On May 16, the New York Times reported that, during the tense period between the January 6 insurrection and Biden’s inauguration, Justice Samuel Alito’s family displayed an upside-down American flag outside their home. An upside-down flag is a distress signal — a way that soldiers or ships at sea show that they are in extraordinary danger.

Taken in isolation, it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions from this flag. The Times reports that many supporters of the “Stop the Steal” campaign — former President Donald Trump’s failed effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election — embraced an inverted American flag to signal their belief that the United States was in grave danger. Alito claims that the flag was raised by his wife “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

But this flag is hardly an isolated incident. On the bench, Alito is the Supreme Court’s most unrelenting Republican partisan — a reliable vote for whatever outcome is preferred by the GOP’s right wing, regardless of whether there is any legal support for that position. Alito isn’t simply a bad judge; he is the negation of law, frequently embracing claims that even intellectual leaders within the conservative movement find risible.

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The morning before the Times published its flag scoop, for example, Alito published a dissenting opinion claiming that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was unconstitutional. The opinion was so poorly reasoned that Justice Clarence Thomas, ordinarily an ally of far-right causes, mocked Alito’s opinion for “winding its way through English, Colonial, and early American history” without ever connecting that history to anything that’s actually in the Constitution.

Off the bench, meanwhile, Alito has a long history of making partisan statements that are just ambiguous enough that he can deny he was bemoaning a Republican defeat in a recent election. A little more than a week after Democratic President Barack Obama won his 2012 reelection race, Alito spoke to the conservative Federalist Society, where, quoting from one of his least favorite law professors, he warned that America is caught in a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.”

Alito has long been the justice most skeptical of free speech arguments — he was the sole dissenter in two Obama-era decisions establishing that even extraordinarily offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment — but this skepticism evaporates the minute a Republican claims that they are being censored. Among other things, Alito voted to let Texas’s Republican legislature seize control over content moderation at sites like Twitter and YouTube, then tried to prohibit the Biden administration from asking those same sites to voluntarily remove content from anti-vaxxers and election deniers.

Alito frequently mocks his colleagues, even fellow Republicans, when they attribute government policies to anti-Black racism. After Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion that the states of Louisiana and Oregon allowed non-unanimous juries to convict felony defendants more than a century ago to dilute the influence of Black jurors, Alito was livid, ranting in dissent: “To add insult to injury, the Court tars Louisiana and Oregon with the charge of racism.”

Yet while Alito denies that racism might have motivated Louisiana’s Jim Crow lawmakers in the late 19th century, he brims with empathy for white plaintiffs who claim to be victims of racism. When a white firefighter alleged that he was denied a promotion because of his race, Alito was quick to tie this decision to the local mayor’s fear that he “would incur the wrath of … influential leaders of New Haven’s African-American community” if the city didn’t promote more non-white firefighters.

Empirical data shows that Alito is the most pro-prosecution justice on the Supreme Court, voting in favor of criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time. But he’s tripped over himself to protect one criminal defendant in particular: Donald Trump. An empirical analysis of the Court’s “standing” decisions — cases asking whether the federal courts have jurisdiction over a particular dispute — found that Alito rules in favor of conservative litigants 100 percent of the time, and against liberal litigants in every single case.

Though Alito, who turned 74 last month, is probably in the twilight of his career, his unapologetically partisan approach to judging could very well be the judiciary’s future, at least if Trump secures another term in the White House.

Today’s headlines are peppered with names like Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Trump’s stolen documents trial who has also behaved like a member of Trump’s defense team, or Matthew Kacsmaryk, the former Christian right litigator who’s been willing to rubber stamp virtually any request for a court order filed by a Republican. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the powerful federal court that oversees appeals out of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, is now a bastion of Alito-like partisans who treat laws and precedents that undermine the GOP’s policy goals as mere inconveniences to be struck down or ignored.

These are the sorts of judicial appointees who would likely appeal to a second-term Trump, as the instigator of the January 6 insurrection looks to fill the bench with judges who will not interfere with his ambitions in the same way that many judges did in his first term.

Alito — a judge with no theory of the Constitution, and no insight into how judges should read ambiguous laws, beyond his driving belief that his team should always win — is the perfect fit, in other words, for what the Republican Party has become in the age of Trump.

Samuel Alito, by the numbers

It’s probably possible to go through any long-serving judge’s record and find opinions that aren’t especially persuasive. So, rather than rely on anecdotal evidence of Alito’s partisanship, let’s start with two empirical analyses of his behavior on the Supreme Court.

Political scientist Lee Epstein examined how often each current justice votes for a defendant’s position in criminal cases. Her data, which was first reported by NBC News, shows a fairly clear partisan divide. All three of the Court’s Democrats voted with criminal defendants in over half of the cases they heard, with former public defender Ketanji Brown Jackson favoring defendants in nearly 4 out of 5 cases. All six of the Court’s Republicans, meanwhile, vote with criminal defendants less than half the time.

But there is also a great deal of variation among the Republicans. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the most libertarian of the Court’s Republican appointees, voted with criminal defendants in 45 percent of cases. Alito, who once served as the top federal prosecutor in the state of New Jersey, is the most pro-prosecution justice, voting with criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time.

Yet Alito’s distrust for criminal defense lawyers seemed to evaporate the minute the leader of his political party became a criminal defendant. At oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the case asking whether Trump is immune from prosecution for his attempt to steal the 2020 election, Alito offered a dizzying argument for why his Court should give presidents broad immunity from criminal consequences.

If an incumbent president who “loses a very close, hotly contested election” knows that they could face prosecution, Alito claimed, “will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito’s supposed concern was that a losing candidate will not “leave office peacefully” if they could be prosecuted by the incoming administration.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that Trump is a case about a president who refused to leave office peacefully. Trump even incited an insurrection at the US Capitol after he lost his reelection bid.

Similarly, in Fischer v. United States, a case asking whether January 6 insurrectionists can be charged under a statute making it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding, Alito peppered Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar with concerns that, if the January 6 defendants can be convicted under this law, that could someday lead to overly aggressive prosecutions of political protesters. At one point, Alito even took the side of a hypothetical heckler who starts screaming in the middle of a Supreme Court argument and is later charged with obstructing the proceeding.

Alito can also set aside his pro-prosecution instincts in cases involving right-wing causes such as gun rights. At oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi, for example, Alito was one of the only justices who appeared open to a lower court’s ruling that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders have a Second Amendment right to own a gun. Indeed, many of Alito’s questions echoed so-called men’s rights advocates, who complain that judges unthinkingly issue these restraining orders without investigating the facts of a particular case.

Consider, as well, a case analysis by Adam Unikowsky, a Supreme Court litigator who previously clerked for conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

In order to bring a federal lawsuit, a plaintiff must show that they were injured in some way by the defendant they wish to sue — a requirement known as “standing.” Unikowsky looked at 10 years’ worth of Supreme Court standing cases, first classifying each case as one where a “conservative” litigant brought a lawsuit, or as one where a “progressive” litigant filed suit. He then looked at how every current justice voted.

Nearly every justice sometimes voted against their political views — Thomas, for example, voted four times that a conservative litigant lacked standing and twice voted in favor of a progressive litigant. Alito, however, was the exception. In all six cases brought by a conservative, Alito voted for the suit to move forward. Meanwhile, in all 10 cases brought by a progressive, Alito voted to deny standing.

(Unikowsky also found that Justice Jackson, the Court’s newest member, has not yet crossed over in a standing case, but the data includes only one case, where she joined a 6–3 decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee.)

Some of Alito’s standing opinions are genuinely embarrassing. The worst is his dissent in California v. Texas (2021), one of the four cases where Thomas voted to deny standing to a conservative litigant.

Texas was the third of three Supreme Court cases attempting to destroy the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. But even many high-profile Republicans found this lawsuit humiliating. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board labeled this case the “Texas Obamacare Blunder.” Conservative policy wonk Yuval Levin wrote in the National Review that Texas “doesn’t even merit being called silly. It’s ridiculous.”

As originally drafted, Obamacare required most Americans to pay higher taxes if they did not obtain health insurance. In 2017, however, Congress eliminated this tax by zeroing it out. The Texas plaintiffs claimed that this zero-dollar tax was unconstitutional, and that the proper remedy was that the Affordable Care Act must be repealed in its entirety.

No one is allowed to bring a federal lawsuit unless they can show that they’ve been injured in some way. A zero-dollar tax obviously injures no one, because it doesn’t require anyone to pay anything. And so seven justices concluded that the Texas lawsuit must be tossed out.

Alito dissented. While it is difficult to summarize his convoluted reasoning concisely, he essentially argued that, even if the zero-dollar tax did not injure these plaintiffs, they were injured by various other provisions of Obamacare and thus had standing.

This is simply not how standing works — a litigant cannot manufacture standing to challenge one provision of federal law by claiming they are injured by another, completely different provision of federal law. As Jonathan Adler, one of the architects of a different Supreme Court suit attacking Obamacare, wrote of Alito’s opinion, “standing simply cannot work the way that Justice Alito wants it to” because, if it did, “it would become child’s play to challenge every provision of every major federal law so long as some constitutional infirmity could be located somewhere within the statute’s text.”

Alito’s Texas opinion, in other words, would allow virtually anyone to challenge any major federal law, eviscerating the requirement that someone must actually be injured by a law before they can file a federal lawsuit against it. Needless to say, Alito does not take such a blasé attitude toward standing when left-leaning litigants appear in his Court. But, when handed a lawsuit that could sabotage Obama’s legacy, Alito was willing to waive one of the most well-established checks on judicial power so that he could invalidate the keystone of that legacy.

Alito’s jurisprudence of white racial innocence

In a 2005 speech explaining why he opposed Chief Justice John Roberts’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, then-Sen. Obama explained how he thinks judges actually decide difficult cases. While “95 percent” of cases can be resolved solely by looking at neutral legal principles, Obama said, “adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon” in the especially challenging cases that come before the Supreme Court.

In those hardest cases, Obama argued, “that last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

One might think that empathy, which means the capacity to understand the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of another person, would be an essential quality in anyone tasked with judging other people. But Republicans later latched onto Obama’s statement as evidence that his judicial appointees would decide cases based on feelings and vibes, instead of law. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in 2016, “the President’s idea of what’s appropriate for justices to consider is totally at odds with our constitutional system. We are a government of laws and not a government of judges.”

Alito’s jurisprudence, however, displays neither the universal empathy touted by Obama nor the kind of mechanical application of legal principles imagined by Grassley. Instead, Alito engages in selective empathy, often mocking the concerns of left-leaning litigants while simultaneously being extraordinarily protective of conservatives. And this selective empathy is most obvious in Alito’s decisions involving race.

Alito lashes out at his colleagues when they accuse white lawmakers — even, in one case, white lawmakers in the Jim Crow South — of racism. Yet he showed tremendous empathy for the firefighter who claimed to be a victim of anti-white discrimination.

Indeed, one of the unifying themes in Alito’s race cases is his desire to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law — and especially into American voting rights law.

Consider, for example, Alito’s majority opinion in Abbott v. Perez (2018), where the Court’s Republican majority rejected a claim that Texas’s GOP-friendly congressional maps were an illegal racial gerrymander.

In 2011, the Texas legislature drew maps that never took effect, and that were eventually declared an illegal gerrymander by a federal court. Because of the legal challenges to these maps, the state legislature drew alternative maps in 2012 that were supposed to be used only in that year’s election. Though much of these interim 2012 maps closely resembled the illegal 2011 maps, a court allowed Texas to use them in the 2012 election because otherwise the state would not have been able to conduct the election at all.

Then, in 2013, the Texas legislature passed a new law converting the 2012 stopgap maps into permanent maps, meaning that they would be used until the next census in 2020. The state legislature did so, moreover, despite the fact that many of the districts in these new maps were still being challenged as unlawful racial gerrymanders.

Alito’s opinion in Perez, however, cut most of these challenges off. He reasoned that “the 2013 Legislature’s intent was legitimate” because the decision to convert the interim maps into permanent maps was not driven by racism. Rather, it was driven by a desire to “bring the litigation about the State’s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.”

Alito’s argument, in other words, was that the 2013 maps were permissible because they were enacted to shut down a lawsuit challenging a racial gerrymander. It’s as if the school districts that were declared unlawfully segregated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) had simply passed a new law re-creating the same racially segregated schools that existed before Brown was decided, and then argued that the new law should be upheld because it was enacted to end a lawsuit challenging segregation.

Consider, as well, Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), a case asking whether two Arizona election laws that allegedly had a disproportionate negative impact on nonwhite voters violated a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act.

In rejecting this claim, Alito simply made up a bunch of new limits on the Voting Rights Act that appear nowhere in the law’s text. He declared, for example, that state laws which purport to fight voter fraud are presumptively legal. He also applied a strong presumption that any voting restriction that was commonplace in 1982 does not violate the 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act.

This later presumption is completely ridiculous. The only reason why Congress enacts any law is because it wants to change the status quo. If Congress enacted a new voting rights law in 1982, that means that Congress was unsatisfied with the state of voting rights in 1982 and wanted to change it — not to preserve restrictions that were commonplace at the time.

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her Brnovich dissent, Alito’s opinion “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.”

Alito’s selective concern about the First Amendment

Earlier this month, Alito delivered the commencement address at Franciscan University, a Catholic school in Ohio. Much of his speech echoed the sort of anti-“cancel culture” rhetoric that can be heard on any given episode of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.

“Troubled waters are slamming against some of our most fundamental principles,” Alito told the graduates, echoing similar rhetoric that he used to describe the reelection of President Obama in 2012. “Support for freedom of speech,” Alito claimed, “is declining dangerously, especially where it should find broadest and widest acceptance.”

Alito’s concern about free speech is a little jarring, because he’s long been the justice least likely to back free speech claims by civil rights plaintiffs. In 2010 and 2011, for example, Alito was the sole dissenter in two important free speech cases reiterating the Court’s well-established view that speech is protected by the First Amendment even if it is likely to offend most people.

The justice’s more recent free speech decisions, meanwhile, largely turn on whether the party that wishes to shape public discourse is a Democrat or a Republican.

In 2021, for example, Texas’s Republican legislature enacted a law that effectively seizes control over all content moderation at major social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. The law was an explicit effort to force these platforms to host right-wing content that they would prefer not to publish. “It is now law that conservative viewpoints in Texas cannot be banned on social media,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said when he signed the law.

The law is also comically unconstitutional. The Court held in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), that “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And it held in Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974), a publication’s choice to publish or not publish certain content is subject only to the outlet’s “editorial control and judgment,” and “it has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press.”

Yet, when a majority of his colleagues voted to temporarily block this Texas law, Alito dissented, suggesting that Texas’s Republican lawmakers should have more leeway to address “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

Not long after Alito wrote this dissent, however, the Court heard another case, known as Murthy v. Missouri, which involved an unusual order handed down by the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That order effectively forbade the Biden administration from asking social media companies to voluntarily remove harmful content, such as videos seeking to recruit terrorists or tweets that promote false and potentially dangerous medical advice.

Once again, a majority of Alito’s colleagues voted to block this lower court order. Once again, Alito dissented.

It should be obvious that the First Amendment cannot simultaneously empower a Republican government to force media outlets to change their editorial policies, while also forbidding a Democratic government from asking a media outlet to change what it publishes — unless, of course, you believe that there is one First Amendment for Democrats and a different one for Republicans.

Later in his address to Francisan’s graduating class, Alito had a revealing line about why he believes that freedom of religion is threatened in the United States. “Religious liberty is also threatened,” Alito claimed. Then he warned the graduates that “when you venture out into the world, you may well find yourself in a job, or community or a social setting when you will be pressured to endorse ideas you don’t believe, or to abandon core beliefs.”

This warning blurs an important line between the kind of pressure that can plausibly violate “religious liberty,” and the kind of pressure that is just an ordinary part of living in a pluralistic society.

Alito is correct that, under some circumstances, a worker who is pressured because of their religious beliefs at work may have a viable religious liberty claim. That’s because federal law requires employers to accommodate their employee’s religious beliefs unless doing so would impose an “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.” So, for example, if a worker’s boss pressured a conservative Catholic employee to sign a statement endorsing the right to an abortion, such pressure would likely violate this worker’s civil rights.

But there is no right to be free from pressure, or even social ostracization, because people in your community or social circles find your religious beliefs abhorrent. If freedom of religion means anything, it must include both the right of a conservative evangelical to believe that gay people are sinful, and the right of everyone else to turn up their nose in disgust at anyone who expresses such a viewpoint.

Yet Alito hasn’t simply argued that conservative Christians have a right not to be shunned for their views, he’s argued that the rights of gay Americans must be diminished in order to protect the feelings of people who oppose those rights. Hence Alito’s argument that Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, was wrongly decided because “it will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.”

Thus, in Samuel Alito’s America, Republicans have the power to control media, while Democrats can’t even ask media outlets to change what they publish. Meanwhile, the rights of historically marginalized groups must be diminished to prevent anyone from speaking ill of those who would marginalize them.

Can Alito be defended?

A 2023 essay by attorney Adam White tries to find a larger intellectual project behind Alito’s jurisprudence, beyond an overarching command that the Republican Party should always win. Alito, White claims, is a “Burkean conservative,” a reference to the 18th-century English conservative Edmund Burke, who is wary of the “dangers of concentrating too much power [in] the hands of elites or elite institutions.”

White argues that Alito seeks to preserve traditional ways of organizing society, and to diminish the power of institutions that can cause the United States to depart from such traditions. As White writes, “when government action — especially the swift and sweeping work of agencies, executives, and courts, rather than legislatures — threatens longstanding traditions or the institutions and communities that keep and transmit them, Justice Alito’s instinct has been to begin with a presumption in favor of defending tradition.”

Alito, for what it’s worth, appears to think of himself very much as White describes him. In his Franciscan speech, for example, Alito argued that the Constitution “guards against improvident change,” both because the document itself is almost impossible to amend, and because it makes it very difficult for the federal government to make law. The framers of the Constitution, Alito claims, “knew that times would inevitably come when people would be tempted to make hurried and unwise changes,” and they believed that the “country’s well-being depended on the ability to resist these temptations.”

Thus, at Franciscan, Alito presented himself as that most conservative of guardians — a judge who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

But if Alito imagines a country that is slow to change its laws, and one where Congress — and not swifter-moving institutions like the courts or executive branch agencies — are the drivers of policy, this vision appears to wax and wane depending on who is in the White House, and whether a new policy benefits liberals or conservatives.

Consider two cases, both of which involve court decisions that sought to shape US policy.

In Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California (2020), a majority of Alito’s colleagues concluded that the Trump administration failed to complete the appropriate paperwork when it tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA, which had been in effect for eight years when the Court ruled, allows hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children to live and work in this country.

When a Republican administration sought to end a program created by Democrats, Alito behaved exactly as White describes him — warning about concentrating too much power in the judiciary. Shortly after Trump officials tried to end DACA, Alito wrote in dissent, “one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked this rescission, and since then, this issue has been mired in litigation.” He complained that “the federal judiciary” had effectively prevented Trump from implementing one of his policy goals “during an entire presidential term.”

Three years later, however, one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked a different federal policy. Kacsmaryk, the crusader for the religious right that Trump put on the bench, attempted to ban the abortion drug mifepristone nearly a quarter century after the FDA authorized doctors to prescribe it in the United States. Even on Alito’s very conservative, anti-abortion Court, he was one of only two justices who went along with this attempt to remove a widely available medication from the market by judicial decree.

Or consider Alito’s vote in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the challenge to Trump’s decision to ban citizens of several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. Trump did so, moreover, after bragging on the campaign trail about his plan to enact an unconstitutional ban on Muslims entering the United States if elected president.

Before Trump took office, Alito was often the Court’s most outspoken proponent of an expansive concept of religious freedom, especially in cases involving conservative Christians. But Alito abandoned this concern for religious liberty, as well as any concerns about the executive branch setting policy, in the Hawaii case. Instead, Alito joined an opinion claiming that federal law “exudes deference” to President Trump.

Under President Biden, by contrast, Alito’s been one of the Court’s strongest proponents of the so-called major questions doctrine, a judicially created doctrine that’s been used almost exclusively to strike down policies created by Democratic administrations, and that has no basis in either the Constitution’s text or in any statute. Indeed, Alito’s even wielded this doctrine to strike down Biden administration policies that were unambiguously authorized by federal law.

So let’s dispel this fiction that Alito takes a principled, Burkean approach to the law and the Constitution. Alito does often use the sort of rhetoric that is associated with traditionalist forms of conservatism, but that rhetoric only drives his actual decisions when it leads to the outcome he prefers.

Samuel Alito is one of the worst judges of his generation. He rejects the very basic idea that courts must decide cases based on the law, and not based on their partisan views. He routinely embarrasses himself in oral arguments, and in his published opinions, with legal reasoning that no sensible lawyer can take seriously. And he even tries to distort public debate and silence critics.

But most of all, Alito is one of the most uninteresting thinkers in the country. Here he is, in one of the most powerful and intellectually rigorous jobs on the planet — a philosopher king, presiding over the mightiest nation that has ever existed — and his only big idea is “Republicans should win.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5905380&forum_id=2#50145317)

IMMIGRATION & BORDER

- Sealed the Southern Border

- Carried out the most interior removals annually, ever

- Expanded 287(g) by 1823%

- Thousands of third nation deportations

- Built around 200 miles of wall, 750 miles under construction.

- Mega Master Court Hearings for illegals

- Shut down the San Francisco Immigration Court

- Ended TPS for 12 nations

- Slowed renewals and deported some DACA individuals

- Issued Guidance to make sure Public Charge can determine a foreigner's inadmissibility

- Ending the 60-day layoff grace period for work visas

- Revoked over 200k visas

- Revoked at least 2,300 visas related to birth tourism concerns in the past 40 days.

- Two different H-1B fees

- Reweighted H-1Bs

- DOJ first use of Alien Terrorist Removal Court

- Suspended PERM filings of two companies that abused H-1Bs

- Cut fentanyl trafficking at the Southern Border by 56%

- Ended "catch-and-release"

- Reinstated "Remain in Mexico"

- Paused visa processing for 75 nations

- Cut the number of new foreign students in the US by 17%

- Enforced English-language proficiency requirements for commercial truck driving.

- Slashed Refugee admission by 97% and the remaining % went to South Africans

- 10x'd Denaturalizations

- Signed the Laken Riley Act into law

- Terminated the CHNV parole program for over 500k individuals

- Revoked parole for those admitted through the CBP One

- Created a self deportation machine

- Rescinded the "sensitive locations" enforcement policy

- Expanded immigration detention capacity

- Reactivated immigration fines

- Increased scrutiny of employment authorization

- 10x'd I-9 audits

- Reduced Naturalizations by 75% (monthly).

- The White House reported negative net migration in 2025, which it described as the first year of net-negative migration in at least 50 years

- Immigration-court asylum grant rates fell to 5.5% in June 2026 according to TRAC; the White House has cited an approximately 7% grant rate more broadly

- Signed the Secure America Act, providing about $69.55 billion through FY2029 for CBP, ICE, HSI, border technology, detention, removal operations and related DHS immigration enforcement

SOCIAL POLICY & DEI

- Closed down over 40 "gender-affirming" centers for minors.

- Forced several of the above to open detransitioning clinics.

- Abolished federal DEI/DEIA programs and offices

- Rescinded Biden's federal racial-equity executive orders

- Removed DEI considerations from federal hiring and promotions

- Eliminated or reorganized DEI-based federal Special Emphasis Programs

- Ended discriminatory restrictions in federal employee affinity groups

- Revoked EO 11246's federal-contractor affirmative-action framework

- Ended race/sex preferences covered by the administration's federal contracting directives

- Required federal contractors to comply with antidiscrimination requirements under the administration's new framework

- Directed DOJ/EEOC enforcement against unlawful private-sector DEI discrimination

- Initiated civil-rights investigations of university admissions practices

- Removed disparate-impact provisions from Education's Title VI regulations

- Abolished military DEI offices and programs

- Made military personnel decisions merit-focused under the new DoD policy

- Removed race/sex presumptions from DOT's DBE contracting programs

- Terminated federal environmental-justice initiatives covered by the DEI orders

- Terminated DOJ's Lowndes County environmental-justice settlement

- Removed/archived hundreds of Education Department DEI materials

- Directed changes to DEI-related programming at the Smithsonian

- Expanded federal-contractor anti-DEI policy again through EO 14398 in 2026

- Whites above 50% of births reversing the trend.

CRIME, DRUGS & PUBLIC SAFETY

- Violent crime fell 9.3% nationwide in 2025

- Murders fell 18.1% nationwide in 2025

- Robbery fell 18.5% nationwide in 2025

- Rape fell 7.6% nationwide in 2025

- Aggravated assault fell 7.2% nationwide in 2025

- Property crime fell 12.4% nationwide in 2025

- Violent crime fell another 10.6% in the first half of 2026

- Murders fell another 23% in the first half of 2026

- Nearly 54,000 FBI violent-crime arrests

- Captured nine FBI Ten Most Wanted fugitives

- U.S. Marshals arrested 62,000+ fugitives in FY2025

- Launched Operation Take Back America

- Launched Operation Spring Cleaning, resulting in 1,100+ arrests and seizures of nearly 1,000 illegal firearms and 2,700+ pounds of narcotics

- Created the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, declared a D.C. crime emergency and temporarily placed D.C. police under federal direction

- Took federal action against D.C.'s cashless-bail policies

- Directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty in eligible D.C. cases

- Recorded 17,000+ arrests through the D.C. crime initiative

- Created the Memphis Safe Task Force, which recorded 5,100+ arrests

- Memphis violent crime fell 19% in 2025

- Memphis murders fell 43%+ year-to-date in 2026

- Expanded federal enforcement against MS-13

- Expanded federal enforcement against Tren de Aragua

- Designated major cartels and certain transnational gangs as terrorist organizations

- Expanded federal prosecution of cartel leaders and traffickers

- ATF seized 36,000+ illegal crime guns and 2.3 million+ rounds of ammunition from prohibited persons, gangs and criminal organizations

- Intercepted 4,300+ firearms being trafficked toward Mexican cartels

- Expanded enforcement against machine-gun conversion devices

- Signed the HALT Fentanyl Act

- DEA seized 45 million+ fentanyl pills, nearly 200,000 kilograms of cocaine and 1,100+ kilograms of heroin in FY2025

- Overall drug-overdose deaths fell 14% in 2025

- Expanded prosecutions of cartel-linked fentanyl networks

- Created the Fentanyl Free America initiative

- FBI arrested 5,000+ child predators and human traffickers

- FBI located or identified 11,000+ child victims

- Signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act

- Restored federal death-penalty enforcement, rescinded the Biden-era execution moratorium, restored the pentobarbital protocol and directed DOJ to seek capital punishment in appropriate eligible cases

- Increased federal support for state and local law enforcement

- On-duty law-enforcement deaths fell 25% in 2025

MAHA & HEALTH

- Established the Make America Healthy Again Commission

- Released new 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines centered on whole, nutrient-dense foods

- Began a federal initiative to phase out six widely used petroleum-based synthetic food dyes: Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2 and Green 3

- Secured synthetic-dye removal commitments from roughly 40% of the U.S. food industry, including 27 major food companies

- Approved multiple new naturally derived food-color alternatives

- Changed FDA policy to make "no artificial colors" labeling easier for foods using naturally derived colors

- Began developing the first federal definition of "ultra-processed food"

- Approved SNAP food-restriction waivers for more than 20 states, including Florida restrictions on soda, energy drinks, candy and prepared desserts

- Signed the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act

- Announced $61.9 million to strengthen Head Start nutrition and expand access to fresh and healthy food for more than 100,000 families

- Restored the Presidential Fitness Test

- Revamped the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition

- Launched a nationwide childhood-physical-activity effort through Get Kids Active

- Made childhood chronic disease a formal government-wide priority and redirected $1.8 billion annually toward combating it

- Launched a $50 million autism data-science initiative

- Launched the first national Autism Missing and Endangered Person Alert initiative

- Doubled funding for the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative

- Directed federal health agencies to increase transparency and open-source access to federally funded health research

- Revised the federal childhood vaccine schedule/recommendations under the administration's new framework

- Launched Operation Stork Speed to improve the safety, nutritional quality and availability of infant formula

- Took executive action to expand access to IVF

- Reclassified marijuana to Schedule III to facilitate medical research and alter its federal regulatory treatment

- Launched the Great Healthcare Plan framework

- Launched TrumpRx to provide access to discounted prescription drugs

- Invested more than $1 billion in farm modernization and long-term food-supply resilience

- Issued an executive order advancing regenerative agriculture

- Secured Most-Favored-Nation drug-pricing agreements with 26 pharmaceutical manufacturers covering 89% of the branded-drug market by September 2026

- Secured a prior-authorization reform pledge from major health insurers covering nearly 8 in 10 Americans; by April 2026 leading plans reported eliminating about 11% of prior authorizations, or roughly 6.5 million requests

ECONOMY & KITCHEN TABLE

- The ISM Manufacturing PMI registered 54.6 in August 2026, marking eight straight months of manufacturing expansion after a 10-month contraction

- Manufacturing employment rose by 58,000 from its December 2025 low through August 2026; the White House also reported nearly 100,000 additional factory-construction jobs during the second term

- Major U.S. stock indexes reached multiple record highs during the second term; the Nasdaq reached another intraday record on September 22, 2026

- Treasury collected $292.5 billion in gross customs duties in FY2026 through August and issued $125.2 billion in refunds, leaving $167.3 billion in net customs revenue

- SNAP participation fell by roughly 5 million people, or about 12%, between July 2025 and May 2026 as the OBBBA’s work-requirement and noncitizen-eligibility changes began rolling out; analysts caution that some of the decline preceded full implementation

- Treasury and the IRS proposed rules applying PRWORA eligibility restrictions to the refundable portions of the Child Tax Credit, EITC, American Opportunity Tax Credit and adoption tax credit for taxpayers who are not U.S. citizens, nationals or qualified aliens

OBBBA: TAXES, BENEFITS, AGRICULTURE, DEFENSE & INFRASTRUCTURE

- Signed the OBBBA

- Made the lower individual income-tax rates from the 2017 TCJA permanent

- Permanently increased the standard deduction and increased it further under the OBBBA

- Permanently increased the Child Tax Credit

- Created a deduction of up to $25,000 for qualified tip income

- Created a deduction of up to $12,500 in qualified overtime compensation, or $25,000 for joint filers

- Created a $6,000 additional deduction for qualifying seniors ($12,000 for an eligible married couple), marketed by the White House as “No Tax on Social Security”; it is an income-tax deduction and does not literally repeal taxation of Social Security benefits

- Created a deduction of up to $10,000 for interest on qualifying loans for new American-assembled vehicles

- Raised the SALT deduction cap to $40,000 for 2025, subject to the law's income phaseout and scheduled changes

- Made 100% bonus depreciation permanent

- Made the Section 199A pass-through deduction permanent

- Permanently expanded the estate and gift tax exemption

- Restored immediate deductions for qualifying domestic R&D expenditures

- Created Trump Accounts for children, including a $1,000 federal contribution for eligible children born from 2025 through 2028

- Permanently expanded the employer tax credit for paid family and medical leave

- Expanded employer-provided childcare tax incentives

- Expanded Opportunity Zones

- Created new incentives for investment in qualifying rural communities

- Funded additional border-wall construction, barriers and related border infrastructure

- Funded thousands of additional ICE, CBP and Border Patrol personnel

- Massively expanded immigration-detention funding

- Funded additional removal and deportation operations

- Funded additional border-surveillance technology

- Funded additional immigration judges and court resources

- Provided funding to reimburse states for qualifying border-security activities

- Added Medicaid community-engagement requirements for certain able-bodied adults

- Increased Medicaid eligibility verification and required more frequent redeterminations for certain expansion enrollees

- Changed Medicaid provider-tax rules

- Changed state-directed-payment rules

- Added cost-sharing requirements for portions of the Medicaid expansion population

- Restricted Medicaid and CHIP federal funding for certain reproductive-health providers

- Limited Medicare eligibility for certain categories of lawfully present noncitizens

- Tightened verification for ACA premium-tax-credit eligibility

- Required repayment of excess advance premium tax credits without the previous statutory repayment caps

- Permanently allowed first-dollar telehealth coverage for HSA-compatible high-deductible plans

- Made bronze and catastrophic health plans HSA-compatible

- Allowed qualifying direct-primary-care arrangements to work with HSAs

- Created the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program

- Expanded SNAP work requirements for certain able-bodied adults and extended the ages covered

- Changed federal-state SNAP administrative cost sharing

- Required certain states with high SNAP payment-error rates to contribute toward benefit costs

- Restricted SNAP eligibility for specified categories of noncitizens

- Increased agricultural commodity reference prices

- Expanded base acres

- Strengthened Price Loss Coverage

- Strengthened Agriculture Risk Coverage

- Updated agricultural marketing-loan programs

- Updated federal sugar policy

- Updated federal dairy policy

- Expanded agricultural disaster assistance

- Increased benefits for beginning farmers and ranchers

- Expanded crop-insurance premium support

- Created a poultry insurance pilot program

- Increased agricultural trade-promotion funding

- Expanded conservation funding

- Capped federal lending for graduate and professional students

- Ended new Grad PLUS lending

- Reformed federal student-loan repayment, deferment and forbearance rules

- Reformed student-loan rehabilitation

- Modified Public Service Loan Forgiveness provisions

- Created Workforce Pell Grants for qualifying short-term workforce programs

- Changed Pell Grant eligibility rules

- Funded and launched development of Golden Dome homeland missile-defense capabilities

- Expanded missile and interceptor procurement and production

- Expanded domestic munitions production

- Expanded military aircraft procurement

- Expanded naval shipbuilding

- Expanded the U.S. defense industrial base

- Expanded nuclear-deterrence modernization

- Expanded military infrastructure investment

- Expanded Coast Guard procurement and infrastructure

- Required additional federal oil and gas leasing

- Accelerated the termination of several EV tax subsidies

- Accelerated the phaseout of several wind and solar tax subsidies

- Expanded nuclear-energy tax incentives

- Expanded domestic critical-mineral incentives

- Provided $12.5 billion to modernize and replace aging air-traffic-control infrastructure

FOREIGN AID, USAID, UN & COST CUTTING

- Ordered a government-wide review of U.S. foreign assistance

- Paused new obligations and disbursements of foreign development assistance pending review

- Cancelled 83% of USAID-managed foreign-aid programs

- Terminated more than $76.5 billion in USAID foreign-assistance awards by March 2025

- Dismantled USAID as an independent foreign-assistance operation and transferred/consolidated remaining functions under the State Department

- Reduced USAID's global workforce by roughly 95%, eliminating thousands of positions

- Terminated all remaining State- and USAID-funded projects in Afghanistan in April 2025

- Shifted U.S. foreign assistance toward an "America First" foreign-policy framework

- Increased emphasis on burden-sharing by foreign governments and international organizations

- Signed the Rescissions Act of 2025, rescinding $7.9 billion in previously enacted foreign-assistance funding across USAID, development, economic-support, international-organization, migration/refugee, democracy and peacekeeping accounts

- Used presidential rescission authority to cancel additional unobligated foreign-aid and international-organization funding through the administration's 2025 pocket-rescission action

- Ended U.S. funding for UNRWA

- Ended U.S. participation in the UN Human Rights Council and associated U.S. funding, including the attributable share of the UN regular budget, and eliminated the U.S. representative office

- Ordered a government-wide review of U.S. funding and participation in international organizations, conventions and treaties

- Withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations in 2026, including 31 UN entities and 35 non-UN organizations

- Reviewed U.S. membership in UNESCO and moved to end U.S. participation following the review

- Proposed eliminating or consolidating the traditional Development Assistance, Economic Support Fund, Democracy Fund and Assistance for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia accounts

- Proposed an $8.3 billion reduction across major economic, development and democracy-assistance accounts in the FY2026 budget

- Proposed a $3.2 billion reduction across international disaster, migration and refugee-assistance accounts

- Proposed consolidating international humanitarian assistance into a smaller $2.5 billion account

- Proposed shifting foreign assistance away from grants and toward investment through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation

- Reduced the federal civilian workforce as part of government-wide cost cutting; employment across 22 major agencies fell by nearly 256,000, or more than 11%, from December 2024 to January 2026

- Restricted federal hiring across most agencies

- Used deferred resignations, attrition and reductions in force to reduce federal payrolls

FRAUD ENFORCEMENT

- Created the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, chaired by Vice President JD Vance and spanning major federal departments and agencies

- According to the White House, identified nearly $230 billion in suspected fraud, stopped $56 billion in fraudulent payments and enforced more than $55 billion through indictments, settlements and civil penalties

- Created Fraud gov and a public Fraud Ledger tracking investigations, suspensions, recoveries and enforcement actions

- Created minimum anti-fraud standards for federal benefit programs, expanding identity and eligibility verification and pre-payment controls

- Expanded federal data-sharing and required agencies to identify high-risk fraud trends before payment and develop measurable anti-fraud plans

- Launched a national fraud whistleblower program

- Created the DOJ National Fraud Enforcement Division, led by the first Assistant Attorney General specifically responsible for the division, with nationwide taxpayer-fraud coordination responsibilities

- Expanded DOJ Health Care Fraud Strike Forces as DOJ reported roughly 8,000 active fraud cases by April 2026

- Uncovered $6.3 billion in suspected fraudulent government contracts and launched an investigation

- Referred 562,000 fraudulent or delinquent pandemic-era SBA loans, totaling roughly $22 billion, for aggressive collection

- Blocked $60 million in fraudulent student-loan applications in the first month of enhanced screening

- Identified more than 10,000 suspected fraud cases involving international-student work programs

- Suspended $1.4 billion in home-health and hospice funding amid fraud investigations, including 447 hospices and 23 home-health agencies in Los Angeles tied to an estimated $600+ million in suspected fraud

- Halted new Medicare enrollment for hospice providers nationwide during the fraud crackdown

- Launched audits of Medicaid Fraud Control Units in all 50 states and expanded Medicaid fraud investigations nationwide

- Deferred $1.3 billion in federal Medicaid reimbursements to California amid fraud-related enforcement

- Halted nearly $260 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota and deferred an additional $91 million amid fraud allegations

- Charged 15 defendants in a major Minnesota healthcare-fraud investigation, including cases DOJ described as the state's largest autism-fraud prosecution and highest-loss Medicaid fraud case

- Charged four Ohio defendants, including two state employees, in an alleged $30 million Medicaid billing scheme and seized 14 luxury vehicles

- Imposed a temporary moratorium on new home-health and hospice providers in high-risk areas of Ohio

- Served criminal warrants and administrative charges on 20 Minnesota businesses suspected of SNAP fraud

- Expanded investigations into fraudulent childcare providers and charged a Minneapolis daycare owner in a federal fraud case

- Created the DOJ Trade Fraud Task Force, which surpassed $1 billion in recoveries, penalties, forfeitures and publicly charged losses while expanding civil and criminal enforcement against customs and tariff fraud

- Created federal-state anti-fraud partnerships, including the Florida Anti-Fraud Task Force, and expanded data-sharing to identify fraudulent benefit claims

ENERGY & DEREGULATION

- Declared a National Energy Emergency

- Resumed LNG export approvals and ended the Biden-era pause on new approvals

- Achieved record U.S. LNG exports in 2025, becoming the first country to export more than 100 million metric tons in a year

- Achieved record U.S. oil and natural-gas production in 2025

- Achieved record crude-oil and petroleum-product exports in 2026

- Opened hundreds of millions of acres of federal land to oil, gas and coal development

- Expanded offshore oil and gas leasing

- Expanded energy development in Alaska, including reopening ANWR development opportunities

- Expanded coal leasing on federal lands and ended the federal coal-leasing moratorium

- Accelerated federal permitting for energy projects

- Ordered agencies to identify and eliminate regulations burdening domestic energy production

- Revoked the Obama-era EPA Endangerment Finding

- Reversed Biden-era restrictions on fossil-fuel development, natural-gas infrastructure and federal-land energy development

- Ended the federal push toward eliminating gas appliances

- Halted the Biden-era fossil-fuel restrictions on federal buildings

- Issued four executive orders expanding American nuclear power, including faster NRC licensing and a goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050

- Accelerated deployment of advanced nuclear reactors and expanded federal support for advanced-reactor demonstrations

- Expanded domestic nuclear-fuel supply chains, including uranium enrichment and fuel production

- Launched a government-wide 10-for-1 deregulatory policy

- Finalized 646 deregulatory actions versus five regulatory actions in FY2025, a 129-to-1 deregulatory-to-regulatory ratio

- Ordered automatic review and rescission of outdated energy regulations

VETERANS

- Reduced the VA disability-benefits backlog by more than 70%, bringing it below 70,000 claims for the first time since 2020

- Enrolled more than 250,000 new veterans in VA healthcare in 2026

- Opened more than 40 new VA healthcare clinics since January 2025

- Provided more than 3.2 million VA appointments outside normal operating hours through expanded early-morning, evening and weekend scheduling

- Completed more than 82 million direct-care VA appointments in FY2025, a 4.1% increase

- Completed nearly 60 million VA community-care appointments in FY2025, a 12% increase

- Permanently housed 51,936 homeless veterans in FY2025, the most in seven years

- Invested another $1.2 billion in VA infrastructure improvements in Q3 FY2026, including $915 million for facility repairs/upgrades and $229 million for infrastructure supporting electronic health records

FAITH & RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

- Established the White House Faith Office within the Executive Office of the President and Domestic Policy Council

- Established the DOJ-led Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias

- Established the Religious Liberty Commission to advise the White House on religious-liberty protections and policy

- Issued updated Education Department guidance on constitutionally protected prayer and religious expression in public elementary and secondary schools

- Restored HHS’s Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the Office for Civil Rights

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5905380&forum_id=2#50156451)