Chronologie de la presidence Obama

Question 1

La présidence de Barack Obama (2009-2017)

La présidence de Barack Obama fut inédite par la dimension symbolique de l’élection du premier président afro-américain à la Maison-Blanche. Elle fut également controversée. Dans les rangs du Parti républicain et de la mouvance conservatrice, des soupçons furent exprimés quant à son penchant supposé pour le socialisme, sa religion ou son lieu de naissance, jetant ainsi le doute sur sa légitimité de chef de l’État, puisqu’une personne née hors du territoire américain n’est pas éligible à la fonction présidentielle. À l’inverse, ses partisans virent en lui le sauveur d’une Amérique affaiblie moralement, diplomatiquement et économiquement lors de la présidence de George W. Bush (2001-2009), discréditée à leurs yeux par la « guerre contre la terreur » et une crise économique de premier plan. La campagne présidentielle de 2009 suscita ainsi l’espoir d’un grand changement chez les électeurs d’Obama, pour qui il incarnait la possibilité d’un renouvellement de la présidence, de l’État fédéral et de la société, ainsi que l’éventualité d’une amélioration du sort des minorités et d’une réduction des inégalités. Le degré de concrétisation de ces espoirs constitue l’un des critères à l’aune desquels un état de lieux de la présidence Obama peut être établi.
D’autres paramètres pertinents sont également à prendre en compte, tels que la trajectoire personnelle et politique d’Obama, le contexte économique dont il hérita en 2009, ou encore la nature du système politique américain, caractérisé par une séparation des pouvoirs qui limite la marge de manœuvre du président.
Les modalités d’action d’Obama évoluèrent en fonction de la composition politique du Congrès : s’il put s’appuyer initialement sur une majorité démocrate dans les deux chambres, il dut faire face à une majorité républicaine à la Chambre des représentants à partir des élections législatives de 2010, puis au Sénat à partir de 2014. En politique intérieure, comme en politique étrangère, les années Obama furent caractérisées par la recherche constante du compromis. Cependant, une posture présidentielle en apparence moins impériale (pour reprendre le terme employé par A. Schlesinger dans son ouvrage The Imperial Presidency), conjuguée à des erreurs de communication à propos du programme de ses deux mandats, a facilité la tâche d’une opposition décidée à faire obstruction. L’échec de la nomination de Merrick Garland à la Cour suprême en 2016 illustre ces difficultés. Obama, dont les talents d’orateur l’aidèrent à remporter deux élections de suite avec une majorité du vote populaire, dut revoir ses ambitions à la baisse. Pour cerner les rapports de force, il conviendra de tenir compte des interlocuteurs du président, tant démocrates que républicains. Parmi les principaux acteurs de la période, on retiendra des conseillers et ministres influents de l’administration Obama (par exemple, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emmanuel, Timothy Geithner, John Kerry, Jacob Lew, x et Lawrence Summers), ainsi que les dirigeants de l’opposition, notamment John Boehner, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney et Paul Ryan.
On tâchera d’examiner la présidence Obama à l’aune d’un ensemble de promesses, de mesures et de résultats, en s’attachant au positionnement idéologique et à la stratégie politique du candidat puis du président, ainsi qu’au contexte socio-culturel de la période concernée. Un tel examen appelle une étude multidimensionnelle, qui peut s’articuler autour de cinq enjeux principaux.
L’économie
L’une des questions les plus épineuses à laquelle Obama dut faire face fut celle de l’économie. À son arrivée au pouvoir, il hérita d’une situation de crise économique extrêmement grave, dont l’ampleur, la nature et les conséquences, telles que les licenciements et saisies de logements (foreclosures), lui valurent le nom de Grande Récession, en écho à la Grande Dépression qui suivit le krach boursier de 1929. Les mesures fiscales, monétaires et économiques prises par l’administration Obama pour y faire face furent considérables, et si elles n’eurent pas le retentissement du New Deal des années 1930, elles aboutirent néanmoins au sauvetage de l’industrie automobile et des banques. En 2009, le plan de relance de l’économie (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) permit de réduire le chômage, tandis que la loi Dodd-Frank de 2010 visait à mieux réguler le système bancaire. Sur ces points, il conviendra de privilégier la portée idéologique et le débat politique autour du stimulus et de la politique de sauvetage des grandes entreprises plutôt que les aspects purement techniques de la politique économique menée par l’administration Obama.
La politique sociale
Le champ d’intervention des pouvoirs publics étant très vaste dans le domaine de la politique sociale, il s’agira de mettre l’accent sur les mesures politiques fortes ou à portée symbolique. La réforme du système de santé (Obamacare) demeure l’action la plus emblématique de la présidence Obama en matière de politique sociale. Les tergiversations, les maladresses politiques et l’opposition farouche des conservateurs, démocrates autant que républicains, vidèrent le texte de loi (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) d’une grande partie de sa substance, témoignant ainsi de la difficulté politique à réformer en profondeur le système de santé. On peut penser que, malgré cette réforme, la politique sociale de l’administration Obama s’inscrivit dans la droite lignée de celle de ses prédécesseurs. Qu’il s’agisse de l’enseignement, des Faith- Based Initiatives ou de l’aide aux plus démunis, Obama semble avoir opté pour la continuité plutôt que pour la rupture.
La défense de l’environnement
Sur cet enjeu comme sur les autres, il faut tenir compte du blocage systématique du Congrès et des incohérences de la Maison-Blanche. Les promesses écologiques d’Obama, esquissées dans sa campagne électorale de 2008, enthousiasmèrent les écologistes. Mais très vite, les choix économiques reléguèrent la question environnementale au second plan. Obama semblait penser que sa réélection en 2012 dépendrait principalement du taux de chômage, de la croissance, de la compétitivité économique et du compromis avec le Congrès, même si son discours officiel continuait à articuler transition énergétique et croissance économique. En 2013, en revanche, libéré du fardeau de la réélection, Obama déclara : « si le Congrès n’agit pas [en faveur de l’environnement] pour protéger les générations à venir, moi, je le ferai », annonçant un deuxième mandat marqué par des décisions importantes en matière environnementale. En novembre 2015, il rejeta le projet d’oléoduc géant Keystone XL et annonça le Clean Power Plan concernant le charbon. La signature, au siège de l’ONU à New York en 2016, des accords de Paris (COP21) consacra Obama comme président favorable à l’écologie. Mais les obstacles juridiques auxquels le Clean Power Plan dut faire face, tant devant la Cour suprême que devant la Cour d’appel fédérale, illustrent à la fois la complexité du système politique américain et la difficulté de porter un jugement sur la politique de l’administration Obama sans tenir compte des contre-pouvoirs.
La politique étrangère
La politique étrangère américaine est guidée par des intérêts inscrits dans la durée. L’opposition d’Obama à la guerre en Irak laissa présager qu’en arrivant au pouvoir, il allait être confronté à l’inertie du complexe militaro-industriel. Si elle fut réelle, le président réussit pourtant à infléchir la politique extérieure de son pays sur de nombreuses questions, notamment vis-à-vis de l’Iran et de Cuba. Mais à force de vouloir se démarquer de son prédécesseur et éviter une démarche de nature idéologique, Obama se vit critiqué pour son indécision, et parfois pour son improvisation. Aux yeux d’un bon nombre de conservateurs, il faisait figure de fossoyeur de la puissance, de l’hégémonie et du leadership américains. Le cadre doctrinal de la politique étrangère de l’administration Obama s’avère difficile à décoder, ce qui s’explique en partie par l’échec de l’unilatéralisme bushiste des années 2000 et par la complexité inhérente à l’utilisation du smart power prôné par Obama. Le bilan comporte des échecs indéniables. Après le discours prometteur du Caire en 2009, Washington ne parvint pas à résorber la fracture entre le monde musulman et l’Occident, ni à faire avancer la cause de la paix au Proche-Orient. Quant au soutien apporté à l’intervention militaire franco- britannique en Lybie en 2011, il fut contesté, tout comme le refus d’intervenir en Syrie en 2013 malgré l’utilisation d’armes chimiques par le régime syrien.
Le leadership moral

La victoire d’Obama à l’élection présidentielle de 2008 eut un impact immédiat sur l’image des États-Unis, ternie par l’invasion de l’Irak en 2003. La promesse de retirer les troupes américaines d’Irak et de fermer la prison de Guantanamo laissait penser qu’un terme serait mis à certaines dérives des néoconservateurs, ce que le comité Nobel encouragea en attribuant le prix de la Paix au président américain dès 2009. Or non seulement le centre d’incarcération de Guantanamo ne fut pas fermé, mais le nombre de personnes tuées à l’étranger par des drones de l’armée américaine, hors de tout cadre juridique reconnu, augmenta. En 2013, l’affaire Snowden montra que l’État américain se dotait de moyens de surveillance contraires aux principes en vigueur. De même, si le discours de campagne sur la notion de race, prononcé à Philadelphie le 18 mars 2008, laissait penser que la société étatsunienne avait évolué sur la question raciale, tendant vers une plus grande égalité républicaine, l’élection de 2008 fut suivie par une augmentation des violences policières contre les Noirs et une polarisation accrue du débat public, avant que l’élection de 2016 ne porte au pouvoir un candidat décidé à détricoter le legs de son prédécesseur.
La participation élevée lors de l’élection présidentielle de 2008 reflète les grands espoirs suscités chez nombre d’électeurs par la campagne d’Obama. Ces espoirs furent en partie déçus car, contrairement à Franklin Delano Roosevelt ou Ronald Reagan par exemple, Obama ne parvint pas à transformer la société. Au bout du compte, il fut un président gestionnaire et réformateur, plutôt que fondateur.

Bilan
Mais au-dela du bilan sans doute mitigé, il s’agira d’étudier le contexte historique de la présidence Obama, ainsi que ses enjeux politiques, sociaux et économiques, avec la distance critique nécessaire pour prendre la pleine mesure de ces huit années de pouvoir.

Answer 1

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Question 2

Thepresidency of Barack Obamabegan at noonESTon January 20, 2009, whenBarack Obamawasinauguratedas the44thPresident of the United States, and ended on January 20, 2017. Obama, aDemocratfromIllinois, took office following a decisive victory overRepublicanJohn McCainin the2008 presidential election. Four years later, in the2012 election, he defeated RepublicanMitt Romneyto win re-election. He was thefirstAfrican Americanpresident, the firstmultiracialpresident, the first non-white president, and the first president to have been born inHawaii. Obama was succeeded by RepublicanDonald Trump, who won the2016 presidential election.
Obama’s first-term actions addressed theglobal financial crisisand included amajor stimulus package, a partial extension of theBush tax cuts, legislation, a majorfinancial regulation reform bill, and the end of a major USmilitary presenceinIraq. Obama also appointedSupreme CourtJusticesElena KaganandSonia Sotomayor, the latter of whom became the firstHispanic Americanon the Supreme Court. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress until Republicans won a majority in theHouse of Representativesin the2010 elections. Following the elections, Obama and Congressional Republicans engaged in a protracted stand-off over government spending levels and thedebt ceiling. The Obama administration’s policy against terrorism downplayed Bush’s counterinsurgency model, expanding air strikes and making extensive use of special forces and encouraging greater reliance on host-government militaries. The Obama administration orchestrated themilitary operationthat resulted in thedeath of Osama bin Ladenin 2011.

In his second term, Obama took steps to combatclimate change, signing a majorinternational climate agreementand anexecutive orderto limitcarbon emissions. Obama also presided over the implementation of theAffordable Care Actand other legislation passed in his first term, and he negotiated rapprochements with Iran and Cuba. The number of American soldiers in Afghanistan fell dramatically during Obama’s second term, though U.S. soldiers remained in Afghanistan throughout Obama’s presidency andcontinue to as of 2019. Republicans took control of the Senate after the2014 elections, and Obama continued to grapple with Congressional Republicans over government spending, immigration, judicial nominations, and other issues.

Answer 2

The financial crisis of 2007–2008, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, was a severe worldwide economic crisis considered by many economists to have been the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, to which it is often compared.[1][2][3][4]

It began in 2007 with a crisis in the subprime mortgage market in the United States, and developed into a full-blown international banking crisis with the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008.[5] Excessive risk-taking by banks such as Lehman Brothers helped to magnify the financial impact globally.[6]
Massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies were employed to prevent a possible collapse of the world financial system. The crisis was nonetheless followed by a global economic downturn, the Great Recession.
The European debt crisis, a crisis in the banking system of the European countries using the euro, followed later.

In 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the US following the crisis to “promote the financial stability of the United States”.

Question 3

The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government.[54] An estimated 151,000 to 600,000 Iraqis were killed in the first three to four years of conflict. In 2009, official US troops were withdrawn, but American soldiers remain on the ground fighting in Iraq, most redeployed following the spread of the Syrian Civil War, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria having invaded Iraq from Syria, and captured large areas quickly, while carrying out widespread atrocities and global terrorist attacks.
In October 2002, Congress authorized President Bush to use military force against Iraq should he choose to.[58] The Iraq War began on 19 March 2003,[59] when the U.S., joined by the U.K. and several coalition allies, launched a “shock and awe” bombing campaign. Iraqi forces were quickly overwhelmed as U.S.-led forces swept through the country. The invasion led to the collapse of the Ba’athist government; Saddam was captured during Operation Red Dawn in December of that same year and executed by a military court three years later. However, the power vacuum following Saddam’s demise and the mismanagement of the occupation led to widespread sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis, as well as a lengthy insurgency against U.S. and coalition forces. Many violent insurgent groups were supported by Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq. The United States responded with a troop surge in 2007, a build up of 170,000 troops.[60] The surge in troops gave greater security to Iraq’s government and military, and was largely a success.[61] The winding down of U.S. involvement in Iraq accelerated under President Barack Obama. The U.S. formally withdrew all combat troops from Iraq by December 2011.[62]
The Bush administration based its rationale for the war principally on the assertion that Iraq, which had been viewed by the U.S. as a rogue state since the 1990–1991 Gulf War, supposedly possessed an active weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) program,[63] and that the Iraqi government posed a threat to the United States and its coalition allies.[64][65] Some U.S. officials falsely accused Saddam of harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda,[66] while others cited the desire to end a repressive dictatorship and bring democracy to the people of Iraq.[67][68] In 2004, the 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence of an operational relationship between the Saddam Hussein regime and al-Qaeda.[69] No stockpiles of WMDs or an active WMD program were ever found in Iraq.[70] Bush administration officials made numerous assertions about a purported Saddam-Al-Qaeda relationship and WMDs that were based on sketchy evidence, and which intelligence officials pushed back on.[70][71] The rationale of U.S. pre-war intelligence faced heavy criticism both domestically and internationally.
In seven months of secret FBI debriefings after his capture, Saddam admitted that he faked having weapons of mass destruction when he was in power but had planned on developing a weapons of mass destruction program with nuclear capability within a year. Saddam made the admissions in videotaped interviews with George L. Piro, an FBI agent who was assigned by the FBI with the CIA’s approval to try to develop the former dictator’s cooperation
In the aftermath of the invasion, Iraq held multi-party elections in 2005. Nouri al-Maliki became Prime Minister in 2006 and remained in office until 2014. The al-Maliki government enacted policies that were widely seen as having the effect of alienating the country’s Sunni minority and worsening sectarian tensions. In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched a military offensive in northern Iraq and declared a worldwide Islamic caliphate, eliciting another military response from the United States and its allies. The Iraq War caused over a hundred thousand civilian deaths and tens of thousands of military deaths (see estimates below). The majority of deaths occurred as a result of the insurgency and civil conflicts between 2004 and 2007. Subsequently, the Iraqi Civil War, which was largely considered a domino effect of the invasion, propelled at least 67,000 civilian deaths in addition to the displacement of five million people within the country.

Answer 3

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Question 4

Osama bin Laden, the founder and first leader of the Islamist terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, shortly after 1:00 am PKT
The raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was launched from Afghanistan.[6] U.S. military officials said that after the raid U.S. forces took the body of bin Laden to Afghanistan for identification, then buried it at sea within 24 hours of his death in accordance with Islamic tradition.[7]

Al-Qaeda confirmed the death on May 6 with posts made on militant websites, vowing to avenge the killing.[8] Other Pakistani militant groups, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, vowed retaliation against the U.S. and against Pakistan for not preventing the operation.[9] The raid was supported by over 90% of the American public,[10][11] was welcomed by the United Nations, NATO, the European Union and a large number of governments,[12] but was condemned by others, including two-thirds of the Pakistani public.[13] Legal and ethical aspects of the killing, such as his not being taken alive despite being unarmed, were questioned by others, including Amnesty International.[14] Also controversial was the decision not to release any photographic or DNA evidence of bin Laden’s death to the public.[15]

Answer 4

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Question 5

The Paris Agreement (French: Accord de Paris)[3] is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), dealing with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance, signed in 2016. The agreement’s language was negotiated by representatives of 196 state parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in Le Bourget, near Paris, France, and adopted by consensus on 12 December 2015.
In June 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the agreement. Under the agreement, the earliest effective date of withdrawal for the U.S. is November 2020, shortly before the end of President Trump’s 2016 term. In practice, changes in United States policy that are contrary to the Paris Agreement have already been put in place.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often shortened to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), nicknamed Obamacare, is a United States federal statute enacted by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. Together with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 amendment, it represents the U.S. healthcare system’s most significant regulatory overhaul and expansion of coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

Answer 5

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Question 6

First 100 days
heinauguration of Barack Obamaas the 44th President took place on January 20, 2009. In his first few days in office, Obama issuedexecutive ordersandpresidential memorandadirecting the U.S. military to develop plans to withdraw troops from Iraq.[195]He ordered the closing of theGuantanamo Bay detention camp,[196]but Congress prevented the closure by refusing to appropriate the required funds[197][198][199]and preventing moving any Guantanamo detainee into the U.S. or to other countries.[200]Obama reduced the secrecy given to presidential records.[201]He also revoked PresidentGeorge W. Bush’s restoration of PresidentRonald Reagan’sMexico City Policyprohibiting federal aid to international family planning organizations that perform or provide counseling about abortion.[202]
The Mexico City Policy was first implemented in 1984 by theReagan Administration. Since that time, theUnited States Agency for International Development(USAID) has enforced the policy during all subsequent Republican Administrations and has rescinded the policy at the direction of all Democratic Administrations.[2]After its initial implementation byPresident Reaganin 1984,[3]the policy was rescinded by Democratic PresidentBill Clintonin January 1993,[4]re-instituted in January 2001 by Republican PresidentGeorge W. Bush,[5]rescinded in January 2009 by Democratic PresidentBarack Obama,[6][7]and reinstated in January 2017 when Republican PresidentDonald Trumptook office.

Answer 6

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Question 7

Domestic policy

Obama appointed two women to serve on the Supreme Court in the first two years of his Presidency. He nominatedSonia Sotomayoron May 26, 2009 to replace retiringAssociate JusticeDavid Souter; she was confirmed on August 6, 2009,[206]becoming the first Supreme Court Justice ofHispanicdescent.[207]Obama nominatedElena Kaganon May 10, 2010 to replace retiring Associate JusticeJohn Paul Stevens. She was confirmed on August 5, 2010, bringing the number of women sitting simultaneously on the Court to three justices for the first time in American history.[208]

On March 30, 2010, Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, areconciliation billthat ended the process of the federal government giving subsidies to private banks to give out federally insured loans, increased thePell Grantscholarship award, and made changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.[209][210]
In amajor space policy speechin April 2010, Obama announced a planned change in direction atNASA, the U.S. space agency. He ended plans for a return ofhuman spaceflightto the moon and development of theAres Irocket,Ares Vrocket andConstellation program, in favor of funding Earth science projects, a new rocket type, and research and development for an eventual manned mission to Mars, and ongoing missions to theInternational Space Station.[211]

President Obama’s2011 State of the Union Addressfocused on themes of education and innovation, stressing the importance ofinnovation economicsto make the United States more competitive globally. He spoke of a five-year freeze in domestic spending, eliminating tax breaks for oil companies and reversing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, banning congressionalearmarks, and reducing healthcare costs. He promised the United States would have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015 and be 80% reliant on “clean” electricity.[212][213]

Answer 7

The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Pub.L. 111–152, 124 Stat. 1029) is a law that was enacted by the 111th United States Congress, by means of the reconciliation process, in order to amend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Pub.L. 111–148). The law includes the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which was attached as a rider.
The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 30, 2010 at Northern Virginia Community College.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station (habitable artificial satellite) in low Earth orbit.
The ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews, following the Soviet and later Russian Salyut, Almaz, and Mir stations as well as Skylab from the US

Question 8

LGBT rights

On October 8, 2009, Obama signed theMatthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a measure that expanded the1969 United States federal hate-crime lawto include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.[2
On December 22, 2010, Obama signed theDon’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010, which fulfilled a key promise made in the 2008 presidential campaign[216][217]to end theDon’t ask, don’t tellpolicy of 1993 that had prevented gay and lesbian people from serving openly in theUnited States Armed Forces.[218]In 2016, thePentagonalso ended the policy that barredtransgenderpeople from serving openly in the military.[219

As a candidate for the Illinois state senate in 1996, Obama had said he favored legalizingsame-sex marriage.[220]By the time of his Senate run in 2004, he said he supported civil unions and domestic partnerships for same-sex partners but opposed same-sex marriages.[221]In 2008, he reaffirmed this position by stating “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.”[222]On May 9, 2012, shortly after the official launch of his campaign for re-election as president, Obama said his views had evolved, and he publicly affirmed his personal support for the legalization of same-sex marriage, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to do so.[223][224]
During his secondinaugural addresson January 21, 2013,[194]Obama became the first U.S. President in office to call for full equality for gay Americans: “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.” This was the first time that a president mentionedgay rightsor the word “gay” in an inaugural address.[

White House advisory and oversight groups
On March 11, 2009, Obama created theWhite House Council on Women and Girls, which formed part of theOffice of Intergovernmental Affairs, having been established byExecutive Order13506with a broad mandate to advise him on issues relating to the welfare of American women and girls.[231]The Council was chaired bySenior Advisor to the PresidentValerie Jarrett.[232]Obama also established theWhite House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assaultthrough a government memorandum on January 22, 2014, with a broad mandate to advise him on issues relating to sexual assault on college and university campuses throughout the United States.[232][233][234]The co-chairs of the Task Force were Vice PresidentJoe Bidenand Jarrett.[233]The Task Force was a development out of the White House Council on Women and Girls andOffice of the Vice President of the United States, and prior to that the 1994Violence Against Women Actfirst drafted by Biden.[2

Answer 8

x

Question 9

Economic policy

Obama presents his firstweekly addressas President of the United States on January 24, 2009, discussing theAmerican Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
On February 17, 2009, Obama signed theAmerican Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a $787billioneconomic stimuluspackage aimed at helping the economy recover from thedeepening worldwide recession.[236]The act includes increased federal spending for health care, infrastructure, education, various tax breaks andincentives, and direct assistance to individuals
Obama and theCongressional Budget Officepredicted the 2010budget deficitwould be $1.5trillion or 10.6% of the nation’sgross domestic product(GDP) compared to the 2009 deficit of $1.4trillion or 9.9% of GDP.[247][248]For 2011, the administration predicted the deficit would shrink to $1.34trillion, and the 10-year deficit would increase to $8.53trillion or 90% of GDP.[249]The most recent increase in the U.S.debt ceilingto $17.2trillion took effect in February 2014.[250]On August 2, 2011, after a lengthy congressional debate over whether to raise the nation’s debt limit, Obama signed the bipartisanBudget Control Act of 2011. The legislation enforces limits on discretionary spending until 2021, establishes a procedure to increase the debt limit, creates a Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to propose further deficit reduction with a stated goal of achieving at least $1.5trillion in budgetary savings over 10 years, and establishes automatic procedures for reducing spending by as much as $1.2trillion if legislation originating with the new joint select committee does not achieve such savings.[251]By passing the legislation, Congress was able to prevent aU.S. governmentdefaulton its obligations.[252]
As it did throughout 2008, the unemployment rate rose in 2009, reaching a peak in October at 10.0% and averaging 10.0% in the fourth quarter. Following a decrease to 9.7% in the first quarter of 2010, the unemployment rate fell to 9.6% in the second quarter, where it remained for the rest of the year.[255]Between February and December 2010, employment rose by 0.8%, which was less than the average of 1.9% experienced during comparable periods in the past four employment recoveries.[256]By November 2012, the unemployment rate fell to 7.7%,[257]decreasing to 6.7% in the last month of 2013.[258]During 2014, the unemployment rate continued to decline, falling to 6.3% in the first quarter.[259]GDP growth returned in the third quarter of 2009, expanding at a rate of 1.6%, followed by a 5.0% increase in the fourth quarter.[260]Growth continued in 2010, posting an increase of 3.7% in the first quarter, with lesser gains throughout the rest of the year.[260]In July 2010, theFederal Reservenoted that economic activity continued to increase, but its pace had slowed, and chairmanBen Bernankesaid the economic outlook was “unusually uncertain”.[261]Overall, the economy expanded at a rate of 2.9% in 2010.[262]

TheCongressional Budget Office(CBO) and a broad range of economists credit Obama’s stimulus plan for economic growth.[263][264]The CBO released a report stating that the stimulus bill increased employment by 1–2.1million,[264][265][266][267]while conceding that “It is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.”[263]Although an April 2010, survey of members of theNational Association for Business Economicsshowed an increase in job creation (over a similar January survey) for the first time in two years, 73% of 68 respondents believed the stimulus bill has had no impact on employment.[268]The economy of the United States has grown faster than the other originalNATOmembers by a wider margin under President Obama than it has anytime since the end ofWorld War II.[269]TheOrganisation for Economic Co-operation and Developmentcredits the much faster growth in the United States to the stimulus plan of the US and the austerity measures in the European Union.[270]
Within a month of the2010 midterm elections, Obama announced a compromise deal with the Congressional Republican leadership that included a temporary, two-year extension of the2001 and 2003 income tax rates, a one-yearpayroll taxreduction, continuation of unemployment benefits, and a new rate and exemption amount forestate taxes.[271]The compromise overcame opposition from some in both parties, and the resulting $858billionTax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress before Obama signed it on December 17, 2010.[272]
In December 2013, Obama declared that growingincome inequalityis a “defining challenge of our time” and called on Congress to bolster the safety net and raise wages. This came on the heels of thenationwide strikes of fast-food workersandPope Francis’ criticism of inequality andtrickle-down economics.[273]
Obama urged Congress to ratify a 12-nation free trade pact called theTrans-Pacific Partnership.[274]

Answer 9

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Question 10

Environmental policy

On September 30, 2009, the Obama administration proposed new regulations on power plants, factories, and oil refineries in an attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to curbglobal warming.[275][276]

On April 20, 2010, an explosion destroyed an offshoredrilling rigat theMacondo Prospectin theGulf of Mexico, causing amajor sustained oil leak. Obama visited the Gulf, announced a federal investigation, and formed a bipartisan commission to recommend new safety standards.
In July 2013, Obama expressed reservations and stated he “would reject theKeystone XL pipelineif it increased carbon pollution” or “greenhouse emissions”.[279][280]Obama’s advisers called for a halt topetroleum exploration in the Arcticin January 2013.[281]On February 24, 2015, Obama vetoed a bill that would have authorized the pipeline.[282]It was the third veto of Obama’s presidency and his first major veto.[283

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Question 11

Health care reform

Obama called forCongressto pass legislation reforminghealth care in the United States, a key campaign promise and a top legislative goal.[285]He proposed an expansion of health insurance coverage to cover the uninsured, to cap premium increases, and to allow people to retain their coverage when they leave or change jobs. His proposal was to spend $900billion over 10 years and include a government insurance plan, also known as thepublic option, to compete with the corporate insurance sector as a main component to lowering costs and improving quality of health care. It would also make it illegal for insurers to drop sick people or deny them coverage forpre-existing conditions, and require every American to carry health coverage. The plan also includes medical spending cuts and taxes on insurance companies that offer expensive plans.[286][287]

On July 14, 2009, House Democratic leaders introduced a 1,017-page plan for overhauling the U.S. health care system, which Obama wanted Congress to approve by the end of 2009.[285]After much public debate during the Congressional summer recess of 2009, Obama delivereda speech to a joint session of Congresson September 9 where he addressed concerns over the proposals.[289]In March 2009, Obama lifted a ban on using federal funds for stem cell research.[290]
On November 7, 2009, a health care bill featuring the public option was passed in the House.[291][292]On December 24, 2009, the Senate passed its own bill—without a public option—on a party-line vote of 60–39.[293]On March 21, 2010, thePatient Protection and Affordable Care Act(ACA) passed by the Senate in December was passed in the House by a vote of 219 to 212.[294]Obama signed the bill into law on March 23, 2010.[2

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Question 12

Gun control
On January 16, 2013, one month after theSandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Obama signed 23 executive orders and outlined a series of sweeping proposals regardinggun control.[309]He urged Congress to reintroduce anexpired banon military-styleassault weapons, such as those used in several recent mass shootings, impose limits on ammunition magazines to 10 rounds, introduce background checks on all gun sales, pass a ban on possession and sale of armor-piercing bullets, introduce harsher penalties for gun-traffickers, especially unlicensed dealers who buy arms for criminals and approving the appointment of the head of the federalBureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosivesfor the first time since 2006.[310]On January 5, 2016, Obama announced new executive actions extending background check requirements to more gun sellers.[311]In a 2016 editorial in theNew York Times, Obama compared the struggle for what he termed “common-sense gun reform” towomen’s suffrageand othercivil rights movementsin American history.[312]

Government mass surveillance

In 2005 and 2006, Obama criticized certain aspects of thePatriot Actfor infringing too much on civil liberties and sought as Senator to strengthen civil liberties protections.[319][320][321]In 2006, he voted to reauthorize a revised version of the Patriot Act, saying the law was not ideal but that the revised version had strengthened civil liberties.[321]In 2011, he signed a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act.[322]Following the2013 global surveillance disclosuresbywhistleblowerEdward Snowden, Obama condemned the leak as unpatriotic,[320]but called for increased restrictions on the NSA to address violations of privacy.[323][324]The changes which Obama ordered have been described as “modest” however.

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Question 13

Foreign policy

In February and March 2009, Vice President Joe Biden andSecretary of StateHillary Clinton made separate overseas trips to announce a “new era” in U.S. foreign relations with Russia and Europe, using the terms “break” and “reset” to signal major changes from the policies of the preceding administration.[326]Obama attempted to reach out to Arab leaders by granting his first interview to an Arab satellite TV network,Al Arabiya.[327]
On March 19, Obama continued his outreach to the Muslim world, releasing a New Year’s video message to the people and government of Iran.[328][329]In April, Obama gave a speech inAnkara, Turkey, which was well received by many Arab governments.[330]On June 4, 2009, Obama delivered a speech atCairo Universityin Egypt calling for “A New Beginning” in relations between the Islamic world and the United States and promoting Middle East peace.[331]
On June 26, 2009, Obama responded to the Iranian government’s actions towards protesters followingIran’s 2009 presidential electionby saying: “The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous. We see it and we condemn it.”[332]While in Moscow on July 7, he responded to Vice President Biden’s comment on a possible Israeli military strike on Iran by saying: “We have said directly to the Israelis that it is important to try and resolve this in an international setting in a way that does not create major conflict in the Middle East.”[333]
On September 24, 2009, Obama became the first sitting U.S. President topresideover a meeting of theUnited Nations Security Council.[334]
In March 2010, Obama took a public stance against plans by the government of Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahuto continue building Jewish housing projects in predominantly Arab neighborhoods ofEast Jerusalem.[335][336]During the same month, an agreement was reached with the administration of Russian PresidentDmitry Medvedevto replace the1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treatywith a new pact reducing the number of long-range nuclear weapons in the arsenals of both countries by about a third.[337]Obama and Medvedev signed theNew STARTtreaty in April 2010, and theU.S. Senateratified it in December 2010.
In December 2011, Obama instructed agencies to considerLGBT rightswhen issuing financial aid to foreign countries.[339]In August 2013, he criticized Russia’s law that discriminates against gays,[340]but he stopped short of advocating a boycott of the upcoming2014 Winter OlympicsinSochi, Russia.

In December 2014, Obama announced that he intended tonormalize relationshipsbetweenCuba and the United States.[342]The countries’ respective “interests sections” in one another’s capitals were upgraded to embassies on July 20, 2015.
In March 2015, Obama declared that he had authorized U.S. forces to provide logistical and intelligence support to the Saudis in theirmilitary intervention in Yemen, establishing a “Joint Planning Cell” with Saudi Arabia.[343][344]In 2016, the Obama administration proposed a series ofarms deals with Saudi Arabiaworth $115 billion.[345]Obama halted the sale of guided munition technology toSaudi Arabiaafter Saudi warplanestargeted a funeralin Yemen’s capital Sanaa, killing more than 140 people.[346]
Before leaving office, Obama said German ChancellorAngela Merkelhad been his “closest international partner” throughout his tenure as president.[347]

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Question 14

In February 27, 2009, Obama announced that combat operations in Iraq would end within 18 months. His remarks were made to a group ofMarinespreparing for deployment to Afghanistan. Obama said, “Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”[348]
On August 19, 2010, the last U.S. combat brigade exited Iraq. Remaining troops transitioned from combat operations tocounter-terrorismand the training, equipping, and advising of Iraqi security forces.[349][350]On August 31, 2010, Obama announced that the United States combat mission in Iraq was over.[351]On October 21, 2011 President Obama announced that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq in time to be “home for the holidays”.[352]
In June 2014, following thecapture of MosulbyISIS, Obama sent 275 troops to provide support and security for U.S. personnel and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. ISIS continued to gain ground and to commitwidespread massacres and ethnic cleansing.[353][354]
In August 2014, during theSinjar massacre, Obama ordered acampaign of U.S. airstrikes against ISIS.[355]

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Question 15

War in Afghanistan

Early in his presidency, Obama moved to bolster U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan.[360]He announced an increase in U.S. troop levels to 17,000 military personnel in February 2009 to “stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan
In February 2013, Obama said the U.S. military would reduce the troop level in Afghanistan from 68,000 to 34,000 U.S. troops by February 2014.[365]
In October 2015, the White House announced a plan to keep U.S. Forces in Afghanistan indefinitely in light of the deteriorating security situation.[366]

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Question 16

Israel

In 2011, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemningIsraeli settlements, with the United States being the only nation to do so.[367]Obama supports thetwo-state solutionto theArab–Israeli conflictbased on the 1967 borders with land swaps.[368]
In June 2011, Obama said the bond between the United States and Israel is “unbreakable”.[369]During the initial years of the Obama administration, the U.S. increased military cooperation with Israel
In 2013,Jeffrey Goldbergreported that, in Obama’s view, “with each new settlement announcement, Netanyahu is moving his country down a path toward near-total isolation.”[372]In 2014, Obama likened theZionist movementto theCivil Rights Movementin the United States. He said both movements seek to bring justice and equal rights to historically persecuted peoples. He explained, “To me, being pro-Israel and pro-Jewish is part and parcel with the values that I’ve been fighting for since I was politically conscious and started getting involved in politics.”[373]Obama expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself during the2014 Israel–Gaza conflict.[374]In 2015, Obama was harshly criticized by Israel for advocating and signing theIran Nuclear Deal; Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu, who had advocated the U.S. congress to oppose it, said the deal was “dangerous” and “bad”.[375]
On December 23, 2016, under the Obama Administration, the United States abstained fromUnited Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemnedIsraeli settlement buildingin the occupiedPalestinian territoriesas a violation of international law, effectively allowing it to pass.[376]Netanyahu strongly criticized the Obama Administration’s actions,[377][378]and the Israeli government withdrew its annual dues from the organization, which totaled $6 million, on January 6, 2017.[379]On January 5, 2017, theUnited States House of Representativesvoted 342–80 to condemn the UN Resolution.[380][381]

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Question 17

Libya
In February 2011, protests in Libya began against long-time dictatorMuammar Gaddafias part of theArab Spring. They soon turned violent. In March, as forces loyal to Gaddafi advanced on rebels across Libya, calls for a no-fly zone came from around the world, including Europe, theArab League, and a resolution[382]passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate.[383]In response to the unanimous passage ofUnited Nations Security Council Resolution 1973on March 17, Gaddafi—who had previously vowed to “show no mercy” to the rebels of Benghazi[384]—announced an immediate cessation of military activities,[385]yet reports came in that his forces continued shellingMisrata. The next day, on Obama’s orders, the U.S. military took part in air strikes to destroy the Libyan government’s air defense capabilities to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly-zone,[386]including the use ofTomahawk missiles,B-2 Spirits, and fighter jets.[387][388][389]Six days later, on March 25, by unanimous vote of all its 28 members,NATOtook over leadership of the effort, dubbedOperation Unified Protector.[390]Some Representatives[391]questioned whether Obama had the constitutional authority to order military action in addition to questioning its cost, structure and aftermath.[392][393]

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Question 18

Syrian Civil War
On August 18, 2011, several months after the start of theSyrian Civil War, Obama issued a written statement that said: “The time has come forPresident Assadto step aside.”[394][395]This stance was reaffirmed in November 2015.[396]In 2012, Obama authorized multipleprograms run by the CIAand the Pentagon to train anti-Assad rebels.[397]The Pentagon-run program was later found to have failed and was formally abandoned in October 2015.[398][399]
In the wake of achemical weapons attackin Syria,formally blamedby the Obama administration on the Assad government, Obama chose not to enforce the “red line” he had pledged[400]and, rather than authorize the promised military action against Assad, went along with the Russia-brokered deal that led to Assadgiving up chemical weapons; however attacks withchlorine gascontinued.[401][402]In 2014, Obama authorized anair campaign aimed primarily at ISIL, but repeatedly promised the U.S. would not deploy ground troops in Syria.[403][404]

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Question 19

Death of Osama bin Laden
Starting with information received from Central Intelligence Agency operatives in July 2010, the CIA developed intelligence over the next several months that determined what they believed to be the hideout ofOsama bin Laden. He was living in seclusion ina large compoundinAbbottabad, Pakistan, a suburban area 35 miles (56km) fromIslamabad.[405]CIA headLeon Panettareported this intelligence to President Obama in March 2011.[405]Meeting with his national security advisers over the course of the next six weeks, Obama rejected a plan to bomb the compound, and authorized a “surgical raid” to be conducted byUnited States Navy SEALs.[405]The operation took place on May 1, 2011, and resulted in the shooting death of bin Laden and the seizure of papers, computer drives and disks from the compound.[406][407]DNA testing was one of five methods used to positively identify bin Laden’s corpse,[408]which was buried at sea several hours later.[409]Within minutes of the President’s announcement from Washington, DC, late in the evening on May 1, there were spontaneous celebrations around the country as crowds gathered outside the White House, and at New York City’sGround ZeroandTimes Square.[406][410]Reaction to the announcementwas positive across party lines, including from former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.[411]

Answer 19

The United States Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) Teams, commonly known as Navy SEALs, are the U.S. Navy’s primary special operations force and a component of the Naval Special Warfare Command. The Navy SEALs were created by John F. Kennedy on 1 January 1962. Among the SEALs main functions are conducting small-unit unconventional special operation missions in maritime, jungle, urban, arctic, mountainous, and desert environments. SEALs are primarily tasked with capturing or if necessary, eliminating high level targets, or gathering intelligence behind enemy lines for future military actions. They are often referred to as “The cream of the crop”.[6

The World Trade Center site, formerly referred to as “Ground Zero” or “the Pile” immediately after the September 11 attacks, is a 14.6-acre (5.9 ha) area in Lower Manhattan in New York City.[1][2] The site is bounded by Vesey Street to the north, the West Side Highway to the west, Liberty Street to the south, and Church Street to the east. The Port Authority owns the site’s land (except for 7 World Trade Center). The previous World Trade Center complex stood on the site until it was destroyed in the September 11 attacks.

Question 20

Iran nuclear talks
In November 2013, the Obama administration openednegotiationswith Iran to prevent it from acquiringnuclear weapons, which included aninterim agreement. Negotiations took two years with numerous delays, with a deal being announced July 14, 2015. The deal, titled the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”, saw the removal of sanctions in exchange for measures that would prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons. While Obama hailed the agreement as being a step towards a more hopeful world, the deal drew strong criticism from Republican and conservative quarters, and from Israeli prime ministerBenjamin Netanyahu.[412][413][414]In addition, the transfer of $1.7 billion in cash to Iran shortly after the deal was announced was criticized by the republican party. The Obama administration said that the payment in cash was because of the “effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions”.[415]In order to advance the deal, the Obama administration shieldedHezbollahfrom theDrug Enforcement Administration’sProject Cassandrainvestigation regarding drug smuggling and from theCentral Intelligence Agency.

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Question 21

cultural image
On May 25, 2011, Obama became the first President of the United States to address both houses of theUK ParliamentinWestminster Hall, London. This was only the fifth occurrence since the start of the 20th century of a head of state’s being extended this invitation, followingCharles de Gaullein 1960,Nelson Mandelain 1996,Queen Elizabeth IIin 2002 andPope Benedict XVIin 2010.[458][459]
On October 9, 2009, theNorwegian Nobel Committeeannounced that Obama had won the2009 Nobel Peace Prize”for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.[460]Obama accepted this award inOslo, Norway on December 10, 2009, with “deep gratitude and great humility.”[461]The award drew a mixture of praise and criticism from world leaders and media figures.[462][463][464][465]Obama’s peace prize was called a “stunning surprise” byThe New York Times.[466]Obama is the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the third to become a Nobel laureate while in office.[467]Obama’s Nobel Prize has been viewed skeptically in subsequent years, especially after the director of the Nobel Institute,Geir Lundestad, said Obama’s Peace Prize did not have the desired effect.[468]

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Question 22

An assessment on the Barack Obama’s presidencyBarack Obama

Political strategy of Barack Obama

1 On the economic front

• Overall unemployment reached its peak, at 10 percent, in October 2009, and began a long slow decrease so that six years later, in the fall of 2015, it at last reached a tolerable 5 percent.
• The Obama health insurance reform barely survived a legal challenge in the Supreme Court in 2015, and its further survival would depend on the willingness of congressmen and -women and judges to defend it.

2 THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY AND INEQUALITY

Like global warming, the growth in economic inequality poses a challenge to progressive presidential leadership that would be daunting under the best of political circumstances. The trends in both the climate and the economy are by their nature difficult to reverse, and in an era of partisan polarization and nearly constant gridlock, presidents seeking to meet those challenges are unlikely to be able to claim decisive victories. When change fails to match expectations, the disappointment that many people feel may lead them to disparage what political leadership has accomplished. That reaction, however, would be a mistake in the case of Barack Obama’s record on economic inequality. Despite relentless Republican opposition, Obama made significant progress in mitigating and reducing inequality. What he did not receive is much political credit for that achievement—and why he failed to get credit is as important a question as how he was able to do as much as he did.

When Barack Obama went to Osawatomie, Kansas, in December 2011 to give a speech on inequality and called it “the defining issue of our time,” he was registering a shift in the framing of the problem and seeking to put inequality at the center of his 2012 reelection campaign.2
Conservatives have generally seen redistribution as both illegitimate and futile—illegitimate because government has no right to transfer income from those who earn it to anyone else, and futile because dng so will only reduce the incentives to be productive.
But if these were the chief causes, policy would likely be ineffectual in reducing inequality, except by depressing economic growth. Disagreeing with this analysis, other economists as well as sociologists and political scientists have argued that rising inequality has political and institutional sources and pointed to cross-national evidence that greater equality does not, in fact, come at the expense of growth.
But many who have offered this interpretation have also insisted that more radical policies than Obama’s would be necessary to reduce inequality in the United States. The constraints of American politics are severe, but which party controls the presidency has nonetheless made an enormous difference in the extent of economic inequality. Building on the work of Douglas Hibbs, Larry Bartels finds that from 1948 to 2014 income inequality increased sharply under Republican presidents but decreased somewhat under Democrats.
Yet even Bartels is skeptical about any recent rollback of inequality under Obama.
The more tractable questions about presidential leadership involve changes in policy with an immediate and direct impact. During Obama’s presidency, these changes came in three areas: 1) the response to the Great Recession, particularly through the Recovery Act in 2009; 2) healthcare reform, mainly through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010; and 3) changes in taxation, chiefly through tax provisions of the Recovery Act and the ACA and legislation adopted during the lame-duck session after the 2012 election, which repealed earlier Republican tax cuts on the top brackets and extended permanently the Recovery Act’s tax cuts for the poor. These policies substantially mitigated the effects of the Great Recession on poverty and inequality. Once the healthcare and tax reforms were carried out in 2013 and 2014, they significantly reduced inequality from the level it had reached before Obama became president. But these achievements might as well have been declared state secrets. Many of them involved policies that were low in visibility and high in complexity and therefore inherently difficult for ordinary citizens to understand even when they were beneficiaries.
The Great Recession, the Recovery Act, and Inequality
Any assessment of Obama’s record on inequality has to take into account the conditions under which he became president. During 2008, unemployment had risen from 5 percent to nearly 8 percent (it would eventually peak at 10 percent). The collapse of the housing market had set off a financial panic in the fall of 2008, imperiling major financial institutions and raising the specter of a depression on the scale of the 1930s. As of January 2009, the economy was in free fall: nearly 750,000 jobs were being lost each month, and real GDP was dropping at an annual rate of about 6 percent.8
A declining economy typically has disparate implications for people depending on their socioeconomic position and how much of a cushion they have against adversity. Recessions increase inequality in market incomes chiefly because of higher unemployment rates and the increased duration of unemployment. So, at the inception of Obama’s presidency, inequality was set to increase substantially from its already high levels. Instead, federal policies cut short the recession and limited the impact on both inequality and poverty. The federal government’s response to the recession had three different aspects. The first consisted of standing countercyclical policies—automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and food stamps. The second aspect comprised measures taken to stabilize financial markets, beginning under George W. Bush. In September 2008, the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board had rescued major banks and other financial institutions, and in October Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized up to $700 billion to buy distressed assets or equity in financial institutions. By the end of 2008, the Federal Reserve had reduced interest rates to zero, and it continued to support the economy through quantitative easing under Obama. The continuity of these financial-market policies from the Bush to Obama administrations highlights the short-lived bipartisan support those policies enjoyed at the height of the financial crisis. Obama did, however, use the TARP funds in one way that many Republicans opposed—to bail out the auto industry, an unambiguous success. And in 2010, Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed by Congress almost entirely on party lines. Fiscal stimulus, the third aspect of the federal response to the Great Recession, was chiefly the work of Obama and the Democrats, except for a tax cut adopted under Bush in early 2008. Obama’s stimulus program, enacted less

than a month after he took office, served in part as a vehicle for his larger agenda. As its full name indicated, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included provisions for long-term investments in public infrastructure and technological innovation. Indeed, with its provisions for the financing of green technology and a new program in the Energy Department to support breakthrough discoveries, it would turn out to be the only major piece of legislation that Obama was able to get through Congress to address climate change (all his other measures would be through executive action). The Recovery Act also financed improvements in roads, bridges, water and sewage systems, and other aspects of public infrastructure, emphasizing “shovel-ready” projects to create jobs and get money into circulation as quickly as possible. But, partly because of the difficulty in using public investment to boost short-term demand and target support to those hit hardest by the recession, most of the Recovery Act’s more than $800 billion in funds went to three other purposes: tax cuts, expanded benefits for the unemployed and the poor, and fiscal relief to the states. The first two of these were unambiguously aimed at mitigating inequality and poverty as well as stimulating the economy. The legislation created or enlarged three tax credits: a new Making Work Pay tax credit, which went to low- and middle-income people, and increases in the earned income tax credit and child tax credit, which went to those with low incomes. The expanded government benefits in the Recovery Act were also structured to favor people in greatest distress. The legislation increased the duration and generosity of unemployment benefits and, in an unprecedented step, paid for a substantial portion of health insurance for the unemployed. It also temporarily expanded food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP]), welfare payments (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), and assistance for housing (Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program). SNAP assumed particular importance: one in four children and one in eight adults were receiving food stamps by 2010, as the program functioned, in effect, as a minimum basic income.

The final part of the Recovery Act—fiscal relief to the states—was more uncertain in its distributive implications. The rationale for federal aid to the states was to reduce cutbacks in public services and layoffs of teachers and other public employees as states saw their revenues fall. But the federal money was fungible. Even when the federal aid was tied to a program like Medicaid, states might use the funds to reduce their own spending in that area. So there was no guarantee that federal aid would end up as stimulus, much less as progressive stimulus.
Altogether—taking into account later extensions of the Recovery Act’s temporary tax cuts and spending measures—the total discretionary stimulus from 2009 to 2012 amounted to $1.2 trillion and averaged about 2 percent of GDP.
Hemmed in by the failure to win credit for the Recovery Act, Obama was unable to build on it. Healthcare reform would have that same problem.

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Question 23

Healthcare Reform as Redistributive Policy

— Passed in March 2010, the law expanded Medicaid to serve more of the poor and near-poor (up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level), and it enabled others to obtain private insurance through a new structure of rules and subsidies in the individual insurance market.

Tax Reform in the Obama Presidency
The tax cuts at the beginning of Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies were skewed toward the upper brackets, whereas Obama’s tax cuts were targeted toward low- and middle-income people.
Legislation in 2012 repealed the Bush tax cuts for high-income individuals and families, pushing the top rate back up to 39.6 percent. It also increased taxes on capital income and made a variety of other changes, including reinstatement of the estate tax, that fell primarily on the rich.
The Credit Conundrum
The Recovery Act, healthcare reform, and tax changes of the Obama presidency all followed the same pattern. The policies were progressive in their inspiration and impact, but they were nonetheless disappointing to progressives, who wanted stronger measures. They were also little appreciated or understood by the public at large, which saw them largely through partisan lenses. Republicans, of course, lambasted the policies, and conservative media portrayed them as unmitigated failures. To be sure, the economic recovery and healthcare reforms did help Obama win reelection in 2012, though at that time even opinion leaders who supported Obama did not believe that he had been able to do much about the growth in economic inequality.

Answer 23

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Question 24

6 Obama’s court
Obama’s law school years coincided with a burgeoning conservative attack on both liberal constitutional doctrines and liberal approaches to constitutional interpretation more generally.
even before the Court lost its most powerful conservative with Antonin Scalia’s death a year before Obama left the presidency, the predicted constitutional realignment had not come to pass. In the battle between a liberal president and a conservative-majority Court, Obama prevailed when it came to blockbuster cases on new issues, like the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, as well as the defense of longstanding doctrines like affirmative action and abortion. Despite the conservatism of the Court’s majority, it has been Obama’s Court, which is to say a twenty-first-century Court that continues to reflect—even if imperfectly—the central preoccupations of the second half of the twentieth century.
Trump quickly made his first appointment to the Supreme Court in 2017—an appointment that Democrats claimed was stolen from Obama by the Republicans’ refusal to consider his nominee. And while Trump’s appointment of federal appellate judge Neil Gorsuch was relatively conventional, Trump’s ascendancy and governing style has been anything but.
At the end of his tenure, Obama’s Court that looked as though it had a solid liberal majority returns to the cusp of conservative control.
The Mid-Century Settlement
The constitutional doctrine the Supreme Court elaborated in the middle of the twentieth century had two essential features: the broad legitimacy of the federal administrative state, especially in the realm of economic regulation, and the judicial protection of civil rights and civil liberties.
The legitimacy of the administrative state had its origins in the New Deal era of the 1930s.
decade the Court had placed its imprimatur on a vastly expanded federal administrative apparatus. For the following fifty years, the Court allowed the political branches virtually free rein to regulate the economic and social spheres.
As it evolved, the mid-century settlement became as much about carving out a space for judicial protection of minorities and fundamental rights as it was about protecting the administrative state from the judiciary.
The first African American president of the United States was possible because of a civil rights movement that had received the Court’s blessing in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a movement that forced the adoption of the civil rights acts of the 1960s and fundamentally changed the American electoral calculus.
The Warren Court became synonymous with a judicial expansion of a a kind of liberal constitutional rights, from racial equality to privacy, to freedom of speech and religion.
The constitutional developments that characterized the 1930s and the 1960s estabished the enormous power of the federal government and the judicial protection of individual and minority rights. But before the justices began to put the finishing touches to the Mid-settlement Republicans began proliferating.
years, Nixon appointed four new members of the Court: Chief Justice Warren Burger and Associate Justices Lewis F. Powell, Harry A. Blackmun, and William H. Rehnquist. Though the Burger Court was less liberal than its predecessor, it nonetheless continued expanding individual rights, most notably where women’s rights were concerned. In 1986, the Burger Court gave way to the identifiably more conservative Rehnquist Court.
Even after Bill Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer to the Court in the 1990s, that conservative dominance continued with seven Republican-appointed justices. The Rehnquist Court was the most stable in 150 years.
The conservatives who increasingly populated the Court toward the end of the century did not accept the evolved equilibrium of a vast administrative state combined with judicial protection of liberal rights. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, appointed in 1986 and 1991 by Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush respectively, were unafraid of enforcing their version of the Constitution whether or not it challenged established political settlements. In fact, they were part of a more fundamental challenge to the method of constitutional interpretation itself. Articulated most powerfully on the Court by the charismatic Justice Scalia, this conservative challenge strategically embraced an approach to the Constitution that emphasized the text of the document and its original understanding. The goal was to limit judicial discretion to protect liberal causes and produce more conservative constitutional outcomes.
despite several decades of a mjority of republican appointments, the court has not delivered as conservatives had expected by 2000. Too many were less than reliable as John Paul Stevens (Nixon, 1975), Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan, 1981), Anthony M. Kennedy (Reagan, 1988), and David H. Souter (George H. W. Bush, 1990)
Stevens and Souter came to be closely aligned with the Court’s left flank.
It was against this backdrop that, in 2005, George W. Bush appointed John G. Roberts to replace Rehnquist as chief justice and Samuel Alito to replace O’Connor. With Alito and Roberts at the Court, conservatives saw a better chance to remake the Constitution.
Reestablishing the “Constitution-in-Exile” would undermine the legitimacy of the regulatory state that had been insulated from constitutional challenge since the New Deal.6 Conservative justices were equally committed to rolling back the protection of individual rights in areas like affirmative action and abortion, and stopping the evolving protection of sexual orientation in its tracks.
This more reliable 5–4 Court seemed poised to deliver on promises not kept—a wholesale remaking of the mid-century constitutional settlement seemed achievable.

Answer 24

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Question 25

Obamacare and the Persistence of the Administrative State
The opportunity came with the constitutional challenge to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare,” as it was quickly dubbed), the signal achievement of his domestic policy and the most significant expansion of the regulatory state in a generation.
Though the Court had imposed almost no limits on Congress’s power to regulate in an area of nationwide concern for the fifty years following the New Deal, the Rehnquist Court had flirted with reimposing such limits.
Reviled by the entirety of the Republican Party, especially its Tea Party wing, and offensive to the very notion of a federal government with limited powers, the ACA precipitated a severe political backlash as soon as it was signed into law on March 23, 2010. The following fall, Republicans regained control of the House; in 2014, they gained a majority in the Senate. Health care was both the beginning and end of Obama’s grand domestic policy successes.
A unique opportunity to strike down a comprehensive social welfare statute on the order of Social Security or Medicaid.
the Court upheld the part of the statute most offensive to those hoping for a return of the Constitution-in-Exile. This was the individual mandate—the requirement that all citizens buy health insurance or face a financial penalty.
Roberts nonetheless saved the mandate by treating the penalty as a tax and therefore as a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing powers. Congress could not order people to buy health insurance, but it could tax people for not having it.
Conservative commentators savagely attacked the chief justice they had held up as their champion just a few years before.12 Roberts might have been surprised by the vitriol. After all, he had been careful to salvage the jurisprudentially important issue—the Commerce Clause—despite validating the law. He also significantly expanded the Court’s conditional spending clause doctrine by holding that states could opt out of the federal government’s proposed Medicaid expansion without losing preexisting federal Medicaid funding. Many conservative states opted to do just that. The political implications of the case were clearly more salient to the public, and perhaps to the conservatives on the Court, than the constitutional ones. Roberts’s vote saved Obama’s leading domestic initiative, at least for the remainder of Obama’s presidency. But the decision also lent energy to the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. A Republican Congress voted repeatedly to dismantle Obamacare.13 And in 2016, Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, would ride the wave of popular discontent all the way to the White House by promising repeal.

Indeed, for many commentators, the fact that five justices agreed that the ACA violated the Commerce Clause signaled a dangerously out-of-touch and radical Court. It portended the kind of judicial activism last seen when the Court regularly struck down Progressive and New Deal era social welfare legislation in the decades before the New Deal.
The Rights Revolution Extended and Defended
If the ACA represented the counter-revolution that failed to undermine the administrative state, same-sex marriage tells an even more dramatic story in the realm of individual rights. The drama of this latter story inheres in both the fact that the Roberts Court extended individual rights to people and areas beyond the Warren and Burger Courts and the rapidity with which it did so.

Answer 25

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Question 26

Color-Blindness and Race Consciousness in the Twenty-First Century
  That societal change obviates the need for racial remedies was the theme of the Roberts Court’s most aggressive attack on race-based government action—the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder.34 Shelby County struck down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA).
The Voting Rights Act is a central component of the equal rights edifice that President Lyndon Johnson, at the urging of Martin Luther King Jr., helped to force through a somewhat recalcitrant Congress.
   In the age of Obama, the Roberts Court brought down an important component of that edifice at least partly because of the success of the first black president.
   Though the four liberal dissenting justices predicted that Shelby County would lead to more of the same, Roberts asserted that there had to come a time when the country moved on from its race problem. In Justice Scalia’s words, the Voting Rights Act constituted a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” and a “racial preferment”36 that was no longer warranted.
Even more significantly, in the 2016 case of Fisher v. University of Texas,41 Justice Kennedy, for the first time, joined an opinion upholding an affirmative action plan in higher education. Liberals had worried since the rise of the Rehnquist Court that affirmative action would fall, and the Roberts Court seemed surely poised to make that a reality. But even as the Court and some of the public remained hostile, the principle of “diversity” continued to gain traction in the larger society, with military and business leaders bolstering the universities’ claims that race consciousness was necessary for the development of national leadership and international competitiveness in every sector. Unlike Shelby County, where racial and partisan politics converged to undermine a key mid-century protection, Fisher proved a notable victory for progressives.
Conservative Victories and the New Rights Bearers 
Even as affirmative action survived, Shelby County was hardly alone in moving constitutional doctrine in a more conservative direction. Though the Court largely failed to undermine prior liberal bedrock, it did succeed in establishing some new conservative principles within constitutional law. Consider the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Court, by a bare majority, struck down a Washington, D.C., gun regulation as a violation of the Second Amendment.42 Enshrining the Second Amendment as an individual rights provision—against arguments that it only applied to gun possession in the context of militias—was a significant step. Heller buttressed the rights claims of a core constituency of the Republican Party, gave constitutional legitimacy to the National Rifle Association—one of the most powerful interest groups in the nation—and offered conservatives a rights jurisprudence that they could embrace. That jurisprudence bolstered the politics that had partially created it. Despite the mass shooting of children in a Sandy Hook, Connecticut, elementary school, preceded and followed by numerous other mass shootings throughout the country, the gun rights answer was always more guns, not fewer. When Obama talked about passing more stringent gun laws, gun sales soared. Obama reluctantly spent a great deal of political capital attempting to rein in the peculiar American penchant for violence—to no avail. The political support for gun rights now had constitutional support as well.
The most visible import of Citizens United, however, was in its underlying principle that money equals speech at a moment when the richest 0.1 percent of Americans owned more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Citizens United  reinforced an already existing perception that the political class was owned by the capitalist one—that concentrated wealth skewed policymaking. That Citizens United also asserted that corporations enjoy speech rights did not help matters. In the shadow of the Great Recession of 2008, when banks were bailed out and their managers were not held to account for the foolish (and sometimes criminal) things they did, treating corporations as persons with rights seemed to add insult to injury. The populist movements that produced a right-wing Donald Trump and a left-wing Bernie Sanders reflected a deeply held belief that the system was rigged.
Pointing to Citizens United, Shelby County, Heller, and the Chamber of Commerce victories, commentators have asserted that the Roberts Court has been the most conservative in the Supreme Court’s modern history. It is undeniable that during Obama’s two terms, the Court’s conservative wing was ascendant in many important areas and that the conservative justices made progress toward their counterrevolutionary agenda. Even so, many expected the Court to devastate the mid-century settlement. It did not. The Court ruled for progressives in a number of areas: affirmative action remained possible in higher education; the right to abortion was reaffirmed as one that states cannot unduly burden; and gay men and lesbians gained marriage rights. The outlines of a new conservatism are identifiable, but the real story is how much of the liberal standards of the mid-twentieth century stood fast against what had at the start seemed inevitable destruction.
The Power and Politics of Appointments 
A year before Obama was scheduled to leave office, the sudden death of seventy-nine-year-old Antonin Scalia gave him the opportunity to further entrench the mid-century settlement with his own appointment to the Court. Obama had already placed two justices there: Sonia Sotomayor replaced David Souter and Elena Kagan replaced John Paul Stevens. Sotomayor and Kagan joined Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the eighty-three-year-old Clinton appointee, bringing the total number of women on the Court to an historic high of three—all of them liberal.
Though he got off to a slow start, Obama’s appointments in the lower courts were more transformative. His initial attempts to depoliticize the judicial nomination and appointment process failed. Just as obstruction and deadlock characterized Obama’s relations with Congress for the last four years of his presidency, so too they characterized his judicial nominations.

Scalia’s death might have given Obama an opportunity to further entrench the mid-century settlement with a fifth liberal vote at the Court. Obama chose Merrick Garland, a well-respected, moderate, sixty-three-year-old judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Garland was an uncontroversial pick in any presidential administration and a choice that would normally kick up little fuss even amid a polarized electorate.
However, the Republican-controlled Congress refused to consider the nomination, betting that a future Republican administration would give them a more congenial choice. Senators argued that it was inappropriate for the sitting president to make an appointment with a presidential election looming—even if that election was almost ten months away. The refusal even to consider Garland was unprecedented and a significant breach of constitutional norms. That delay ultimately proved consequential. Elections matter. With the presidential victory of Republican Donald Trump, and the subsequent nomination of conservative judge Neil Gorsuch, many on the left protested that the Republicans had robbed Obama, and the Democrats, of their rightful Supreme Court seat. Continuing to play hardball, the Senate dispensed with the filibuster to confirm Gorsuch, and he was seated quickly as the newest junior justice Gorsuch’s confirmation put Justice Kennedy back in the middle of the Court, with the balance of power between liberals and conservatives at 4–4–1.
As Obama left the White House, the question was how much the Obama Court would become the Trump Court, with two more specific questions looming: Would more liberal or moderate justices leave the bench, giving Trump further opportunities to truly shift the political balance? And would the mid-century constitutional settlement persist despite the ever-increasing conservatism of the Court? The most significant events in the life of the twenty-first-century Supreme Court would be dictated by the rightward lurch of American politics.
Obama’s judicial legacy—which had seemed so promising just a year earlier—would now be written by his successors’ appointments.

Answer 26

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Question 27

Civic Ideals, Race, and Nation in the Age of Obama
the Democratic Party selected Obama to make a prime-time speech to the country at its 2004 National Convention in Boston to call Democrats back to a faith that major segments of the party had found difficult to embrace in the wake of the disappointments of the 1960s and 1970s. “In no other country on Earth,” Obama declared in his national debut, was his own “story even possible.” “Tonight,” he added, “we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation,” a greatness rooted in the country’s original declaration that “ ‘all men are created equal … [and] endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’ ”3
Jeremiah Wright’s Christianity and politics had been fired in the black nationalist crucible of the 1960s and 1970s.4 Wright thundered forth in his weekly sermons from his pulpit at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ like an Old Testament truth-teller, his words, like those of the prophet Isaiah, uncompromising and frequently condemnatory.5 In one sermon, given in 2003, Wright cataloged the offenses that the government had committed against African Americans: it “put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastion of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.” Shifting from the past to the present, Wright condemned America in terms that made his words indistinguishable from Malcolm X’s sternest. “The government gives them drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. Not God Bless America. God Damn America.”
Another was Obama’s ability to show that his own biracialism gave him a unique ability to comprehend the aspirations and frustrations of both black and white America and to find a way to bring the two together. “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,”
“am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.”

“That anger is not always productive,” but it is “real; it is powerful” and cannot be wished away. But Obama asserted, neither could the anger and resentment of whites. This was the most startling move that Obama made in this speech, emboldened to do so by his belief that his biracialism had given him as much insight into—and authority to speak about—whites as blacks. “A similar anger exists within segments of the white community” who do not feel “privileged by their race.” They, too, have had to scratch for everything. They, too, “are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away.”
As with black anger, white resentment could focus on the wrong targets. “And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns … widens the racial divide,” and blocks “the path toward understanding.”
“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons,” Obama suggested, “is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country … is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what wave seen—is that America can change. That is [the] true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”
At its core, racial nationalism is the belief that America is a land meant for white people, or Europeans, and their descendants.
racial nationalism lost considerable legitimacy as the civil rights revolution advanced.
explicit talk of racial superiority and inferiority was banished from polite public conversation and from mainstream politics.
White supremacist hate groups, such as David Duke’s Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood, did make their racial thinking—and racial nationalism—plain.
Only certain races and ethnicities could be assimilated to the American culture of liberty and freedom. “Race matters. Ethnicity matters. History matters. Nationality matters,” Buchanan declared in staccato bursts. “Multiculturalist ideology be damned, this is what history teaches.”27
The key charge against Obama—that as a black man, he had no right to occupy the White House, and no right to lead America—could never be uttered directly. After the civil rights revolution, such statements could no longer be made in public. Hence ostensibly race-neutral grounds had to be found for challenging Obama’s legitimacy to occupy the Oval Office. None proved more powerful than the charge that Obama had not been born in the United States.
That charge finally faded in 2012, only to be replaced by another equally damaging accusation: that Obama was a secret practitioner of the Muslim faith.
Occasionally the true nature of the animus against Obama—that, as a black man, he had no right to occupy the White House—came into clear view. Such was the case with sentiments expressed at the Tea Party’s March on Washington on September 12, 2009.
Twenty-first-century Tea Partiers opposed with fury two signature legislative initiatives of the Obama administratio the near trillion-dollar stimulus package of 2009 meant to revive the economy in the aftermath of the 2008 crash and the even more ambitious Affordable Care Act (ACA) that aimed to provide insurance to millions of Americans who could not afford health care.
They demanded that the government “keep its hands off their Medicare,” as though Medicare were something other than a government-sponsored and -funded program.
The Tea Party’s September 2009 March on Washington shocked everyone with its size: as many as 100,000 protesters came to Washington to take their stand.
To Tea Partiers, Obama’s insistence that he had not been born abroad only confirmed that he was a deceiver, a man never to be trusted.

Though the Tea Party failed to dislodge Obama from the presidency in 2012, it did strip him of his majorities first in the House (2010) and then in the Senate (2014). Its supporters paralyzed the federal government, ensuring that Obama and the Democrats would have no major legislative accomplishments during his final six years in office. The country suffered from this paralysis, its effects most evident in Congress’s inaction on a number of critical fronts: millions of undocumented immigrants living in the shadows; the poor condition of large portions of the country’s transportation infrastructure; an epidemic of gun ownership and killing; and slow progress on climate control. Whatever Obama accomplished, he did more and more by executive order, a limited decree-issuing power given to presidents to advance laws passed by Congress that required some modification—usually in the form of refining mechanisms of implementation and enforcement—in order to accomplish the original legislative aim. The intensity and constancy of conservative attacks across the years of his presidency charred Obama, making him more reluctant than he had been to share himself and his dreams with the American people. The “keep hope alive” crusader of the 2008 campaign, the one so ready to use personal details of his family’s life and journey as evidence that the American dream still lived, disappeared somewhere in the first term and, except for brief flashes, never really returned. Obama dared not show any anger, lest he be categorized and demeaned as an “angry black man,” in the manner of Jesse Jackson. Plain speaking on race questions was also, he learned, a perilous act. When Obama offered sympathy for the family of Trayvon Martin, an innocent black teenager killed by white vigilante George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012, the president drew an outraged response from white conservatives who accused him of taking the side of blacks and of attempting to exert undue influence on the legal process. Obama’s offensive words had been anodyne: “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.” Obama’s cautiousness, however, won him little credit from his critics, who now began complaining that he was remote, hard to read, and inaccessible. Obama’s reticence confirmed the suspicions of many whites that he was indeed an alien presence in the White House.
Race also required that Obama constrain himself in terms of domestic policy. He rarely proposed or endorsed legislation meant to address problems particular to the black community and requiring a remedy that could be interpreted as race specific.
Obama’s achievement in health care, if it survives the current Republican presidency and Congress, will one day come to be seen as rivaling FDR’s achievement with Social Security. But the Obama administration’s record, overall, cannot match what the Roosevelt administration accomplished across its four terms. That Obama never found an evocative label, such as the “New Deal,” to encompass his reform ambitions further underscores the fragmentary nature of his accomplishments. The achievement gap between the two administrations, however, should not be attributed solely, or even primarily, to Obama’s limitations as a leader. Obama had to operate in political circumstances that were far more difficult than what Roosevelt had had to manage. Roosevelt never had to contend with charges that he was racially unfit for the White House; to the contrary, he was an American blueblood.
Obama had to contend every day with racially inflected populist fury on the right. That right undercut Obama’s support in Congress every bit as quickly and effectively as the left insurgency of the 1930s had given the Roosevelt coalition extraordinary legislative influence. The weakness of the left in the early twenty-first century constrained the Obama administration in profound ways.46 Voices on the left did emerge near the end of Obama’s first term, when young people, gathering under the banner “We are the 99%,” occupied parks and squares in New York and other cities to protest the concentration of wealth and power in the “1%.” Taking the name “Occupy Wall Street,” after the site of the first protest in September 2011, these protesters eventually coalesced into significant left movements, such as Black Lives Matter and socialist Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for the presidency. But these movements acquired heft only in late 2014 and 2015, too late in Obama’s presidency to be useful to him.47 Like all presidents in their last two years in office, Obama had become a lame duck, with little chance of getting significant legislation through Congress. Obama did turn toward executive orders and foreign policy in his last two years—arenas in which he could pursue policy goals without having to worry much about congressional support. In foreign affairs, he made the United States a signatory to the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal. In the United States he signed executive orders to allow four million undocumented immigrants to remain legally in the United States, to give America a more robust clean power energy regime, and to ensure citizens’ privacy. But because none of these foreign or domestic acts were secured through congressional legislation or treaties, each can be reversed by the stroke of a subsequent president’s pen.48 Hillary Clinton, had she been elected, would no doubt have preserved Obama’s executive orders and foreign policy initiatives. Donald Trump, by contrast, wants to erase Obama’s legacy. Obama’s accomplishments look more substantial once we grasp the hostile political environment in which he had to operate. He superintended an economic recovery much more robust than what Europe achieved during those years. He brought a half-century campaign for national health insurance to a successful conclusion. The ranks of the African American middle class expanded substantially under him. His vision of civic nationalism inspired tens of millions of young nonwhites to believe that they could find opportunity and liberty, and democracy, in America.
That Obama exited the presidency without blemish in his personal life is itself an impressive accomplishment. Obama’s knowledge of his moral rectitude will likely give him little comfort, however, as he contemplates what he was never given a chance to do: transcend racial division, create a path toward citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, rebuild the country’s infrastructure, and give the country a chance to recover from its addiction to guns and violence. And then there are the matters that, as a black man, he could not, and would not, touch at all: most important, the tangle of poverty, police violence, and prison that has shaped the lives of too many of the country’s black poor. America elected its first black president in the early twenty-first century and then told him that he, as a black man, should not be allowed to govern the white nation over which he presided. The Obama campaign for the presidency reinvigorated America’s civic nationalist tradition like no other event of the last fifty years. And yet it also stirred the racial nationalist anxieties of millions of white Americans who simply could not become comfortable with the idea that a black man was commander-in-chief. Donald Trump’s victory in November 2016 owed a great deal to his ability to become the instrument through which white Americans expressed their unease about America’s accelerating transformation into a society no longer recognizable as white and European.
In 2015 he calculated correctly that vicious rhetorical attacks on Mexicans and Muslims would propel him to the forefront of those vying for the 2016 Republican nomination.

Answer 27

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Question 28

Counterterrorism policy
President Obama significantly expanded the targeted killing program, increasing both the number of strikes and their frequency outside of the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the first year of Obama’s presidency, the CIA conducted fifty-two drone strikes in Pakistan, compared to forty-eight during the entire Bush administration. That number escalated to 122 in 2010, before declining to just a handful by 2016. As the Pakistan drone strikes declined, the Obama administration began ramping up its assassination program in Yemen, peaking at forty-seven hits in 2012. Obama’s CIA had also launched nineteen drone attacks against terrorists in Somalia by September 2016 and one in Libya.
Feinstein’s support for drone strikes reflected the opinions of most Americans. Obama’s targeted killing program remained his most popular policy.
pollsters did not ask the respondents why they approved of the strikes, leaving it unclear whether the policy resonated with voters because they believed it helped avoid lengthy wars and avert future attacks, or because they got visceral satisfaction from the revenge murders of accused terrorists.
Though the drone strikes were initially shrouded in secrecy, the American public did learn many specifics about the program thanks to aggressive reporting by national security reporters at elite newspapers and specialized blogs.
The media revelations about the targeted killings forced the administration to disclose more details about them. To demonstrate a commitment to transparency, the president in 2016 released statistics on drone and cruise missile strikes outside of official war zones.
Bush’s and Obama’s lawyers “had drawn up semantic arguments carefully delineating the difference between a targeted killing and an assassination,” wrote Elliot Ackerman, a former CIA paramilitary officer.
It was special forces commandos, not drones, who carried out the most famous assassination of Obama’s presidency.
Moreover, an air strike would kill many civilians and might miss the main target. Instead, Obama ordered Navy Seals to raid the compound in the middle of the night and shoot the 9/11 mastermind at close range.
The special forces troops, who accomplished their mission without losing any American lives, were technically under the command of the CIA for the raid.
The success of the bin Laden raid boosted the president’s popularity and even briefly earned praise for the president from Republicans.
Liberty and Security
While Obama’s assassination policy enjoyed broad support, his surveillance program proved more controversial.
A year and a half later, in June 2015, the USA Freedom Act extended the relevant section of the Patriot Act and adopted some reforms and controls on bulk data collection. Under the new act, the NSA could look through the telecommunications companies’ metadata, but only after it identified specific phone numbers and individuals and obtained a court order.
The USA Freedom Act compromise was a typical solution for the Obama administration: there were more safeguards for civil liberties, but the basic structure of the counterterrorism program remained unchanged.
The War on Leakers
Obama initially pledged that his administration would encourage, rather than punish, government whistleblowers who revealed abuses and incompetence within their agencies.
The Espionage Act had been passed in 1917 with the goal of stopping the theft of government secrets and their transmittal to foreign powers.

Answer 28

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Question 29

Liberal Internationalism, Law, and the First African American President
The election of the nation’s first African American president was possible, in part, because of a failed war in Iraq. Barack Obama promised change in the way the country conducted itself at home and abroad. Speaking to a crowd of 200,000 enthusiastic German citizens in Berlin, he announced that his presidency would “build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”
In his Nobel Peace Prize address and other speeches, Obama echoed the famous midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who saw tragic “irony” in American efforts to marry power with righteousness, which often produced neither. Niebuhr, like Obama, counseled for more modesty, more attention to trade-offs, and more willingness to accept “lesser evils,” rather than the dangerous illusions of perfection. The United States was exceptional, Niebuhr and Obama believed, but not above history or human folly.
Obama called for a broader and more creative foreign policy, less imprisoned by the atavistic reliance on overwhelming American military power, which had long proven less effective than it first appeared.
He also doubted the effectiveness of major military campaigns, explaining in part his hesitance and ultimate passivity in the face of genocide in Syria. Obama felt legally and practically constrained against undertaking extensive military action to stop the civil war in Syria, or at least balance the increasing advantage accruing to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s Russian- and Iranian-supported forces. He painfully watched events in Syria, spoke forcefully for regime change, but did very little. Despite his obvious reluctance to deploy troops in large numbers, Obama’s emphasis on legality and his desire to use American power more effectively triggered a surprising increase in executive authority over the use of force.
In this sense, the Obama “war doctrine,” as some would call it, vastly increased the direct reach of presidential force at the cost of traditional institutions, especially Congress. When seeking approval for its actions, the administration looked to the courts, often in secret, rather than the public or the legislature.
He consulted closely with leaders of the military and relevant civilian agencies. Nonetheless, Obama could not avoid the consequence of creating permanent and centralized war powers for the president that were less accountable to American democratic institutions than traditional acts of warfare. He affirmed, as no chief executive had before, the right of the president to kill enemies abroad without notice, based solely on the judgment of his closest advisors.
In foreign policy, it is always easier to articulate what you are against, instead of what you are for. The president did not have a clear vision of the world he hoped to create, but he knew which mistaken American actions he wanted to reverse, especially in Iraq.
The president was serious about opening the United States to friendlier relations with the citizens of the Middle East, and he hoped to do this by negotiating mutually beneficial deals with their leaders, and those in other regions. Diplomacy was indeed his alternative to war. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, initially appointed by George W. Bush after serving his father, stayed on to serve Obama as well, and he observed the seriousness of the new president’s efforts: “I found the president quite pragmatic on national security and open to compromise on most issues—or, to put it more crassly, to cutting a deal…. Obama was the most deliberative president I worked for.”
Working closely with Gates and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Obama reached out to China, Russia, and Iran—perhaps the three most important American regional adversaries—seeking to build a working relationship with each. He refrained from the kind of threatening rhetoric that both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush employed at the start of their presidencies. Obama was measured, discreet, and aspirational in his words. He dropped the aggressive Bush administration phrases that fired up Americans but frightened foreigner observers: “Global War on Terror,” “axis of evil,” “radical Islam,” and “American preeminence.” Instead, Obama spoke of cooperation and partnership.
Most of all, Obama avoided simple binaries between friends and enemies, or “us” versus “them.”
Obama wanted to erase the militaristic Cold War mentality that he saw in the Global War on Terror.
The most obvious failure of Obama’s foreign policy was in Russia.
The nuclear arms race has returned, and Obama reluctantly made efforts to modernize the American arsenal in response. In 2015 the United States participated in a Cold War–style military exercise with its NATO allies—the largest since the collapse of the Soviet Union—simulating a war with Russia in Europe. In 2016 a second such exercise took place, with a focus on protecting Poland’s integrity against a feared Russian invasion. These were hardly the antiwar efforts that Obama hoped to lead when he announced an end to permanent war less than eight years earlier. Just the opposite. The rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) followed a similar pattern.
With the withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, a new terrorist organization emerged, led by poorly educated Islamic leaders who were radicalized in American-run prisons. they organized a media-savvy transnational organization that mobilized adherents seeking to overturn Western power and build an alternative state.
Despite continuous urgings, the president did not intervene to stop the horror around ISIS because he did not see an exit strategy. The same was true for events in Russia. Obama and his European allies did not perceive a benefit in provoking war with Vladimir Putin. In both settings the president chose to curtail his hopes for cooperation. He acted to contain but not destroy threatening actors, as he avoided direct American embroilment on the ground.
The tragedy of Obama’s foreign policy
Like Taft and Hoover, Obama accepted the tragedy of a terribly imperfect international system, he sought to improve it slowly through diplomacy and negotiation, and he avoided the whirlwind of full-scale military conflict, if at all possible.
Obama’s hesitance in confronting Putin and ISIS was born of pessimism about not only the practicality of force, but also its broader implications.
The glaring failure of Obama’s foreign policy was that even when he used force, through drone strikes or regime overthrow in Libya, his hesitations and tentativeness limited his ability to affect change on the ground. Adversaries like Putin and Assad discounted his attempts at deterrence. Often correctly, they assumed he would not retaliate effectively against their aggression. Allies (especially in the Middle East, but also in Asia and Europe) had their confidence in American commitments shaken. They were not as certain as they once were under Washington’s security umbrella.
Russian aggression and the continuing genocidal violence in Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East will be as much a part of Obama’s liberal internationalist legacy as his praise-worthy openings to Cuba and Iran. His foreign policy record was hopeful, tragic, and deeply contradictory. The same could be said of Obama’s domestic record, inherited by President Donald Trump and a white nationalist Republican Party in control of Congress after 2016.

Answer 29

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Question 30

The Irony of the First African American President
The irony is that for the first African American president race mattered in his foreign policy, but not as anyone expected. Historians will not remember Obama as a president who democratized international affairs by opening policy to new ethnic groups, or expanding the dialogue about race and foreign affairs. He did some of that, but it was not his consistent priority. He was not a great liberator.
If anything, moral arguments about guns, abortion, immigration, and human rights divided Americans in Obama’s time. Cold Wars were personal wars for Obama that he wanted to extinguish through law, even at the cost of deeply held convictions. President Obama’s sophisticated and sometime contradictory world-view failed to persuade many at home and abroad.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and his aggressive advocacy of militaristic protectionism were stinging rejections of Obama’s liberal internationalism.

Answer 30

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Question 31

Methodologie

All men are created equal? Barack Obama and the American Revolution
There are two constitutional clauses about slavery: the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clausewhich meant that anyone running away from a state with slavery to a state without it had to be sent back.

ParStevenSarson: Professeur des universités- Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3
PubliéparMarion Costele28/03/2019
Barack Obama believes that the American nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (including the Bill of Rights)—have been the driving forces of American history and remain the foundations of American politics today. In this talk we will explore Obama’s analyses of these documents and of their legacies since, in particular in relation to slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights. We will look at the words of Barack Obama, as derived from his writings and speeches, and also at historical sources from the time of the American Revolution, through the Civil War, and to the Civil Rights era.

Introduction
This presentation is about the language Barack Obama uses as well as his interpretation of American history. I will try to show how he uses language to reinforce historical interpretation in a way that is very clever and that you would not get with his successor.What we see through Obama is an interpretation of American history that presents the American Revolution as something that is not finished yet, but has been ongoing since the Revolution itself.
Why is it interesting to look at the American Revolution through Barack Obama’s eyes? One reason is that, listening to his speeches and reading his book when he first campaigned for the presidential election in 2008, and observing how attuned he was to American history, it is quite striking to see how much it informed his politics, his values as well as his policies, his ideologies as well as his ideas, and how much he actually knew about it. Moreover,analysing ourinterpretationof history, and not just the facts, is a good way get into the analysis of history.
Barack Obama takes the American Revolution not just as something that is contained in time; the ideas of the American Revolution have evolved throughout American history, in particular with the abolition of slavery and segregation.The abolition of slavery may therefore be seen as an extension of the American Revolution to the 1860s, and then the abolition of Jim Crow laws a hundred years later as a further extension of the ideas of liberty and equalitythat were there from the founding of the U.S.
One of the things that may be noticed about Barack Obama’s many references about American history ishow often he cites the founding documents of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Constitutiondrafted in 1787, ratified in 1788 and implemented in 1789.
1. Quoting the Declaration of Independence
1.1 Keynote Speech at the DNC, 2004
I have selected a few extracts of his speeches where he refers to the Declaration of Independence: unsurprisingly, Barack Obama mentions the Declaration during big occasions, when he would have the largest audiences.
Barack Obama’s first ever national speech was a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004: he had been noticed and picked out by the John Kerry campaign that year to give this important speech – Bill Clinton had done it before, it is a real breakthrough for any politician trying to make it and maybe one day run for president. This is what Obama said in his first inaugural address:
Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address (prepared remarks)
Source:http://p2004.org/demconv04/obama072704sp.html
He quotes the Declaration word for word, and talks about theGod-given promise that all are equal, all are free, all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness, which is an idea contained in the Declaration.
1.2 Second Inaugural Address, 2013
His second inaugural address also refers to the Declaration and defines it as what makes America exceptional:
What makes us exceptional—what makes us American—is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Second Inaugural Address by President Barack Obama, 2013
Source:https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/21/inaugural-address-president-barack-obama
There is a close identification of the nation with that founding document and the ideas contained within it.
1.3 Farewell Address, 2017
Finally, Obama mentions the Declaration of Independence in his farewell address, in which he had to find abalance between his belief in the historical progress of the values and ideals of the Declaration and the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Does the election of Donald Trump wipe Obama out? Is Obama an exception or is he a mark of progress? The pretty sophisticated way in which Obama talked about that very issue in his farewell address was to reiterate his belief in long-term progress. But more often than not, progress is not linear: sometimes you go backwards. Obama said many times that the road to democracy is long and hard. Sometimes it seems you take two steps forward and then one step back.Obama’s election was an emblem of growing equality, but Trump’s election reminds us that the fight for equality is still ongoing.There are days where you lose the battle, but you must keep on fighting the war.
Obama talked in his farewell address about “…. the conviction that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (“My Farewell Address”, 2017. Source:The White House)
Despite the election of Donald Trump, and everything backwards that it represents, Obama still believed in those principles.
2. Quoting the Constitution
Obama also quotes the Constitution often: he tries to relate the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution as the first moment of progress in American history.His idea is that the Declaration’s values are embedded in the Constitution, which is actually historiographically quite controversial.Historians have this argument about whether they believe, as Obama does, that the values of the Declaration are indeed embedded institutionally in the Constitution orwhether the Constitution, with its enormous power structure, created a government that was designed to suppress the spirit of 1776and the radical ideas that appear in the Declaration. I personally think that it is a bit of both. It is very hard to say becausethe point of the Declaration was to break away from Britain; the point of the Constitution was to create a new government.They therefore have very different purposes: breaking away from a government inherently means being anti-power; creating a new government inherently means talking about power. It is not fair to compare the Declaration and the Constitution in this invidious way, because they have such different purposes.
2.1“A More Perfect Union,” Philadelphia, 2008
Obama therefore sees the Declaration as embedded in the Constitution in many ways, and we can see the relationship between the two in a speech he made in Philadelphia in March 2008. His campaign was going pretty well at that point, and he was ahead of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. However, he got a bit side-tracked because his pastor,Reverend Jeremiah Wright, had made some quitecontroversial comments about 9/11being America’s chickens coming home to roost, and had talked about the inherent racism in American domestic and foreign policy – he had used the term “God dam America”, which is pretty inflammatory language, especially in American cultural context. Obama answered those comments in his speech, and at the same time laid out the groundwork of his beliefs about American history.
‘We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.’
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launchedAmerica’s improbable experiment in democracy.Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had travelled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted throughthe spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”

Answer 31

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Question 32

“A More Perfect Union,” Philadelphia, 2008
Source:https://my.ofa.us/page/content/hisownwords/
The speech exemplifies the linguistic subtleties of Obamaian rhetoric. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union” is rendered in quote marks in all the transcripts. But there’s an elision there: the actual Constitution says “We the people of the United States”. I think this elision is deliberate. But what does it mean? At the end of the 18thcentury, African Americans made up 20% of the US population, but they were mostlyslaves. Theywere considered to be among “the people”, but they were not “of the United States”.This is one of the subtle ways in which Obama signals a slightlymore radical and critical interpretation of American history, without being actually explicit about it. He has two audiences: a black audience that will hear the omission of “of the United States”, and a white audience who might not hear it.
Barack Obama goes on to say: “Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had travelled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of Independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.”
In saying that the Founders at that Convention “made real the Declaration of Independence in a Constitution”, Obama appears to stating a historical fact but is in fact advancing a historical interpretation.While Obama claims here that the ideas of equality and liberty embedded in the Declaration were translated into the Constitution. Many historians, on the other hand, argue that the Constitution was intended to roll back advances toward equality and liberty that many Founders believed had gone too far since and partly because of the Declaration.
In other words, Obama credits the Constitution with the creation of a “democracy” that according to some historians it was meant to inhibit. Indeed Obama furthermore refers to “America’s improbable experiment in democracy”. At the time, however, the term “democracy” usually meant thedirect rule of the people, something that even radicals like Thomas Jefferson equated with mob rule and descent into anarchy. What the Founders favoured in fact was what they called “republicanism,” a term that then implied therepresentation of the people in government, a representation appropriately checked and balanced by law and therefore a very different thing from democracy’s direct rule and absolute power. It was only in the middle of the 1790s that Americans began using the term “democracy” in the same looser way we do—to imply the representation rather than the direct rule of the people.
Obama exaggerates here the extent of democracy as an aim of the American Revolution. He then he does it again in a sort of social-democratic way: “Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots”. Mentioning manual workers and intellectuals in the same sentence underscores the fact that,according to Obama’s views on democracy, anyone can become a statesman.This is not a European idea, this is a very American ideal. It is all embedded in this speech, in Obama’s rapid run through of the American Revolution.
This brings to mindJohn Dickinson, who was one of the pamphleteer against Britain and is now known as the penman of the American Revolution. He wrote a pamphlet calledLetters from an American Farmer. He pretended to be a farmer – he was actually a big planter with lots of slaves, a lawyer and a politician – and he is one of these early Americans who pretended to be from a log cabin, but really was not.
Obama describes these revolutionaries, these farmers, scholars, statesmen and patriots as having travelled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution and then they made real their Declaration of Independence. But it actually was the pilgrims and the Puritans in 1620-1630 who travelled across an ocean to escape tyranny. They did not live long enough to declare their independence. Obama knows the difference in time, the century and a half or more between these events.This is another elisional collapse of time: he is trying to send the American Revolution back in time, to the founding of the colonies,to show that America has always been about freedom, from the very founding of this land as an American land (as opposed to Native American land). There might not have been liberty and equality at that time, but there was at least a pursuit of happiness by these people.
In this speech, they are also conflated with the revolutionaries themselves, which magnifies the achievements of both – the founding of America and the founding of the United States. Obama knows the difference: he says this deliberately, as his speeches are carefully constructed.
There is one more elision in “the spring of 1787”. The Constitutional Convention that he is referring to first met on May 20th, and sat until September 17th: that’s the summer, not the spring. Barack Obama has taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for twelve years. He wassumma cum laudeat Harvard law school. 32 So why say spring? Spring is about newness, new light, new life. He has done a similar thing with the American Revolution: he talked about British colonial rule as a kind of winter, evoking blood on the snow. He places the birth of the United States is the spring: although it is not technically true, there is a metaphorical truth in the way he presents it. It is also about creating an image in the memory of Americans and conveying a certain conception of American history.
Nevertheless, he knew about inequalities in early America and mentions them: one of the purposes of that 2008 speech was to create a balance between the anger that Reverend Jeramiah Wright expressed and the optimism about America and its history that Obama himself represents.He says:
“The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.”
Obama is making an assumption about the Founders themselves: he believes they thought they coul not fix slavery at that time, and therefore compromised and set the conditions for the next generation to end the slave trade. It actually took three or four more generations to end slave trade, but the founders had nevertheless projected the solution in the future.
The sentence “[…] the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time” shows that Obama is projecting the American Revolution from its own time into the future and that it was, he implies, the intention of the Revolution: they were not going to create a perfect society straight away, but they would state values by which it would be created in the future.
What Obama has argued so far is that the Founders themselves projected American values of equality and liberty into the future, arguing that they will happen one day: it is one thing to do that from the past, but it is a different thing to look at that from the point of view of the future.
2.2“For We Were Born of Change,” Selma, Alabama, 2015
There are places where Obama does that, when he talks, not about what the Founders intended, but about looking back at what was reaped from their words. He gave a speech in 2015 in Selma, Alabama to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights March. He says:
What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?
“For We Were Born of Change,” Selma, Alabama, 2015
Source:http://time.com/3736357/barack-obama-selma-speech-transcript/
Again, there is that difference between ideals and reality; the ideals give a sense that we can aim for that new reality.Obama tries to bring African American history in mainstream American history, and that is the most radical form of historical interpretation that he does. Even today, when American history is presented, there is American history and then there is this “unfortunate” African American history: those are two parallel lines. Obama makes them part of the same story:Selma is not an outlier, it is central in American history.The disenfranchisement and the Civil Rights Movement are central parts of the country’s history, not some sidebar in a textbook.
That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents:
‘We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.’
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
“For We Were Born of Change,” Selma, Alabama, 2015
Source:http://time.com/3736357/barack-obama-selma-speech-transcript/
We saw the elision of “of the United States” in the 2008 speech in Philadelphia: African Americans were slaves, so they could not be of the United States, even though they were in “the people”. Here, the wording is slightly different. Constitutionally, America was an equal country, but in reality, it was not, because of the Jim Crow laws.Plessy v. Ferguson, argued in the Supreme Court in 1896, decided that you could have separate facilities; separate, but equal. So segregation did not violate the 14thamendment – but it was obviously a legal lie.Williams v. Mississippiin 1898 decided that the requirements for voter registration were not based on race; but of course, those requirements disqualified black people from voting.
Each of these three ellipses seems to a constitutional law that was not implemented before the Civil Rights Movement. They represented empty promises, hence this silence that leaves out the words “of the United States”.
Obama’s speech announcing his run for the presidency gives us a clue as to why he sees power in words. He said: “Lincoln believed in the power of words”. Here, in his 2015 speech, Barack Obama finds that power:
These are not just words [about the quotes from Declaration and the Constitution]. They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny. For founders like Franklin and Jefferson, for leaders like Lincoln and FDR, the success of our experiment in self-government rested on engaging all of our citizens in this work. And that’s what we celebrate here in Selma.That’s what this movement was all about, one leg in our long journey toward freedom.
“For We Were Born of Change,” Selma, Alabama, 2015
Source:http://time.com/3736357/barack-obama-selma-speech-transcript/
2.3The Audacity of Hope, 2006
We can find another clue as to the power of words in theAudacity of Hope, his main book. In this extract, he quotes the Declaration of Independence, andsome paragraphs in the book begin in capitals:
‘WE HOLD THESE truths to be self-evident, that all men are Created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’.
Those capitals are unique to his book: it does not replicate any transcript of the Declaration of Independence that I know of. But it does replicate the sense of 18thcentury texts and it recreates thatsense of scriptural text. And he calls those words “Our common creed”.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘creed’ as :
1 a. A form of words setting forth authoritatively and concisely the general belief of the Christian Church, or those articles of belief which are regarded as essential; a brief summary of Christian doctrine: usually and properly applied to the three statements of belief known as the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds.
1 b. A repetition of the creed, as an act of devotion.
1. c. More generally: A formula of religious belief; a confession of faith,esp.one held as authoritative and binding upon the members of a communion.
2 a. An accepted or professed system of religious belief; the faith of a community or an individual,esp.as expressed or capable of expression in a definite formula.
2 b. transf.A system of belief in general; a set of opinions on any subject,e.g. politics or science.
2 c. Belief, faith (in reference to a single fact).rare.
The meaning of ‘creed’ is therefore religiously based.For Obama, these words carry the force of Scripture: he is a Christian and a believer, although he is always at pains to say that you do not need religion. But they carry for him the same kind of ideological power that religious texts did.
3.All men are created equal
3.1 The Constitution
At the time when Jefferson wrote the words “all men are created equal” and “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” and defined them as unalienable rights, he owned two hundred slaves. Throughout the course of his life, he owned six hundred. How do we reconcile all this hypocrisy to these ideals?Those words did not just belong to him: other people could take them and use them for themselves. In January 1777, a petition from slaves in Massachusetts asked for their freedom on the grounds
that your Petitioners apprehend that thay [they] have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unaliable [inalienable] Right to that freedom which the Grat Parent of the Unavers hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind” (DIAPO 12). SO other people can take these ideas forward, whatever we might think of Thomas Jefferson. They ask for slavery to be abolished and it was: in 1780, Massachusetts implemented a new Constitution, which contained the same words as the Declaration of Independence. And slaves brought cases to court saying “this makes us free, slavery is against the law.
To The Honorable Counsel & House of [Representa]tives for the State of Massachusitte [Massachusetts] Bay in General Court assembled, Jan. 13, 1777.
Source:http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6237/
In 1781, Quock Walker, a Massachusetts slave won his freedom on the basis that the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared all men to be born free and equal. By 1790, there were no more slaves in Massachusetts.
These words work, they really do have power. Through the Constitution, we can teach that what is special in the US is that particular balance between state governments and the national government; we can teach thatthe Constitution is grounded on ideas of popular sovereignty. This is not some divine government: this is government from the bottom up, not the top down.
We can of course argue about whether the fifty-five rich white men who drafted the Constitution really were the people of the U.S. But again, what they created would not belong to them forever; others would take it forward.
We can see an example of that withAbraham Lincoln. In hisGettysburg Addressin 1863, he talked about the “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”. Those words would make no sense without the Constitution being grounded on the idea that it was founded by “we the people”. Whatever we think of these fifty-five men, their words were later on used by Abraham Lincoln to bring about a “new birth of freedom”

Answer 32

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Question 33

Transcription du discours de Randall  professor and author- Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Nine of the first fifteen Presidents owned Negro slaves, including George Washington who referred to them as a troublesome species of property. When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated in 1801, one of seven Americans was enslaved, nearly two hundred by the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. Jackson saw nothing wrong with owning and selling slaves. Neither did President James K. Polk whose wife replaced White House servants with slaves and transformed the White House basement into slave quarters.
The most fervent Negrophobe to ever occupy the White House, Andrew Johnson, was the successor to Abraham Lincoln, the assassinated President who, before Obama, was the Chief Executive most admired among Negroes. A foe of almost all of the federal constitutional and statutory provisions that sought to elevate blacks during the aftermath of the Civil War, Johnson asserted unabashedly that this is a country for white men and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men."
During his campaign and in his gracious concession speech to Obama on election night, Senator John McCain made reference to the fact that President Theodore Roosevelt had infuriated many Americans when he invited the black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House on October 16, 1901. Although McCain's remarks were a welcome acknowledgement of racism in American history, the reaction against Washington's presence at dinner at the White House was even more vicious than McCain's comments suggested. The Memphis [Tennessee] Scimitar newspaper editorialized that Roosevelt's dining with a nigger constituted the most damnable outrage that has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States. Similarly angered was Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina who declared that the action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.
At the inauguration I enjoyed the thought that Barack Obama would occupy the same post as Warren G. Harding, who, bowing to segregation, had insisted upon the fundamental, eternal, and inescapable difference between whites and blacks; the same post Calvin Coolidge won after being nominated at a political convention at which a chicken-wire screen separated white and black delegates to the 1924 Republican convention; the same post as the legendary Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose administration barred Negro reporters from his press conferences for most of his tenure as the Chief Executive; the same post as that occupied by Richard Milhous Nixon who casually and repeatedly referred to blacks as jigs and niggers. I derived pleasure from recalling that while the eminent writer Toni Morrison had described Bill Clinton metaphorically as America's first black president, now, in January 2009, metaphor was giving way to reality.
The President and his family are the closest thing to royalty that exists in the United States. They are the First Family. It is widely considered to be an honor to be in their presence. When they enter a gathering, all rise in recognition of their pre-eminence. They confer prestige onto any person, entertainment, restaurant, or book that they favor. Their every movement, gesture, word, and article of clothing is publicized.
The status of the President's family as America's royalty was on full display at the Inauguration. That event was tantamount to a democratic coronation. It was a day on which the overwhelming majority of Americans set aside political disagreements to affirm their fealty to the office and symbol of the Presidency. It was a moment at which millions of Americans, including those who voted for Senator McCain, nonetheless offered best wishes to the victor and proclaimed that he is their President, too.
Many Americans received vicarious enjoyment as they watched the Obamas receive international accolades. Most blacks shared that enjoyment and experienced as well an unprecedented sense of validation as they witnessed one of their own ascend to the highest tier of prestige and power in American society. After long years of degradation that gave way to ostracism that gave way to invisibility that gave way to tokenism, the emergence of an African American First Family offered to Black America an unprecedented thrill.
Many observers spoke of Obama's inauguration as a monument marking a fundamental discontinuity in American life: BO - Before Obama - the United States was mired in distraction about all things racial, but AO - After Obama - a miraculous cleansing occurred. Race no longer mattered. The election of a black man signalled the coming of a post-racial society. This triumphalist reading of the election was posited by the conservative Wall Street Journal when it claimed, the day after Obama's victory, that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.
For all of the dramatic transformations mirrored and wrought by Obama's election, however, it also displayed the haunting persistence of the race line. Much of what Obama had to surmount in order to get elected was rooted in America's racial traumas. He had to overcome doubts lodged deep in the psyches of blacks, his essential base. He had to overcome fear that he would be unable to convince working-class whites to vote for him once they entered the sanctuary of the voting booth. He had to overcome detractors who complained that he is not "black enough." And he also had to overcome enemies who complained that he was married to a prototypical angry" black woman.
That Obama won the election despite these impediments shows racial progress. But that he had to surmount them also shows the stubborn resilience of racial – resistance. Moreover, the special circumstances under which he prevailed counsel caution in interpreting the election as the ultimate racial breakthrough that some see it as representing. After all, he was helped by a perfect storm - the dramatic economic collapse that transfixed America in the weeks immediately preceding the vote, two unresolved military conflicts abroad, the evident flaws of an aged opponent, the presence of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin whom many voters perceived as dangerously ill-prepared, the off-putting model of a discredited Republican incumbent President, and a strong electoral tide in favor of Democrats. 
True, Obama did triumph decisively, winning the Electoral College 338 to 163. He was the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a majority of the popular vote and his 52% take was the largest slice for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson's landslide in 1964. Obama also captured a larger share of the white vote than either Al Gore or John Kerry and beat John McCain 54% to 44% among young (under 30) whites. Obama, however, lost to McCain in the overall competition for the white vote. While Obama won 95% of the black vote, 66% of the latino vote, and 62% of the Asian-American vote, he won only 43% of the white vote (to McCain's 55%). These polarities reflect more than voters' reactions to the race of candidates. Differing assessments of character and programmatic orientations also help to explain why whites tend to vote Republican in presidential contests while blacks and other racial minorities tend to vote Democratic. But it is also true that racial sentiments interact with and influence the ideological and cultural dispositions - e.g., attitudes toward taxation, social welfare programs, expressions of patriotism, governmental protection of traditionally oppressed groups - that have contributed to a situation in which, by and large, the Democratic Party is a refuge for blacks while the Republican Party is conspicuous in the degree to which blacks are absent from its ranks, especially in presidential contests. While racial prejudice is not the only explanation for racially distinctive patterns of partisanship, it is indisputably one explanation and an important on at that. Surely it is no coincidence that in the presidential contest of 2008, the states in which racial polarization in voting was most stark - Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina - are also the states with the most infamous histories of white supremacist politics.
How has Obama's race figured into Americans' responses to his presidency, particularly the often fervent opposition to him and his policies?
An accurate answer is difficult to discern for several interrelated reasons. First, racial discrimination is hard to identify. Second, public attempts to identify racial discrimination are often politically costly.
Racial discrimination - disfavoring an individual or group because of perceived racial affiliation - is a stigmatized behavior: it is generally viewed as morally wrong. That was not always so. Until the 1960s, many Americans were altogether willing to say openly that they believed that whites are morally and intellectually superior to blacks and that it was perfectly appropriate to discriminate against blacks on a racial basis in competitions for employment, housing, education, and other endeavors. One of the great achievements of the Civil Rights Revolution (helped to no small degree by universal disgust with the racist outrages of Nazism) was the delegitimation of anti-black prejudice. The struggles advanced by figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Thurgood Marshall and Bayard Rustin placed a moral cloud over racial discrimination. They made racial bigotry not only unfashionable but contemptible. They made it an object of scorn and a target for ostracism. A result is that the prevalence of racial discrimination has been diminished. It has by no means been eradicated; racial discrimination is still very much present in American life. But when people consciously engage in racial discrimination, they typically deny that they are and often take care to hide their real motivations.
Deciphering ambiguous conduct is often a complex, time-consuming, uncertain business. 
Furthermore, the problem of identification is still more complicated. People who engage in racial discrimination not only hide their prejudice from observers; they also often hide their prejudice from themselves. Many people who engage in racial discrimination believe with all sincerity that they do not. As it becomes socially hurtful to label someone as racially prejudiced, it also becomes incumbent to make such charges carefully to avoid wrongful accusations. The stigmatizing force of the charge thus becomes an inhibition upon deploying the charge. Nowadays to make an unsubstantiated charge of racial prejudice is nearly as discrediting as to be accused of being racially prejudiced. People who make unsubstantiated charges of racial discrimination are accused of "playing the race card." Nothing has more besmirched the reputations of certain black leaders - Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton come immediately to mind - than charges that they make allegations of racial discrimination opportunistically and irresponsibly. 
The difficulty of identifying racial prejudice and the cost of attempting to do so doing is highlighted by an episode that transpired in September 2009. From the outset of his Presidency, Obama had pressed the Congress to enact health care reforms. In September he did so again, this time in the form of a nationally telecast speech before both houses of Congress. In the course of the speech, Obama made his case and answered criticisms. One criticism that had been raised is that legislation he had proposed failed to exclude illegal aliens from the health-care benefits offered. When President Obama disputed the accuracy of this criticism, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, a Republican Member of the House of Representatives, screamed: "You lie!" This was highly unusual, indeed unprecedented. For a member of Congress to express displeasure with a President through silence or even booing or hissing is not uncommon. But for a Representative to shout at a President and call him a liar entailed an unusually brazen act of disrespect that elicited widespread condemnation, including the disapproval of most prominent Republican politicians.
There was, then, little controversy over whether Joe Wilson had acted badly; most observers agree that he had. There was controversy, however, regarding whether Wilson's conduct was racially discriminatory. Maureen Dowd, the acerbic columnist for the New York Times concluded that race did play a role in Wilson's outburst. "I've been loath to admit," she declared, "that the... frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi... had much to do with race... But Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president... convinced me: Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it." According to Dowd, "Wilson clearly did not like being lectured [to] by the brainy black president..."
Another observer who identified Wilson's conduct as racially discriminatory was former President Jimmy Carter. Asked about "You Lie!" Carter remarked: "Racism... still exists and I think it has bubbled up to the surface because of a belief among many white people, not just in the south but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance and grieves me and concerns me very deeply."
On the other hand, there were many observers who viewed Wilson's shout as mere rudeness, a regrettable, even egregious, lapse into incivility but a gesture which should not have been tagged with the stigmatizing label "racist." Decrying what she views as American's "hair-trigger response to any remark or action involving an African American," Kathleen Parker asserted that "It is profoundly irresponsible... to call Wilson a racist." Pressing her point, Parker averred that "It is the height (or depth) of racism to suggest that any opposition to Obama's policies is race-based." 
All that the tormenting political correctness police could point to, Ferris asserted, was that Representative Wilson was southern, white conservative, and Republican. Actually, those who accused Wilson of racial discrimination did point to other considerations. T
 To them, the absence of any express reference to race on Wilson's part absolves him of the racism indictment.
President Obama distanced himself from the Dowd-Carter complaint and steadfastly minimized the role of race in the opposition to his program, his leadership, his administration. Responding to question's about Wilson's shout, Obama said that he appreciated that the Representative had "apologized quickly and without equivocation." Continuing, Obama remarked that "we have to get to the point where we can have a conversation about big, important issues that matter... without vitriol, without name-calling, without the assumption of the worst in other people's motives.
Obama's response, eschewing any hint of racial accusation, was wholly in keeping with his carefully-designed image as a dignified, careful, non-angry, non-resentful, statesman who happens to be black. (Not a black statesman. But a statesman who happens to be black. In other words a politician whose racial identity is incidental, not central, to his mission) Obama was keenly aware that he would have paid a stiff price for even mildly suggesting what is highly likely - that an affronted sense of racial privilege probably played some part in Wilson's rude display of temper. During the campaign for the presidency, Obama was harshly chastized by influential arbiters of public opinion when he jokingly remarked that his rival's camp would try to dissuade voters from supporting him because, among other things, he did not "look like" previous presidents. More recently, right-wing journalists such as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck have accused Obama of "hating" whites and engaging in reverse discrimination. These accusations have no plausible foundation. But they generate publicity that fuels racial anxiety and create opportunities for mis-statements or over-reactions by Obama and his defenders which, in turn, create additional publicity, further exacerbating racial tensions. Even though the enemies of Obama make no persuasive argument to back up their assertions that he "hates" white people, the naked assertion itself is injurious to the President. It forces the public to think anew about his race. It literally "blackens" him.
Obama has had to work hard to convince white onlookers that he harbors no racial resentment, loves America, and that his first and unalterable allegiance is to the nation as a whole as opposed merely to Black America. That is one reason why the word reparations never leaves Obama's mouth. He seeks to stay clear of any conduct that would enable enemies to portray him as a stereotypically "black" politician. Occasionally Obama discusses the history of racial injustice in this country. In his famous speech on race relations in the spring of 2008 in which he disavowed the teachings of his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., he declared that Americans
...need to remind [themselves] that so many of the disparities that exist in the African American community today can be directly traced to inequities pass on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.... Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or black were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps to explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the controlled pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
Many commentators praised this speech for what they saw as its brave candor. But even the passage quoted above, Obama's most direct engagement with racial oppression, is suffused with a passive voice that obscures the participation of whites, past and present, in the making and perpetuation of racial subordination.Obama stated that blacks were prevented... from owning property, that loans were not granted to African Americans, and hat blacks were excluded from unions. But who have been the primary perpetrators and beneficiaries of those awful injustices? In Obama's chronicle whites are strangely absent. In Obama's narrative slavery and segregation happened without enslavers or segregationists. This rhetorical stance was not inadvertent. Obama had thought long and hard about the dilemma black politicians face when addressing whites about racial problems while simultaneously seeking to avoid white backlash.
In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama recounts sitting with a white senator listening to a black senator - John Doe - launch into a lengthy peroration on why the elimination of a certain program was a case of blatant racism. After a few minutes, the white senator (who had a liberal voting record) turned to him and said You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white." Obama avoids issues, positions, gestures, and rhetoric that prompts whites to feel more white. He seeks to remove or greatly lessen any racial gap between him and white voters. To accomplish that end he evades racial disputes or obscures or mutes them.
The Presidency of Barack Obama has already fired the imaginations of millions internationally who now dare dream that, despite the complexion of their skin or the place of birth of their parents, they, too, can become the President or Prime Minister of a First World, predominantly white country. In the United States, his ascendancy has brought to the forefront an entire cadre of people of color - not only himself, not only the First Lady, Michelle Obama, not only the first African American Attorney General, Eric Holder, and not only the first Latino Justice of the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. He has also promoted to positions of authority dozens, if not hundreds, of people of color who will use their experience in the Obama Administration as platforms for higher office in subsequent administrations. Obama will continue to nudge the United States towards a course that is more egalitarian, more just, more environmentally-sensitive, more diplomatic, and more multi-lateral than the course that would be set by any other politician with a realistic chance of getting elected. Obama, however, is an exceedingly cautious politician who is disinclined to venture beyond what he perceives as the comfort zone of a majority of the voting population. Regarding no topic is his realistic caution more on display than the subject of race relations. Because that topic remains highly volatile and because his blackness makes him peculiarly vulnerable to racial demagoguery, Obama avoids grappling with the American race question, thus exemplifying its central but repressed and paradoxical place in the political culture of the United States.Notes sur la presidence de Barack Obama

Answer 33

x

Question 34

Sujet : La présidence Obama ou la confirmation d’un renforcement institutionnel transpartisan de l’exécutif américain.

caractère transpartisan de ce renforcement institutionnel, qui est aussi bien le fait de présidents démocrates que de leurs homologues républicains.

SOMMAIRE
Introduction
1. La présidence impériale
2. Barack Obama : entre promesses de changement et poursuite du renforcement de l’exécutif
3. Le renforcement de la présidence n’a pas d’étiquette partisane
Conclusion
Introduction
La Constitution américaine, rédigée en 1787, avait pour objectif premier de garantir la pérennité de la nature démocratique du régime politique.
La peur d’une éventuelle « tyrannie de l’exécutif » était telle que les rédacteurs de la première Constitution américaine, les Articles de la Confédération de 1781, avaient renoncé à créer un pouvoir exécutif indépendant, préférant alors demander au Congrès de cumuler les fonctions législatives et exécutives.
Un tel système ayant vite démontré ses limites la rédaction d’un nouveau texte mettant en place un véritable pouvoir exécutif indépendant du législatif fut nécessaire, et la Constitution de 1787, celle-là même qui est encore aujourd’hui la Constitution des États-Unis, se chargea d’édifier un système fédéral composé de trois pouvoirs (législatif, exécutif et judiciaire) à la fois souverains et interconnectés par le système des freins et contrepoids
la Constitution a créé une présidence limitée dans ses attributions et dépendante des autres pouvoirs fédéraux.
Ainsi, si le président a le droit de choisir les juges fédéraux, la Constitution précise que leur nomination doit être confirmée par une majorité des sénateurs. Le véto présidentiel peut quant à lui être surmonté par une majorité des deux tiers dans chacune des deux chambres du Congrès, et les traités conclus par le président au nom des États-Unis doivent être approuvés par deux tiers des membres de la Chambre haute. Ces limites constitutionnelles qui lui étaient imposées étaient censées maintenir l’exécutif sous l’œil vigilant des autres pouvoirs fédéraux, et notamment du Congrès.
La présidence impériale
une simple lecture de la Constitution démontre la supériorité théorique du Congrès en termes d’étendue des prérogatives), la présidence américaine est aujourd’hui volontiers présentée comme l’institution politique la plus puissante au monde
l’historien américain Arthur Schlesinger allait même jusqu’à évoquer une « présidence impériale » et décrivait une institution qui s’était selon lui libérée de ses entraves constitutionnelles au point d’accoucher d’une présidence non plus républicaine mais impériale, qu’il définissait de la manière suivante :
Quand l’équilibre constitutionnel est renversé en faveur des pouvoirs du président et aux dépens de l’obligation qui lui est faite de rendre des comptes, la présidence peut être qualifiée d’impériale.[2]
Les présidents américains n’avaient pas attendu Nixon pour décider unilatéralement l’engagement de troupes américaines à l’étranger alors même que la Constitution donne au Congrès le pouvoir exclusif de déclarer la guerre, contourner le processus législatif en prenant quelques-unes des décisions les plus importantes de l’histoire du pays par le biais de décrets exécutifs jamais prévus par le texte constitutionnel, ou signer des accords exécutifs permettant au président de conclure une entente avec une nation étrangère sans avoir à passer par la procédure de ratification des traités.
S’il n’est donc pas le fait d’un seul président, ce renforcement institutionnel n’est pas non plus l’œuvre d’un seul parti. Certes, le concept de présidence impériale est « né » au cours d’une mandature républicaine. Mais un regard rapide sur l’histoire des États-Unis suffit à se convaincre que le renforcement de la présidence est un phénomène institutionnel davantage qu’une manœuvre partisane qui serait l’apanage exclusif des Républicains. Dès la première moitié du 20ème siècle, Woodrow Wilson et surtout Franklin Roosevelt, tous deux issus du Parti démocrate, ont été décrits par leurs opposants politiques comme des présidents peu respectueux de l’équilibre des pouvoirs, Roosevelt étant même clairement qualifié de dictateur en puissance par certains au moment de son conflit ouvert avec la Cour suprême en 1937[3]. Plus récemment, le comportement d’un Lyndon Johnson forçant la main du Congrès pour obtenir un soutien législatif à la Guerre du Vietnam tout en prenant soin de rappeler qu’il n’avait pas besoin de ce soutien pour lancer les hostilités sera repris à l’identique par George W. Bush au moment des guerres en Afghanistan et en Irak. Enfin, les opérations militaires en Serbie, au Soudan, en Afghanistan ou en Iraq décidées unilatéralement par Bill Clinton sans aucune autorisation préalable du Congrès ont également démontré que les Démocrates étaient au moins autant en mesure que leurs homologues de la droite américaine d’utiliser l’accroissement du pouvoir présidentiel à leur avantage.
2. Barack Obama : entre promesses de changement et poursuite du renforcement de l’exécutif
Ce caractère transpartisan du renforcement de l’institution présidentielle n’a pas évité à Barack Obama de devoir prendre en compte, lors de sa première campagne victorieuse en 2008, la demande d’un retour à une présidence plus modeste et respectueuse de la séparation des pouvoirs. Le candidat Obama fut alors élu au moins en partie sur une volonté de changement, un changement dont il avait d’ailleurs fait un slogan de campagne et qui devait être mesuré entre autres par rapport à son prédécesseur immédiat, George W. Bush. Ledit changement devait concerner tous les domaines, aussi bien politiques qu’institutionnels, et l’utilisation du pouvoir présidentiel apparut très rapidement comme l’un des critères sur lesquels le nouveau président allait être jugé. Son prédécesseur avait, au lendemain du 11 septembre, poussé tellement loin les limites du pouvoir exécutif que Barack Obama, lui-même ancien professeur de droit constitutionnel, était attendu sur sa capacité à ramener la présidence américaine dans les limites que la loi organique lui imposait.
Le candidat Obama lui-même fit part, durant la campagne de 2008, de son inquiétude vis-à-vis de l’accroissement du pouvoir présidentiel durant la mandature qui s’achevait
Les problèmes les plus graves auxquels nous faisons face actuellement sont liés à la façon dont George Bush essaye d’accumuler de plus en plus de pouvoir au sein de l’exécutif sans passer par le Congrès.
Pourtant, alors que la présidence Obama vient de prendre fin, il semble difficile d’affirmer que le pouvoir exécutif américain a reculé ou même stagné au cours des huit dernières années. Si la plus grande victoire législative de la présidence Obama, la loi de réforme du système de santé mieux connue sous le nom d’Obamacare, est le fruit d’une répartition des rôles institutionnels somme toute assez classique puisqu’il s’agit d’une loi adoptée par le législatif et appliquée par la présidence, les deux institutions étant sous contrôle du Parti démocrate lors de l’adoption de la loi, la prise en main partielle (dès 2011) puis totale (à partir de 2015) du Congrès par les Républicains a placé Barack Obama dans une situation de cohabitation partisane dans laquelle le président a à de nombreuses reprises fait usage des pouvoirs unilatéraux de la présidence pour tenter d’engranger des victoires politiques qui ne pouvaient désormais plus être obtenues par la voie traditionnelle de la collaboration entre exécutif et législatif.
Barack Obama lui-même reconnaissait volontiers ce changement de méthode institutionnelle et cette utilisation plus offensive du pouvoir exécutif lors d’une déclaration publique faisant suite au premier conseil des ministres de l’année 2014.
Le président Obama n’a d’ailleurs pas hésité à passer de la parole aux actes. Ainsi, les directives présidentielles DACA[5]et DAPA[6], ont permis à l’Administration Obama, de manière unilatérale et donc sans avoir à obtenir l’assentiment du Congrès, d’accorder aux clandestins arrivés mineurs sur le sol américain ainsi qu’aux parents clandestins d’enfants nés sur le sol américain une amnistie de deux ou trois ans et la possibilité de solliciter un permis de travail. Les directives en question pouvaient potentiellement concerner jusqu’à cinq millions de personnes, soit près de la moitié de la population clandestine estimée des États-Unis.
Une coalition de 26 états décide alors de porter l’affaire devant les tribunaux fédéraux et obtiendra gain de cause puisqu’une cour fédérale de première instance ainsi qu’une cour d’appel fédérale donneront tort à l’Administration Obama, la cour d’appel allant même jusqu’à affirmer que les deux directives présidentielles enfreignaient les lois américaines liées à l’immigration et la naturalisation. L’affaire arrivera jusqu’à la Cour suprême qui, composée de huit membres suite au décès du juge Antonin Scalia, rendra une décision paritaire qui confirme donc la décision prise par les cours inférieures, et ne permettra pas à l’Administration Obama de mettre en place les directives DACA et DAPA.
La plus haute juridiction du pays a également dû rappeler à la présidence les limites que la Constitution lui impose dans un autre domaine, celui des nominations par le président des membres de l’administration fédérale. L’Article II de la Constitution précise en effet que le président doit les nommer « avec l’avis et le consentement du Sénat », mais lui donne la possibilité de procéder seul à des nominations temporaires lorsqu’une vacance intervient alors que le Sénat n’est pas en session. Au cours de l’année 2012, l’Administration Obama a de manière unilatérale interprété un ralentissement du travail quotidien du Sénat comme une absence de session parlementaire, et en a profité pour nommer trois nouveaux membres du Bureau National des Relations du Travail. Dans une décision unanime[8]en forme de camouflet pour la présidence, la Cour suprême a infirmé le droit du président de procéder à de telles nominations en concluant que seul le Sénat, et non l’exécutif, était en mesure de déterminer si la Chambre haute était ou non en session.
Ces deux affaires, aussi importantes soient-elles, ne sont que deux exemples parmi d’autres de la relation tendue qu’a entretenue l’Administration Obama avec la Cour suprême au sujet des limites du pouvoir exécutif. On évoquera également, dans ce domaine, la décision Hobby Lobby de 2014.
Suite à l’adoption de la loi de réforme du système de santé Obamacare, le Département de la santé avait contraint les entreprises américaines fournissant à leurs employés une assurance santé à inclure dans celle-ci la prise en charge de certains traitements contraceptifs. Les propriétaires de l’entreprise familiale Hobby Lobby ont alors poursuivi l’État américain en justice car cette obligation portait selon eux atteinte à leur liberté de culte en les forçant à financer des méthodes contraceptives contraires à leurs convictions religieuses. La Cour suprême leur donna raison dans la décision Burwell c. Hobby Lobby, infligeant par la même une défaite judiciaire à l’Administration Obama.
Plus généralement, une étude réalisée par le célèbre site d’analyse statistique Five Thirty Eight a mis en lumière le fait que l’Administration Obama n’avait, à la fin du mois de juin 2015, remporté que 47% des affaires jugées par la Cour suprême dans lesquelles elle était impliquée, soit le plus faible total pour n’importe quel président américain depuis Harry Truman dans les années 1940.[10]
Dans le domaine de l’énergie, Barack Obama, confronté à l’attitude frileuse des Républicains sur la thématique du changement climatique et de ses conséquences environnementales, a mis en place un projet connu sous le nom de Clean Power Plan, dont l’objectif annoncé était de réduire de 32% les émissions de dioxyde de carbone par les centrales électriques américaines à l’horizon 2025.
Le plan a été géré exclusivement par la Maison-Blanche et l’Agence américaine de protection de l’environnement, elle-même placée sous la responsabilité du président, sans que le Congrès soit impliqué dans un projet pourtant législatif par nature. Les critiques dénonçant un abus de pouvoir de l’Administration Obama ont été nombreuses et toutes ne sont pas venues des rangs républicains. Ainsi, Lawrence Tribe, professeur de droit constitutionnel à l’université d’Harvard, homme de gauche et, symboliquement, ancien professeur de Barack Obama, s’est montré très critique à l’encontre de son ancien élève en affirmant que « bruler la Constitution ne devrait pas faire partie de notre politique énergétique ».
Des polémiques ont également émergé dans le domaine de l’exécution des lois, devenu depuis les années 1970 l’un des principaux points d’achoppement entre présidence et Congrès. La Constitution américaine est on ne peut plus claire sur le fait que la principale tâche de l’exécutif, si ce n’est sa seule raison d’être, est de « veiller à la fidèle exécution des lois » adoptées par le Congrès. Toutefois, confrontés de plus en plus souvent à des lois en forme de fourre-tout législatifs adoptées par un Congrès fréquemment contrôlé par leurs adversaires politiques, les présidents américains ont développé des techniques administratives leur permettant de remettre en cause, à des fins politiques, leur engagement constitutionnel en matière d’exécution des lois.
Dès 1974, le Congrès adoptait ainsi le Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, censé mettre fin à la pratique de l’administration Nixon qui consistait à ne pas exécuter certaines dispositions de loi en refusant de dépenser les fonds publics alloués par le Congrès. Plus tard, à partir de la présidence de Ronald Reagan et de manière décuplée durant la présidence de George W. Bush, les chefs de l’État ont pris pour habitude de rédiger des documents connus sous le nom de déclarations de promulgation[12]. Dans ce document qu’il joint à une loi qu’il a accepté de promulguer, le président annonce se réserver le droit de ne pas exécuter certaines dispositions qu’il juge problématiques d’un point de vue constitutionnel, quand bien même les dispositions en question ont été adoptées par le Congrès et promulguées par le président lui-même.
Cet apparent renoncement au devoir constitutionnel du président d’exécuter toute loi qu’il accepte de promulguer (et à laquelle il n’oppose donc pas son veto) a fini par créer une vive polémique institutionnelle et médiatique au cours de la présidence de George W. Bush, cette pratique de la déclaration de promulgation ayant pris une ampleur sans précédent durant sa mandature.
Censé incarner un changement radical par rapport au président l’ayant précédé, Barack Obama fut interrogé dès sa campagne présidentielle de 2008 sur la position et le comportement qu’il adopterait, s’il devait être élu, vis-à-vis de ces déclarations de promulgation. Plus précisément, il lui fut demandé s’il pouvait promettre de ne pas utiliser de déclarations de promulgation pour altérer à son avantage le processus législatif. La réponse de celui qui était alors sénateur de l’Illinois fut sans équivoque :
Notre système politique a été construit par les Pères fondateurs de manière à ce qu’il y ait des freins et contrepoids. Nous ne voulons pas d’un président trop puissant, d’un Congrès trop puissant, ou de cours trop puissantes, chacun a son propre rôle. Le rôle du Congrès est d’adopter des lois. Le président peut promulguer ces lois ou utiliser son droit de veto.
Mais George Bush, dans sa tentative d’accroître les pouvoirs de la présidence, a tenté d’affirmer son droit de changer ce que le Congrès a adopté en joignant une lettre disant « je ne suis pas d’accord avec telle ou telle partie de la loi, je vais choisir de l’interpréter de telle ou telle manière. » Cela ne fait pas partie de ses pouvoirs, mais George Bush croit qu’il peut inventer des lois comme bon lui semble. Je suis en désaccord avec cette pratique, j’ai enseigné la Constitution pendant dix ans, je crois en la Constitution et j’obéirai à la Constitution des États-Unis. Nous n’utiliserons pas les déclarations de promulgation pour contourner les pouvoirs du Congrès.[13]
Les choses semblaient claires : celui qui deviendrait quelques mois plus tard le 44ème président des États-Unis semblait rejeter la pratique des déclarations de promulgation et s’engager dans la voie d’une répartition traditionnelle des rôles au sein de laquelle le Congrès adopte les lois et l’exécutif les applique sans autre forme de procès.
Pourtant, la présidence Obama va donner un nouvel élan à la polémique autour des déclarations de promulgation en donnant naissance à une polémique à laquelle même la présidence Bush avait échappé : un cas clair et avéré d’une disposition de loi adoptée par le législatif, promulguée par le président, et qui ne sera pourtant pas appliquée par l’exécutif après avoir vu sa légitimité remise en cause par le président dans une déclaration de promulgation.
Ainsi, le 31 mai 2014, le sergent de l’armée américaine Bowe Bergdhal, détenu par les Talibans depuis le mois de juin 2009, est libéré dans le cadre d’un échange incluant cinq prisonniers Talibans détenus à Guantanamo. Or, les conditions d’une éventuelle libération de détenus de la prison de Guantanamo étaient réglementées par la disposition 1035 de la loi d’Autorisation de la Défense nationale pour l’année fiscale 2014, intitulée « transfert vers des pays étrangers d’individus détenus à la base navale américaine de Guantanamo », et qui autorisait l’exécutif à procéder à de tels transferts à la condition, entre autres, que «Le ministre de la Défense prévienne les commissions compétentes du Congrès (…) au moins 30 jours avant le transfert ou la libération de l’individu.»
Toutefois, dans le cas des cinq Talibans détenus à Guantanamo et échangés contre le sergent Bowe Bergdhal, le Congrès n’a été prévenu par l’exécutif que quelques heures avant l’échange et l’Administration Obama n’a donc pas respecté les termes de la disposition 1035, dont elle avait remis en cause la constitutionnalité dans sa déclaration de promulgation relative à la loi d’Autorisation de la Défense nationale pour l’année fiscale 2014, loi que le président avait pourtant accepté de promulguer.
Au-delà de ce seul cas, là thématique de l’exécution des lois par la présidence a surgi à plusieurs reprises au cours des deux mandats de Barack Obama, notamment dans le cadre de l’exécution de la loi phare de sa présidence, la réforme du système de santé dite Obamacare.
Ainsi, au moins trois dispositions au sein du large édifice législatif que représente cette loi (la mise en place d’un plafond pour les franchises médicales, l’obligation faite à toute entreprise de plus de cinquante employés d’assurer ces derniers, et celle faite à tout Américain de choisir une assurance santé compatible avec Obamacare) ont vu leur application repoussée dans le temps par l’Administration Obama sans que cela ne semble être autorisé par la loi en question.
La question constitutionnelle posée par une telle pratique est à la fois complexe et essentielle puisqu’il s’agit de savoir si le président a le droit, au nom de son devoir d’exécuter les lois adoptées par le législatif, de repousser l’exécution de certains aspects de la loi s’il l’estime nécessaire, ou si une telle démarche est par essence législative et constitue en réalité, dans les cas où une date limite d’exécution est explicitée par le texte législatif lui-même (ce qui était le cas des trois dispositions citées plus haut), une réécriture de la loi.
Plusieurs épisodes polémiques survenus au cours des huit ans de présidence de Barack Obama ont également rappelé la capacité de l’exécutif de s’affranchir des règles légales et constitutionnelles relatives à la protection de la vie privée des Américains. Ainsi, les révélations du célèbre lanceur d’alerte Edward Snowden ont permis de (re)mettre en évidence la capacité de la NSA de surveiller les communications personnelles de tous les Américains de manière totalement illégale puisque toute surveillance des communications privées d’un citoyen Américain est censée être précédée de l’attribution d’un mandat par une Cour spéciale.
A l’heure d’établir le bilan de la présidence Obama, il semble donc difficile pour ne pas dire impossible d’affirmer que l’utilisation du pouvoir exécutif par le 44ème président des États-Unis a été plus modeste ou moins offensive que celle de son prédécesseur.
3. Le renforcement de la présidence n’a pas d’étiquette partisane
Si l’on s’est essentiellement concentré, dans le cadre de cet article, sur la pratique du pouvoir exécutif par Barack Obama, il est essentiel de rappeler, comme on l’a fait pour Richard Nixon, que le 44ème président des États-Unis ne fut en aucun cas une exception en matière de renforcement institutionnel de la présidence américaine.
En revanche, l’idée même de présidence impériale reste une questionpolitiquede premier ordre puisque aujourd’hui encore, la sphère médiatico-politique et même la société américaine dans son ensemble ocillent régulièrement, au gré des alternances partisanes, entre volonté de voir le président agir et rejet d’une personnalisation du pouvoir qui, par bien des aspects, va à l’encontre de l’histoire politique du pays.
a réaction des deux grands partis américains vis-à-vis de l’accroissement du pouvoir présidentiel a peu ou prou été la même : présenté comme nécessaire pour le bien du peuple américain par le parti du président, dénoncé comme une violation sans précédent de la Constitution et de la nature démocratique du régime par le parti d’opposition. Des positions évidemment interchangeables selon que le président fut démocrate ou républicain.
La puissance de l’exécutif semblait en revanche leur poser beaucoup moins de problèmes durant la mandature de Barack Obama. Les Républicains ont quant à eux fait preuve d’une réciprocité certaine, défendant bec et ongles l’approche expansionniste de George W. Bush au nom de l’impératif de sécurité nationale, puis s’inquiétant de la même utilisation offensive du pouvoir exécutif par Barack Obama au point pour certains d’entre eux d’envisager, vers la fin de sa présidence, une enquête parlementaire censée déboucher sur une destitution du président.
Cette attitude ambivalente voire contradictoire n’est pas limitée à la sphère politique et touche également les médias, qui oscillent entre approbation et dénonciation de l’accroissement du pouvoir exécutif en fonction de la correspondance (ou de l’absence de correspondance) entre leurs préférences partisanes et la couleur politique du locataire de la Maison-Blanche.
Puisque la dynamique des pouvoirs aux États-Unis repose sur un système de vases communicants où chaque pouvoir a les moyens constitutionnels de défendre ses prérogatives institutionnelles, l’accroissement du pouvoir présidentiel est au moins en partie la conséquence d’un abandon de poste de la part du Congrès.
Une telle timidité du pouvoir législatif au moment de décider une intervention militaire contraste fortement avec ce que prévoit le texte constitutionnel. La Constitution américaine précise en effet de manière on ne peut plus explicite que le Congrès est seul habilité à déclarer la guerre, le président ne pouvant tenir son rôle de commandant en chef des forces armées qu’une fois que le législatif a décidé le lancement des hostilités.
Cette situation est d’autant plus favorable à l’exécutif que l’architecture de l’institution présidentielle la rend infiniment moins susceptible que le législatif aux blocages intra-institutionnels.
Par définition, la présidence n’est jamais paralysée par les luttes partisanes intra institutionnelles auxquelles le Congrès doit si souvent faire face, le président et le vice-président ayant toujours appartenu au même parti depuis 1865 là où le Congrès est par définition toujours divisé entre Démocrates et Républicains.
Enfin, la centralisation de la communication et du processus de décision offre à l’institution présidentielle une plus grande cohérence communicationnelle.
Lorsque le Congrès se plaint, comme il le fait si souvent, de l’accroissement du pouvoir présidentiel, il dénonce en réalité un problème qu’il a largement contribué à créer et qu’il a les moyens institutionnels de régler.
Conclusion
Si la relative résignation des deux autres pouvoirs fédéraux lui permet donc d’accroitre son champ d’action, l’avantage principal de la présidence réside peut-être en réalité dans le fait qu’elle n’opère pas sur le même plan que les membres du Congrès et les médias.
Là où les législateurs raisonnent avant tout en termes partisans, l’opposition entre Républicains et Démocrates rythmant la vie de l’institution, la présidence est unie du point de vue partisan et se concentre sur l’aspect institutionnel et sur les capacités d’action qui sont accordées à l’homme qui incarne la fonction. A titre d’exemple, on citera la réaction des deux partis au Congrès lors des deux dernières réformes dufilibuster, cette technique d’obstruction parlementaire propre au Sénat qui permet d’empêcher tout vote tant qu’un sénateur garde la parole et qu’une majorité qualifiée de soixante sénateurs sur cent ne s’est pas constituée pour l’interrompre et procéder au vote.
Dès 2013, le leader de la majorité démocrate au Sénat Harry Reid avait fait abolir le filibuster pour les confirmations des nominations des membres de l’administration présidentielle et des juges fédéraux hors juges de la Cour suprême, dans une manœuvre qui a souvent été décrite comme « l’option nucléaire ». Toutes ces nominations, faites alors par le président Obama, pouvaient désormais être confirmées par une simple majorité absolue, rendant toute obstruction républicaine presque inopérante. Les sénateurs républicains critiquèrent alors très largement la manoeuvre, le sénateur Lamar Alexander allant jusqu’à la décrire comme «le changement le plus dangereux et le plus important des règles du Sénat depuis leur rédaction par Thomas Jefferson.»[17]
Pourtant, lorsque les rôles furent inversés quatre ans plus tard, avec un Sénat dominé par les Républicains et une Maison-Blanche habitée par Donald Trump, ce fut au tour des Républicains de supprimer le filibuster pour le dernier type de nominations pour lesquelles il était encore en place, celles des juges de la Cour suprême. Devant la volonté des Démocrates de bloquer la confirmation de la nomination du juge Neil Gorsuch, le nouveau leader du Sénat, le Républicain Mitch McConnell, n’hésitait pas à réutiliser l’option nucléaire tant décriée par les Républicains quatre ans plus tôt lorsqu’elle était utilisée par les Démocrates. Les rôles et les réactions s’inversèrent totalement, les Républicains mettant en avant la nécessité d’avancer et d’éviter une obstruction parlementaire, alors que les Démocrates défendaient dorénavant les droits de la minorité sénatoriale.
A l’inverse, il est rare pour ne pas dire impossible d’entendre un ancien président critiquer l’utilisation du pouvoir exécutif par son successeur ou même, une fois en fonctions, par ses prédécesseurs, et ce quelle que soit l’étiquette partisane de ces derniers.
C’est en ce sens que le titre de cet article évoque un renforcement transpartisan de l’institution présidentielle. Il ne s’agit évidemment pas d’affirmer que la politique et l’idéologie partisane n’ont pas leur place au plus haut sommet de l’État américain, ni d’oublier que, contrairement au chef de l’État français, le président américain est également chef de parti, mais de remarquer qu’au cours du dernier siècle, l’accroissement du pouvoir exécutif s’est fait de manière relativement constante et, surtout, indépendamment de l’étiquette politique de celui qui occupait la fonction. Depuis la première élection de Franklin Roosevelt en 1932 et en incluant Donald Trump, sept Démocrates et sept Républicains ont occupé la Maison-Blanche sans que le renforcement de l’institution présidentielle n’ait été inversé ou même sérieusement freiné. A plusieurs reprises, des Républicains ont transmis à des Démocrates une institution plus forte que celle qu’ils avaient trouvée en arrivant, et vice versa.
Si les différents présidents américains envisagent donc le renforcement pérenne de leur institution en dehors d’un cadre partisan ou idéologique, le Congrès et les médias continuent quant à eux à procéder à une lecture purement politique de la situation : si le renforcement institutionnel de l’exécutif est une bonne chose quand votre parti (pour les législateurs) ou le parti que vous soutenez (pour les médias) est au pouvoir car il permet d’agir, il devient en revanche un danger pour la démocratie lorsqu’il permet à vos adversaires politiques d’avancer leurs pions.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr, The Imperial Presidency, Mariner Books, 2004 (première édition en 1973), page ix. Citation originale : «When the Constitutional balance is upset in favor of presidential power and at the expense of presidential accountability, the office can be said to become imperial.»
Roosevelt souhaite faire passer le nombre de juges de la plus haute cour du pays à 15 (au lieu de 9) de manière à noyer la majorité conservatrice de la Cour en nommant lui-même des juges qui seraient plus favorables à ses idées. La manœuvre n’aurait rien eu d’illégal puisque le nombre de juges de la Cour suprême n’est pas fixé par la Constitution, mais de nombreuses voix s’élèvent pour dénoncer une dérive autoritaire du président.

Answer 34

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Question 35

After Obamacare: The New Stakes of US Healthcare Policy

ParAlondraNelson: Professor of Sociology- Columbia University
PubliéparClifford Armionle21/02/2013
The new stakes for healthcare policy in the U.S. are apparent in what Obamacare concretized — the further privatization and stratification of healthcare—and what it left unsaid—the assertion of a right to health. Solutions lie outside of the formal domain of policy and in the realm of ethics and human rights. Yet, it is hard to imagine the application of these remedies at a time when life can be taken with impunity and in a world in which the US kills through drone warfare with each bomb carrying not only the threat of death but also the message that some lives matter less than yours or mine.
Alondra Nelson is a sociologist and teaches at Columbia University. Her social and historical approach to medicine, science and technology has given rise, in particular, to a book on the health policies implemented by the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s.

> Body And Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination(University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

Of all forms of discrimination and inequalities, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman…
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1966
Americans of all hues expressed surprise when Barack Obama was elected four years ago (and again last month), with many candidly remarking that they never thought they would live to see the day when the United States would be led by a President of African descent.
As the Obama administration’s policy priorities took shape, many thought it equally unlikely that there would be significant healthcare reform during their lifetimes. Yet the first black US President would once again deliver the unexpected.
When President Obama finally spearheaded the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act last summer — after the constitutionality of the law was upheld by the Supreme Court — his team successfully overcame strident partisan resistance from conservatives who had mounted a legal challenge to it. The Obama administration also prevailed against widespread skepticism, not only from the law’s detractors, but also from its supporters. For, very few were confident that a major transformation in American social welfare policy was possible given the failures of several prior presidents in this arena over the last century including, most recently, Bill Clinton, whose frustrated effort at healthcare reform was still fresh in public memory.
Undoubtedly, the new health policy offers crucial and tangible benefits. As the law’s full name makes clear, one of its fundamental accomplishments will be to protect patients from mistreatment by health insurance companies. For example, so-called “Obamacare” guards against arbitrary loss or denial of insurance coverage. The law also mandates that insurance companies use the largest portion of the money they earn toward actual medical benefits for patients, rather than corporate profit. And, thankfully, it is no longer lawful for that the fact of being a woman be deemed an inherent “medical condition” that justifies the imposition of higher fees than what a man pays.
As Obamacare is rolled out, improved access to medical services will be accomplished through a public-private regime that, on the one hand, extends federal healthcare support for the poor and the elderly and, on the other, expands for-profit insurance coverage for some. As a result, the numbers of underinsured and uninsured people in the US is expected to shrink from its current level of 50 million persons to about 20 million. There will be a salient reduction in human need and suffering.
But the arms of Obama’s care wrap around too few. Medical care will remain elusive for those 20 million Americans who do not bear the hardship of acute poverty or inhabit the stable prosperity of the middle class. To fall in the gap between these two circumstances is to face the social purgatory of a healthless, uninsured existence.
As Joan Didion poignantly reminds us in her peerless essay collectionThe White Album(1979), health insurance is not a cure-all. Didion’s illuminating prose winds its way through the 1960s, pausing along the way to observe some of that era’s most important cultural landmarks. The book’s title essay documents a fraught medical encounter: In October 1967, Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton was taken to Oakland’s Highland Hospital following an altercation with police that left one officer fatally wounded and another injured. In this same meeting, the black radical suffered a bullet wound to the stomach and a leg injury. As Newton lay bleeding in the emergency room, Corrine Leonard, the nurse on duty that evening had a more pressing matter in mind, his insurance status. She stated,
I heard a moaning and a groaning, and I went over and it was — this Negro fellow was there. He had been shot in the stomach and at the time he didn’t appear in any acute distress… and I asked him… if he belonged to Kaiser [insurance], and he said, “Yes, yes. Get a doctor. Can’t you see I’m bleeding…” And I asked him if he had his Kaiser card and he got upset at this and he said, “Come on, get a doctor over here. I’ve been shot”… I told him we’d have to check to makes sure he was a member.”
Didion confesses to the reader that she too was doubtful of Newton’s status. She initially interpreted this moment as “a classic instance of an historical outsider confronting the established order at its most impenetrable level” until she “learned that Huey Newton was in fact an enrolled member of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan.” Although he was insured, the activist Newton was not a viable patient or a believable client. He received little sympathy and delayed medical treatment. Then as now, health access was for members only; but membership was no guarantee of compassion.
Compounding this issue of the ethics of diagnosis and treatment is the internalization of a notion of health as a commodity and a mark of morality — rather than as an inalienable right — by those who might most benefit from truly universal health care. Such sentiment reflects the success of an ideological campaign waged by conservatives in the US who coined the term “socialized medicine” and made it the discursive currency of opponents to a public health commons. This outlook is evident comments like this from a single mother as reported recently byThe Washington Post: “I feel irresponsible… I feel like I’m less of a person because I don’t even have health insurance.”
These examples are instructive. They caution us that there are matters germane to health equality that cannot be readily legislated. To compel the selling and buying of insurance, as Obamacare does, does not fix the root causes of healthcare scarcity in the US: the broader and widening terrain of socioeconomic inequality and the belief that there are undesirables — not merely those who are uninsurable, but those deemed undeserving of consideration and, therefore, also of benevolence.
In prior centuries, when epidemics cut across all classes of society it was perhaps less difficult to appreciate how healthcare politics implicated us alltogether. Today, we have storehouses of healthless ones, corralled in prisons, war zones, and refugee camps — set apart. Geographic and social distance makes it harder for us to apprehend our deep corporeal interconnectedness.
Thenew stakesfor healthcare policy in the U.S. are apparent in what Obamacareconcretized — the further privatization and stratification of healthcare — and what it left unsaid — the assertion of a right to health. Solutions lie outside of the formal domain of policy and in the realm of ethics and human rights. Yet, it is hard to imagine the application of these remedies at a time when life can be taken with impunity and in a world in which the US kills through drone warfare with each bomb carrying not only the threat of death but also the message that some lives matter less than yours or mine.
Just as it was naïve to believe that the election of the first black president would usher the end of racial inequality — a so-called “post-racial America” — it is equally mistaken to think that the legalization of Obamacare would end healthcare inequality. What healthcare policies can be truly transformative when the very value of life is hierarchical?

Answer 35

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