My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t end there. At least that’s what I would choose to believe.
—BARACK OBAMA
SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON WAS THOUGHT TO BE THE front-runner for the presidency when she announced her candidacy in 2007. Clinton was a strong candidate, but her opponents now blamed her for the scandals of the Clinton years. She was, through her husband’s and her own fundraising, also associated with the enormously effective Democratic Party money machine, which had very close ties to Wall Street and titans of the high-tech industry.
Political corruption, worsened enormously by our campaign finance system, is a serious threat to the rule of law. Indeed our campaign finance system may be the single greatest threat that will remain with us long after the departure of Donald Trump. But in 2008 it was all too easy to pin corruption on the people who had been at the head of the Democratic Party since 1992: Bill and Hillary Clinton.
A new US senator from the state of Illinois (elected only four years earlier in 2004) entered the presidential race, promising to end the war in Iraq, increase our energy independence, and especially to reform our healthcare system. He also talked about corruption in government. Barack Hussein Obama came on the scene like a whirlwind, crisscrossing the country with his message.
Obama won the Democratic nomination and chose Delaware senator Joe Biden as his running mate. Obama and Biden ran against Republican war hero and senator John McCain, who made the unfortunate choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin, a far-right Republican, to be his running mate. It was a fatal mistake.
Said Nicolle Wallace, Palin’s advisor during the presidential campaign, “There was a moment shortly after I met her that I realized that she realized that she was in over her head.”
Voters saw how shallow Palin was when Katie Couric asked her to name a newspaper that she read regularly, and she couldn’t name one.
Couric: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this—to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media—
Couric: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.
Kellyanne Conway may have coined “alternative facts” in 2016, but Sarah Palin demonstrated a remarkably similar attitude in 2008. She was a tragic choice for McCain, who not only had suffered years of imprisonment and torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, but had a remarkable career in the Senate, often breaking with Republican leaders on critically important issues such as campaign finance reform.
During one interview with Fox News on November 1, 2008, Palin said, “We’re confident that we’re going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first one hundred days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?”
Critics quickly pointed out that we weren’t at war with Iran.
In another interview she suggested that the media’s criticisms of her were unconstitutional, or at least not protected by the First Amendment.
She said, “If [the media] convinces enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”
Obama won the presidency with 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173.
In 2009 Obama faced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Banks were going under, and the stock market was dropping fast. Unemployment rose to 10 percent. The Bush administration had stabilized Wall Street and provided a rescue package for financial institutions the previous fall, but the economy was sinking. In February 2009 Congress approved Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package. It cut some taxes and raised others, extended unemployment benefits, and funded public works projects.
To avoid another financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010. The law regulated the riskiest investments—derivatives, credit default swaps, and commodities futures. The law also regulated consumer finance. Obama wanted to install Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren as head of the newly created Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, but banks and other lenders hated her, and Republican opposition in Congress made her confirmation impossible. Instead, she advised the president on consumer finance for two years and then ran for the Senate.
Obama’s most significant and most controversial legislative achievement was the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Healthcare is roughly one-seventh of our economy, and people who did not like the ACA had plenty of incentive to oppose it.
Then there were the continuing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On May 1, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed him. Later that year Obama removed American troops from Iraq. Getting out of Afghanistan was a difficult task that, after two terms and eight years in office, Obama couldn’t accomplish.
Obama tried to reduce the number of US troops abroad and use high-tech substitutes for military ground operations. This meant unarmed drones and the political and legal problems that come with them. Obama authorized 506 drone strikes in the Middle East that killed 3,040 terrorists and 391 civilians. Human Rights Watch revealed as many as twelve civilians were killed in December 2014 when a US drone targeted vehicles that were part of a wedding procession going toward the groom’s village outside the central Yemeni city of Rad’a. Sometimes the drones were aimed at anonymous targets who appeared to be associated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban through their behavior. That those deploying the drones didn’t always know who the target was became obvious when eight Americans were killed by drones.
Using drones was probably a better alternative than reliance on ground troops to find and kill terrorists, but it came at a steep political cost and subjected the United States to legitimate criticism from human rights organizations.
The Obama years saw heightened political rhetoric from Republicans. Many (but not all) Republican officeholders stuck to policy differences and avoided getting personal.
That being said, there was at times a noticeable drop of decorum in Congress during the Obama years.
During his first State of the Union address, as Obama mentioned that the Affordable Care Act would not mandate coverage for undocumented immigrants, there was a shout from the audience: “You lie.” It was Republican congressman Joe Wilson from South Carolina. Later in the speech when Obama mentioned that there were still significant details to be worked out, a group of Republicans in the audience actually laughed derisively.
Such scenes are familiar in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, where the opposition routinely shouts down the prime minister. But rules of decorum in the United States House and Senate have traditionally demanded more respect, particularly during the president’s State of the Union address. Until Obama showed up. We can agree or disagree about the rules on the floor of a legislature (whether catcalls are allowed), but when the rules of decorum change, we have to wonder why.
Admittedly this incident during Obama’s State of the Union was not as egregious as what happened over 150 years earlier on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate when Representative Preston Brooks, also a congressman from South Carolina, attacked Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane because Senator Sumner supported the abolition of slavery. The question is whether Wilson’s motivations in 2010 weren’t that much different from Brooks’s 150 years earlier. Was Wilson’s outrage about the Affordable Care Act, or about our having an African American president?
Criticism from the right-wing media was even worse. Collective hatred for Obama was evident even when he first began running. Those protesting his candidacy called him a traitor, a socialist, a communist, a Muslim, or an Arab. None of the adjectives were true, but the name-calling never stopped, even after he was elected.
One of Obama’s severest critics was right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza started his career as a pundit writing for the ultra-conservative (some said racist) Dartmouth Review as a student at Dartmouth College. D’Souza became a Twitter troll saying terrible, scurrilous things about President Obama. Once, D’Souza tweeted a photo of Obama with the caption “Obama’s dad dumped him at birth & his mom got rid of him at the age of 10—did they know something we didn’t when we signed up this guy?”
On another photo, D’Souza wrote, “THEY CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO … Watch this vulgar man show his stuff while America cowers in embarrassment.”
D’Souza for five years was President Obama’s most vocal hater, writing three books, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Obama’s America, and America: Imagine a World Without Her. He filmed companion documentaries for the last two.
Most of D’Souza’s findings in the books and documentaries were widely discredited by scholars, journalists, and those who rely on facts. The film Obama’s America still became a hit among Obama haters. It grossed $33 million, making it the highest-grossing political documentary after Michael Moore’s anti-Bush Fahrenheit 9/11.
In May 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to a campaign-finance violation after he was caught getting two straw donors to contribute to the campaign of his old friend Wendy Long, who was running against Kirsten Gillibrand in the US Senate race in New York. D’Souza faced up to two years in prison but ultimately got eight months in a halfway house, plus community service, and a $30,000 fine.
On May 31, 2018, President Trump pardoned D’Souza, who continues to spew his venom on right-wing media.
Meanwhile, Republicans took over Congress in 2010, largely because of a backlash against the ACA and the enormous government economic stimulus spending that had spurned a successful “Tea Party” movement. This movement promised lower taxes and less regulation as a path to economic prosperity and individual liberty.
The connection between small government and the original Boston Tea Party of 1773 was unclear (especially to anyone who understands history). But that did not stop participants from showing up in eighteenth-century costumes and railing against Obama and the Democrats as our forbearers had railed against the British. It was a period theme party and a political party in one.
Then the racists showed up. Racist comments about Obama were made in chat rooms and at impromptu “tea party” meetings around the country.
In April 2011, during Obama’s first term, there was a call to see President Obama’s birth certificate. The request came on The View, from the New York City real estate developer and reality TV star Donald Trump.
Obama released his full-form birth certificate on April 26, 2011. It stated he was born at Honolulu’s Kapiolani Hospital on August 4, 1961.
“We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” said the president.
Even after this, Trump and his followers refused to accept its legitimacy—or Obama’s. In speeches, Trump praised himself for making Obama produce the birth certificate.
Besides this cruel injection of racism (yet again) into American politics, another separate threat to the rule of law, the injection of money into politics, was about to get a lot worse. Corruption would accelerate with a vengeance.
In 2009 the United States Supreme Court heard Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case, decided five to four by the conservative majority, overturned a federal statute, the McCain-Feingold Act, that prohibited independent political expenditures by corporations.
Corporations are people, ruled the court. This gave corporations the First Amendment right to spend money on communications about candidates as they please. A cornerstone of the bipartisan campaign finance legislation drafted by Senator John McCain—President Obama’s opponent in 2008—and signed by President Bush in 2001 was thrown out in 2009 by five justices of the Supreme Court who themselves had never been elected to any public office. People across the political spectrum were—and still are—outraged. Polling data continues to show that Americans of all political viewpoints are disgusted by the role of money in politics.
By 2012 Republicans hoped to use some of this anger to oust Obama. Said Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
They didn’t succeed. In 2012 Obama defeated Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan, but it wasn’t as big a victory as his first election. Obama amassed 65,446,032 votes to Romney’s 60,589,084. Obama won 332 electoral votes, Romney 206.
Republicans vowed not to let Obama pass a single bill in his second term. Obama resorted to issuing executive orders to further his agenda.
Here, yet another issue crucial to the rule of law arose, one recognized by the founders but not fully addressed in the Constitution. Should the president have the power to act unilaterally without the consent of Congress? The party that controls the White House almost always supports expanded use of executive orders, and the party that controls Congress almost always opposes it. When the playbooks switch, their positions switch, although their sheer hypocrisy is apparent to anyone with a memory.
The executive orders Obama signed protected the environment, including addressing climate change; promoted diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce; promoted rehabilitation of prisoners; provided aid to students to get more affordable loans; normalized relations with Cuba; provided for job training for workers; allowed children of undocumented immigrants to remain in this country at least temporarily (DACA); provided for admission to this country of refugees; and much more. Democrats were thrilled with many of these policy initiatives. The “rule of law” question was rarely discussed by Democrats. They chose not to discuss what might happen with executive orders if a Republican were in the White House. They would soon learn.
Conservative commentators jumped all over Obama’s executive orders, taking legitimate arguments about presidential power way overboard. They even fantasized that he intended to issue an executive order allowing himself a third term. None of that was true.
Republican members of Congress then jumped in.
“President Obama has cemented his legacy of lawlessness,” declared House Speaker John Boehner. Charles Krauthammer, the conservative pundit, said this was “an impeachable offense.”
President Obama did observe some limits. He never declared a “national emergency” under the National Emergencies Act to spend money on a project that had been proposed to Congress and rejected. Obama used executive orders to the extent he could get away with it (he sometimes won in court and sometimes lost), but he did not call any of his policy priorities or campaign promises a “national emergency.” He understood that there were at least some limits on executive power.
Obama never called the right-wing press that criticized him the “enemy of the people” or questioned freedom of the press under the First Amendment.
The Obama years saw a resurgence of another threat to the rule of law: gun violence. Assassins did not target prominent political leaders as they had in the 1960s with the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Now, forty years later, assassins took the lives of schoolchildren.
On December 14, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and gunned down twenty small children and six adults, including teachers, with an assault rifle. The wailing around the country was loud, but Congress refused to do anything about gun violence. Many Republican lawmakers cried that the Democrats were trying to take away guns in violation of the Second Amendment.
Gun proliferation and the campaign finance problem were not unrelated. The National Rifle Association usually supported Republican candidates, but it also threatened to support an opposing primary candidate if any Republican supported any kind of gun legislation. The NRA had the money to do this as one of the largest spenders in political races—often GOP primaries.
This happened to Debra Maggart, a Republican leader in the Tennessee House of Representatives. A lifetime member of the NRA with an A-plus rating, she refused to support a 2012 bill that would permit Tennessee residents to keep guns inside locked cars. In her primary run for reelection, the NRA spent $155,000 to defeat her. They ran ads linking her with President Obama concerning gun control.
She lost badly.
The message was clear: We will help you get elected and protect your seat from Democrats. We will spend millions on ads that make your opponent look worse than a liquor store robber. In return, we expect you to oppose any laws that regulate guns. If you don’t comply, we will load our weapons and direct everything in our arsenal at you.
For the GOP it was an NRA protection racket.
Some Democrats in rural districts—including Democratic congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand of New York—also took substantial amounts of money and support from the NRA. The NRA message to them was also clear: oppose gun laws or lose your seat to a Republican. Many of these Democrats only had a “change of heart” about guns when they were appointed or ran for statewide office and had to appeal to a different electorate.
For the 2012 election, the NRA spent more than $19 million to defeat Democrats and stray Republicans who supported gun control. As Citizens United showed us, big money in politics has become the single most important aspect of our elections. When Russian agents interfered in the 2016 elections in the United States, establishing connections with the NRA to meet top Republican politicians was one of their subversion strategies.
The Sandy Hook school shooting also brought about a resurgence of another age-old problem going back to the Salem witch trials—myth or what we call today “fake news.”
Alex Jones, the founder of InfoWars, which publishes false and often dangerous conspiracy theories and other alt-right talking points, posted on his website that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax—a “staged event.” Jones also claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing and Boston Marathon bombing were staged by actors. (He has also said that the government puts fluoride in the water to turn people gay.)
As a result of Jones’s postings, family members of the Sandy Hook victims received harassment, death threats, and even physical attacks from Jones’s followers.
At least six relatives of the deceased Sandy Hook children have sued Jones for defamation.
Jones made up the outrageous story that the New York Police Department, while searching Congressman Anthony Weiner’s emails, discovered a pedophilia ring linked to the Democrats. The ring, Jones blared, participated in satanic ritual abuse. One Twitter user, following his “story,” wrote that “cheese pizza” was code for child pornography. Another said the ring operated out of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington, DC. The story spread as far as Turkey, appearing in pro-Erdoğan newspapers.
The owners of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor received hundreds of threats. An armed man appeared in front of the restaurant and was arrested.
Jones has gotten rich spouting his inflaming nonsense. His YouTube channel has 2.3 million viewers. He rakes it in.
In 2015 Trump, then a Republican candidate, appeared on Jones’s show.
“Your reputation is amazing,” said Trump. “I will not let you down.”
Meanwhile, Obama was angering the man who would arguably be the most decisive factor in determining the next president of the United States: Vladimir Putin.
His administration passed the Magnitsky Act in December 2012 in retaliation against the human rights abuses suffered in Russia by Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer and whistle-blower who untangled a web of tax fraud and graft involving twenty-three companies and $230 million linked to the Kremlin and persons close to Putin. Magnitsky was beaten and jailed, and he died just before he was to be released.
The law kept eighteen Russian government officials and businessmen from entering or banking in the United States.
Two weeks after Obama signed the bill, Putin signed a bill in Russia blocking the adoption of Russian children by American parents. Magnitsky was also declared guilty of all the crimes he was accused of.
Getting in a fight with Russia—or rather standing up to human rights abuses and Russian military aggression—for President Obama and his first-term secretary of state Hillary Clinton, may have been a political mistake even if it was the right thing to do.
Obama intended for ethics to be a strong point of his presidency, and he largely succeeded. His first full day in office, January 21, 2009, he signed an executive order, drafted by his chief ethics counsel Norman Eisen, that substantially narrowed the conflicts of interest in the revolving door from the private sector into government. He wanted to set a higher bar and he did.
The Obama presidency still had its share of scandals, although less than his predecessors’. The most discussed scandal was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s cavalier insistence that she use a personal email server for State Department business. She should not have done that. State Department lawyers should not have allowed her to do that because it potentially violated the Presidential Records Act.
Karl Rove did something similar with his email, using a Republican National Committee server in the Bush administration, and he had been subjected to a congressional investigation by angry Democrats when his emails were lost. State Department security officials should have made absolutely certain that, if Secretary Clinton insisted on using the private server, the records would be retained and nobody would use it for classified information. The private email server was bad judgment on multiple levels, but not criminal.
Unless of course Republican members of Congress wanted to try to make it criminal in order to win the presidency in 2016. And of course that’s exactly what happened.
Meanwhile, the rhetoric on policy heated up as well. Let’s listen to some Republican members of Congress. Keep in mind that these are members of Congress, not right-wing radio talk show hosts.
“This administration has so many Muslim Brotherhood members that have influence that they just are making wrong decisions for America,” said Texas congressman Louie Gohmert. Gohmert also warned that the hate crimes bill would lead to Nazism and the legalization of necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality.
Michele Bachmann, a former congresswoman from Minnesota, said in 2014:
“The gay community thinks that they’ve so bullied the American people and they so intimidate politicians that politicians fear them, and so they think that they get to dictate the agenda everywhere.”
The right-wing media was even worse.
Fox News commentator Sean Hannity invited his guests to bring their hatred to the fore. He once said that “all Muslims are barbaric terrorists that need to be hunted down and killed.”
Laura Ingraham, a Fox radio host, stated she hates government, Planned Parenthood, immigrants, and the poor. Ann Coulter hates soccer moms. Ingraham hates soccer. She once said, “Liberal moms like soccer because it’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is coed, even at the kindergarten level.”
Rush Limbaugh has been mocking women, especially liberal women, for years. He once said, “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”
Limbaugh had an equal amount if not greater contempt for President Obama, going as far as telling his listeners that “Obama hates this country.”
Then he paused, and went on, “He is trying—Barack Obama is trying—to dismantle this country brick by brick, the American Dream. There is no other way to put this. He was indoctrinated as a child. His father was a communist. His mother was a leftist. He was sent to prep and Ivy League schools where his contempt for the country was reinforced.
“This is what we have as a president: a radical ideologue, a ruthless politician who despises the country and the way it was founded and the way in which it has become great.
“He hates it.”
The GOP, the party of Lincoln, had more and more people trying to turn it into the party of hate.
Enter Donald Trump.