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Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Republicans’ Endgame to Take Down President Obama
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Love him or hate him, Barack Obama is the President of the United States. The
Republicans’ campaign to discredit him, embarrass him and block Democratic
initiatives since he took office in 2009 has been an ugly chapter in American
history. Now that President Obama is in his last 2 years, Republicans are
waging a no-holds-barred campaign to humiliate him at the cost of the
credibility of the United State of America.
From the editorial board of the New York Times:
A New Phase in Anti-Obama
Attacks
by The Editorial Board
April 11, 2015
It is a peculiar, but
unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight,
the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier
and more destructive.
Republican lawmakers in Washington and around
the country have been focused on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating
him personally since the day he took office in 2009. But even against that
backdrop, and even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the
tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to
undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.
It is a line of attack that
echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship.
Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that
Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false
idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more
subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in
it.
Perhaps the most outrageous
example of the attack on the president’s legitimacy was a letter signed by 47 Republican
senators to the leadership of Iran
saying Mr. Obama had no authority to conclude negotiations over Iran’s nuclear
weapons program. Try to imagine the outrage from Republicans if a similar group
of Democrats had written to the Kremlin in 1986 telling Mikhail Gorbachev that
President Ronald Reagan did not have the authority to negotiate a nuclear arms
deal at the Reykjavik
summit meeting that winter.
There is no functional
difference between that example and the Iran talks, except that the
congressional Republican caucus does not like Mr. Obama and wants to deny him
any policy victory.
On April 3, Colbert King, a
Washington Post columnist summarized a series of actions by
Republicans attacking the president’s authority in areas that most Americans
thought had been settled by the Civil War. Arizona legislators, for example,
have been working on a bill that “prohibits this state or any of its political
subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer
or cooperate with an executive order issued by the president of the United
States that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as
prescribed by the United States Constitution.”
The bill sounds an awful lot
like John C. Calhoun’s secessionist screed of 1828, the South Carolina
Exposition and Protest. Laurie Roberts of The Arizona Republic wrote
that it was just “one of a series of kooky measures aimed at declaring our
independence from federal gun laws, from the Affordable Care Act, from the
Environmental Protection Agency, from the Department of Justice, from Barack
Obama.”
Republicans defend this sort
of action by accusing Mr. Obama of acting like a king and citing executive
actions he has taken — on immigration and pollution among other things. That’s
nonsense. The same Republicans had no objection when President George W. Bush
used his executive authority to authorize the torture of terrorism suspects and
tap the phones of American citizens. It is not executive orders the Republicans
object to; it is Mr. Obama’s policies, and Mr. Obama.
The Senate majority leader,
Mitch McConnell, who declared war on the new president in 2009 as minority
leader and used the filibuster to paralyze the Senate, essentially told foreign
governments to ignore the carbon-emission goals Mr. Obama was trying to set by
international agreement. Because climate-change deniers in Congress and in some
states oppose the effort, setting those goals is pointless, Mr. McConnell
pronounced last month.
If this insurrection is
driven by something other than a blend of ideological extremism and personal
animosity, it is not clear what that might be. But it is ugly, it deepens
mistrust of government and it harms the office of the president, not just Mr.
Obama.
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Saturday, April 4, 2015
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