Home ›

Conservative Action Project

Printer-friendly version Send to friend

Religious Right Groups And Chamber of Commerce Fail To Block District Court Nominee

Submitted by Brian Tashman on May 4, 2011 - 2:20pm

Religious Right and pro-corporate groups failed today to block President Obama’s nominee for U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, John McConnell, from receiving an up-or-down vote in the Senate. The Senate invoked cloture on McConnell’s nomination in a 63-33 vote, defeating the filibuster against McConnell. Filibusters against district court judges are extremely rare—only a handful of District Court nominees have ever faced cloture votes, and none have ever been blocked—and many Republicans previously vowed they would never filibuster a judicial nominee.

Today’s vote came after a long wait for McConnell: according to The Providence Journal, the delay caused by the concerted right-wing effort to block McConnell forced Rhode Island’s chief federal judge to “take the unusual step of reassigning more than two dozen civil cases to judges in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.”

Why the tough fight? McConnell faced virulent opposition from the Chamber of Commerce over his role fighting big tobacco companies and lead paint manufacturers. The Chamber and other groups that oppose corporate accountability found allies in the Religious Right groups that decided to fight McConnell as well.

The Conservative Action Project made McConnell a top target of their efforts. The group includes pro-corporate organizations like the 60 Plus Association, National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Limited Government, Citizens United, and American Tax Reform, along with social conservatives such as the Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, Heritage Action, American Values, Liberty Counsel Action, and Eagle Forum. The Conservative Action Project’s Memo to the Movement [PDF] claimed McConnell was unqualified to serve in the judiciary because he was a trial lawyer with a history of challenging big business.

Eagle Forum derided him as a “pro-choice, anti-business, pro-judicial activism nominee” who “has made numerous anti-business statements.” The Family Research Council slammed McConnell for his ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the country’s most prominent civil rights organizations, and Phillip Jauregui’s Judicial Action Group said that his link to the SPLC and the American Constitution Society shows he “supports organizations who support homosexual marriage and oppose conservative politicians.”

While the Corporate Right and the Religious Right of the McConnell nomination failed, many of these organizations will continue to work together to block other qualified judicial nominees and aggravate the country’s burgeoning judicial vacancy crisis.

PFAW
Filed under:

What Happens When The Right Buys Its Own Lies

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on July 1, 2010 - 2:19pm

Since the establishment conservative movement never stops trying to co-opt the Tea Party mantle for itself, I guess that means I have to keep covering their efforts as well.

I've written about the Conservative Action Project before, noting that it is one of the many right-wing coalitions that exist to establish the party line of the issue of the day, often though "Memo for the Movement" statements that it releases. These memos tend to be mostly meaningless collections of bullet points and links, but apparently members of the coalition feel they serve some purpose, which is why they keep issuing them.

The latest memo carries the names of a wide variety of right-wing leaders - including Ed Meese, Wendy Wright, Grover Norquist, Gary Bauer, Mat Staver, Curt Levey, Andrea Lafferty, and Louis Sheldon - who have joined together to commend the Tea Party Movement for its "fidelity to the Constitution."

And after the memo's standard pointless bullet points, this paragraph appears:

Earlier this year, many Tea Party Movement leaders and conservative leaders found common ground at a meeting and ceremony at the Collingwood Library & Museum in Alexandria, VA-- part of the original Mount Vernon Estate owned by President George Washington. The Mount Vernon Statement, issued on February 17, 2010, restates the ideas of the American founding as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It was signed by over 100 leaders-including Tea Party Movement leaders--representing tens of millions of conservative activists nationwide and re-enforced the principles of Constitutional Conservatism for the 21st Century.

Do you remember the Mount Vernon Statement?  It was the attempt earlier this year by these very same activists to co-opt the Tea Party movement by merging it with the establishment conservative movement.

But it was all for naught, as a short time later the Tea Party movement released its own "Contract From America" manifesto which explicitly excluded any and all social issues.

The Tea Party movement's consistent refusal to adopt the Religious Right's agenda as part of the Tea Party agenda has infuriated establishment conservatives to no end, which is why they have continuously worked to co-opt the movement for their own ends ... leading to situations like this where the conservative establishment drafts and signs a document proclaiming its own agenda while unilaterally claiming that it represents the Tea Party movement - and then later, using that same document as an excuse to commend itself for its "fidelity to the Constitution."

PFAW
Filed under:

Conservative Action Project: A New Name For the Same Old Right-Wing Agenda

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on February 1, 2010 - 12:13pm

Several months ago, I wrote a post noting the emergence of the new right-wing coalition calling itself that Conservative Action Project. At the time, all that I could figure out about it was that its membership included several Religious Right leaders and it seemed to operate out of the Council for National Policy.

Today, the Washington Post examines the role that new media is playing in shaping and disseminating conservative messaging throughout the right-wing echo chamber and reports that the Conservative Action Project is playing a a key role in that effort through the weekly meetings hosted by the Family Research Council:

Inside the Beltway, much of it is fueled by the Conservative Action Project (CAP), a new group of conservative leaders chaired by Reagan-era attorney general Edwin Meese III. CAP, whose influential memos "for the movement" circulate on Capitol Hill, is an offshoot of the Council for National Policy, a highly secretive organization of conservative leaders and donors.

...

At 7:30 a.m., members of the Conservative Action Project gather at the Family Research Council, a social conservative group.

CAP grew out of a series of meetings of conservatives, determined to engineer a political comeback, in the weeks after Obama's election. One took place during a Council for National Policy meeting at a D.C. hotel, conservatives said. The secretive council was formed in the early 1980s to coordinate what was then called the "New Right."

Key players in CAP, members said, include Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway; Greg Mueller, president of CRC Public Relations; and former congressman David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.). Its only paid staff member is Patrick Pizzella, an official in the George W. Bush administration, who works out of the Council for National Policy offices.

Among CAP's projects was supporting the Health Care Freedom Coalition, whose more than 50 economic and social conservative groups quietly built health-care opposition, CAP members said. The coalition is a spinoff of FreedomWorks, the D.C.-based group that works extensively with tea-party activists.

CAP also worked unsuccessfully to defeat David F. Hamilton, Obama's first appellate judicial nominee. A Nov. 9 CAP memo calling Hamilton "an ideologue first and a jurist second" helped trigger blog blasts from Erickson and an anti-Hamilton speech at the conservative Federalist Society by Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Judiciary Committee Republican.

PFAW
Filed under:

How Many Coalitions Does The Religious Right Need?

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on October 7, 2009 - 2:02pm

Over the last several months, we've been chronicling the seemingly endless emergence of new Religious Right groups and coalitions. 

In recent months we've witnessed the arrival of the American Principles Project and the Faith and Freedom Institute, which was followed by Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition, while Newt Gingrich was unveiling his Renewing American Leadership effort, and Lou Engle was announcing his Call to Action.  And then a bunch of Religious Right leaders came together under the banner of the Freedom Federation, but apparently the Freedom Federation wasn't enough because now there is something Conservative Action Project which has been sending out "memos for the [conservative] movement" on a regular basis [PDF]:

The Conservative Action Project, chaired by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, is designed to facilitate conservative leaders working together on behalf of common goals. Participation is extended to leaders of groups representing all major elements of the conservative movement—economic, social and national security.

The Conservative Action Project doesn't seem to have a fixed membership, though the memos usually carry the names of people like Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Gary Bauer of American Values, among others.

To date, the coalition has issued memos demanding that heathcare legislation contain lawsuit reform and doesn't include coverage for abortion, one blasting President Obama for supposedly carrying out an "apology and appeasement tour," one decrying the "culture of corruption," and a new memo "requiring that legislation be available on the Internet for 72 hours before consideration by the House."

This new group seems to have some sort of link to the Center for National Policy, considering that the contact info listed on this memo uses the email address: @cfnpaction.org. The Council for National Policy's URL is cfnp.org, and it has an affiliated c4 known as CNP Action.

PFAW
Filed under:
Syndicate content