#ed feulner

BREAKING: Jim DeMint Out at Heritage

The Heritage Foundation has confirmed that former senator Jim DeMint has been asked to resign as president. A statement was issued by Thomas A. Saunders III, chairman of The Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees.

The Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees, by a unanimous vote, has asked for and received the resignation of Jim DeMint as president and CEO of the organization. The Board elected…

UPDATE: All-Staff Meeting Called at Heritage, “Leadership Change” to Be Discussed

The Washington Examiner is reporting that an all-staff meeting has been called at The Heritage Foundation to discuss “the news reports about a leadership change at Heritage.” The meeting was called by DeMint’s predecessor at Heritage, Ed Feulner, and was set place to begin this afternoon at 4:30pm.

Heritage’s Board of Directors met this morningto discuss DeMint’s fate; the Examiner reports that…

Ed Feulner, former president of The Heritage Foundation. (Photo: Cliff Owen/AP)

Ed Feulner, former president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, has joined Donald Trump’s transition team to help prepare for the possibility of a win by the Republican presidential candidate this fall.

Feulner, 75, is the first major figure with deep credibility in the conservative movement to join the Trump transition effort, which is being run by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Two sources with direct knowledge of Feulner’s involvement confirmed his role.

Contacted by phone, Feulner confirmed that he is working for Trump’s transition team but declined to comment and referred questions to the Trump campaign.

Feulner is credited with building the Heritage Foundation from a small, struggling policy think tank in the 1970s to the influential behemoth it became during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and beyond. He retired as president in 2013, when former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, took the reins of the organization.

The addition of Feulner has great symbolic value for Trump, who is viewed with intense suspicion by many conservatives who doubt his commitment to their ideology. However, despite the addition of Feulner, Christie is having trouble finding people to fill many of the slots needed to run a successful transition team, according to one conservative policy expert in Washington, D.C.

When asked about the lack of names announced so far, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks argued that the transition effort has “a great team and tremendous, overwhelming interest, but the campaign is focused on connecting with voters and Mr. Trump’s message and vision for the country.”

Hicks added that “Hillary Clinton may put an inordinate amount of focus on her transition team because she is relying on a rigged system that has propelled her thus far.”

Clinton has several high-profile Democrats — led by former interior secretary and Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar — running her transition.

Both Trump and Clinton have taxpayer-funded office space provided for a transition effort, the result of a 2010 law that moved up the availability of such money to just after the party conventions, rather than after the election.

Winner: Senator Jim DeMint, two-term Tea Party senator from South Carolina, who dropped a bomb on just about everyone (including his brain trust of fellow South Carolina whack-jobs, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Gov. Nikki Haley) by announcing that he's resigning from the Senate come January in order to head the überlensherr of all conservative think-tanks, The Heritage Foundation.

I don't think I'm overstating if I say that The Heritage Foundation, since its inception in 1973, has done more than any other single organization to move the national political conversation to the far right. Responsible for a myriad of big-time Republican agenda stuff — like the content of Paul Ryan's pseudo-Ayn Randian budget plan, Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and the organization which helped kill the Clinton healthcare bill — The Heritage Foundation is, and always has been, made up of the power elite within the GOP. 

While it is a shocker that DeMint is resigning, what's even more shocking is that Ed Feulner is resigning. Feulner has been the president of The Heritage Foundation for most of its existence. He was on board at its inception, and was recruited in 1977 by another of the organizations founders, Richard Mellon-Scaiff (the heir to the Carnegie-Mellon oligarchy). He's held the position ever since. In other words, this guy is the most famous, powerful, and influential politico you've never heard of.

How deep do his tracks cut? Feulner was on Reagan's transition team back in '81 but declined a position at the White House. Instead, he participated in Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet" during the first term, along with Heritage Foundation co-founder Joseph Coors (Tap the Rockies!). Reagan chief-of-staff (and later, Heritage Foundation distinguished chair holder) Ed Meese wrote a letter promising Feulner that "this Administration will cooperate fully with your efforts." And cooperate, they did, instituting the sharpest political right turn of the 20th century. 

In many ways, DeMint is a strange choice as Feulner's successor. Whereas Feulner has held to the background durning most of his tenure, orchestrating much of the last 30 years' conservative messaging in the form of policy papers, private campaign funding, and congressional testimony (all executed by a rogue's gallery of HF henchmen), DeMint (a former marketing executive) has used his time in the spotlight as the GOP's go-to attack dog. Here are some highlights:

• In 2000, DeMint staged a rally at which he tossed 17,000 pages of IRS tax code out of a hot air balloon. His point? Abolish the IRS, and taxation in general. That'd be great, except then stoplights wouldn't work anymore. And planes would crash every day. And there would be no teachers or firefighters anymore. Good plan.

• In 2007, his successful opposition to immigration reform — specifically, a proposal that would allow illegal immigrants a way to gain citizenship — created the oft-used rhetorical flourish "amnesty" to describe those seeking to keep their families in the US. DeMint: 1; Dream Act: 0.

• He's fond of using measured language to describe what would happen were his political opponents to succeed at anything: "Freedom is dissolving!" Oh, and, "America is teetering toward tyranny!" That's my favorite.

• Among the weirdos DeMint has supported, no one stands out quite like the recently defeated Todd Akin, whom DeMint backed up after the MO Republican claimed that women who are raped have secret lady juices that can distinguish between rape sperm and not-rape sperm. "We support Todd Akin," said a statement from DeMint's PAC, "and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us."

• A self-styled kingmaker, DeMint (through his PAC, the Senate Conservative's Fund), credits himself with the 2010 Tea Party sweep through Congress. In funding the campaigns of dozens of Tea Party candidates around the country, DeMint was instrumental in reshaping Congress into the well-oiled machine we see chugging along today (*ahem*). Among the jewels in his crown: the election of potential presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.

While the style with which DeMint executes his agendas doesn't scream "Conservative Shadow Government Illuminati Puppet Master," the substance of his ideology certainly dovetails nicely with that of The Heritage Foundation. So what was the tipping point that got DeMint the job? Cash, and his ability to raise it and spend it.

Seeing the success that DeMint and others had in insinuating themselves into Congressional elections around the country using PAC money, the Heritage Foundation announced during the 2010 election cycle that they were starting Heritage Action, their own PAC with similar aims. "The Heritage Foundation makes [politicians] see the light," said Feulner in a 2011 interview with The New Republic. "Heritage Action makes them feel the heat." (*shudder*)

The establishment of Heritage Action marked a shift in the Heritage Foundation's tactical M.O., away from shadow-lobbying (they insist they aren't lobbyists, but damned if I can tell the difference), and toward the micro-economy of newly legal election rigging (post-Citizens United). 

Besides DeMint's obvious facility with how and where to direct PAC money, both he and the Heritage Foundation hang out with the same crew. The Koch Brothers and their interests have funneled tens of thousands of dollars into DeMint's campaigns and his PACs. They've given millions to the Heritage Foundation. 

Unlike his so-to-be predecessor, I don't think we'll see a many-decades long tenure for DeMint. He was urged by true believers to throw his hat into the presidential primary last year, and I gotta think he considered it. This new job might just be the springboard he needs to catapult himself into serious contention for the GOP 2016 nomination. He's bound to make new and powerful friends at his new job, the kind of friends who pull presidential strings from behind the curtain. Could the Heritage Foundation be grooming its very own candidate?

Loser: The Tea Party who, while they may be gaining an institutional supporter with DeMint's new position, is also losing their most vocal advocate in the Senate. 

Beyond that, DeMint's sudden departure stinks of a rat abandoning a sinking ship. Many of his Tea Party allies in Congress whom he helped elect in the first place, representatives like Allen West (FL), Todd Akin (MO), Chip Cravaak (MN), and Joe Walsh (IL), were roundly defeated in November's election. Add to that a slew of polls, including a Winthrop University Poll in DeMint's home state of South Carolina, which show a severe enthusiasm gap for the once popular Tea Party.

Although his efforts at electing Tea Partiers in 2010 have gone down as DeMint's greatest political victory to date, similar efforts in the 2012 election cycle were met with loss after loss. Aside from his support of Akin and his "legitimate rape" claims, DeMint was successful in defeating longtime GOP Sen. Dick Luger of Indiana during the primary, only to have Richard Mourdock, his Tea Party candidate and defender of the idea that pregnancy from rape is "something that God intended," defeated by Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly. DeMint also funded failed Tea Party bids by Sharron Angle (NV) and Christine O'Donnell (DE).