election claims, justifying their push by citing voter concerns about “election integrity.”
Salon
The Salon report names the Family Research Council, the Susan B. Anthony List, the American Principles Project, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Honest Elections Project. All of these are associated with just one organization — the Council for National Policy, a pro-corporate, anti-democracy Christian extremist group funded by billionaires.
Their actions often have to do with bending or repurposing or even crippling state power, state functions, government agencies, and government institutions in ways that will benefit the network as a whole — or certain segments of the network — with the hope of returns sometime later.
Sarah Chayes
The Family Research Council appears eight different times on our public list of CNP members.
Heritage Action is the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. There are 17 current and former executives of the Heritage Foundation on the CNP members list.
Other CNP members: the presidents of FreedomWorks, the Susan B. Anthony List, the American Principles Project; the CEO of ALEC; the founder of the Honest Elections Project; and both co-founders of Tea Party Patriots.
The laws they hope to pass make elections less secure, and the party will owe them for their help for years to come. For example, Georgia just passed a law that — among other things — gives the state legislature a loophole to overturn any election outcome the majority party doesn’t like. According to the New York Times, at least 23 of 68 bills introduced in Georgia to restrict voting had language strikingly similar to that of a Heritage Action letter distributed to state legislators in January.
There’s no doubt that this plan has been in the works for some time. CNP members began strategizing a way to “invalidate” the election in case of a Trump loss back in February 2020.
Learn more about the Council for National Policy here.
