Posts Tagged ‘Neil Gorsuch’

Supreme Court Rumbles NCAA Scam

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021

I used to follow some college athletics. Now I don’t. At the same time universities were getting more and more expensive, they were also getting more and more woke. College sports used to be an oasis from that nonsense, but so many programs bent the knee to #BlackLivesMatter last year that I just stopped paying attention.

So I was happy to see yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that colleges couldn’t collude to avoid paying student athletes.

he U.S. Supreme Court on Monday threw out limits set by the major governing body for American intercollegiate sports on education-related benefits that schools can give players as a violation of antitrust law, handing a big victory to student-athletes fighting for greater financial compensation.

The 9-0 ruling put the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) further on the defensive as it struggles to preserve a business model – huge revenues generated by college sports and big salaries for executives and coaches while players remain unpaid – under assault on multiple fronts.

The NCAA’s curbs on non-cash payments to college athletes related to education – including benefits such as computers, science equipment and musical instruments – were part of what critics have called the fiction of amateurism in college sports, an enterprise that rakes in billions of dollars annually.

These limits, according to the ruling authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, are anticompetitive under a federal law called the Sherman Antitrust Act. The ruling could pave the way for challenges to other NCAA compensation rules, a prospect that Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to invite in a separate opinion agreeing with Gorsuch.

Kavanaugh wrote that those other limits on compensation for players “also raise serious questions under the antitrust laws” and suggested they likely would be struck down if lower courts follow the analysis laid out in Monday’s ruling.

“The NCAA is not above the law,” Kavanaugh added.

For years, football and basketball have been big moneymakers for some colleges and universities (and money losers for others). Why not let student athletes benefit from that? Tradition? Hell, colleges are hellbent on destroying every tradition that made them vital institutions (including freedom of speech, free inquiry and the rule of law), so why not that one as well?

I’ve long thought that traditional football power schools (Alabama, Texas, USC, Oklahoma, etc.) could make a lot more money by leaving the NCAA and forming their own competing football conference of 15 or so teams, playing a round robin schedule plus playoffs. They could pay athletes and forge a partnership deal with the NFL to provide year-round professional coaching. It would provide more entertainment than watching power schools beat up on Rice or UNT every year.

America’s entire higher education system needs a hard reboot: Shut down all colleges and universities for a year, eliminate SJW departments like Women’s Studies entirely, hand every woke professor and administrator a pink slip, and deny federal loan and contracts for any university it costs students more than 10 grand a year to attend. Right now all this is a pipe-dream, but college athletics are one of the last sources of unwarranted affection ordinary people feel toward higher education. (“College is a $120,000 hooker, and you are an idiot who fell in love with her!”) Maybe the demise of the current plantation athletic complex will help pave the way for real reform.

Here’s the text of the decision.

And here’s a South Park clip to round out the post:

Supreme Court Strikes Down California’s Church Service Ban

Saturday, February 6th, 2021

Evidently Americans do continue to enjoy some modest minimum of freedom of religion, as the Supreme Court just struck down California’s ban on indoor church services:

Late Friday evening, the Supreme Court, in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, issued emergency relief suspending California’s broad ban on indoor religious services. The Court ruled that California was “enjoined from enforcing the . . . prohibition on indoor worship services . . . pending disposition of the petition for a writ of certiorari.” The order is limited: Relief was “denied with respect to the [25%] percentage capacity limitations” and denied with respect to the prohibition on singing and chanting during indoor services,” although the Court left the door open to hear any “new evidence . . . that the State is not applying the percentage capacity limitations or the prohibition on singing and chanting in a generally applicable manner.” This lifts some of the most stringent restrictions on religious services in the country. Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito wanted to grant broader relief on these fronts; Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh thought the evidentiary record was too unclear.

The Court was yet again divided on these issues, but not entirely along the same lines as in prior cases. Chief Justice Roberts, who dissented when the Court ruled against Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions in November, reiterated his view that courts should defer to elected officials and public-health experts, but thought that California had gone too far this time: “The State’s present determination — that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero — appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.” Justice Gorsuch argued that California was overgeneralizing the risks of religious services:

California . . . insists that religious worship is so different that it demands especially onerous regulation. The State offers essentially four reasons why: It says that religious exercises involve (1) large numbers of people mixing from different households; (2) in close physical proximity; (3) for extended periods; (4) with singing . . . California errs to the extent it suggests its four factors are always present in worship, or always absent from the other secular activities its regulations allow. Nor has California sought to explain why it cannot address its legitimate concerns with rules short of a total ban . . .

On further inspection, the singing ban may not be what it first appears. It seems California’s powerful entertainment industry has won an exemption. So, once more, we appear to have a State playing favorites during a pandemic, expending considerable effort to protect lucrative industries (casinos in Nevada; movie studios in California) while denying similar largesse to its faithful. . . . Even if a full congregation singing hymns is too risky, California does not explain why even a single masked cantor cannot lead worship behind a mask and a plexiglass shield. Or why even a lone muezzin may not sing the call to prayer from a remote location inside a mosque as worshippers file in.

Gorsuch concluded:

[California’s] “temporary” ban on indoor worship has been in place since August 2020, and applied routinely since March. California no longer asks its movie studios, malls, and manicurists to wait. And one could be forgiven for doubting its asserted timeline. Government actors have been moving the goalposts on pandemic-related sacrifices for months, adopting new benchmarks that always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner. As this crisis enters its second year — and hovers over a second Lent, a second Passover, and a second Ramadan — it is too late for the State to defend extreme measures with claims of temporary exigency, if it ever could. Drafting narrowly tailored regulations can be difficult. But if Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, something has gone seriously awry.

The three liberal justices dissented, asserting that the opinions of unelected experts should trump enumerated constitutional rights.

The Trump White House’s List Of Trump’s Accomplishments

Sunday, January 24th, 2021

I wanted to compile a list of the Trump Administration’s pluses and minuses (and, indeed, still might). One source I was going to draw from was the WhiteHouse.gov list of Trump Accomplishments. However, the Biden Administration took that down. As a service, and for the Historical Record, I’ve fished that list out of the Wayback Machine and am posting it below. (Plus you never know when the Biden Administration might ask the Wayback Machine to remove it from their records.) I’ve even tried to replicate the formatting.


As of January 2021

Trump Administration Accomplishments

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Unprecedented Economic Boom

Before the China Virus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy.

  • America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times government experts’ projections.
  • Middle-Class family income increased nearly $6,000 – more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration.
  • The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century.
  • Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job-hirings.
  • More Americans reported being employed than ever before – nearly 160 million.
  • Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low.
  • The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record.
  • Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly 3 decades.

Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds.

  • Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school diploma all reached record lows.
  • Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years.
  • Lifted nearly 7 million people off of food stamps.
  • Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows.
  • Income inequality fell for two straight years, and by the largest amount in over a decade.
  • The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth.
  • Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue collar workers – a 16 percent pay increase.
  • African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent.

Brought jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA.

  • Created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs.
  • Put in place policies to bring back supply chains from overseas.
  • Small business optimism broke a 35-year old record in 2018.

Hit record stock market numbers and record 401ks.

  • The DOW closed above 20,000 for the first time in 2017 and topped 30,000 in 2020.
  • The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have repeatedly notched record highs.

Rebuilding and investing in rural America.

  • Signed an Executive Order on Modernizing the Regulatory Framework for Agricultural Biotechnology Products, which is bringing innovative new technologies to market in American farming and agriculture.
  • Strengthened America’s rural economy by investing over $1.3 billion through the Agriculture Department’s ReConnect Program to bring high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America.

Achieved a record-setting economic comeback by rejecting blanket lockdowns.

  • An October 2020 Gallup survey found 56 percent of Americans said they were better off during a pandemic than four years prior.
  • During the third quarter of 2020, the economy grew at a rate of 33.1 percent – the most rapid GDP growth ever recorded.
  • Since coronavirus lockdowns ended, the economy has added back over 12 million jobs, more than half the jobs lost.
  • Jobs have been recovered 23 times faster than the previous administration’s recovery.
  • Unemployment fell to 6.7 percent in December, from a pandemic peak of 14.7 percent in April – beating expectations of well over 10 percent unemployment through the end of 2020.
  • Under the previous administration, it took 49 months for the unemployment rate to fall from 10 percent to under 7 percent compared to just 3 months for the Trump Administration.
  • Since April, the Hispanic unemployment rate has fallen by 9.6 percent, Asian-American unemployment by 8.6 percent, and Black American unemployment by 6.8 percent.
  • 80 percent of small businesses are now open, up from just 53 percent in April.
  • Small business confidence hit a new high.
  • Homebuilder confidence reached an all-time high, and home sales hit their highest reading since December 2006.
  • Manufacturing optimism nearly doubled.
  • Household net worth rose $7.4 trillion in Q2 2020 to $112 trillion, an all-time high.
  • Home prices hit an all-time record high.
  • The United States rejected crippling lockdowns that crush the economy and inflict countless public health harms and instead safely reopened its economy.
  • Business confidence is higher in America than in any other G7 or European Union country.
  • Stabilized America’s financial markets with the establishment of a number of Treasury Department supported facilities at the Federal Reserve.

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Tax Relief for the Middle Class

Passed $3.2 trillion in historic tax relief and reformed the tax code.

  • Signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – the largest tax reform package in history.
  • More than 6 million American workers received wage increases, bonuses, and increased benefits thanks to the tax cuts.
  • A typical family of four earning $75,000 received an income tax cut of more than $2,000 – slashing their tax bill in half.
  • Doubled the standard deduction – making the first $24,000 earned by a married couple completely tax-free.
  • Doubled the child tax credit.
  • Virtually eliminated the unfair Estate Tax, or Death Tax.
  • Cut the business tax rate from 35 percent – the highest in the developed world – all the way down to 21 percent.
  • Small businesses can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.
  • Businesses can now deduct 100 percent of the cost of their capital investments in the year the investment is made.
  • Since the passage of tax cuts, the share of total wealth held by the bottom half of households has increased, while the share held by the top 1 percent has decreased.
  • Over 400 companies have announced bonuses, wage increases, new hires, or new investments in the United States.
  • Over $1.5 trillion was repatriated into the United States from overseas.
  • Lower investment cost and higher capital returns led to faster growth in the middle class, real wages, and international competitiveness.

Jobs and investments are pouring into Opportunity Zones.

  • Created nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones where capital gains on long-term investments are taxed at zero.
  • Opportunity Zone designations have increased property values within them by 1.1 percent, creating an estimated $11 billion in wealth for the nearly half of Opportunity Zone residents who own their own home.
  • Opportunity Zones have attracted $75 billion in funds and driven $52 billion of new investment in economically distressed communities, creating at least 500,000 new jobs.
  • Approximately 1 million Americans will be lifted from poverty as a result of these new investments.
  • Private equity investments into businesses in Opportunity Zones were nearly 30 percent higher than investments into businesses in similar areas that were not designated Opportunity Zones.

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Massive Deregulation

Ended the regulatory assault on American Businesses and Workers.

  • Instead of 2-for-1, we eliminated 8 old regulations for every 1 new regulation adopted.
  • Provided the average American household an extra $3,100 every year.
  • Reduced the direct cost of regulatory compliance by $50 billion, and will reduce costs by an additional $50 billion in FY 2020 alone.
  • Removed nearly 25,000 pages from the Federal Register – more than any other president. The previous administration added over 16,000 pages.
  • Established the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation to reduce outdated regulations at the state, local, and tribal levels.
  • Signed an executive order to make it easier for businesses to offer retirement plans.
  • Signed two executive orders to increase transparency in Federal agencies and protect Americans and their small businesses from administrative abuse.
  • Modernized the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for the first time in over 40 years.
  • Reduced approval times for major infrastructure projects from 10 or more years down to 2 years or less.
  • Helped community banks by signing legislation that rolled back costly provisions of Dodd-Frank.
  • Established the White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing to bring down housing costs.
  • Removed regulations that threatened the development of a strong and stable internet.
  • Eased and simplified restrictions on rocket launches, helping to spur commercial investment in space projects.
  • Published a whole-of-government strategy focused on ensuring American leadership in automated vehicle technology.
  • Streamlined energy efficiency regulations for American families and businesses, including preserving affordable lightbulbs, enhancing the utility of showerheads, and enabling greater time savings with dishwashers.
  • Removed unnecessary regulations that restrict the seafood industry and impede job creation.
  • Modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology regulations to put America in the lead to develop new technologies.
  • Took action to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response to COVID-19, including lifting restrictions on manufacturers to more quickly produce ventilators.

Successfully rolled back burdensome regulatory overreach.

  • Rescinded the previous administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which would have abolished zoning for single-family housing to build low-income, federally subsidized apartments.
  • Issued a final rule on the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard.
  • Eliminated the Waters of the United States Rule and replaced it with the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, providing relief and certainty for farmers and property owners.
  • Repealed the previous administration’s costly fuel economy regulations by finalizing the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, which will make cars more affordable, and lower the price of new vehicles by an estimated $2,200.

Americans now have more money in their pockets.

  • Deregulation had an especially beneficial impact on low-income Americans who pay a much higher share of their incomes for overregulation.
  • Cut red tape in the healthcare industry, providing Americans with more affordable healthcare and saving Americans nearly 10 percent on prescription drugs.
  • Deregulatory efforts yielded savings to the medical community an estimated $6.6 billion – with a reduction of 42 million hours of regulatory compliance work through 2021.
  • Removed government barriers to personal freedom and consumer choice in healthcare.
  • Once fully in effect, 20 major deregulatory actions undertaken by the Trump Administration are expected to save American consumers and businesses over $220 billion per year.
  • Signed 16 pieces of deregulatory legislation that will result in a $40 billion increase in annual real incomes.

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Fair and Reciprocal Trade

Secured historic trade deals to defend American workers.

  • Immediately withdrew from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
  • Ended the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and replaced it with the brand new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
  • The USMCA contains powerful new protections for American manufacturers, auto-makers, farmers, dairy producers, and workers.
  • The USMCA is expected to generate over $68 billion in economic activity and potentially create over 550,000 new jobs over ten years.
  • Signed an executive order making it government policy to Buy American and Hire American, and took action to stop the outsourcing of jobs overseas.
  • Negotiated with Japan to slash tariffs and open its market to $7 billion in American agricultural products and ended its ban on potatoes and lamb.
  • Over 90 percent of American agricultural exports to Japan now receive preferential treatment, and most are duty-free.
  • Negotiated another deal with Japan to boost $40 billion worth of digital trade.
  • Renegotiated the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement, doubling the cap on imports of American vehicles and extending the American light truck tariff.
  • Reached a written, fully-enforceable Phase One trade agreement with China on confronting pirated and counterfeit goods, and the protection of American ideas, trade secrets, patents, and trademarks.
  • China agreed to purchase an additional $200 billion worth of United States exports and opened market access for over 4,000 American facilities to exports while all tariffs remained in effect.
  • Achieved a mutual agreement with the European Union (EU) that addresses unfair trade practices and increases duty-free exports by 180 percent to $420 million.
  • Secured a pledge from the EU to eliminate tariffs on American lobster – the first United States-European Union negotiated tariff reduction in over 20 years.
  • Scored a historic victory by overhauling the Universal Postal Union, whose outdated policies were undermining American workers and interests.
  • Engaged extensively with trade partners like the EU and Japan to advance reforms to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
  • Issued a first-ever comprehensive report on the WTO Appellate Body’s failures to comply with WTO rules and interpret WTO agreements as written.
  • Blocked nominees to the WTO’s Appellate Body until WTO Members recognize and address longstanding issues with Appellate Body activism.
  • Submitted 5 papers to the WTO Committee on Agriculture to improve Members’ understanding of how trade policies are implemented, highlight areas for improved transparency, and encourage members to maintain up-to-date notifications on market access and domestic support.

Took strong actions to confront unfair trade practices and put America First.

  • Imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions worth of Chinese goods to protect American jobs and stop China’s abuses under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
  • Directed an all-of-government effort to halt and punish efforts by the Communist Party of China to steal and profit from American innovations and intellectual property.
  • Imposed tariffs on foreign aluminum and foreign steel to protect our vital industries and support our national security.
  • Approved tariffs on $1.8 billion in imports of washing machines and $8.5 billion in imports of solar panels.
  • Blocked illegal timber imports from Peru.
  • Took action against France for its digital services tax that unfairly targets American technology companies.
  • `Launched investigations into digital services taxes that have been proposed or adopted by 10 other countries.

Historic support for American farmers.

  • Successfully negotiated more than 50 agreements with countries around the world to increase foreign market access and boost exports of American agriculture products, supporting more than 1 million American jobs.
  • Authorized $28 billion in aid for farmers who have been subjected to unfair trade practices – fully funded by the tariffs paid by China.
  • China lifted its ban on poultry, opened its market to beef, and agreed to purchase at least $80 billion of American agricultural products in the next two years.
  • The European Union agreed to increase beef imports by 180 percent and opened up its market to more imports of soybeans.
  • South Korea lifted its ban on American poultry and eggs, and agreed to provide market access for record exports of American rice.
  • Argentina lifted its ban on American pork.
  • Brazil agreed to increase wheat imports by $180 million a year and raised its quotas for purchases of United States ethanol.
  • Guatemala and Tunisia opened up their markets to American eggs.
  • Won tariff exemptions in Ecuador for wheat and soybeans.
  • Suspended $817 million in trade preferences for Thailand under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program due to its failure to adequately provide reasonable market access for American pork products.
  • The amount of food stamps redeemed at farmers markets increased from $1.4 million in May 2020 to $1.75 million in September 2020 – a 50 percent increase over last year.
  • Rapidly deployed the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which provided $30 billion in support to farmers and ranchers facing decreased prices and market disruption when COVID-19 impacted the food supply chain.
  • Authorized more than $6 billion for the Farmers to Families Food Box program, which delivered over 128 million boxes of locally sourced, produce, meat, and dairy products to charity and faith-based organizations nationwide.
  • Delegated authorities via the Defense Production Act to protect breaks in the American food supply chain as a result of COVID-19.

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American Energy Independence

Unleashed America’s oil and natural gas potential.

  • For the first time in nearly 70 years, the United States has become a net energy exporter.
  • The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.
  • Natural gas production reached a record-high of 34.9 quads in 2019, following record high production in 2018 and in 2017.
  • The United States has been a net natural gas exporter for three consecutive years and has an export capacity of nearly 10 billion cubic feet per day.
  • Withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris Climate Agreement.
  • Canceled the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, and replaced it with the new Affordable Clean Energy rule.
  • Approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
  • Opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to oil and gas leasing.
  • Repealed the last administration’s Federal Coal Leasing Moratorium, which prohibited coal leasing on Federal lands.
  • Reformed permitting rules to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and speed approval for mines.
  • Fixed the New Source Review permitting program, which punished companies for upgrading or repairing coal power plants.
  • Fixed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) steam electric and coal ash rules.
  • The average American family saved $2,500 a year in lower electric bills and lower prices at the gas pump.
  • Signed legislation repealing the harmful Stream Protection Rule.
  • Reduced the time to approve drilling permits on public lands by half, increasing permit applications to drill on public lands by 300 percent.
  • Expedited approval of the NuStar’s New Burgos pipeline to export American gasoline to Mexico.
  • Streamlined Liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal permitting and allowed long-term LNG export authorizations to be extended through 2050.
  • The United States is now among the top three LNG exporters in the world.
  • Increased LNG exports five-fold since January 2017, reaching an all-time high in January 2020.
  • LNG exports are expected to reduce the American trade deficit by over $10 billion.
  • Granted more than 20 new long-term approvals for LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries.
  • The development of natural gas and LNG infrastructure in the United States is providing tens of thousands of jobs, and has led to the investment of tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure.
  • There are now 6 LNG export facilities operating in the United States, with 2 additional export projects under construction.
  • The amount of nuclear energy production in 2019 was the highest on record, through a combination of increased capacity from power plant upgrades and shorter refueling and maintenance cycles.
  • Prevented Russian energy coercion across Europe through various lines of effort, including the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation, civil nuclear deals with Romania and Poland, and opposition to Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
  • Issued the Presidential Permit for the A2A railroad between Canada and Alaska, providing energy resources to emerging markets.

Increased access to our country’s abundant natural resources in order to achieve energy independence.

  • Renewable energy production and consumption both reached record highs in 2019.
  • Enacted policies that helped double the amount of electricity generated by solar and helped increase the amount of wind generation by 32 percent from 2016 through 2019.
  • Accelerated construction of energy infrastructure to ensure American energy producers can deliver their products to the market.
  • Cut red tape holding back the construction of new energy infrastructure.
  • Authorized ethanol producers to sell E15 year-round and allowed higher-ethanol gasoline to be distributed from existing pumps at filling stations.
  • Ensured greater transparency and certainty in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program.
  • Negotiated leasing capacity in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Australia, providing American taxpayers a return on this infrastructure investment.
  • Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.
  • Reformed Section 401 of the Clean Water Act regulation to allow for the curation of interstate infrastructure.
  • Resolved the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis during COVID-19 by getting OPEC, Russia, and others to cut nearly 10 million barrels of production a day, stabilizing world oil prices.
  • Directed the Department of Energy to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate market volatility caused by COVID-19.

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Investing in America’s Workers and Families

Affordable and high-quality Child Care for American workers and their families.

  • Doubled the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child and expanded the eligibility for receiving the credit.
  • Nearly 40 million families benefitted from the child tax credit (CTC), receiving an average benefit of $2,200 – totaling credits of approximately $88 billion.
  • Signed the largest-ever increase in Child Care and Development Block Grants – expanding access to quality, affordable child care for more than 800,000 low-income families.
  • Secured an additional $3.5 billion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to help families and first responders with child care needs.
  • Created the first-ever paid family leave tax credit for employees earning $72,000 or less.
  • Signed into law 12-weeks of paid parental leave for Federal workers.
  • Signed into law a provision that enables new parents to withdraw up to $5,000 from their retirement accounts without penalty when they give birth to or adopt a child.

Advanced apprenticeship career pathways to good-paying jobs.

  • Expanded apprenticeships to more than 850,000 and established the new Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship programs in new and emerging fields.
  • Established the National Council for the American Worker and the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.
  • Over 460 companies have signed the Pledge to America’s Workers, committing to provide more than 16 million job and training opportunities.
  • Signed an executive order that directs the Federal government to replace outdated degree-based hiring with skills-based hiring.

Advanced women’s economic empowerment.

  • Included women’s empowerment for the first time in the President’s 2017 National Security Strategy.
  • Signed into law key pieces of legislation, including the Women, Peace, and Security Act and the Women Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act.
  • Launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative – the first-ever whole-of-government approach to women’s economic empowerment that has reached 24 million women worldwide.
  • Established an innovative new W-GDP Fund at USAID.
  • Launched the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) with 13 other nations.
  • Announced a $50 million donation on behalf of the United States to We-Fi providing more capital to women-owned businesses around the world.
  • Released the first-ever Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security, which focused on increasing women’s participation to prevent and resolve conflicts.
  • Launched the W-GDP 2x Global Women’s Initiative with the Development Finance Corporation, which has mobilized more than $3 billion in private sector investments over three years.

Ensured American leadership in technology and innovation.

  • First administration to name artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and 5G communications as national research and development priorities.
  • Launched the American Broadband Initiative to promote the rapid deployment of broadband internet across rural America.
  • Made 100 megahertz of crucial mid-band spectrum available for commercial operations, a key factor to driving widespread 5G access across rural America.
  • Launched the American AI Initiative to ensure American leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), and established the National AI Initiative Office at the White House.
  • Established the first-ever principles for Federal agency adoption of AI to improve services for the American people.
  • Signed the National Quantum Initiative Act establishing the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House to drive breakthroughs in quantum information science.
  • Signed the Secure 5G and Beyond Act to ensure America leads the world in 5G.
  • Launched a groundbreaking program to test safe and innovative commercial drone operations nationwide.
  • Issued new rulemaking to accelerate the return of American civil supersonic aviation.
  • Committed to doubling investments in AI and quantum information science (QIS) research and development.
  • Announced the establishment of $1 billion AI and quantum research institutes across America.
  • Established the largest dual-use 5G test sites in the world to advance 5G commercial and military innovation.
  • Signed landmark Prague Principles with America’s allies to advance the deployment of secure 5G telecommunications networks.
  • Signed first-ever bilateral AI cooperation agreement with the United Kingdom.
  • Built collation among allies to ban Chinese Telecom Company Huawei from their 5G infrastructure.

Preserved American jobs for American workers and rejected the importation of cheap foreign labor.

  • Pressured the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to reverse their decision to lay off over 200 American workers and replace them with cheaper foreign workers.
  • Removed the TVA Chairman of the Board and a TVA Board Member.

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Life-Saving Response to the China Virus

Restricted travel to the United States from infected regions of the world.

  • Suspended all travel from China, saving thousands of lives.
  • Required all American citizens returning home from designated outbreak countries to return through designated airports with enhanced screening measures, and to undergo a self-quarantine.
  • Announced further travel restrictions on Iran, the Schengen Area of Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Brazil.
  • Issued travel advisory warnings recommending that American citizens avoid all international travel.
  • Reached bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada to suspend non-essential travel and expeditiously return illegal aliens.
  • Repatriated over 100,000 American citizens stranded abroad on more than 1,140 flights from 136 countries and territories.
  • Safely transported, evacuated, treated, and returned home trapped passengers on cruise ships.
  • Took action to authorize visa sanctions on foreign governments who impede our efforts to protect American citizens by refusing or unreasonably delaying the return of their own citizens, subjects, or residents from the United States.

Acted early to combat the China Virus in the United States.

  • Established the White House Coronavirus Task Force, with leading experts on infectious diseases, to manage the Administration’s efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and to keep workplaces safe.
  • Pledged in the State of the Union address to “take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from the Virus,” while the Democrats’ response made not a single mention of COVID-19 or even the threat of China.
  • Declared COVID-19 a National Emergency under the Stafford Act.
  • Established the 24/7 FEMA National Response Coordination Center.
  • Released guidance recommending containment measures critical to slowing the spread of the Virus, decompressing peak burden on hospitals and infrastructure, and diminishing health impacts.
  • Implemented strong community mitigation strategies to sharply reduce the number of lives lost in the United States down from experts’ projection of up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States without mitigation.
  • Halted American funding to the World Health Organization to counter its egregious bias towards China that jeopardized the safety of Americans.
  • Announced plans for withdrawal from the World Health Organization and redirected contribution funds to help meet global public health needs.
  • Called on the United Nations to hold China accountable for their handling of the virus, including refusing to be transparent and failing to contain the virus before it spread.

Re-purposed domestic manufacturing facilities to ensure frontline workers had critical supplies.

  • Distributed billions of pieces of Personal Protective Equipment, including gloves, masks, gowns, and face shields.
  • Invoked the Defense Production Act over 100 times to accelerate the development and manufacturing of essential material in the USA.
  • Made historic investments of more than $3 billion into the industrial base.
  • Contracted with companies such as Ford, General Motors, Philips, and General Electric to produce ventilators.
  • Contracted with Honeywell, 3M, O&M Halyard, Moldex, and Lydall to increase our Nation’s production of N-95 masks.
  • The Army Corps of Engineers built 11,000 beds, distributed 10,000 ventilators, and surged personnel to hospitals.
  • Converted the Javits Center in New York into a 3,000-bed hospital, and opened medical facilities in Seattle and New Orleans.
  • Dispatched the USNS Comfort to New York City, and the USNS Mercy to Los Angeles.
  • Deployed thousands of FEMA employees, National Guard members, and military forces to help in the response.
  • Provided support to states facing new emergences of the virus, including surging testing sites, deploying medical personnel, and advising on mitigation strategies.
  • Announced Federal support to governors for use of the National Guard with 100 percent cost-share.
  • Established the Supply Chain Task Force as a “control tower” to strategically allocate high-demand medical supplies and PPE to areas of greatest need.
  • Requested critical data elements from states about the status of hospital capacity, ventilators, and PPE.
  • Executed nearly 250 flights through Project Air Bridge to transport hundreds of millions of surgical masks, N95 respirators, gloves, and gowns from around the world to hospitals and facilities throughout the United States.
  • Signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that Americans have a reliable supply of products like beef, pork, and poultry.
  • Stabilized the food supply chain restoring the Nation’s protein processing capacity through a collaborative approach with Federal, state, and local officials and industry partners.
  • The continued movement of food and other critical items of daily life distributed to stores and to American homes went unaffected.

Replenished the depleted Strategic National Stockpile.

  • Increased the number of ventilators nearly ten-fold to more than 153,000.
  • Despite the grim projections from the media and governors, no American who has needed a ventilator has been denied a ventilator.
  • Increased the number of N95 masks fourteen-fold to more than 176 million.
  • Issued an executive order ensuring critical medical supplies are produced in the United States.

Created the largest, most advanced, and most innovative testing system in the world.

  • Built the world’s leading testing system from scratch, conducting over 200 million tests – more than all of the European Union combined.
  • Engaged more than 400 test developers to increase testing capacity from less than 100 tests per day to more than 2 million tests per day.
  • Slashed red tape and approved Emergency Use Authorizations for more than 300 different tests, including 235 molecular tests, 63 antibody tests, and 11 antigen tests.
  • Delivered state-of-the-art testing devices and millions of tests to every certified nursing home in the country.
  • Announced more flexibility to Medicare Advantage and Part D plans to waive cost-sharing for tests.
  • Over 2,000 retail pharmacy stores, including CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens, are providing testing using new regulatory and reimbursement options.
  • Deployed tens of millions of tests to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribes, disaster relief operations, Home Health/Hospice organizations, and the Veterans Health Administration.
  • Began shipping 150 million BinaxNOW rapid tests to states, long-term care facilities, the IHS, HBCUs, and other key partners.

Pioneered groundbreaking treatments and therapies that reduced the mortality rate by 85 percent, saving over 2 million lives.

  • The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates in the entire world.
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program to expedite the regulatory review process for therapeutics in clinical trials, accelerate the development and publication of industry guidance on developing treatments, and utilize regulatory flexibility to help facilitate the scaling-up of manufacturing capacity.
  • More than 370 therapies are in clinical trials and another 560 are in the planning stages.
  • Announced $450 million in available funds to support the manufacturing of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail.
  • Shipped tens of thousands of doses of the Regeneron drug.
  • Authorized an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma.
  • Treated around 100,000 patients with convalescent plasma, which may reduce mortality by 50 percent.
  • Provided $48 million to fund the Mayo Clinic study that tested the efficacy of convalescent plasma for patients with COVID-19.
  • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of AstraZeneca’s cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies.
  • Approved Remdesivir as the first COVID-19 treatment, which could reduce hospitalization time by nearly a third.
  • Secured more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Remdesivir, enough to treat over 850,000 high-risk patients.
  • Granted an EUA to Eli Lilly for its anti-body treatments.
  • Finalized an agreement with Eli Lilly to purchase the first doses of the company’s investigational antibody therapeutic.
  • Provided up to $270 million to the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers to support the collection of up to 360,000 units of plasma.
  • Launched a nationwide campaign to ask patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma.
  • Announced Phase 3 clinical trials for varying types of blood thinners to treat adults diagnosed with COVID-19.
  • Issued an EUA for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab.
  • FDA issued an EUA for casirivimab and imdevimab to be administered together.
  • Launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium with private sector and academic leaders unleashing America’s supercomputers to accelerate coronavirus research.

Brought the full power of American medicine and government to produce a safe and effective vaccine in record time.

  • Launched Operation Warp Speed to initiate an unprecedented drive to develop and make available an effective vaccine by January 2021.
  • Pfizer and Moderna developed two vaccines in just nine months, five times faster than the fastest prior vaccine development in American history.
  • Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are approximately 95 effective – far exceeding all expectations.
  • AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson also both have promising candidates in the final stage of clinical trials.
  • The vaccines will be administered within 24 hours of FDA-approval.
  • Made millions of vaccine doses available before the end of 2020, with hundreds of millions more to quickly follow.
  • FedEx and UPS will ship doses from warehouses directly to local pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers.
  • Finalized a partnership with CVS and Walgreens to deliver vaccines directly to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities as soon as a state requests it, at no cost to America’s seniors.
  • Signed an executive order to ensure that the United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations.
  • Provided approximately $13 billion to accelerate vaccine development and to manufacture all of the top candidates in advance.
  • Provided critical investments of $4.1 billion to Moderna to support the development, manufacturing, and distribution of their vaccines.
  • Moderna announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.
  • Provided Pfizer up to $1.95 billion to support the mass-manufacturing and nationwide distribution of their vaccine candidate.
  • Pfizer announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.
  • Provided approximately $1 billion to support the manufacturing and distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate.
  • Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.
  • Made up to $1.2 billion available to support AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate.
  • AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.
  • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of Novavax’s vaccine candidate with 100 million doses expected.
  • Partnered with Sanofi and GSK to support large-scale manufacturing of a COVID-19 investigational vaccine.
  • Awarded $200 million in funding to support vaccine preparedness and plans for the immediate distribution and administration of vaccines.
  • Provided $31 million to Cytvia for vaccine-related consumable products.
  • Under the PREP Act, issued guidance authorizing qualified pharmacy technicians to administer vaccines.
  • Announced that McKesson Corporation will produce store, and distribute vaccine ancillary supply kits on behalf of the Strategic National Stockpile to help healthcare workers who will administer vaccines.
  • Announced partnership with large-chain, independent, and regional pharmacies to deliver vaccines.

Prioritized resources for the most vulnerable Americans, including nursing home residents.

  • Quickly established guidelines for nursing homes and expanded telehealth opportunities to protect vulnerable seniors.
  • Increased surveillance, oversight, and transparency of all 15,417 Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes by requiring them to report cases of COVID-19 to all residents, their families, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
  • Required that all nursing homes test staff regularly.
  • Launched an unprecedented national nursing home training curriculum to equip nursing home staff with the knowledge they need to stop the spread of COVID-19.
  • Delivered $81 million for increased inspections and funded 35,000 members of the Nation Guard to deliver critical supplies to every Medicare-certified nursing homes.
  • Deployed Federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks.
  • Distributed tens of billions of dollars in Provider Relief Funds to protect nursing homes, long-term care facilities, safety-net hospitals, rural hospitals, and communities hardest hit by the virus.
  • Released 1.5 million N95 respirators from the Strategic National Stockpile for distribution to over 3,000 nursing home facilities.
  • Directed the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council to refocus on underserved communities impacted by the coronavirus.
  • Required that testing results reported include data on race, gender, ethnicity, and ZIP code, to ensure that resources were directed to communities disproportionately harmed by the virus.
  • Ensured testing was offered at 95 percent of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), which serve over 29 million patients in 12,000 communities across the Nation.
  • Invested an unprecedented $8 billion in tribal communities.
  • Maintained safe access for Veterans to VA healthcare throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic and supported non-VA hospital systems and private and state-run nursing homes with VA clinical teams.
  • Signed legislation ensuring no reduction of VA education benefits under the GI Bill for online distance learning.

Supported Americans as they safely return to school and work.

  • Issued the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, a detailed blueprint to help governors as they began reopening the country. Focused on protecting the most vulnerable and mitigating the risk of any resurgence, while restarting the economy and allowing Americans to safely return to their jobs.
  • Helped Americans return to work by providing extensive guidance on workplace-safety measures to protect against COVID-19, and investigating over 10,000 coronavirus-related complaints and referrals.
  • Provided over $31 billion to support elementary and secondary schools.
  • Distributed 125 million face masks to school districts.
  • Provided comprehensive guidelines to schools on how to protect and identify high-risk individuals, prevent the spread of COVID-19, and conduct safe in-person teaching.
  • Brought back the safe return of college athletics, including Big Ten and Pac-12 football.

Rescued the American economy with nearly $3.4 trillion in relief, the largest financial aid package in history.

  • Secured an initial $8.3 billion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Act, supporting the development of treatments and vaccines, and to procure critical medical supplies and equipment.
  • Signed the $100 billion Families First Coronavirus Relief Act, guaranteeing free coronavirus testing, emergency paid sick leave and family leave, Medicaid funding, and food assistance.
  • Signed the $2.3 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, providing unprecedented and immediate relief to American families, workers, and businesses.
  • Signed additional legislation providing nearly $900 billion in support for coronavirus emergency response and relief, including critically needed funds to continue the Paycheck Protection Program.
  • Signed the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act, adding an additional $310 billion to replenish the program.
  • Delivered approximately 160 million relief payments to hardworking Americans.
  • Through the Paycheck Protection Program, approved over $525 billion in forgivable loans to more than 5.2 million small businesses, supporting more than 51 million American jobs.
  • The Treasury Department approved the establishment of the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility to provide liquidity to the financial system.
  • The Treasury Department, working with the Federal Reserve, was able to leverage approximately $4 trillion in emergency lending facilities.
  • Signed an executive order extending expanded unemployment benefits.
  • Signed an executive order to temporarily suspend student loan payments, evictions, and collection of payroll taxes.
  • Small Business Administration expanded access to emergency economic assistance for small businesses, faith-based, and religious entities.
  • Protected jobs for American workers impacted by COVID-19 by temporarily suspending several job-related nonimmigrant visas, including H-1B’s, H-2B’s without a nexus to the food-supply chain, certain H-4’s, as well as L’s and certain J’s.

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Great Healthcare for Americans

Empowered American patients by greatly expanding healthcare choice, transparency, and affordability.

  • Eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate – a financial relief to low and middle-income households that made up nearly 80 percent of the families who paid the penalty for not wanting to purchase health insurance.
  • Increased choice for consumers by promoting competition in the individual health insurance market leading to lower premiums for three years in a row.
  • Under the Trump Administration, more than 90 percent of the counties have multiple options on the individual insurance market to choose from.
  • Offered Association Health Plans, which allow employers to pool together and offer more affordable, quality health coverage to their employees at up to 30 percent lower cost.
  • Increased availability of short-term, limited-duration health plans, which can cost up to 60 percent less than traditional plans, giving Americans more flexibility to choose plans that suit their needs.
  • Expanded Health Reimbursement Arrangements, allowing millions of Americans to be able to shop for a plan of their choice on the individual market, and then have their employer cover the cost.
  • Added 2,100 new Medicare Advantage plan options since 2017, a 76 percent increase.
  • Lowered Medicare Advantage premiums by 34 percent nationwide to the lowest level in 14 years. Medicare health plan premium savings for beneficiaries have totaled $nearly 1.5 billion since 2017.
  • Improved access to tax-free health savings accounts for individuals with chronic conditions.
  • Eliminated costly Obamacare taxes, including the health insurance tax, the medical device tax, and the “Cadillac tax.”
  • Worked with states to create more flexibility and relief from oppressive Obamacare regulations, including reinsurance waivers to help lower premiums.
  • Released legislative principles to end surprise medical billing.
  • Finalized requirements for unprecedented price transparency from hospitals and insurance companies so patients know what the cost is before they receive care.
  • Took action to require that hospitals make the prices they negotiate with insurers publicly available and easily accessible online.
  • Improved patients access to their health data by penalizing hospitals and causing clinicians to lose their incentive payments if they do not comply.
  • Expanded access to telehealth, especially in rural and underserved communities.
  • Increased Medicare payments to rural hospitals to stem a decade of rising closures and deliver enhanced access to care in rural areas.

Issued unprecedented reforms that dramatically lowered the price of prescription drugs.

  • Lowered drug prices for the first time in 51 years.
  • Launched an initiative to stop global freeloading in the drug market.
  • Finalized a rule to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada.
  • Finalized the Most Favored Nation Rule to ensure that pharmaceutical companies offer the same discounts to the United States as they do to other nations, resulting in an estimated $85 billion in savings over seven years and $30 billion in out-of-pocket costs alone.
  • Proposed a rule requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and Epi-Pens directly to patients.
  • Ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from informing patients about the best prices for the medications they need.
  • Ended the costly kickbacks to middlemen and ensured that patients directly benefit from available discounts at the pharmacy counter, saving Americans up to 30 percent on brand name pharmaceuticals.
  • Enhanced Part D plans to provide many seniors with Medicare access to a broad set of insulins at a maximum $35 copay for a month’s supply of each type of insulin.
  • Reduced Medicare Part D prescription drug premiums, saving beneficiaries nearly $2 billion in premium costs since 2017.
  • Ended the Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which provided market exclusivity to generic drugs.

Promoted research and innovation in healthcare to ensure that American patients have access to the best treatment in the world.

  • Signed first-ever executive order to affirm that it is the official policy of the United States Government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.
  • Passed Right To Try to give terminally ill patients access to lifesaving cures.
  • Signed an executive order to fight kidney disease with more transplants and better treatment.
  • Signed into law a $1 billion increase in funding for critical Alzheimer’s research.
  • Accelerated medical breakthroughs in genetic treatments for Sickle Cell disease.
  • Finalized the interoperability rules that will give American patients access to their electronic health records on their phones.
  • Initiated an effort to provide $500 million over the next decade to improve pediatric cancer research.
  • Launched a campaign to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in America in the next decade.
  • Started a program to provide the HIV prevention drug PrEP to uninsured patients for free.
  • Signed an executive order and awarded new development contracts to modernize the influenza vaccine.

Protected our Nation’s seniors by safeguarding and strengthening Medicare.

  • Updated the way Medicare pays for innovative medical products to ensure beneficiaries have access to the latest innovation and treatment.
  • Reduced improper payments for Medicare an estimated $15 billion since 2016 protecting taxpayer dollars and leading to less fraud, waste, and abuse.
  • Took rapid action to combat antimicrobial resistance and secure access to life-saving new antibiotic drugs for American seniors, by removing several financial disincentives and setting policies to reduce inappropriate use.
  • Launched new online tools, including eMedicare, Blue Button 2.0, and Care Compare, to help seniors see what is covered, compare costs, streamline data, and compare tools available on Medicare.gov.
  • Provided new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits, including modifications to help keep seniors safe in their homes, respite care for caregivers, non-opioid pain management alternatives like therapeutic massages, transportation, and more in-home support services and assistance.
  • Protected Medicare beneficiaries by removing Social Security numbers from all Medicare cards, a project completed ahead of schedule.
  • Unleashed unprecedented transparency in Medicare and Medicaid data to spur research and innovation.

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Remaking the Federal Judiciary

Appointed a historic number of Federal judges who will interpret the Constitution as written.

  • Nominated and confirmed over 230 Federal judges.
  • Confirmed 54 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, making up nearly a third of the entire appellate bench.
  • Filled all Court of Appeals vacancies for the first time in four decades.
  • Flipped the Second, Third, and Eleventh Circuits from Democrat-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. And dramatically reshaped the long-liberal Ninth Circuit.

Appointed three Supreme Court justices, expanding its conservative-appointed majority to 6-3.

  • Appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
  • Appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.
  • Appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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Achieving a Secure Border

Secured the Southern Border of the United States.

  • Built over 400 miles of the world’s most robust and advanced border wall.
  • Illegal crossings have plummeted over 87 percent where the wall has been constructed.
  • Deployed nearly 5,000 troops to the Southern border. In addition, Mexico deployed tens of thousands of their own soldiers and national guardsmen to secure their side of the US-Mexico border.
  • Ended the dangerous practice of Catch-and-Release, which means that instead of aliens getting released into the United States pending future hearings never to be seen again, they are detained pending removal, and then ultimately returned to their home countries.
  • Entered into three historic asylum cooperation agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to stop asylum fraud and resettle illegal migrants in third-party nations pending their asylum applications.
  • Entered into a historic partnership with Mexico, referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” to safely return asylum-seekers to Mexico while awaiting hearings in the United States.

Fully enforced the immigration laws of the United States.

  • Signed an executive order to strip discretionary Federal grant funding from deadly sanctuary cities.
  • Fully enforced and implemented statutorily authorized “expedited removal” of illegal aliens.
  • The Department of Justice prosecuted a record-breaking number of immigration-related crimes.
  • Used Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to reduce the number of aliens coming from countries whose governments refuse to accept their nationals who were ordered removed from the United States.

Ended asylum fraud, shut down human smuggling traffickers, and solved the humanitarian crisis across the Western Hemisphere.

  • Suspended, via regulation, asylum for aliens who had skipped previous countries where they were eligible for asylum but opted to “forum shop” and continue to the United States.
  • Safeguarded migrant families, and protected migrant safety, by promulgating new regulations under the Flores Settlement Agreement.
  • Proposed regulations to end the practice of giving free work permits to illegal aliens lodging meritless asylum claims.
  • Issued “internal relocation” guidance.
  • Cross-trained United States Border Patrol agents to conduct credible fear screenings alongside USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) adjudication personnel to reduce massive backlogs.
  • Streamlined and expedited the asylum hearing process through both the Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and the Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP).
  • Launched the Family Fraud Initiative to identify hundreds of individuals who were fraudulently presenting themselves as family units at the border, oftentimes with trafficking children, in order to ensure child welfare.
  • Improved screening in countries with high overstay rates and reduced visa overstay rates in many of these countries.
  • Removed bureaucratic constraints on United States consular officers that reduced their ability to appropriately vet visa applicants.
  • Worked with Mexico and other regional partners to dismantle the human smuggling networks in our hemisphere that profit from human misery and fuel the border crisis by exploiting vulnerable populations.

Secured our Nation’s immigration system against criminals and terrorists.

  • Instituted national security travel bans to keep out terrorists, jihadists, and violent extremists, and implemented a uniform security and information-sharing baseline all nations must meet in order for their nationals to be able to travel to, and emigrate to, the United States.
  • Suspended refugee resettlement from the world’s most dangerous and terror-afflicted regions.
  • Rebalanced refugee assistance to focus on overseas resettlement and burden-sharing.
  • 85 percent reduction in refugee resettlement.
  • Overhauled badly-broken refugee security screening process.
  • Required the Department of State to consult with states and localities as part of the Federal government’s refugee resettlement process.
  • Issued strict sanctions on countries that have failed to take back their own nationals.
  • Established the National Vetting Center, which is the most advanced and comprehensive visa screening system anywhere in the world.

Protected American workers and taxpayers.

  • Issued a comprehensive “public charge” regulation to ensure newcomers to the United States are financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare.
  • Created an enforcement mechanism for sponsor repayment and deeming, to ensure that people who are presenting themselves as sponsors are actually responsible for sponsor obligations.
  • Issued regulations to combat the horrendous practice of “birth tourism.”
  • Issued a rule with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to make illegal aliens ineligible for public housing.
  • Issued directives requiring Federal agencies to hire United States workers first and prioritizing the hiring of United States workers wherever possible.
  • Suspended the entry of low-wage workers that threaten American jobs.
  • Finalized new H-1B regulations to permanently end the displacement of United States workers and modify the administrative tools that are required for H-1B visa issuance.
  • Defended United States sovereignty by withdrawing from the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration.
  • Suspended Employment Authorization Documents for aliens who arrive illegally between ports of entry and are ordered removed from the United States.
  • Restored integrity to the use of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by strictly adhering to the statutory conditions required for TPS.

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Restoring American Leadership Abroad

Restored America’s leadership in the world and successfully negotiated to ensure our allies pay their fair share for our military protection.

  • Secured a $400 billion increase in defense spending from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies by 2024, and the number of members meeting their minimum obligations more than doubled.
  • Credited by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for strengthening NATO.
  • Worked to reform and streamline the United Nations (UN) and reduced spending by $1.3 billion.
  • Allies, including Japan and the Republic of Korea, committed to increase burden-sharing.
  • Protected our Second Amendment rights by announcing the United States will never ratify the UN Arms Trade Treaty.
  • Returned 56 hostages and detainees from more than 24 countries.
  • Worked to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific region, promoting new investments and expanding American partnerships.

Advanced peace through strength.

  • Withdrew from the horrible, one-sided Iran Nuclear Deal and imposed crippling sanctions on the Iranian Regime.
  • Conducted vigorous enforcement on all sanctions to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero and deny the regime its principal source of revenue.
  • First president to meet with a leader of North Korea and the first sitting president to cross the demilitarized zone into North Korea.
  • Maintained a maximum pressure campaign and enforced tough sanctions on North Korea while negotiating de-nuclearization, the release of American hostages, and the return of the remains of American heroes.
  • Brokered economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, bolstering peace in the Balkans.
  • Signed the Honk Kong Autonomy Act and ended the United States’ preferential treatment with Hong Kong to hold China accountable for its infringement on the autonomy of Hong Kong.
  • Led allied efforts to defeat the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the international telecommunications system.

Renewed our cherished friendship and alliance with Israel and took historic action to promote peace in the Middle East.

  • Recognized Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel and quickly moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
  • Acknowledged Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declared that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not inconsistent with international law.
  • Removed the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council due to the group’s blatant anti-Israel bias.
  • Brokered historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab-Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and Sudan.
  • In addition, the United States negotiated a normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco, and recognized Moroccan Sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara, a position with long standing bipartisan support.
  • Brokered a deal for Kosovo to normalize ties and establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
  • Announced that Serbia would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
  • First American president to address an assembly of leaders from more than 50 Muslim nations, and reach an agreement to fight terrorism in all its forms.
  • Established the Etidal Center to combat terrorism in the Middle East in conjunction with the Saudi Arabian Government.
  • Announced the Vision for Peace Political Plan – a two-state solution that resolves the risks of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security, and the first time Israel has agreed to a map and a Palestinian state.
  • Released an economic plan to empower the Palestinian people and enhance Palestinian governance through historic private investment.

Stood up against Communism and Socialism in the Western Hemisphere.

  • Reversed the previous Administration’s disastrous Cuba policy, canceling the sellout deal with the Communist Castro dictatorship.
  • Pledged not to lift sanctions until all political prisoners are freed; freedoms of assembly and expression are respected; all political parties are legalized; and free elections are scheduled.
  • Enacted a new policy aimed at preventing American dollars from funding the Cuban regime, including stricter travel restrictions and restrictions on the importation of Cuban alcohol and tobacco.
  • Implemented a cap on remittances to Cuba.
  • Enabled Americans to file lawsuits against persons and entities that traffic in property confiscated by the Cuban regime.
  • First world leader to recognize Juan Guaido as the Interim President of Venezuela and led a diplomatic coalition against the Socialist Dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.
  • Blocked all property of the Venezuelan Government in the jurisdiction of the United States.
  • Cut off the financial resources of the Maduro regime and sanctioned key sectors of the Venezuelan economy exploited by the regime.
  • Brought criminal charges against Nicolas Maduro for his narco-terrorism.
  • Imposed stiff sanctions on the Ortega regime in Nicaragua.
  • Joined together with Mexico and Canada in a successful bid to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with 60 matches to be held in the United States.
  • Won bid to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.

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Colossal Rebuilding of the Military

Rebuilt the military and created the Sixth Branch, the United States Space Force.

  • Completely rebuilt the United States military with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.
  • Secured three pay raises for our service members and their families, including the largest raise in a decade.
  • Established the Space Force, the first new branch of the United States Armed Forces since 1947.
  • Modernized and recapitalized our nuclear forces and missile defenses to ensure they continue to serve as a strong deterrent.
  • Upgraded our cyber defenses by elevating the Cyber Command into a major warfighting command and by reducing burdensome procedural restrictions on cyber operations.
  • Vetoed the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, which failed to protect our national security, disrespected the history of our veterans and military, and contradicted our efforts to put America first.

Defeated terrorists, held leaders accountable for malign actions, and bolstered peace around the world.

  • Defeated 100 percent of ISIS’ territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
  • Freed nearly 8 million civilians from ISIS’ bloodthirsty control, and liberated Mosul, Raqqa, and the final ISIS foothold of Baghuz.
  • Killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Qasem Soleimani.
  • Created the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center (TFTC) in partnership between the United States and its Gulf partners to combat extremist ideology and threats, and target terrorist financial networks, including over 60 terrorist individuals and entities spanning the globe.
  • Twice took decisive military action against the Assad regime in Syria for the barbaric use of chemical weapons against innocent civilians, including a successful 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles strike.
  • Authorized sanctions against bad actors tied to Syria’s chemical weapons program.
  • Negotiated an extended ceasefire with Turkey in northeast Syria.

Addressed gaps in American’s defense-industrial base, providing much-needed updates to improve the safety of our country.

  • Protected America’s defense-industrial base, directing the first whole-of-government assessment of our manufacturing and defense supply chains since the 1950s.
  • Took decisive steps to secure our information and communications technology and services supply chain, including unsafe mobile applications.
  • Completed several multi-year nuclear material removal campaigns, securing over 1,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and significantly reducing global nuclear threats.
  • Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.
  • Established a whole-of-government strategy addressing the threat posed by China’s malign efforts targeting the United States taxpayer-funded research and development ecosystem.
  • Advanced missile defense capabilities and regional alliances.
  • Bolstered the ability of our allies and partners to defend themselves through the sale of aid and military equipment.
  • Signed the largest arms deal ever, worth nearly $110 billion, with Saudi Arabia.

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Serving and Protecting Our Veterans

Reformed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to improve care, choice, and employee accountability.

  • Signed and implemented the VA Mission Act, which made permanent Veterans CHOICE, revolutionized the VA community care system, and delivered quality care closer to home for Veterans.
  • The number of Veterans who say they trust VA services has increased 19 percent to a record 91 percent, an all-time high.
  • Offered same-day emergency mental health care at every VA medical facility, and secured $9.5 billion for mental health services in 2020.
  • Signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act of 2017, which ensured that veterans could continue to see the doctor of their choice and wouldn’t have to wait for care.
  • During the Trump Administration, millions of veterans have been able to choose a private doctor in their communities.
  • Expanded Veterans’ ability to access telehealth services, including through the “Anywhere to Anywhere” VA healthcare initiative leading to a 1000 percent increase in usage during COVID-19.
  • Signed the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and removed thousands of VA workers who failed to give our Vets the care they have so richly deserve.
  • Signed the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 and improved the efficiency of the VA, setting record numbers of appeals decisions.
  • Modernized medical records to begin a seamless transition from the Department of Defense to the VA.
  • Launched a new tool that provides Veterans with online access to average wait times and quality-of-care data.
  • The promised White House VA Hotline has fielded hundreds of thousands of calls.
  • Formed the PREVENTS Task Force to fight the tragedy of Veteran suicide.

Decreased veteran homelessness, improved education benefits, and achieved record-low veteran unemployment.

  • Signed and implemented the Forever GI Bill, allowing Veterans to use their benefits to get an education at any point in their lives.
  • Eliminated every penny of Federal student loan debt owed by American veterans who are completely and permanently disabled.
  • Compared to 2009, 49 percent fewer veterans experienced homelessness nationwide during 2019.
  • Signed and implemented the HAVEN Act to ensure that Veterans who’ve declared bankruptcy don’t lose their disability payments.
  • Helped hundreds of thousands of military service members make the transition from the military to the civilian workforce, and developed programs to support the employment of military spouses.
  • Placed nearly 40,000 homeless veterans into employment through the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program.
  • Placed over 600,000 veterans into employment through American Job Center services.
  • Enrolled over 500,000 transitioning service members in over 20,000 Department of Labor employment workshops.
  • Signed an executive order to help Veterans transition seamlessly into the United States Merchant Marine.

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Making Communities Safer

Signed into law landmark criminal justice reform.

  • Signed the bipartisan First Step Act into law, the first landmark criminal justice reform legislation ever passed to reduce recidivism and help former inmates successfully rejoin society.
  • Promoted second chance hiring to give former inmates the opportunity to live crime-free lives and find meaningful employment.
  • Launched a new “Ready to Work” initiative to help connect employers directly with former prisoners.
  • Awarded $2.2 million to states to expand the use of fidelity bonds, which underwrite companies that hire former prisoners.
  • Reversed decades-old ban on Second Chance Pell programs to provide postsecondary education to individuals who are incarcerated expand their skills and better succeed in the workforce upon re-entry.
  • Awarded over $333 million in Department of Labor grants to nonprofits and local and state governments for reentry projects focused on career development services for justice-involved youth and adults who were formerly incarcerated.

Unprecedented support for law-enforcement.

  • In 2019, violent crime fell for the third consecutive year.
  • Since 2016, the violent crime rate has declined over 5 percent and the murder rate has decreased by over 7 percent.
  • Launched Operation Legend to combat a surge of violent crime in cities, resulting in more than 5,500 arrests.
  • Deployed the National Guard and Federal law enforcement to Kenosha to stop violence and restore public safety.
  • Provided $1 million to Kenosha law enforcement, nearly $4 million to support small businesses in Kenosha, and provided over $41 million to support law enforcement to the state of Wisconsin.
  • Deployed Federal agents to save the courthouse in Portland from rioters.
  • Signed an executive order outlining ten-year prison sentences for destroying Federal property and monuments.
  • Directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute Federal offenses related to ongoing violence.
  • DOJ provided nearly $400 million for new law enforcement hiring.
  • Endorsed by the 355,000 members of the Fraternal Order of Police.
  • Revitalized Project Safe Neighborhoods, which brings together Federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials to develop solutions to violent crime.
  • Improved first-responder communications by deploying the FirstNet National Public Safety Broadband Network, which serves more than 12,000 public safety agencies across the Nation.
  • Established a new commission to evaluate best practices for recruiting, training, and supporting law enforcement officers.
  • Signed the Safe Policing for Safe Communities executive order to incentive local police department reforms in line with law and order.
  • Made hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment available to local law enforcement.
  • Signed an executive order to help prevent violence against law enforcement officers.
  • Secured permanent funding for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for first responders.

Implemented strong measures to stem hate crimes, gun violence, and human trafficking.

  • Signed an executive order making clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism.
  • Launched a centralized website to educate the public about hate crimes and encourage reporting.
  • Signed the Fix NICS Act to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.
  • Signed the STOP School Violence Act and created a Commission on School Safety to examine ways to make our schools safer.
  • Launched the Foster Youth to Independence initiative to prevent and end homelessness among young adults under the age of 25 who are in, or have recently left, the foster care system.
  • Signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which tightened criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking.
  • Established a task force to help combat the tragedy of missing or murdered Native American women and girls.
  • Prioritized fighting for the voiceless and ending the scourge of human trafficking across the Nation, through a whole of government back by legislation, executive action, and engagement with key industries.
  • Created the first-ever White House position focused solely on combating human trafficking.

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Cherishing Life and Religious Liberty

Steadfastly supported the sanctity of every human life and worked tirelessly to prevent government funding of abortion.

  • Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, ensuring that taxpayer money is not used to fund abortion globally.
  • Issued a rule preventing Title X taxpayer funding from subsiding the abortion industry.
  • Supported legislation to end late-term abortions.
  • Cut all funding to the United Nations population fund due to the fund’s support for coercive abortion and forced sterilization.
  • Signed legislation overturning the previous administration’s regulation that prohibited states from defunding abortion facilities as part of their family planning programs.
  • Fully enforced the requirement that taxpayer dollars do not support abortion coverage in Obamacare exchange plans.
  • Stopped the Federal funding of fetal tissue research.
  • Worked to protect healthcare entities and individuals’ conscience rights – ensuring that no medical professional is forced to participate in an abortion in violation of their beliefs.
  • Issued an executive order reinforcing requirement that all hospitals in the United States provide medical treatment or an emergency transfer for infants who are in need of emergency medical care—regardless of prematurity or disability.
  • Led a coalition of countries to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, declaring that there is no international right to abortion and committing to protecting women’s health.
  • First president in history to attend the March for Life.

Stood up for religious liberty in the United States and around the world.

  • Protected the conscience rights of doctors, nurses, teachers, and groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor.
  • First president to convene a meeting at the United Nations to end religious persecution.
  • Established the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.
  • Stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with pastors’ right to speak their minds.
  • Reversed the previous administration’s policy that prevented the government from providing disaster relief to religious organizations.
  • Protected faith-based adoption and foster care providers, ensuring they can continue to serve their communities while following the teachings of their faith.
  • Reduced burdensome barriers to ensure Native Americans are free to keep spiritually and culturally significant eagle feathers found on their tribal lands.
  • Took action to ensure Federal employees can take paid time off work to observe religious holy days.
  • Signed legislation to assist religious and ethnic groups targeted by ISIS for mass murder and genocide in Syria and Iraq.
  • Directed American assistance toward persecuted communities, including through faith-based programs.
  • Launched the International Religious Freedom Alliance – the first-ever alliance devoted to confronting religious persecution around the world.
  • Appointed a Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.
  • Imposed restrictions on certain Chinese officials, internal security units, and companies for their complicity in the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
  • Issued an executive order to protect and promote religious freedom around the world.

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Safeguarding the Environment

Took strong action to protect the environment and ensure clean air and clean water.

  • Took action to protect vulnerable Americans from being exposed to lead and copper in drinking water and finalized a rule protecting children from lead-based paint hazards.
  • Invested over $38 billion in clean water infrastructure.
  • In 2019, America achieved the largest decline in carbon emissions of any country on earth. Since withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States has reduced carbon emissions more than any nation.
  • American levels of particulate matter – one of the main measures of air pollution – are approximately five times lower than the global average.
  • Between 2017 and 2019, the air became 7 percent cleaner – indicated by a steep drop in the combined emissions of criteria pollutants.
  • Led the world in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, having cut energy-related CO2 emissions by 12 percent from 2005 to 2018 while the rest of the world increased emissions by 24 percent.
  • In FY 2019 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cleaned up more major pollution sites than any year in nearly two decades.
  • The EPA delivered $300 million in Brownfields grants directly to communities most in need including investment in 118 Opportunity Zones.
  • Placed a moratorium on offshore drilling off the coasts of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.
  • Restored public access to Federal land at Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
  • Recovered more endangered or threatened species than any other administration in its first term.

Secured agreements and signed legislation to protect the environment and preserve our Nation’s abundant national resources.

  • The USMCA guarantees the strongest environmental protections of any trade agreement in history.
  • Signed the Save Our Seas Act to protect our environment from foreign nations that litter our oceans with debris and developed the first-ever Federal strategic plan to address marine litter.
  • Signed the Great American Outdoors Act, securing the single largest investment in America’s National Parks and public lands in history.
  • Signed the largest public lands legislation in a decade, designating 1.3 million new acres of wilderness.
  • Signed a historic executive order promoting much more active forest management to prevent catastrophic wildfires.
  • Opened and expanded access to over 4 million acres of public lands for hunting and fishing.
  • Joined the One Trillion Trees Initiative to plant, conserve, and restore trees in America and around the world.
  • Delivered infrastructure upgrades and investments for numerous projects, including over half a billion dollars to fix the Herbert Hoover Dike and expanding funding for Everglades restoration by 55 percent.

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Expanding Educational Opportunity

Fought tirelessly to give every American access to the best possible education.

  • The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expanded School Choice, allowing parents to use up to $10,000 from a 529 education savings account to cover K-12 tuition costs at the public, private, or religious school of their choice.
  • Launched a new pro-American lesson plan for students called the 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education.
  • Prohibited the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Federal government.
  • Established the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.
  • Called on Congress to pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act to expand education options for 1 million students of all economic backgrounds.
  • Signed legislation reauthorizing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program.
  • Issued updated guidance making clear that the First Amendment right to Free Exercise of Religion does not end at the door to a public school.

Took action to promote technical education.

  • Signed into law the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, which provides over 13 million students with high-quality vocational education and extends more than $1.3 billion each year to states for critical workforce development programs.
  • Signed the INSPIRE Act which encouraged NASA to have more women and girls participate in STEM and seek careers in aerospace.
  • Allocated no less than $200 million each year in grants to prioritize women and minorities in STEM and computer science education.

Drastically reformed and modernized our educational system to restore local control and promote fairness.

  • Restored state and local control of education by faithfully implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act.
  • Signed an executive order that ensures public universities protect First Amendment rights or they will risk losing funding, addresses student debt by requiring colleges to share a portion of the financial risk, and increases transparency by requiring universities to disclose information about the value of potential educational programs.
  • Issued a rule strengthening Title IX protections for survivors of sexual misconduct in schools, and that – for the first time in history – codifies that sexual harassment is prohibited under Title IX.
  • Negotiated historic bipartisan agreement on new higher education rules to increase innovation and lower costs by reforming accreditation, state authorization, distance education, competency-based education, credit hour, religious liberty, and TEACH Grants.

Prioritized support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

  • Moved the Federal Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative back to the White House.
  • Signed into law the FUTURE Act, making permanent $255 million in annual funding for HBCUs and increasing funding for the Federal Pell Grant program.
  • Signed legislation that included more than $100 million for scholarships, research, and centers of excellence at HBCU land-grant institutions.
  • Fully forgave $322 million in disaster loans to four HBCUs in 2018, so they could fully focus on educating their students.
  • Enabled faith-based HBCUs to enjoy equal access to Federal support.

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Combatting the Opioid Crisis

Brought unprecedented attention and support to combat the opioid crisis.

  • Declared the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency.
  • Secured a record $6 billion in new funding to combat the opioid epidemic.
  • Signed the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, the largest-ever legislative effort to address a drug crisis in our Nation’s history.
  • Launched the Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand in order to confront the many causes fueling the drug crisis.
  • The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded a record $9 billion in grants to expand access to prevention, treatment, and recovery services to States and local communities.
  • Passed the CRIB Act, allowing Medicaid to help mothers and their babies who are born physically dependent on opioids by covering their care in residential pediatric recovery facilities.
  • Distributed $1 billion in grants for addiction prevention and treatment.
  • Announced a Safer Prescriber Plan that seeks to decrease the amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America by one third within three years.
  • Reduced the total amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America.
  • Expanded access to medication-assisted treatment and life-saving Naloxone.
  • Launched FindTreatment.gov, a tool to find help for substance abuse.
  • Drug overdose deaths fell nationwide in 2018 for the first time in nearly three decades.
  • Launched the Drug-Impaired Driving Initiative to work with local law enforcement and the driving public at large to increase awareness.
  • Launched a nationwide public ad campaign on youth opioid abuse that reached 58 percent of young adults in America.
  • Since 2016, there has been a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of Americans receiving medication-assisted treatment.
  • Approved 29 state Medicaid demonstrations to improve access to opioid use disorder treatment, including new flexibility to cover inpatient and residential treatment.
  • Approved nearly $200 million in grants to address the opioid crisis in severely affected communities and to reintegrate workers in recovery back into the workforce.

Took action to seize illegal drugs and punish those preying on innocent Americans.

  • In FY 2019, ICE HSI seized 12,466 pounds of opioids including 3,688 pounds of fentanyl, an increase of 35 percent from FY 2018.
  • Seized tens of thousands of kilograms of heroin and thousands of kilograms of fentanyl since 2017.
  • The Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted more fentanyl traffickers than ever before, dismantled 3,000 drug trafficking organizations, and seized enough fentanyl to kill 105,000 Americans.
  • DOJ charged more than 65 defendants collectively responsible for distributing over 45 million opioid pills.
  • Brought kingpin designations against traffickers operating in China, India, Mexico, and more who have played a role in the epidemic in America.
  • Indicted major Chinese drug traffickers for distributing fentanyl in the U.S for the first time ever, and convinced China to enact strict regulations to control the production and sale of fentanyl.

If I have time, I’d like to go through this list to touch on the highlights of what the Trump Administration got right or wrong, what he accomplished that a Democratic Administration wou8ldn’t have, and what he accomplished that another Republican presidential admistration would or wouldn’t have.

LinkSwarm for June 29, 2018

Friday, June 29th, 2018

Half the year gone! And so far, those of you who declared “Surely Democrats can’t keep up this level of lunacy” are losing your bets…

  • How Democrats’ said lunacy will backfire on them:

    Democrats should also understand that these public tantrums and other slights are simply bad politics. Voters don’t respond well to angry chanting losers harassing people, or to vulgar celebrities, or to threats verging on intimidation and violence. There is nothing inspirational about it, and it makes the targets of the anger look that much more reasonable. If Democrats think this crazed behavior will generate a “blue wave” in November, they are mistaken.

  • Why Democrats are freaking out over Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement:

    How did we get here? Two tracks converged to deliver us this dysfunction. The first is narrowly political. The Democrats, confident that they were on the right side of history, thought there was no harm in accelerating the rush to total victory. For years, Democrats practiced the rule that all is fair in judicial-confirmation battles, starting with the war on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Then, under the leadership of Barack Obama and then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid, they did away with the filibuster on judicial appointments short of the Supreme Court, opening the door for Republicans to nudge it slightly more wide open.

    The second track is longer. Starting over a century ago, progressives began emphasizing ends over means. If the Supreme Court could deliver wins unattainable at the ballot box and unsupported by the Constitution, so be it. Thus was born the “living Constitution” — the doctrine that holds that the magical parchment should mean whatever progressives need it to mean at any moment. This was how Anthony Kennedy became an (apparently temporary) gay-rights hero. After consulting his feelings, he found a constitutional right no one had found in the text before.

    This idea that the Supreme Court is there to serve as a Praetorian Guard around progressive policies was on full display this week. Prior to Kennedy’s retirement announcement, the court issued a 5–4 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public-sector unions can’t compel nonunion members to pay fees for union representation, thus violating the First Amendment.

    Justice Elena Kagan caustically disagreed. For her, the problem with the decision was that “public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support.”

    “The First Amendment was meant for better things,” Kagan concluded in her dissent. “It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.”

    In short: The Supreme Court isn’t there to protect the meaning of the First Amendment; the Supreme Court is there to protect a secure source of financial support for public-sector unions. If the First Amendment gets in the way, that’s okay.

    The panic unfolding across the progressive landscape stems from the creeping fear that the Supreme Court might start doing its job — and not the job progressives have assigned it.

  • Hugh Hewett: “Turns out ‘But Gorsuch’ was a good argument after all.”

    What will the #NeverTrump coalition in the Beltway (with an annex in New York) say now?

    For a while, before tax cuts and regulatory reform boosted the economy, before defense spending increased, before Jerusalem was recognized as Israel’s capital, and before a “maximum pressure” campaign led to a detente with North Korea, #NeverTrumpers were fond of mockingly summarizing Trump supporters’ arguments as “But Gorsuch.”

    This bit of childish taunting always struck me as an unknowing admission of ignorance about the role assumed by the Supreme Court in modern American governance. Even when 21 appeals court judges took their seats — orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues — still the one-note pundits played on, only louder: President Trump was so awful and evil, and conservatives who supported him had done so for one lousy seat on the Supreme Court.

    The implication from all the noise and a thousands posts was that “Gorsuch” wasn’t worth it. Now, after Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s first year on the court, it will be impossible to overstate what his confirmation has meant.

  • Anthony Kennedy as moderate conservative pragmatist:

    While Justice Kennedy was usually a moderate conservative, there were areas of the law in which Justice Kennedy was not particularly moderate and others in which he was not particularly conservative. Particularly in areas touching on the freedom of speech and personal liberty, Justice Kennedy would swing for the fences. Justice Kennedy was easily the most speech-protective Justice on what was a quite speech-protective Court. Whether the speech at issue concerned political campaigns or product pricing, “offensive” messages or dishonest claims about military service, Justice Kennedy believed in uncompromising First Amendment protection. By some accounts it was Justice Kennedy who pushed the Court (and a reluctant Chief Justice) to invalidate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and this would be entirely consistent with what we saw in his First Amendment opinions.

    Speech was not the only freedom that mattered to Justice Kennedy. He had a deep concern for Due Process, as shown in his embrace of habeas rights for alleged enemy combatants, his concerns about the application of capital punishment to some classes of criminal defendants, and his embrace of constitutional limits on punitive damages. He also, perhaps most famously, believed that due regard for individual liberty barred the government from adopting laws prohibiting or disregarding same-sex relationships, as in Lawrence, Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell. In these areas, there was nothing modest, moderate, or minimalist about Justice Kennedy’s views or the doctrinal rules he would embrace.

    Given the makeup of the Roberts Court, as went Justice Kennedy, so went the Court. Where Kennedy was a moderate conservative favoring a minimalist approach, the Roberts court would tend to adopt a moderate conservative opinion. Where Justice Kennedy favored a more muscular approach, on the other hand, there were almost always at least four votes to go along. (NFIB v. Sebelius being a notable exception.) If Justice Kennedy wanted to recognize same-sex marriage or preclude the use of the death penalty for those convicted of non-lethal crimes, the liberals would agree. If Justice Kennedy wanted to protect campaign-related or commercial speech, the conservatives were there. so the Roberts Court was generally as conservative and as moderate as Justice Kennedy wanted to be.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • Kurt Schlichter on the insanity gripping the Democratic Party:

    There’s no sign of sanity. This week they turned the hate up to “11,” then cranked it to “17.” There are not many places to go once you reach “You are real live Nazis murdering children by not letting aspiring Democrat voters flow into the country at will!” At some point, instead of a few wild-eyed randos with crummy aim trying to off libs’ political/cultural opponents, they are going to start collectively going to go for the throat.

    Our collective throat. Which I do not anticipate us Normals responding to in a huggy, loving kind of way.

    Snip.

    We’re already seeing it play out. The mainstream media quit even pretending to be honest – it’s in full scale fib mode. Look at the Time magazine cover of the little girl whose scumbag mom dragged her across the desert to help her break our laws (apparently without daddy’s permission and not for the first time). That Time cover is a lie, but it’s no surprise. The only surprise is that Time magazine is still a thing.

    In fact, the whole manufactured outrage over Democrat-preferred criminals being treated like every other criminal was a lie. And the media not only doesn’t care but actively and consciously supports lying to you to support its liberal allies. But no one cares anymore. They can lie and lie and lie, and do, and we just smile and buy more guns and ammo.

    So the leftists attempt to intimidate us into submission, showing up at people’s houses and screaming at them in restaurants. Take that, Sarah! The idea is since the leftists can’t convince Normals with the power of their ideas – because leftists’ ideas inevitably involve Normals ceding more of their rights and money to leftists – the left wants to make submission and obedience the price for being able to participate in the culture. But what’s inevitable is that us newly militant Normals, whose power is political rather than cultural, are going to respond pursuant to the New Rules and demand that leftists bake us a cake.

  • The craziness among Democrats can be explained by the behavior of cultists after a prophecy fails: the moderates, the ones who were the biggest brake on untrammeled lunacy, are the ones out the door first.

    The more lukewarm Democrats are either keeping their mouths shut or are disappearing from the Party. The ones who remain are the ones who are more committed (translation: barking mad moonbats) who are the ones we hear talking about impeachment, banishing Trump supporters from the public square, protesting at Republican’s houses, etc.

    It also explains why Democratic Party big wigs are losing primary challenges to candidates of the more barking mad persuasion (e.g. Joe Crowley, one of the biggest of the Democratic House big wigs who lost to someone who can only be described as a commie).

  • Speaking of which, the House’s fourth-ranking Democrat just got knocked off by a woman who wants to abolish ICE. “The objection of the hard Left is not to the current style or kind of immigration enforcement; their objection is to the existence of immigration enforcement.”
  • Mega Turbo Democrat Dumbass: “I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.” Yeah, that last bit turned out to not be the case: The FBI arrested him within hours.
  • “Janus Ruling Could Cost Unions Hundreds of Millions.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “In ruling on bullet-stamping law, California Supreme Court says state laws cannot be invalidated on the grounds that complying with them is impossible.” Evidently liberals find this whole “reality” thing too much of a drag…
  • Keep in mind that a majority of Democrats don’t want to abolish ICE. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • In East Texas, more of that voter fraud Democrats claim doesn’t exist.
  • And also in South Texas. Bonus: Hidalgo County fraud, which we’ve previously covered.
  • Bonus: Judges orders redo of Democratic primary runoff due to voting fraud:

    A judge ordered a do-over of a contested Democratic primary runoff race in South Texas after invalidating the runoff results due to voter fraud. The runoff was decided by six votes.

    Ofelia “Ofie” Gutierrez contested the results of the May 22 Democratic primary runoff for Kleberg County Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 after losing to incumbent Esequiel “Cheque” De La Paz by a vote of 318 to 312.

    Gutierrez alleged that more than six illegal votes were counted, cast by people who didn’t reside within Precinct 4 and therefore weren’t eligible to vote in the election.

    On Tuesday, visiting Judge Joel Johnson threw out seven of the 16 ballots Gutierrez challenged in court. All seven were cast by voters related in some way to De La Paz.

  • “Head of prominent charity that campaigns against child abuse is arrested for ‘trying to arrange to rape multiple children as young as two.”
  • 200 Muslim migrants attempt to storm the Croatian border yelling “Allahu Akbar.”
  • Iran reopens uranium plant. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Iran, protests there continued for a sixth day following a currency collapse. “On Sunday, the rial plunged 15 percent to IRR 89,000 against the dollar on the black market. Since the U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal on May 8, the rial has lost more than 40 percent of its value.”
  • The dumbasses at the Austin City Council approved building a soccer stadium. Because subsidizing a popular sport just wasn’t insulting enough to taxpayers…
  • Were Houston police officers dosed with flyers laced with Fentanyl left on patrol car windshields? Followup: Lab tests say no.
  • What it’s like to service an SR-71. “Our last structural integrity review was in 1987, and it declared that the aircraft was about 180 percent stronger than the day it was made. The higher and faster you flew it, the stronger the titanium became.”
  • CNN’s ratings fall below those of the food network. (Hat tip: Ace.)
  • Black man being arrested for shoplifting calls police Nazis. So they charged him with a hate crime. All hate crime laws are stupid, but those that criminalize free speech are an order of magnitude stupider. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • A Tweet with some numbers from the latest Harris poll:

  • A sample from the #WalkAway tag on Twitter:

  • Are eight AT&T buildings (including one in Dallas) hubs for NSA spying?
  • Multiculturalism Watch: Excavating the Aztec’s ceremonial skull rack, which the Spanish conquistadors estimated as holding 130,000 skulls from human sacrifices. “Gomoz Valdas found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed.”
  • Harlan Ellison, RIP.
  • Dave Barry’s 2017 Roundup

    Sunday, December 31st, 2017

    Dave Barry breaks out the Dave Barry in his 2017 roundup:

    Some samples:

    It was a year so surreal, so densely populated with strange and alarming events, that you have to seriously consider the possibility that somebody — and when we say “somebody,” we mean “Russia” — was putting LSD in our water supply. A bizarre event would occur, and it would be all over the news, but before we could wrap our minds around it, another bizarre event would occur, then another and another, coming at us faster and faster, battering the nation with a Category 5 weirdness hurricane that left us hunkering down, clinging to our sanity, no longer certain what was real.

    Meanwhile the big emerging journalism story is the Russians, who, according to many unnamed sources, messed with the election. Nobody seems to know how, specifically, the Russians affected the election, but everybody is pretty sure they did something, especially CNN, which has not been so excited about a story since those heady months in 2014 when it provided 24/7 video coverage of random objects floating in the Pacific while panels of experts speculated on whether these objects might or might not have anything to do with that missing Malaysian airliner. You can tune into CNN anytime, day or night, and you are virtually guaranteed to hear the word “Russians” within 10 seconds, even if it’s during a Depends commercial.

    The biggest political story comes at the end of the month, when Trump nominates Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, noting that the letters in “Neil Gorsuch” can be rearranged to spell both “Heroic Lungs” and “Lunch Orgies.” Democratic leaders pledge to give Gorsuch a fair and open-minded hearing, then destroy him.

    Amazon, aka the Death Star of Retail, becomes even larger and more powerful when it announces plans to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, or enough money to buy nearly four pounds of top sirloin at current Whole Foods prices.

    Facebook announces that it has reached a total of two billion users, who in 2017 alone have already posted a total of 17 trillion impassioned statements of their political views, which have changed a total of zero minds.

    With emotions running high in the wake of Charlottesville, ESPN executives decide to pull announcer Robert Lee off the broadcast of the University of Virginia football game, out of concern that his name might be disturbing to those viewers who are as stupid as ESPN executives.

    In other protest news, police in Berkeley, California, battle anti-fascist activists, or “antifa,” who fight fascism by violently assaulting anybody who might do or say or think something the “antifa” deem unacceptable.

    Speaking of excitement, Hillary Clinton, responding to the insatiable public appetite for reliving the 2016 election over and over and over, comes out with her new tell-all book titled “You Idiots,” in which she candidly reveals that she was in fact a superb candidate and charming human who totally would have won the presidency had it not been for — among many other unfair obstacles that were unfairly placed in her path — James Comey, the Russians, the so-called “Electoral College,” Bernie Sanders, the Democratic National Committee, Anthony Weiner, sexism, Barack Obama, the media, her incompetent campaign staff and the frankly unacceptable stupidity of the American public. Next stop: 2020!

    Meanwhile a major scandal engulfs the entertainment world when The New York Times reveals that powerful movie producer Harvey Weinstein, despite being a prominent supporter of all the correct causes, basically spent the past several decades lumbering around in an open bathrobe forcing himself on unreceptive women. This news comes as a big shock to members of the Hollywood community, especially coming on the heels of their recent discovery that the pope is Catholic.

    In financial news, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, seeking to prop up his nation’s collapsing economy, announces the creation of a new digital currency called the “Petro,” which will be backed by a combination of oil reserves and a magic feather. The Illinois Legislature quickly follows suit, announcing that from now on the financially troubled state will pay its debts with the “Porko,” a digital currency backed by bratwurst.

    Happy New Year, everyone!

    LinkSwarm for April 7, 2017

    Friday, April 7th, 2017

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

    I’m still not wild about President Trump’s decision to strike a Syrian airfield with cruise missiles last night, but the decision makes more sense if you look at it less of a tool to make Bashar Assad mend his ways than as a warning shot across the bows of Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-Un and Xi Jinping, the latter of whom President Trump just happened to be meeting with while the missiles were hitting Shayrat.

    Now some links:

  • Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed to the Supreme Court today. How’d that Nuclear Option work out for you in the long run, Harry Reid?
  • The Obama/Kerry policy on Syrian chemical disarmament has been such an astounding failure that even Polifact has been forced to admit it.
  • Here’s a really interesting precinct-by-precinct map of the 2016 presidential election, along with analysis of changes from previous maps.

  • Susan Rice has changed her story twice. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Intelligence agencies are stonewalling congressional information requests on unmasking scandal.
  • Even Rolling Stone has noticed Putin derangement syndrome.
  • Russia recognizes West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, while recognizing East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.
  • Russia has banned this image:

  • Jobless claims “are hovering near the lowest level since the early 1970s.” Now the trick is to produce enough sustained growth to get the Obama-discouraged long-term unemployed back into the workforce…
  • Dissecting the mainstream media’s dishonest response to every jihad attack.
  • “Conniving, spineless, duplicitous, misleading, double-crossing—Chuck Schumer is a fitting exemplar for the modern Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Intersectionality is a religion. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Marines test polymers to cut weight.
  • College student who was once in pictures with Bill Clinton busted for prostitution. What are the odds? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Justified shooting, unjustified indictment.
  • Mike Pence’s rules for not being alone with other women are probably less about preventing adultery than to prevent him from being framed and smeared by feminists.
  • “Ethicist” Pete Singer: Hey, let’s rape the retarded! It’s not like they’re real human beings…
  • The Royal Canadian Mounted Police can intercept your cell phone conversations.
  • Is Google prejudiced against ex-military employees?
  • ESPN is losing money hand-over-fist, but they’re still going shove the liberal culture war down your throat.
  • Oh the huge manatees…are doing just fine.
  • Hope you don’t need to use the stretch of I-35 near San Antonio this weekend: The Texas Department of Transportation is shutting it down for four days.
  • Don Rickles, RIP. With a great segment with him on the Tonight Show with Frank Sinatra.
  • LinkSwarm for March 31, 2017

    Friday, March 31st, 2017

    Welcome to April Fool’s Eve! Don’t believe anything you hear tomorrow. Especially if it’s from CNN…

  • Representative Moe Brooks of Alabama offers up a one sentence repeal of ObamaCare: “Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.” Get on it, GOP… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Why not give CruzCare a try?
  • Single-payer’s future is Venezuela’s present: “The communist model for healthcare will result in everyone having a right to healthcare and no one getting any of it. There will be black market health care for those who can afford it, a lovely parallel system for the politically well connected, and a crumbling system of overworked, over-regulated providers working to give some care to all the rest of us.”
  • Scott Adams: “With the failure of the Ryan healthcare bill, the illusion of Trump-is-Hitler has been fully replaced with Trump-is-incompetent meme.”
  • CrowdStrike, Patient Zero in the “Russia hacked the Democrats” vector, backtracks key claims.
  • “Filibustering Gorsuch might be a pointless exercise when it comes to keeping him off the court, but it would have the advantage of giving angry Democratic activists something they desperately want: an opportunity to lash out in fury at Republicans.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Democratic senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND) announced they will vote for Gorsuch.
  • Leftists are taking this fact with their usual grace and tact:

    Yeah, I have no idea who Mr. Checkmark Who Has Fewer Followers Than Me is either…

  • Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has seven facts for Democrats to consider before filibustering Gorsuch. “There has never been a successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.”
  • Hosni Mubarek freed in Egypt. But I mainly want to talk about the Times piece of an example of sins of omission by the newspaper of record. “The first democratic election, in 2012, brought to power a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi. But he lasted only a year, making a series of political blunders that cost him the support of the military, crucial parts of the security apparatus and millions of Egyptians, who gathered in the streets in June 2013 to call for his removal.” Yes, one might call “engineering a murderous rampage and instituting a dictatorship in order to fully Islamicize Egyptian society” a “blunder”…
  • So how’s that boycott against North Carolina over the tranny bathroom law panning out? Not so hot. “Tourism has thrived: Hotel occupancy, room rates and demand for rooms set records in 2016, according to the year-end hotel lodging report issued last week by VisitNC, part of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina.” (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
  • “Former Obama Official Describes Last-Minute Rush to Spy on Trump Team, Conceal Intel Sources.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Someone in a small circle of Obama intelligence officials who knew the identity of that American No. 1 committed a felony by leaking Flynn’s name to media.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Chicago follows in Detroit’s footsteps.
  • Journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s baby parts selling scheme indicted on felony eavesdropping charges in California. By an amazing coincidence, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra received donations from Planned Parenthood. What are the odds?
  • There’s an actual Wikipedia article for a list of grenade attacks in Sweden, which have exploded (ha) since 2012. Many occurred in Malmo. Gee, what could possibly be driving all these grenade attacks?
  • Euroweenie to campaign for independence of the People’s Republic of Austin. Good luck with that. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.
  • Trump as The Mule from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • President Trump reverses four Obama regulations. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • $15,000 of Soros money a month per team to fight Trump.
  • You know that “1973 Manhattan was a nightmare of smog” picture your liberal Facebook friends have been posting? Debunked.
  • Behind the scenes of 2016’s wipeout of Republicans in Harris County.
  • Texas Senate votes to end automatic union payroll deductions.
  • Attorney General Ken Paxton’s trial venue is being moved, which is a victory for the prosecution. Given the dismissal of the SEC charges the case is based on, I still think the long-term prognosis points to acquittal or dismissal.
  • Homeowner 3, Robbers 0.
  • Are your sexual fetishes social justice warrior approved, comrade? If not, then expect to be fired…
  • “Spiders could theoretically eat every human on earth in a year and still be hungry.” Obviously this cries out for a research grant and a pilot program…
  • Internet Security issue: “Typosquatting programming language package managers.”
  • Troll level: Godlike.
  • Five-year old suspended for imaginary gun.
  • An obituary for the author of The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
  • McSweeney’s on packing the liberal go-bag. (Hat tip: Gay Patriot’s Twitter feed.)
  • Don McLean’s “American Pie” added to the National recording registry. “I’m really delighted that the government has taken notice of me in this way, and not by tapping my phone or something.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Want. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Hakeem Olajuwon: Better than Jordan.
  • Speaking of shocking statistics: “Steven Seagal released seven films in 2016. Seven.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Oh no! Not the bees! They’re in my eyes!
  • LinkSwarm for March 17, 2017

    Friday, March 17th, 2017

    Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Insert your own Irish-related drinking joke here.

  • President Trump’s approval ratings rise.
  • Did Obama use a British intelligence agency to spy on Trump? (Maybe not.)
  • Did the Obama Administration use Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac as a slush fund to pay for ObamaCare?
  • Senate Democrats are paralized what do to over Neil Gorsuch. Everyone agrees Gorsuch is extremely qualified, but the leftwing nutroots are threatening to primary any Democrat who votes to confirm him. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Finally: “A House panel held a hearing on possibly splitting the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday morning.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • In talking about the House GOP’s pathetic ObamaCare replacement, Stephen Green hits the nail on the head: “Congress is warped because the American electorate has yet to accept that other people’s money does eventually run out — and that we are all the other people.” That’s why we need someone committed to reform in the White House, and Greece and Venezuela’s examples fresh in the public’s eye…
  • Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey: “What we reject is immigration without assimilation.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • ICE arrests 248 illegal aliens, most in the sanctuary city of Philadelphia. “20 had a conviction and/or pending charges or 48 percent (88 of those arrested had criminal convictions and 32 of those arrested have pending criminal charges). In addition, 50 had been previously removed from the United States and subsequently illegally re-entered.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Meanwhile, in Australia: “Teacher quits after primary school students threaten to behead her.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Iraqi government forces besieged Islamic State militants around Mosul’s Old City on Thursday, edging closer to the historic mosque from where the group’s leader declared a caliphate nearly three years ago.”
  • Former Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich says that one of his phonecalls was wiretapped. “If a member of Congress can have his phone tapped, this can happen to anybody.”
  • Ten Senate Democrats are vulnerable in 2018. They’re prime targets for takedowns in the midterm elections. But the process starts now, not then…In order of vulnerability (most to least), the target list features: 1) Joe Donnelly-IN; 2) Bill Nelson-FL; 3) Sherrod Brown-OH; 4) Claire McCaskill-MO; 5) Heidi Heitkamp-ND; 6) Tammy Baldwin-WI; 7) Jon Tester-MN; 8) Joe Manchin-WV; 9) Debbie Stabenow-MI; 10) Bob Casey, Jr.-PA.” Agree with the list, but not the order, since Heitkamp hails from a state Trump won by 36 points. But seeing Stupak bloc flip-flopper Donnelly go down at last would be extremely satisfying…
  • Breakdown of 2016 Presidential race demographics. Least likely to vote for Trump: Black single women. Most likely to vote for Trump: Mormons. Usual poll caveats apply. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Remember convicted felon Brett Kimberlin? There’s always some Kimberlin news floating around the blogsphere, usually in relation to his latest ludicrous lawsuit getting laughed out of court. But this week he made the news for being involved in selling hoax documents designed to bring down Donald Trump. “The entire set of documents appear to have been forged as part of an elaborate scam.” So, like most Kimberlin escapades, the story ends in embarrassing failure. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Cenk Uygur: Why the Democratic Party is useless. 1. As with all these critiques of the Democratic Party from the left, it’s right about the party being a corrupt institution for entrenched interests and wrong about America being gung ho for socialism. 2. Boy, that “not being polite” stuff sure helped Democrats recall Scott Walker! 3. “Cenk Uygur” sounds like a dark, forbidding fortress at the edge of Mordor.
  • Holland is the canary in the European coalmine of radical Islamization. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Speaking of Holland, Geert Wilders placed second in Dutch elections, which falls short of a serious challenge to the Islamophillic and Eurocentric establishment.
  • Dear Sen. McCain: (Sigh).
  • Rand Paul fires back: “He makes a really, really strong case for term limits. I think maybe he’s past his prime. I think maybe he’s gotten a little bit unhinged.”
  • Germany wants to fine companies for not censoring fast enough. What do you want to bet that objections to the rousing success of their Muslim immigration policy are first on the list of things to be censored?
  • Camille Paglia has a new book out, and offers up an interview where she talks about modern feminism (against), southern women (for), working class men (for), Michel Foucault (against), and pornography (for).
  • Soros Fellow Flees Country While Wife Arrested For Welfare Scam.” It seems that earning $1.5 million a year at the Washington, D.C., offices of Mayer Brown LLP just wasn’t enough for Fidelis Agbapuruonwu… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Three #BlackLivesMatter protestors arrested for beating up a homeless man.
  • Man gets a C when he should have gotten an A for a school assignment. So he did what any of us would have done: Successfully amends the Constitution. (Hat tip: Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett’s Twitter feed.)
  • Dwight has some Austin-related memoes from the police beat.
  • “Coming up next on Most ShockingMormon Justice!”
  • King Kong burns.
  • He divided them again!
  • Schumer steals again. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Singer Kelly Clarkson is selling her Tennessee mansion. I like how it’s half typical rich-person mansion, and half Bass Pro Shop…
  • LinkSwarm for March 10, 2017

    Friday, March 10th, 2017

    Welcome to Friday! (And welcome Instapundit readers coming in off Stephen Green’s link to yesterday’s border security roundup.)

    First up: Liberalism’s continued idée fixe on the “Russians hacked the election” fantasy.

  • If Trump had actually been in the pay of the Russians, Wayne Barrett, who worked the Trump beat for the Village Voice for 40 years, would have known about it. “Wayne Barrett had this file for 40 years, and if neither he nor the reporters he trained got this story, it’s not a story.”
  • Even some liberals are now seeing the Russian fantasy as a dangerous distraction that helps Trump.
  • Lefty Glenn Greenwald agrees:

    This obsession with Russia conspiracy tales is poisoning all aspects of U.S. political discourse and weakening any chance for resisting Trump’s actual abuses and excesses. Those who wake up every day to hype the latest episode of this Russia/Trump spy drama tell themselves that they’re bravely undermining and subverting Trump, but they’re doing exactly the opposite.

    This crazed conspiracy mongering is further discrediting U.S. media outlets, making Washington seem even more distant from and irrelevant to the lives of millions of Americans, degrading discourse to the lowliest Trumpian circus level on which he thrives, and is misdirecting huge portions of opposition energy and thought into an exciting but fictitious spy novel – all of which directly redounds to Trump’s benefit.

    Snip.

    Above all else, it’s because it’s an offensive assault on reason. This kind of deranged discourse is an attack on basic journalistic integrity, on any minimal obligation to ensure that one’s claims are based in evidence rather than desire, fantasy, and herd-enforced delusions. And it’s emanating from the most established and mainstream precincts of U.S. political and media elites, who have processed the severe disorientation and loss of position they feel from Trump’s shock election not by doing the work to patiently formulate cogent, effective strategies against him, but rather by desperately latching onto online “dot-connecting” charlatans and spewing the most unhinged Birther-level conspiracies that require a complete abandonment of basic principles of rationality and skepticism.

  • The timidness of the House GOP ObamaCare repeal plan shows that liberalism has already won.
  • Liberals threaten to primary Democratic senators who vote for cloture on Neil Gorsuch. I’m sure there’s no way that supergenius plan could possibly backfire on them…
  • Speaking of Gorsuch, “the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary voted unanimously to rate Neil Gorsuch as “well qualified” to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States,” the highest rating possible. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Nate Silver at 538: “There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble.” Silver comes to many of the same conclusions about MSM blinders that conservatives have been making for years. A few samples:
    • “Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent.”
    • “In a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite7 for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.”
    • “The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans.”
    • “All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink.”
  • The headline is “Battle for Manbij shows Syria’s civil war is almost over – and it looks like Bashar Assad has won.” And that’s part of it. But there’s a lot of information on just how complex the Syrian-Iraqi battlespace is:

    Winners and losers are emerging in what may be the final phase of the Syrian civil war as anti-Isis forces prepare for an attack aimed at capturing Raqqa, the de facto Isis capital in Syria. Kurdish-led Syrian fighters say they have seized part of the road south of Raqqa, cutting Isis off from its other territory further east.

    Isis is confronting an array of enemies approaching Raqqa, but these are divided, with competing agendas and ambitions. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), whose main fighting force is the Syrian Kurdish Popular Mobilisation Units (YPG), backed by the devastating firepower of the US-led air coalition, are now getting close to Raqqa and are likely to receive additional US support. The US currently has 500 Special Operations troops in north-east Syria and may move in American-operated heavy artillery to reinforce the attack on Raqqa.

    This is bad news for Turkey, whose military foray into northern Syria called Operation Euphrates Shield began last August, as it is being squeezed from all sides. In particular, an elaborate political and military chess game is being played around the town of Manbij, captured by the SDF last year, with the aim of excluding Turkey, which had declared it to be its next target. The Turkish priority in Syria is to contain and if possible reduce or eliminate the power of Syrian Kurds whom Ankara sees as supporting the Kurdish insurrection in Turkey.

  • “The U.S. military is sending an additional 2,500 ground combat troops to a staging base in Kuwait from which they could be called upon to back up coalition forces battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.” So instead of following Obama’s strategy of losing slowly and expensively, President Trump’s goal appears to be to crush the Islamic State entirely.
  • “Marine Le Pen: ‘France Isn’t Burkinis on the Beach, France is Brigitte Bardot.'” France is a lot of things, but they could certainly do worse than Brigitte Bardot…

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • 40% of households in Philadelphia can’t pay their water bill.” Remind me again which party runs Philadelphia… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • School restages Trump-Clinton debates, but with a woman playing Trump and a man playing Hillary. Result: Hillary loses even more badly than before. “It seems to me that Hillary’s gender actually covered up her flaws, such as inauthenticity, scriptedness, recitations of pablum, and fake-smiling, while, when she was played by a male actor, those flaws were suddenly very visible to the people who think of themselves as ‘gender-woke’ but maybe should just think of themselves as gender partisans.”
  • Orrin Hatch reneges on retirement promise. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Social Justice Syndrome: “Rising Tide of Personality Disorders Among Millennials.”
  • “100 of the 544 Women’s March partners received a total of $246,637,217 from [George] Soros between 2000 and 2014. Soros gave more than $1 million to 36 of those partners, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, MoveOn.org, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Washington Examiner writer finds the perfect place to visit on the “Day Without Women”: Hooters. I guess that’s an excuse to break out this classic:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Charles Murray on what it was like to be in the middle of a violent crowd trying to assault him.
  • Lawsuit of man wrongly expelled from Amherst for a “rape” that consisted of him receiving a blowjob while he was passed out can move forward after a judge’s ruling.
  • “Defense contracting firm owners Jeffrey Harrington and Michael Mayer, and employee sisters Kimberlee Hewitt and Natalee Hewitt, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in California to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and file false claims for using their companies — Veteran Logistics, Inc., Industrial Xchange, Inc., and Boston Laser Technology, Inc. — to sell the government $45 million worth of mostly incorrect and overpriced products.” As far as I can tell, this naval contracting scandal is unrelated to the Fat Leonard naval contracting scandal. Did the Navy just forget to hire auditors?
  • What’s a little rape to Democrats if there are pipelines to be protested?
  • Lynne Stewart, the radical lawyer and convicted felon who represented murderous anti-American scumbags pro bono, has died.
  • Another day, another fake hate crime exposed.
  • CNN’s new frontier in tastelessness: Cannibalism. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Speaking of CNN: “CNN cuts feed on guest after he cites jihad terror cases involving ‘refugees.'”
  • “Trump Immigration Order Requires Govt Report on ‘Honor Killings‘ by Foreign Nationals.”
  • Don’t believe everything you read about the CIA Vault7 leak. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Radio Shack to close another 187 stores. In other news, Radio Shack still has stores to close. I also ask your forgiveness in advance when I rerun this joke next year. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • In prison, mackerel can be exchanged for goods and services.
  • Brings an entire new meaning to the phrase “Got wood?”
  • Japanese man dies after being crushed under six tons of pornography. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Note that I now have a Gab account in addition to my Twitter account.
  • Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus at CPAC

    Sunday, February 26th, 2017

    Considered including this in Friday’s LinkSwarm, but decided this panel with Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus at CPAC was important enough for a separate post.

    A few points:

  • As previously reported, there’s none of the discord here between Bannon and Priebus that the mainstream media likes to ascribe to them. I’ve seen panels where the panelists were barely hiding their animosity with other panelists, and there’s none of that on display.
  • As for President Trump’s cabinet being the best cabinet in the history of cabinets: George Washington’s first cabinet included Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, so no.
  • “The greatest public speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryant.” Untrue. Martin Luther King, Jr. takes that crown, unless Bannon meant campaign speeches given in Presidential campaigns. There John F. Kennedy was a better speaker, but his venues tended to be smaller.
  • Priebus’ pick for biggest priority of the first 30 days of the Trump Administration: “Neil Gorsuch.”
  • Priebus’ pick for second and third biggest priorities: deregulation and immigration.
  • Bannon’s picks for same: Nations security/sovereignty, “economic nationalism,” and “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Suck it, Jacques Derrida!
  • I’m not sold on “fair trade” and economic nationalism, or how the Trump Administration will keep them from becoming protectionism and crony capitalism. Given their embrace of the Export-Import Bank, the answer appears to be “they won’t.” But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that their vision of more bilateral trade deals can pan out better for American economic interest than the dog’s breakfast of Trans-Pacific Partnership would have. It’s “the devil’s in the details” question, and there are so many, many devils…
  • Bannon: “The rule of law is going to exist when you talk about sovereignty and you talk about immigration.”
  • The Trump Administration is clearly the most serious about deregulation of the economy since Reagan, and maybe the most serious ever.
  • Bannon: “If you think they [the mainstream media] is going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day it is going to be a fight.”
  • Bannon and Priebus use close synonyms to describe each other: “dogged” and “indefatigable.”
  • Watch the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)