Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. By now, we've all heard about Project 2025, the 922-page agenda published by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. It's full of policy proposals designed to empower the next Republican president as they put it, with a plan to enact on day one of their presidency. Although Donald Trump has denied ties to Project 2025, there are all kinds of ties that we've talked about in the past. Here's what we're going to talk about today. Project 2025 did not appear out of thin air. Our next guest argues that Project 2025 stems from a decades-long plan by what he calls a cadre of oligarchs and operatives whose agenda could only be implemented by deregulating the campaign finance system so that cash could short-circuit democracy. The goal, he writes, destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society.

In a new podcast called Master Plan, from The Lever, David Sirota founder and editor in chief of The Lever, host of the podcast Master Plan, co-creator of the movie Don't Look Up, as some of you may know, and former presidential campaign speech writer for Bernie Sanders, delves into the Powell memo written by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. Some of you know that name months before his nomination to the court.

Some deny the significance of the Powell memo on current policy and even go so far as to say the letter reads as a conspiracy theory. David joins us now to share why he thinks we should look back at this mostly forgotten document for answers to how we got Project 2025 and more broadly, big money influence in politics. David Sirota, welcome back to WNYC.

David Sirota: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: The Powell memo, when was it? What was it?

David Sirota: 1971, Lewis Powell was at the pinnacle of the establishment in American politics, head of the American Bar Association. He was a tobacco industry lawyer, major corporate lawyer. Ralph Nader was one of the most respected and famous figures in American politics at the time, passing all sorts of things in Congress. There was a Fortune magazine article about Ralph Nader that captured how big a force he had become in American politics in 1971.

Lewis Powell subsequently was essentially triggered by it and had been radicalized by the fact that the government at the time was so responsive to the public. This is the era when the government was passing Medicare, Medicaid, the EPA Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. Lewis Powell writes this memo to the Chamber of Commerce at the time, and the memo is basically arguing that corporations and those with lots of money, oligarchs essentially need to do a much better job of taking back control of the government.

He said at one point that the businessman is the real forgotten man, which was an invocation of the famous FDR phrase, in which FDR said essentially the worker is the forgotten man. Lewis Powell tried to flip that over. This memo is a blueprint for what the corporate community needs to do specifically to take back that power. There is a focus on taking back the judiciary, taking a page out of what Ralph Nader was doing at the time, which was filing specific lawsuits to try to elicit specific rulings from the courts.

There was also what came out of it, a focus on campaign finance. Deregulating the campaign finance system. One point Powell's memo says that there needs to be a lot of money spent on this project for corporations to take back the government. I think he understood that whereas corporations and oligarchs don't have necessarily a lot of votes, they do have a disproportionate amount of money in the society. What comes out of this? Among the things that come out of this are lawsuits designed to deregulate the campaign finance system. Very soon after the memo comes the Buckley v. Vallejo case, a case that's masterminded by some of the groups that were built out of the Powell memo. There was a series of task force meetings about how to build organizations that would implement the Powell memo. The Buckley v. Vallejo case, one of the first cases that come out of this era, says that money in politics is no longer corruption. Money in politics is constitutionally protected speech. Then soon after that Lewis Powell, he gets installed on the Supreme Court months after he writes this memo. Lewis Powell works behind the scenes at the Supreme Court to extend those free speech rights to corporations spending in elections, a decision that becomes the foundation for Citizens United.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a clip from your podcast, Master Plan, where it starts with you, and then you have a voice actor playing Lewis Powell. Here we go, folks, 42 seconds.

David Sirota: Finally step four, the most important section by far, an area where Powell had unique expertise. Take over the courts.

Lewis Powell: The judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.

David Sirota: Powell saw the legal system, especially the Supreme Court, as an underutilized front where business could be much more assertive.

Lewis Powell: Perhaps the most active exploiters of the judicial system have been groups ranging in political orientation from liberal to the far left.

David Sirota: Powell wanted businesses to use the courts offensively to create a legal environment that was more favorable to their interests.

Brian Lehrer: That's a snippet from the podcast that tells the story that you were just telling before we played it. Remind us, when was that and how long was the period from that and the Lewis Powell memo to the actual Citizens United definition, which equated corporate campaign donations with free speech?

David Sirota: Sure. The memo was written in 1971. Three months later, Lewis Powell gets on the Supreme Court. Then there's the Watergate scandal and it's important to remember that because what came out of the Watergate scandal, and I think a lot of people forget that the Watergate scandal was a campaign finance scandal. Companies were prosecuted. Major companies like American Airlines was prosecuted for illegal campaign donations that ended up in part funding the break-in.

What came out of Watergate was a series of the first real campaign finance reforms in decades. There was a plan that came out of the organizations that were being built out of the Powell memo. At the same time, a plan to challenge the post-Watergate campaign finance regulations in court through then New York senator James Buckley. This is the famous Buckley v. Vallejo case, which ultimately gets ruled on in 1976. You have about a five year period between the organizing around the call to arms, to build out a legal infrastructure to getting that first foundational Supreme Court ruling.

Brian Lehrer: Just to amplify a little bit of what you said, people do forget that Watergate had a campaign finance component. A lot of what got passed after the Democrats swept the congressional elections of 1974, the year that Nixon resigned the presidency because of Watergate, what we may remember mostly is his cover up, his obstruction of justice, destroying taped evidence, things like that. A big part of what Congress enacted after that was campaign finance reform.

David Sirota: That's absolutely right. Here's an interesting little tidbit from Master Plan, which is in 1973, and I know there's been this debate. The Powell memo, did it really inspire anything? Did anything come out of it or was it just a 1970s version of a Reddit thread that didn't mean anything? In 1973, there were a series of meetings of the Powell Memo task force, which was a task force created by the Chamber of Commerce that included top executives at some of the biggest corporations in America, and they had a series of meetings about how to implement the Powell memo.

We discovered documents that have never been reported about one of these meetings in Disney World in 1973. The keynote speaker at the meeting, the person who's flown in, is Gerald Ford, then House Minority leader Gerald Ford. One of the things that was on the agenda to discuss at this meeting was campaign finance reform legislation moving through Congress at the time being accelerated by the backlash to the Watergate scandal. There's a discussion about how to make sure that whatever Congress passes will still allow for business money to flow into politics.

You fast forward a few months from that meeting, Gerald Ford is now president. Language has been slipped into the post Watergate campaign finance reforms that effectively allow for the creation and explosion of corporate perks, a bill that Gerald Ford ends up signing. Now, to be clear, there were a lot of good reforms in there, a lot of legitimate reforms. The point is that even inside of the scandal over Watergate where that prompts demand to clean up government, this Master Plan was already in the works, and securing the victories it would need to have corporations be able to use their disproportionate financial power to essentially short circuit democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Now make the link again back to Project 2025 because usually what gets into the news about Project 2025 is the culture war aspects of it. They want to weaken the enforcement of anti discrimination laws. They want to engage in education culture wars and teach there are only two genders and all of those kinds of things. You're talking about a business or even oligarchs attempt to influence government policy from the 1970s. What's the tie to Project 2025 in terms of what you're reading in that 900 page document?

David Sirota: Sure. First of all, there's a direct tie. The direct tie between the Powell memo and Project 2025 is actually very straightforward. Joseph Coors of the Coors brewing magnate was one of the oligarchs who became essentially radicalized, or at least inspired by the Powell memo. He gave an interview in which he says explicitly, that when he read the Powell memo, it moved him. It stirred him to begin seriously investing in the political infrastructure of the right. He seed funded. He helped really create what became the Heritage Foundation. Now, in all of this organizing, the Heritage Foundation's role, it found its lane was the policy lane. It would start sculpting very specific policies that could essentially be plug-and-play policies for conservative presidents when they win office. They developed a series called the Mandate For Leadership series. Ronald Reagan took the Mandate For Leadership series. I believe it was the first one that they produced, and heritage says he implemented about 60% of its policies. Now, Project 2025 is the 9th iteration of the Mandate For Leadership series. Point being is that the infrastructure that the Powell memo envisioned and that the Powell memo inspired, for instance, in this case via Joseph Coors, has a direct lineage to Project 2025 today. It is quite literally part of the plan. What interest does business have in something like Project 2025? For one thing, and look, it's a 900-page document. There's a ton of things in here that business has an interest in but there are all sorts of corporate deregulation in Project 2025, for instance--

Brian Lehrer: Certainly anything having to do with climate we've covered that extensively on the show and there's more.

David Sirota: Banking. There's a whole thing about essentially deregulating some of the post financial crisis reforms and the like. There's also a whole section--

Brian Lehrer: Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Board that Elizabeth Warren spearheaded the creation of.

David Sirota: Exactly. It's the wish list that we've been hearing Republicans talk about so much, but it should be noted, it's in granular detail. This is a document designed as I said, to be plug and play. The president gets in there, doesn't have to do very much other than literally copy and paste from it. It's worth saying there's a campaign finance angle in here too. The proposals on how to deal with things like the Federal Election Commission, most experts looking at this say it is designed to weaken and further gridlock the Federal Election Commission. It's already been weakened by Citizens United and the like. Again, it goes back to what their agenda really was and how it was articulated all the way back in 1971.

Brian Lehrer: Your former boss, Senator Bernie Sanders, was on Meet the Press just this last week, and here's his one minute of his answer to a question on whether or not he's concerned about Kamala Harris's ties to big money.

Bernie Sanders: Whether you're a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, you should be concerned about the impact of the disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United that today allows billionaires, whether they're Elon Musk and the Republicans, or whether they are democratic billionaires, to play a very, very outsized role in the political process. Look, the average American has one vote but billionaires could start a super PAC and put tens of millions of dollars into defeating the people they don't like and supporting the people they do like. That is not democracy. That is oligarchy. I would hope that every American, regardless of your political persuasion, says, "We got to get rid of the Citizens United and return to a nation where one person has one vote." That's democracy, not billionaires buying elections. If your question is, am I concerned about billionaire influence over the Democratic Party, I surely am just as I am over the Republican Party.

Brian Lehrer: He's talking about Citizens United, which you've tied directly to former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and that memo from 1971. How do you take his answer there about Kamala Harris? Is there any way to overturn Citizens United, which is what Senator Sanders seems to be calling for there, without waiting for how many presidential terms it may take to have enough different justices on the Supreme Court who overturn the decision?

David Sirota: I agree with that. It's a long term project to either pass the constitutional amendment or get a different court that creates a different precedent. I want to add that Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance is right now in court as a named plaintiff, pushing a case to try to prompt the current Supreme Court to actually expand the Citizens United ruling. Remember three Republican justices on that court were not on the court when the five to four ruling on Citizens United came down. He's pushing for an even further deregulation of campaign finance.

I will say this. I think short of getting rid of the Citizens United precedent, which again, I agree is a long term project, there are still things within the Citizens United paradigm, even inside the Citizens United ruling itself, that can be done. Let me give you two examples. The Citizens United ruling says very explicitly that government mandates for disclosure of spending are permissible. The Democrats do have a bill in Congress that was supported by I think maybe it's actually at this point all democratic senators called the Disclose Act, which would require disclosure of all dark money in the federal election system.

At least we would know who is spending the money. Let's remember, a lot of this billionaire money flowing into politics, we don't even know who's talking to us when we see that money being spent. There is also public financing of elections. Not a perfect solution, but it is certainly constitutionally permissible so that candidates have a way to run for office where they don't have to rely on private money that comes with the expectation of legislative favors.

Brian Lehrer: Does it influence you at all thinking of the history of Citizens United? This goes back a decade or more at this point, but that some of the support for that decision came from unions and came from progressive interest groups of various kinds because they wanted the ability to spend unlimited sums of money in support of or in opposition to candidates in elections.

David Sirota: Look, I think anybody who has access to somewhat large amounts of money, you can understand why in their narrow interest, they might want to preserve a system where they get to spend. I would say this. I think when it comes to, for instance, unions, let's use that as an example. Unions do spend in elections. At least in this current economy the way it's set up, they will always, for the foreseeable future, be wildly outspent by capital, oligarchs, corporations.

I think that's a losing game but I also think there's something else at issue here Brian, which is, instead of seeing this as who can spend more, and if I can spend more than I'm for Citizens United, and you may not be for it. Instead of looking at it as a sporting event, we should go back to the question of democracy. By that, I mean this word is thrown around in this election a lot. Democracy.

Democracy is the idea of one person, one vote. It will never be perfect. Money will always play a factor at some level in politics. If you want to know what the democracy crisis is, it's not just Donald Trump and his threat of democracy. The democracy crisis is the last 50 years of many, many, many, if not most elections and policy and legislation being bought by the highest bidder. That's what Citizens United fundamentally threatens.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you one news-of-the-day question before we run out of time. You were just talking about unions. The Teamsters announced yesterday that they will not be endorsing either candidate in the election. It's very rare for the Teamsters not to endorse a democrat, though they did endorse I believe Ronald Reagan in the '80s, George HW Bush. It comes after the union released polling showing its membership, almost 60% preferring to endorse Trump with just 34% backing Harris.

Although I saw the president of the United Auto Workers on CNN last night, they have endorsed Harris. They were talking about how there are a lot of Teamsters locals in Pennsylvania and other states with a lot of support for Harris where locally she polled very well and there's still going to be a turning out a lot of votes. I don't know. What do you make of the union's decision not to endorse and whether it matters politically and why so many Teamsters would support Donald Trump today?

David Sirota: I think if we take their polling numbers at their word, I think part of this is the leadership of the Teamsters being afraid to issue an endorsement that defies what they believe is the will of their membership. These union leaders do answer to their members. Unions aren't like corporations in the sense that there is some democratic accountability over their leadership. I think it's a reflection of that.

The deeper question of why would it be that so many members of a union would support Donald Trump who pushed forward various anti union policies? Why would they support Donald Trump or the membership be split with Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris, who's part of an administration that helped, for instance, the pension of Teamsters members? That's a deeper question.

I do think it goes to the fact that look, people in an election, they're considering all sorts of different issues. Not necessarily just their union affiliation. To be honest, Brian, look, the election, and I lament this, American politics has become much more of a culture war or perceived to be a culture war than an economic class war. I think that's after decades of big-money politics trying to essentially remove the economic class debate from politics to the point where elections become much more of a cultural contest. Donald Trump enjoys that, and I think he flourishes in that.

Brian Lehrer: David Sirota, founder and editor in chief of The Lever, host of their new podcast, Master Plan, about the 50-plus year ago origins of Project 2025, also co-creator of the movie Don't Look Up, and former presidential campaign speech writer for Bernie Sanders. David, thank you for joining us.

David Sirota: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

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