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Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on questions of U.S. constitutional or federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party".
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (born November 20, 1942) is a retired American politician who was the 46th president of the United States from 2021 to 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented Delaware in the United States Senate from 1973 to 2009 and also served as the 47th vice president under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (born December 24, 1946) is an American politician and attorney who served as the 84th United States attorney general from 2017 to 2018. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as United States senator from Alabama from 1997 to 2017 before resigning that position to serve as attorney general in the first administration of President Donald Trump. Trump fired Sessions in 2018 due to his inaction and recusal from the Russian collusion probes.
Elections were held in the United States on November 8, 2022. In these midterm elections, which occurred during incumbent Democratic president Joe Biden's term, all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate were contested to determine the 118th United States Congress. Thirty-nine state and territorial U.S. gubernatorial elections, as well as numerous state and local elections, were also contested.
The 2026 United States Senate election in Texas was held on November 3, 2026, to elect the Class 2 member of the United States Senate from the state of Texas. Democratic state representative James Talarico defeated Republican state attorney general Ken Paxton.
Four-term Republican incumbent John Cornyn sought re-election, but was challenged for the party's nomination by Paxton, which led to no candidates receiving a majority in the March 3 primary.
Democratic backsliding has been identified as a trend in the United States at the state and national levels in various indices and analyses, primarily during the Jim Crow era and in the 21st century under Donald Trump. It is "a process of regime change towards autocracy that makes the exercise of political power more arbitrary and repressive, and that restricts the space for public contestation and political participation in the process of government selection".
The Jim Crow era is among the most-cited historical examples of democratic backsliding, with Black Americans in particular seeing their rights eroded dramatically, especially in the Southern United States.
Project 2025 (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project) is a political initiative published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation with the goal of reshaping the U.S. federal government by consolidating executive power in favor of right-wing policies. It constitutes a policy document that suggests specific changes to the federal government, a personnel database for recommending vetting loyal staff in the federal government, and a set of proposed executive orders for the U.S. president to implement those policies.
The project's policy document Mandate for Leadership calls for the replacement of federal civil service workers by people loyal to "the next conservative president" and for taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Commerce (DOC), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Donald Trump's second and current tenure as the president of the United States began upon his inauguration as the 47th president on January 20, 2025. Trump, a Republican, previously served as the 45th president from 2017 to 2021. He lost re-election to Democratic nominee Joe Biden in 2020, and then won against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in 2024.