MAGA has always hated the Constitution. Every single word, article, and amendment to it. MAGA’s 40 year mission to pack the federal judiciary, and the freedom-hating legal theories that MAGA judicial appointees bring to the bench, has had as its singular mission the diminishing and eventual elimination of individual rights and the maximization of government power — culminating in the concentration of centralized, federal government power.
MAGA’s quack legal theories to eliminate our Constitutional rights and judicial protections of those rights are legion. On one day, they’ll claim that acts of state governments should be exempt from the federal Bill of Rights, and need not abide by it. On another day, they’ll claim that the judicial branch has no authority to protect and enforce our Constitutional rights. The late Texas representative Ron Paul actually introduced the “We the People Act,” a bill to strip courts of their power to enforce and protect our Constitutional rights.
More recently, MAGA has claimed that state legislatures have the sole power to establish election and voting rules for that state; under MAGA’s “independent state legislature” theory, neither the state constitution nor even the state Supreme Court may touch, challenge or void election laws enacted by the state legislature. The state legislature alone would have the power to set election policy. (Hint: not the federal government, and certainly not a political party. Hold that thought.)
Make no mistake, MAGA has tried every trick in the book, and several tricks not in the book, to nullify our basic legal rights.
But when they want a convenient, brute-force method of furthering their brutal agenda, their willingness to capitalize on honest, robust interpretations of the Constitution for use as a crowbar to advance their totalitarian Project 2025 agenda is absolutely shameless. They will exploit the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to clear a path for the elimination of equal protection. Their sudden, breathless appeals to individual rights, states’ rights, and constraints on federal government power can sound incredibly convincing.
They will claim “parental rights” when parental rights are interpreted to protect their legal “right” to beat or abuse their children. Yet, in the purest of irony, they will deny the rights of parents who support their LGBTQ+ children — ludicrously claiming that supporting their LGBTQ+ children is itself “child abuse.”
MAGA’s strategic, seemingly full-throated claims to Constitutionally protected rights are nothing more than a ruse; they weaponize the Constitution’s existing precedents and protections to ultimately tear down those very same protections, like using intact pieces of a building to further vandalize and destroy that same building. When you understand that MAGA sees the Constitution’s remaining protections as weapons to be used against itself, many of the most egregious hypocrisies and self-contradictions come into perfect focus.
It explains why MAGA was willing to exploit the independent state legislature theory to secure fascist power at the state level, using the state-level power thus attained as a path to build what they really want: a federal government that now demands unlimited and arbitrary power over how those same states run elections. It explains why MAGA shamelessly files litigation based on the Equal Protection Clause to advance and implement racist policies that render that very clause toothless.
It explains why MAGA argued for “state sovereignty” and Tenth Amendment rights when the federal government was protecting rights and liberties from state suppression. MAGA didn’t like the Supreme Court or Congress protecting liberties so they seized upon states’ rights in hopes of immunizing state governments from any federal interference with their oppression. They never really believed in states’ rights at all; MAGA simply saw the Tenth Amendment as a temporary shield that they would jettison entirely when they finally secured federal power.
It explains why those who supported “Convention of the States” and those who now support its near opposite, Project 2025, are all the same people.