Jeff Sessions’s career as an attorney general finally came to an end on Wednesday. His ousting wasn’t unexpected — President Donald Trump on more than one occasion conveyed dissatisfaction with Sessions, and perhaps deservedly so. As former Justice Department counsel Hans von Spakovsky reminds us, “Trump has expressed anger over the seemingly endless Russia collusion investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after Sessions recused himself from the investigation because of his involvement in the Trump election campaign.”

This anger culminated in July 2017, when Trump groused, “If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’”

But putting aside the merits of Sessions’s decision to disjoin from the Mueller probe — von Spakovsky says there are “good legal arguments on both sides” — along with his wrongheaded view on civil asset forfeiture and his narrow-minded perspective on the drug war, the 84th attorney general’s overarching achievements shouldn’t be ignored. Indeed, it’s easy to forget just how tarnished the Justice Department was under the Obama administration, the details of which von Spakovsky lays out.

For starters: “The Obama administration had a very adversarial relationship with state and local law enforcement agencies, unfairly criticizing and taking actions against local police departments. It abused its authority far beyond the law in a way that hampered the ability of police officers to protect the public. Sessions stopped this abuse and restored the cooperative and productive relationship the Justice Department had long had with law enforcement.”

On the issue of illegal immigration, Sessions was a pillar. He prioritized enforcement of the law, took action to defund renegade sanctuary cities, and, von Spakovsky notes, “successfully defended (all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court) the power of the president to safeguard the country from illegal immigrants seeking entry from terrorist safe havens.”

Moreover, says von Spakovsky, “One of the biggest scams of the Obama administration involved the Justice Department entering into settlements and non-prosecution agreements that forced defendants to agree to make large payments not to actual victims or the U.S. Treasury, but to third parties that were not involved in the prosecution. Those third parties were often political allies of the Obama administration. The Justice Department was in essence abusing its law enforcement power to help create slush funds for left-wing advocacy organizations.” Instead of falling prey to the allure of this procedure — vengeance is a two-way street, after all — Sessions made government-administered slush-fund-padding defunct.

The Obama administration additionally conjured up a way to avoid regulatory public notice processes, which federal agencies are legally mandated to complete when new regulations are coming down the pipe. To accomplish this, agencies began distributing “guidance documents.” The corollary was two-fold. First, because transparency was axed, subjects that were impacted were shut out of the process. Second, “regulations” were being crafted out of whole cloth. In other words, they were illegally implemented. “At the direction of Sessions,” von Spakovsky writes, “the Justice Department issued a memorandum forbidding its lawyers from treating agency guidance documents as authoritative law entitled to deference when the government brings a civil enforcement action in court against private parties.”

Sessions’s DOJ also mercifully changed course by buttressing a sensible Texas voter ID law (the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went on to uphold that law); initiated a probe into Harvard University, among others, for anti-Asian-American prejudice; and confronted campus speech codes.

“All in all, Sessions has done a good job as attorney general,” von Spakovsky contends. “And he did that despite the fact that, because of Senate Democrats obstructing the confirmation process, most of the Justice Department’s major divisions lack an appointed assistant attorney general to run them. In many ways, Sessions was operating with an inadequate staff and one hand tied behind his back.”

That’s not to say Sessions was perfect. As mentioned before, civil asset forfeiture is a big deal. Not only is it arguably unconstitutional but it’s being used to fill government coffers. Sessions’s stance on the drug war is more understandable — it’s a difficult, contentious, and multifaceted issue — but ultimately we think it’s backfiring and has been for decades. However, it’s also unquestionably the case that his reputation overall has been unfairly tarnished. As von Spakovsky concludes, “Jeff Sessions put the nation’s largest and most powerful law enforcement agency back on course, enforcing the law and administering justice in an impartial, objective, and nonpartisan manner. For that, we should all be thankful.”

That’s something for the voters of Alabama to think about as Sessions mulls over whether he will attempt to reclaim his old seat in the Senate.