The Conservative Action Project, an offshoot of the secretive and influential right-wing Council for National Policy, released a statement Monday signed by a rogues' gallery of right-wing figures demanding faster Senate confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees, claiming that his agenda, aka Project 2025, will suffer unless Senate Republicans step up the pace.
In 2020, the Conservative Action Project energetically promoted Trump’s false claims about the election and participated in his efforts to stay in power after losing the election. The group’s current chair, notorious voter suppression activist Kenneth Blackwell, was involved in behind-the-scenes lobbying to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to abuse his power and interfere with congressional affirmation of state-certified Electoral College votes.
The new statement is further evidence of how closely the right-wing movement is aligned with, or maybe in the pocket of, Trump and his inner circle. More than 100 MAGA and religious-right movement leaders signed the statement, including Christian nationalists, voting restriction activists, leaders of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ political groups, right-wing gadfly/power player Ginni Thomas, MAGA judicial activist Mike Davis, and disgraced former southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson.
Also among the signers is Cleta Mitchell, who joined the infamous phone call on which Trump tried to bully Georgia’s Republican secretary of state into “finding” enough votes to overturn Trump’s loss in the state. Mitchell, who now runs right-wing so-called “election integrity” efforts at the Conservative Partnership Institute, recently appeared on dominionist Jim Garlow’s podcast, where she said House passage of the SAVE Act was a result of God telling her to work on the (largely imaginary) “threat” of non-citizen voting.
The Conservative Action Project is one of many right-wing coalitions formed in reaction to the election of former President Barack Obama, and now includes representatives of MAGA groups created in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss, like the Center for Renewing America. In 2022 it mobilized an unsuccessful effort to defeat the Respect for Marriage Act, which offers legal protections to same-sex couples whose rights would be threatened if the Supreme Court overturns its 2015 marriage equality ruling.