Last week, Justice Samuel Alito delivered a rousing keynote address to the annual convention of the Federalist Society, arguably the nation's most influential conservative legal group.
The speech was starkly different from the guarded public pronouncements that are the usual fare from members of the Supreme Court. Instead, it was a full-throated attack on policies and judicial decisions that, he contended, grant too much power to government agencies charged with protecting public health — and further threaten religious liberties already under assault.
Afterward, one could hardly be blamed for musing on the hypocrisy of Supreme Court nominees who regularly claim they have no political agenda only to pursue such an agenda once they've secured confirmation. It was only last month when the nation witnessed this charade at the Senate Judiciary Committee, with Amy Coney Barrett repeatedly assuring the committee that "I have no mission and no agenda. Judges don't have campaign promises."
Like the newest justice, Alito at his 2006 confirmation hearings promised his political views would be irrelevant to his work on the high court. Then on a federal appeals court, he contended there is a stark difference between being a judge and an advocate who "has the goal of achieving the result that the client wants within the bounds of professional responsibility." A judge, he said, "doesn't have an agenda, and a judge has to follow the law."
And when asked if he agreed with a series of Supreme Court rulings, or continued to subscribe to previous criticisms of other decisions, he consistently. refused to answer. He insisted he could not comment on cases or issues that might come before the court, lest he be seen as prejudging them.
Such reticence vanished before the Federalist Society. Alito unburdened himself of grievances, legal and political. And he freely talked about issues already on the Supreme Court docket. He seemed untroubled skating up to the line of ethics rules requiring judges to remain impartial, to avoid any appearance of bias and to avoid public comment on the merits of any pending matter.
About state public health measures attempting to curb the spread of the coronavirus, he observed that "the pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty" and asserted that "We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020."
Abandoning the posture he assumed at his confirmation hearings, Alito specifically criticized his own court's recent refusal to stop restrictions imposed by two states to fight Covid-19 — measures, he contended, that "blatantly discriminated against houses of worship."
Those cases reveal what he called "emerging trends in the assessment of individual rights" by the court. "It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right."
The justice proudly proclaimed his belief in the virtues of the 1993 law dubbed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, even as the court is currently considering a case that could curtail its reach.
And in discussing the 2018 case of a Colorado baker who refused on religious grounds to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, the justice declared such treatment caused the couple no harm because a nearby baker provided them a "free cake." He professed that view even though a similar issue involving religious freedom and discrimination against same-sex couples is also pending in his courthouse.
Warming to another conservative legal cause celebre, Alito cited what he called the "disturbing trend" of the growing power of federal regulatory agencies. Again, he spoke while the court's docketnow has cases testing the authority of the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Federal Trade Commission.
"Every year," the justice complained, "administrative agencies acting under broad delegations of authority churn out huge volumes of regulations that dwarf the statutes enacted by the people's elected representatives." Echoing the Trump administration's paranoia about a "deep state" and its hostility to science, Alito decried what he called "government by executive officials."
These are hardly the words of a justice without an agenda. Indeed, they seem to be a rallying cry for the Supreme Court's newly augmented conservative majority to use its power to curtail the power of government agencies responsible for protecting public health and safety and to advance the libertarian cause.
As Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, a nonprofit group that has called for stricter ethics rules for the Supreme Court, rightly noted, the speech "was more befitting a Trump rally than a legal society." It provides yet another occasion for Americans to wonder whether our judges can be trusted when they claim that they are merely neutral arbiters of the law.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.